What can we learn from patients? Ex-Googler debuts health social network to find out
Google’s former Chief Health Strategist Roni Zeiger has launched Smart Patients, an online community for cancer patients. Read more »
“First do no harm”: My interview with Amazon and Goodreads on the future of Goodreads
photo: Shutterstock / Thomas Bethge
In an interview Thursday, Goodreads CEO Otis Chandler and Amazon’s VP of Kindle content Russ Grandinetti stressed that Goodreads will not change for the worse following its acquisition by Amazon. Read more at paidContent »
Even elite schools have fundraising challenges, and Evertrue gets $5.25M to help
TechStars-backed EverTrue has raised $5.25 million to help colleges and prep schools build alumni networking mobile apps. Read more »
Facebook vs. Twitter: How do you like your social news feed, filtered or unfiltered?
Facebook is making changes to its news feed in order to try and filter content better for users, while Twitter continues to provide a largely unfiltered experience. Which one is better? That depends on how you use it. Read more »
Path hopes that a renewed focus on design will make 3.0 the charm
photo: Eliza Kern
Path has tried to get more users for its relatively private social network, and hopes that the addition of richer messaging features will help do the trick — along with its usual focus on design. Read more »
Social network for education Edmodo buys Root-1 to expand its app market for teachers
Edmodo, a San Mateo-based startup that provides a social network for teachers and students, has purchased education app maker Root-1. Read more »
Appsecute vows one screen for all devops services
Devops need one way to view all the various systems they depend on. That single-pane-of-glass into Github, Zendesk, and other devops-friendly applications is what Appsecute promises. Read more »
Box trots out IBM, Oracle integrations to boost its enterprise cred
As enterprise software companies build their own Box functionality, Box is wooing them to integrate with its own file-share-sync-and collaboration service. Read more »
Can the creation of music be crowdsourced? Ericsson and DJ Avicii think it can
Swedish DJ and producer Avicii has agreed to work with network builder Ericsson to experiment with a crowdsourced music composition on. Starting on Wednesday, the public will be able to submit audio tracks that could wind up in Avicii’s new single. Read more »
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How to compete with Facebook in 2013
Specialist networks cater to diverse consumer segments, but Facebook’s sheer ubiquity means 94 percent of all social networkers use it. The bottom line: If any generalist network is going to gain mass-market traction, it will be at the expense of Facebook, not in addition to it. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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Social 2013: The enterprise strikes back
With investment souring on consumer-focused companies, 2013 will be more about the social enterprise, with a different set of companies driving innovation and perhaps a little disruption. Look for the likes of Salesforce.com, Jive Software, and other enterprise players to make headlines in the new year. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
FreedomPop brings its freemium 4G model to the home
photo: Shutterstock / alexmillos
The mobile virtual network operator plans to take the “M” out of MVNO. Using Clearwire’s WiMAX network, FreedomPop will start selling in January a residential broadband service with the same incentives as its mobile service, including 1 GB a month of free data. Read more »
MVNO Karma goes live, selling a 4G hotspot made for sharing
Karma has arrived and its brought its concept of social bandwidth along for the ride. It’s betting consumers will be willing to share their 4G connections with strangers if given the proper incentive so it’s doling out free bandwidth in exchange for benevolence. Read more »
Britain’s press inquiry is a deathbed confession, not a solution
Lord Justice Leveson’s high-profile inquiry into phone hacking and unethical behavior by the British press never really tackled the big problems at the heart of the news industry. And what’s worse is that this huge error wasn’t a mistake — but the result of willful ignorance. Read more »
Ad tech startup Triggit raises $7.4M on heels of Facebook-powered growth
San Francisco-based ad tech firm Triggit announced on Thursday that it had raised $7.4 million in Series B funding, led by Spark Capital and Foundry Group. The funding comes after months of growth driven in large part by its inclusion in Facebook’s ad exchange. Read more »
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Examining the rise of crowd labor platforms in 2012
Crowd labor is outsourced information work that can be provisioned automatically. It’s ideally, inexpensive, on demand, and elastic. Platforms providing such services are on the rise in 2012, promising customers lower labor costs in the short term and higher-quality output in the long term. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
5 most surprising things heard at Harvard’s Cyberposium
photo: Barb Darrow
Several hundred Harvard Business School students and others gathered on Sunday to hear technology company founders and visionaries talk shop. Here are my top 5 highlights. Read more »
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What the shift to the cloud means for the future EPG
The purpose of the on-screen guide has shifted. By connecting the guide to content-recommendation engines and advertising platforms, service providers and connected-TV device manufacturers are using the EPG as an access point for understanding consumers and reaching out to them to own the living room. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
QuantiaMD raises $12M for online community for doctors
QuantiaMD, a Waltham, Mass.-based company that provides an online collaboration and communication platform for doctors, has raised $12 million from existing funder Fuse Capital. Launched in 2008, the company said it has more than 160,000 physicians on its network. Read more »
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Social third-quarter 2012: analysis and outlook
Social media technologies continue to permeate marketing and enterprise collaboration, even if investors felt let down in the third quarter by their consumer-facing businesses like Facebook, Groupon, and Zynga. So B2B technology offerings in support of marketing and collaboration will soon steal all the social tech attention. This quarterly wrap-up analyzes these events, and provides a near-term outlook for trends, technologies and companies to watch in the next 18 to 24 months. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Reddit, freedom of speech and the dark side of community
photo: Flickr user Hoggarazzi
In addition to occasional acts of journalism, Reddit is also known for its less savory content, including a page featuring creepy photos of women taken without their permission — and the controversy over that kind of content says a lot about the nature of the community. Read more »
After 1 billion users, what’s next for Facebook
photo: Jason McELweenie/Flickr
Facebook is now up to 1 billion monthly active users after launching in 2004. The milestone was expected but it’s a major accomplishment for the social network. The company is looking to mobile to reach its next billion users. Read more »
Surprise! Facebook looks to boost revenue, mobile with Gifts
Social networking giant Facebook is rolling out a new gift-giving service that enables users to exchange physical gifts entirely through its platform. The new feature is based on technology Facebook acquired when it purchased the startup Karma in May. Read more »
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Work media tools in 2012 and beyond
Welcome to the fast-growing world of work media, a class of social tools oriented toward the needs of enterprises. Their emergence is due to the shifting expectations of an increasingly social workforce and the sense that older approaches to work like email are arguably approaching obsolescence. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
With $3.6M, TreeRing revives the yearbook for the Facebook generation
photo: TreeRing
TreeRing, a San Mateo, Calif.-based company that brings social networking into the creation of school yearbooks, has raised $3.6 million in Series A funding from Flipboard CEO and co-founder Mike McCue, Second Ave Partners, Cedar Grove Investments and other angel investors. Read more »
The new private social networks: “We’re trying to build the home”
Private social networking apps like Path and the SMS-based GroupMe are trying to capitalize on the fact that most people only communicate regularly with a relatively small set of contacts. That requires thinking about social networking and content in a new context. Read more »
How researchers are letting us uncover secrets in social data
photo: Shutterstock/3DProfi
Thanks to the popularity of everything from social media sites such as Twitter to email to mobile phones, it’s easier than ever to get data about who’s connected to whom. With the right tools, we can apply it solve certain problems faster and easier than ever. Read more »
5 startups that stood out at Excelerate’s demo day
Chicago’s Excelerate Labs may not have quite the outsized demo day as Y Combinator, but the 10 companies that just graduated from is accelerator program were still impressive. Here are the five startups that made the biggest impression on us: Orbeus, Lasso, Cureeo, Pictarine and Whimseybox. Read more »
Google+ ready for business with IT-friendly bells and whistles
Google is rolling out business-friendly features for its Google+ social networking service. That paves the way for a paid-version next year or beyond and escalates the battle between Google and Microsoft for the corporate desktop. Read more »
Xing social network toys with news aggregation
Despite the threat of new copyright laws targeting headlines and story snippets, LinkedIn rival Xing is reportedly testing out a news aggregation email service. If done right, that could help with user retention and growth. Read more »
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Consumer privacy in the mobile advertising era
Smartphones can enable an amazing level of connectivity, but they can also allow that activity to be monitored and used in controversial ways. But for mobile marketing to realize its full potential, consumers may need to sacrifice their privacy to one degree or another. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Why Facebook should tread carefully with expectant parents
Facebook is now encouraging expectant parents to memorialize the moment by introducing a new life event for Timeline called “Expecting a baby.” The move, however, goes too far in getting people to share about things in the future out of their control. Read more »
Do college students need their own LinkedIn? AfterCollege thinks so
Despite LinkedIn’s push to attract college students and recent college graduates, career site AfterCollege is on Tuesday announcing a new professional networking layer built on top of its job platform that targets college-age users. Read more »
Marketing is dead, long live marketing
In the era of cloud computing and big data, chief marketing officers can either sink or swim depending on their ability to recognize the importance of the consumer information available to them and are able to capture and put it to use. Read more »
5 startups to watch from DreamIt Ventures NYC demo day 2012
At the Time Life Center in New York on Wednesday, startup accelerator Dreamit Ventures showcased its latest class of 15 startups. The companies were selected from a pool of 500 applicants and originated from cities across the country and around the world. Read more »
Which activities are preferred on tablets vs phones? Keynote tells all
A new survey explains that the no. 1 frustration on tablets and smartphones is the slow loading of web pages. That shouldn’t surprise, but the preferred activities for a smartphone and a tablet just might, suggesting that we’re not ready to dump the phone just yet. Read more »
Facebook stock at half-off, drops below $20 a share
Welcome to life as a public company: Facebook stock has dropped to around $20 a share, almost half its IPO price. It’s a rough time out there for social-networking stocks, including game maker Zynga, but Facebook’s slide is eye-popping. Read more »
Facebook’s first earnings report meets Wall Street estimates
photo: Zef Nikolla
Facebook’s second quarter earnings report – its first since going public in May – just matched Wall Street analysts’ expectations. The company also said it had 955 million monthly active users as of the end of June. Read more »
paidContent turns 10: A brief history of digital media
Remember when Friendster was the hot social network, publishers doubted that ebooks would ever sell, and Netflix thought DVDs in red envelopes was the future? We do — that was that state of digital media when paidContent launched in 2002. Read more »
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Scaling Hadoop clusters: the role of cluster management
Organizations are coping with the challenge of processing unprecedented volumes of data. However, the processes involved with using a large cluster to run applications like Hadoop are error-prone. So IT managers are turning to cluster-management solutions to automate tasks associated with cluster creation, management and maintenance. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
