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Pinterest app will start coming pre-loaded on Nook tablets along with Twitter and Facebook

Eliza Kern — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 17:18:33 +0000

Pinterest announced Monday that the company’s app will start coming pre-loaded on all Nook tablets, along with social apps like Twitter and Facebook. The partnership comes as Pinterest works to build its influence with businesses and has expanded to integrate with other products like Microsoft’s Bing image search results.

Nook representatives noted in the press release that Pinterest had been one of the most-requested apps for the Nook store, which allows customers to download games and social apps. Pinterest also fits with some other features of the new tablets Barnes & Noble introduced last fall: An improved magazine- and catalog-reading experience, and a “rip out the page” feature that lets users save pages from catalogs and magazines to a digital scrapbook.

Pinterest, long known for its innovative design, has been growing rapidly over the past few years, and just took in $200 million in a new round of financing that puts that company’s valuation at $2.5 billion. A February Pew report estimated that about 15 percent of online adults use Pinterest, and the company has been stepping up efforts to provide businesses with analytics tools and specific landing pages just for them. Last week, Bing announced that users would now be able to pin images directly from the search function to Pinterest.

In February Barnes & Noble reported that Nook revenues for the third quarter were down 26 percent to $316 million, even though the company released two new tablets during the year. The company said it expects Nook Media, which it spun off as its own segment last year, to bring in revenues of $2.5 billion for fiscal year 2013.

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Celebrity social media firm Ad.ly predicts $5M in revenue after embracing analytics

Jeff John Roberts — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 21:02:07 +0000

Ad.ly is a Beverly Hills firm that charges brands to obtain social media endorsements from the likes of Mariah Carey and Kim Kardashian. But since its new CEO came on board in March 2012, the four-year-old firm has come to rely less on celebrity tweets for its business model.

According to Ad.ly CEO Walter Delph, the firm had trouble in the past obtaining steady revenue because many brands used it for a one-and-out campaign. Now, he said, Ad.ly has found a second form of income through licensing the company’s analytics platform — tools that can help brand track how mentions on Twitter and Facebook ripple down from a celebrity to their fans.

“We had an activation business, but we didn’t have a data management platform. Now, we do. … It’s a logical extension of the celebrity tweet business,” said Delph in an interview in San Francisco this week. Delph, who was formerly a SVP at News Corp’s Digitam Media division, added that Ad.ly now has more than 10 repeat customers and is on pace to generate around $5 million for the year.

Adly’s decision to turn towards licensing also amounts to an admission that the company is pivoting, and that basing a social media business solely on celebrities is not not viable. This is likely due to the fact that Twitter and Facebook mentions are typically wrapped up in a larger endorsement package — tales of a one-off tweet from Charlie Sheen selling for $9,500 are more the exception than the rule.

Delph also added that social media marketing is a challenge the platforms typically don’t convert into immediate sales.

“You can’t expect me to sell a truck right on Twitter,” said Delph, adding that Ad.ly in the past has done a poor job of explaining how to measure ROI from social media.

While the focus on its analytics tools provide a way to persuade marketers of the value of social media, the new stragegy could also make it hard for Ad.ly to stand out from the dozens of other firms that offer social media listening platforms for brands. In response, Delph said Ad.ly is distinct because it can not just monitor social media ROI but also “activate” it through the celebrity tweets.

Delph adds that the overall social endorsement business is getting stronger because of richer media capacity built into platforms like Twitter.

“If you can show anything beside written word, it’s worth much more. A photo brings 3-4 times the performance.”

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Exclusive: Desire2Learn buys Bill Gates-backed ‘virtual guidance counselor’ Degree Compass

Ki Mae Heussner — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 13:00:53 +0000

For most college students, picking classes involves reading up on options or chatting with classmates and professors. But, if Canadian ed tech company Desire2Learn has its way, more students will consult a data-driven “virtual guidance counselor.”

On Thursday, the company, which is a stone’s throw away from Research in Motion in Ontario’s Kitchener-Waterloo area, announced that it acquired Degree Compass, a predictive analytics tool developed with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The web-based app, created by Tristan Denley, a mathematician and provost of Tennesee’s Austin Peay State University, helps students select the courses most suited to their strengths and interests. Its algorithms consider a particular student’s transcript and test scores, as well as the performance of hundreds of thousands of previous students, to generate a personalized curriculum. The goal is to help more students actually complete their degree – and in a reduced amount of time.

“It’s almost like the way Netflix suggests movies, but instead of just suggesting classes students will enjoy, it suggests those that they’ll be able to handle and will help them get to their degree requirements,” Bill Gates said last year in a speech on the future of higher education.

According to the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, about half of higher education students fail to earn a degree and Complete College America reports that the average student takes 20 percent more courses than needed to meet their degree requirements.

“[We’re trying to] increase student outcomes – making sure all students have a greater ability to do well in their classes through having the right tools,” said Jeff McDowell, Desire2Learn’s VP of market development and new strategies. “This lines up perfectly with some of the things we’re working on regarding analytics.”

Since launching in 1999, Desire2Learn has provided an online learning platform for K-12 and higher education schools in the U.S. and around the world. Last year, after going it alone for more than a decade, the company raised $80 million in its first round of venture financing (which was also the largest ed tech round of the year, according to CBInsights).

As Desire2Learn competes against other learning management systems like Blackboard, the company’s aim is that Degree Compass not only rounds out the suite of learning, eportfolio and analytics tools it offers current customers, but helps it reach new clients. And it highlights the growing demand for data-driven tools that can lead to outcomes.

For now, the technology could help a humanities student, for example, plan a course of study that optimizes his strengths and helps him complete a degree in the shortest amount of time. But, McDowell said, the tool is just a starting point. In time, they could add more functionality so that Degree Compass could help students identify the best courses for a particular career path, not just a degree.

Desire2Learn declined to share financial details. But it said that in addition to the technology, which is currently in use by three schools other than Austin Peay, it will add an undisclosed number of developers. Denley will remain Provost of Austin Peay but work with Desire2Learn on the Degree Compass roadmap and business development.

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Pinterest gets serious about recipe inspiration with Punchfork buy

Kevin Fitchard — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 17:30:40 +0000

A good deal of Pinterest’s members are already using the social network as a visual recipe book, so Pinterest has decided to make its love for food official by scooping up Punchfork, a recipe portal that aggregates culinary ideas from blogs and cooking sites across.

Punchfork CEO Jeff Miller revealed the acquisition on Punchfork’s website today, though he didn’t disclose a purchase price. Pinterest confirmed Punchfork is its first acquisition in its short history, and given the Pinterest community’s obsession with food pins, it seemed a natural fit for the rapidly growing social network. “People come to Pinterest to find inspiration for their everyday lives and we think Punchfork’s mission aligns with this well,” spokesperson Annie Ha said in a statement.

Punchfork is one of the growing number of recipe aggregation portals on the web, but it’s distinguished itself by building an API which food bloggers and independent recipe sites can tap into to bring their recipes and culinary musings to Punchfork’s growing audience. Punchfork has also developed social and analytics tools that help those bloggers track the popularity of their dishes. While Punchfork has used that API to grow its own membership, it’s also shared it with Evernote, powering the note-taker’s new Explore Recipes function on Evernote Food.

With the takeover, though, Punchfork will shut down its website, mobile apps and API, and the Punchfork team will devote itself to bolstering Pinterest’s already impressive recipe discovery boards.

To give you an idea of how popular food is on Pinterest, community recipe portal Allrecipes.com has reported that in three months after it added a “pin it” button to its pages last summer, 50,000 of its were pinned, generating 139 million impressions. An Experian survey of Pinterest users early last year found that 70 percent of account holders said they pinned recipes and used Pinterest for cooking inspiration, beating out home decorating, fashion and crafting.

Like Pinterest, Punchfork positioned itself as a visually oriented “cooking inspiration” site versus the many more nuts-and-bolts recipe aggregators out there like Paprika, Pepperplate and BigOven. Rather than allowing customers to find their own recipes and store them in their own private recipe collections, Punchfork aggregates recipe content from a broad selection of partners, using its service as a dish-discovery engine.

Other startups have adopted similar strategies. Gojee is even more visually oriented than Punchfork, presenting its dishes in luscious full-screen photos. Evernote competitor Springpad has also taken a page from Pinterest’s book, making the visual organization of recipes a key focus.

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Davos does data

Barb Darrow — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 14:20:00 +0000

Big data has gotten very big if the talking heads at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, are talking about it. And they are talking about it.

The big data phenomenon refers to the explosion of data of all types — location coordinates churned out by cell phones and GPS, machine data from manufacturing gear, consumer data from Twitter and Facebook. Just a fraction of that information resides in traditional databases. It’s not only too much to get one’s head around but also overwhelms traditional database and analytics tools, giving rise to a new generation of computing technologies: the Hadoop data framework, NoSQL databases and big data analytics.

The overriding issue is finding the right data, applying the right analytics to it, and letting it deal with real-world problems. And the World Economic Forum’s elite attendees, including prime ministers, corporate titans and star academics, purport to address the biggest of big problems: climate change, the income gap, food inequality, public health crises, Iran.

One session, titled “Decoding the data deluge,” chaired by Jan Hesthaven, a professor of applied mathematics from Brown University, deals with the upside opportunity these huge data sets can enable.

From the course description:

It’s a funny thing about data: If you look up ‘data’ in the literature, it invariably comes laden with negative baggage – words such as ‘overload’ and ‘deluge’. With terms such as these, no wonder scientists and scholars alike shy away! But instead of resisting large data sets, we should be embracing them. Multinational companies are learning how to work with large data sets, and they’re getting better at it all the time. But mid-size and smaller businesses don’t have that expertise. Yet the largest companies will benefit greatly if smaller businesses, many of them key to their supply, production and workforce, can, too, handle massive data. Such ease of data handling can grease the wheels of global commerce.

That is just one of several sessions touching on the topic. Another, “Personal data: the ‘new oil’ of the 21st century,” dealt with the proliferation of personal data generated by new intelligent devices, networks and software and how to build a personal data ecosystem that will “spur economic and societal value without undermining privacy and civil liberties.” Another session, “Convergence on the go,” attacked the consolidation of data voice, video and cellular communications services and its impact on society.

There is also a report, Big data, big impact: new possibilities for international development,” which outlines the impact the collection and proper application of big data can have on financial services, education, agriculture and health care.

According to the report:

Data collected through mobile devices, whether captured by health workers, submitted by individuals, or analysed in the form of data exhaust, can be a crucial tool in understanding population health trends or stopping outbreaks. When collected in the context of individual electronic health records, this data not only improves continuity of care for the individual, but it can be used to create massive datasets with which treatments and outcomes can be compared in an efficient and cost effective manner.

Big data is good, except when it’s bad

All of this discussion in the Alps is happening at a time when the opportunities of big data also raise privacy concerns that are playing out internationally, as discussed by GigaOM’s Derrick Harris here.

The issue of who owns what data is huge, and there are factions fomenting to wall off data because of political concerns. Telcom powers in France and Germany, for example, want to build homegrown data centers that would be impervious to U.S. law enforcement requests for customer data. Their concern is that the U.S. Patriot Act can force U.S. companies running cloud-computing sites in Europe (or elsewhere) to turn over customer data if U.S. authorities suspect terrorist activity. That means American IT powers like Microsoft, Amazon and Google that run cloud operations out of European data centers could be compelled to disclose this information. That specter led some European entities to eschew cloud computing services from U.S. companies. In December, British defense contractor BAE backed out of a Microsoft Office 365 deal, citing this issue.

On Jan. 18, U.S deputy attorney general Bruce Swartz tried to calm the waters, saying that the Patriot Act does not supercede existing international trade agreements. A few days later, the Electronic Freedom Foundation, an advocacy group, debunked Swartz’s claim:

While the DOJ may spin its position one way to try to appease foreign audiences, its actual position is quite clear where it really matters: in US courts when it is trying to access subscriber information held by US-based cloud computing services. Indeed, the DOJ’s position in its court filings is that very little, if any, privacy protection is available against US government access to the records of users of US-based cloud computing services.

Whatever happens in this data privacy and protectionism battle, it is clear that big data is very big indeed. Maybe too big. Big data has been featured in recent issues of mainstream publications including Esquire. A contrarian might say this mainstream hype could also mean the big data bubble is about to burst.

Photo and artwork courtesy of Flickr user World Economic Forum

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Why the next front in big data might be psychological

Derrick Harris — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 16:01:18 +0000

Big data is often talked about as a phenomenon that lets organizations create narratives from their volumes of data. That is an apt characterization when we are talking about connecting the dots among disparate and possibly disconnected data sets. However, when we are talking about anything involving human beings — customer behavior, the spread of disease, attitudes toward products or people — all that many current analytical efforts deliver is the end of the book, or what happened. The end is a fine place to start with regard to big data, but working backward — that is, figuring out why people made the decisions they made — might prove even more valuable for everyone involved.

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