For online media companies, social platforms like Facebook and Twitter bring many opportunities as well as risks. An intelligent and proactive social media strategy can expand a brand’s reach. But the more heavily a media company relies upon a social media platform the more it relinquishes control over the customer experience. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Twitter has argued that it doesn’t own a user’s tweets, but at the same time the company wants to control what users do with their content so that it can monetize the network. There’s an inherent conflict there that is becoming increasingly difficult for Twitter to avoid. Read more »
The purchase of the sports-blogging site Bleacher Report by Turner Broadcasting unit fills a content hole for the Time Warner unit, but it is also a validation of the user-generated-content model behind the sports-blogging network, and a sign of the disruptive effects that model can have. Read more »
Cloud-based storage and cross-device syncing of media content are two of the most competitive areas in consumer IT. Apple, Google and Amazon see cloud-based media services both as a way to increase attachment to their platforms and a means to extend and amplify their broader strategic goals. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The deal that Twitter announced on Thursday with NASCAR will see an editor employed by the network curating and highlighting tweets and other content, a deal that takes Twitter even further into the realm of being a media entity. Should traditional media players be concerned? Read more »
Wattpad, which describes itself as the world’s largest online community of readers and writers, has raised $17 million from a group of venture funds led by Khosla Ventures. Khosla partner Andrew Chung says he thinks Wattpad can do for writing what YouTube has done for video. Read more »
Twitter describes itself as an information network rather than a media entity, but it is making some interesting moves into the content business, including hiring a sports producer to curate content and sending out a weekly email of highlighted content. How far will it go? Read more »
The court poked enough holes in YouTube’s defense that it now has every incentive to try to settle with Viacom as quickly as possible and get on about its business. But on the one issue of law that might have made a difference to Viacom’s business ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
If you’re like many of us, you’re already thinking over some New Year’s resolutions that will make you a better “you” in 2012. But how are the tech industries’ thought leaders approaching the new year? We asked 12 of them for their resolutions. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Kapture, a new start-up from an original member of Qwiki, lets business reward users for sharing pictures about their establishment through their social networks. It allows merchants to leverage user generated content to help spread the word about their businesses and strengthen their relationships with consumers. Read more »
A new wave of apps aims to replace the increasingly crowded space of long-winded five-star user generated reviews (like those on Yelp and Amazon) with straightforward social recommendations. The newest entrant in this field, an iPhone app called Stamped, aims to win with simplicity. Read more »
TrustYou, a Munich-based startup that makes semantic search technology for categorizing online reviews, has taken on $5 million in Series A funding to fuel its U.S. growth. The company has already put a significant portion of the funding round toward acquiring ReviewAnalyst, its Texas-based rival. Read more »
Ness has launched its debut iOS app, a “personal search engine” that aims to provide highly personalized restaurant recommendations. Essentially it’s like a Pandora for restaurants: From the start it’s almost creepily accurate with its recommendations, and the more you use it, the better it gets. Read more »
VideoGenie is announcing Thursday that it has raised $2 million in funding that was led by Blumberg Capital and includes existing investors such as Innovation Endeavors. With the funding, VideoGenie will be able to ramp up hiring, particularly in sales and marketing, to accelerate its growth. Read more »
YouTube’s users now upload more than two full days worth of video per minute, the video sharing site announced on its blog today. The announcement coincides with another usage record, as YouTube is now also seeing more than three billion video views per day. Read more »
Only about 30 percent of video assets on YouTube make up almost all video views on the site. Or, put another way: 70 percent of all YouTube videos are barely viewed at all. So does that mean that the dream of long tail content is over? Read more »
There’s talk of the future of media in the air. So let’s examine how NewNet technologies like social media and real-time feeds are helping to re-invent the ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Most of the recent focus on near-field communications and RFID technology is targeted at mobile payments and advertising. One company, however, is thinking beyond the basics and using the tech to recall your memories — if you consider memories to be user-generated content from smartphones. Read more »
Building a business that is largely based on user-generated content seems like a great idea, until those users decide to post what they want instead of what you want. Amazon and Yelp are two of the most recent companies to experience the downside of user-generated reviews. Read more »
What could a world of tablets bring? Not just better e-book readers or game machines, but an explosion of personally produced content, distributed by individual apps. But will Apple and Amazon seize that opportunity? Read more »
[qi:115] As the economic downturn has hammered companies’ advertising budgets, many businesses have turned to user-generated web content to get their messages out on the cheap rather than shelling out thousands of dollars to ad firms. Tech companies, including Amazon and Nokia, also are turning to […] Read more »
The enterprise social software market is emerging as one of the fastest growing areas of enterprise applications. As a young market it is full of small and dynamic players but existing enterprise vendors in the content management, communications, and CRM markets are taking notice. Social software is poised to not only disrupt existing enterprise application markets but also organizations and markets by flattening information flows.
As users shift to new modes of communicating on the open web, they are pulling these new models into the enterprise and ushering in cultural and organizational change. This report covers the underlying technological trends, the market and its drivers, and a competitive overview of the vendors. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
First the money flowed to social sites like Facebook that showed the world how to get users to interact. Then it moved on to “roll your own” platforms like Ning that allowed people to build their own social microsites. But as Web 2.0 startups get increasingly […] Read more »
