Four VC Firms Battle For Foursquare, Valuation Goes Stratospheric s official now: LBS is next big thing

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foursquare dennis crowley

What do Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures and Redpoint Ventures have in common? Besides being tier one venture capitalists, at least one thing: They are all fighting furiously to be the lead investor in Foursquare’s next venture round.

All that competition is driving the valuation massively upwards, too. A couple of weeks ago we’d heard that the deal would likely be closed at around a $50 million valuation. Today we’ve confirmed that the final price will likely be $60 million – $70 million. They’re raising around $10 million, which means when it’s all over Foursquare will be worth up to $80 million on paper.

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Fox Goes Around Hulu For Mobile TV App (NWS)

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thesimpsons tbi

Fox wants you to watch its TV shows on your phone, but so far, it's not working with Hulu to get them there.

Fox's new "Bitbop" app will be offering full-length television TV shows as temporary downloads or streams for $9.99 a month. It is "soon-to-be-available," according to a press release.

Bitbop is pretty skinny on details so far, but GigaOm reports the service will work on Apple's iPhone, Motorola's Droid, and several BlackBerry models initially, with more devices to come. 

Interesting: News Corp is working around Hulu, which it has a stake in, for its mobile video service. This is the latest sign that Hulu and its owners could be increasingly at odds.

Hulu is reportedly working on a subscription service to bring its shows to Apple's iPad, perhaps among other mobile devices. But that seems to be a separate -- potentially competitive -- service.

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Android Tablet Prototypes Support Flash [VIDEO]

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Drooling over tablets, but worried about lack of Flash support on the iPad? Sit tight, because a slew of tablets running Android will be emerging shortly with full Flash support, thanks to the NVIDIA Tegra platform team’s work with Adobe.

As we’ve said before, the age of the tablet is really just getting started (…again). Apple was the first manufacturer to make a big splash with the iPad, but even back in January there were already a number of other tablets starting to emerge — and now analysts estimate at least 50 tablet devices will make it to market before the year’s end. A good number of those may end up having both Android and NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 platform under the hood, and those devices will come with Flash playback.

We had a chance to sit down with Bill Henry, director of Tegra product management at NVIDIA, earlier today at CTIA to get a live demo of a few working tablet prototypes running Android and powered by the Tegra chip. Check out the video demos below to get a look at the browser in action, an Android version of Wired’s app we’ve seen previously for the iPad, a couple of game demos and some background on how the Tegra 2 platform allows for video-intensive Flash playback without crippling your battery life.


NVIDIA Tegra Android Tablet Browser Demo




Wired App and Fickleblox Demo




Game Demo: Backbreaker




Reviews: Android

Tags: android, CTIA, gadgets, NVIDIA, tablets, tegra

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Ideetje voor Thuis, VRT? -> Acteur twittert tijdens uitzending

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Een arts in de Amerikaanse ziekenhuisserie Nurse Jackie twittert. En die tweets verschijnen tijdens de uitzending op Twitter.

Sinds vorige week zijn de scriptschrijvers van Nurse Jackie al aan het warmdraaien. De eerste tweets op het account van Dr. Fitch Cooper verschenen vorige week. 'A tweet a day keeps the doctor okay', aldus @DoctorCoop die op het moment van schrijven ruim 5.300 followers heeft en zelf bijna 2.000 mensen volgt.

Vanaf de tweede aflevering van het nieuwe seizoen dat deze maand begint, zal Dr. Cooper in de serie gaan twitteren. De tweets verschijnen gelijktijdig online. Zo kunnen zijn Twitter-volgers bijvoorbeeld lezen wat hij ergens van denkt. Ook zal de dokter foto's plaatsen op zijn Twitter-account.

In Nederland zendt Foxlife de serie Nurse Jackie uit, maar pas in september start hier het tweede seizoen.

 

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iTunes, Spotify, Amazon, MySpace and More Unite to Combat Illegal Music Sharing Sites

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iTunes, Spotify, Amazon, MySpace and More Unite to Combat Illegal Music Sharing Sites

iTunes, Spotify, Amazon, MySpace and More Unite to Combat Illegal Music Sharing SitesAiming to “remind listeners of the significance and value of music”, major players from across the music and technology industry have united to launch a site called Why Music Matters.

The site appears to be not much more than a brochure site with illustrative videos designed to share and compel users from across the globe to value the music they listen to and above all else, ensure they are obtaining it legally…but there’s more.

The site has launched what it calls a Trustmark, a symbol that gives both readers and artists the knowledge that the site they are using has the artist’s interests to mind and that the music available on the site is legal.

Services like Spotify, We7, iTunes, mFlow and MySpace have all signed up to the scheme.

A trustmark is open to those involved in the legal physical and digital sale or supply of music direct to consumers including those who sell CDs and those who make music available legally through downloads and streams.

Sites that allows all users the opportunity to upload and make available user generated content are not able to join, making YouTube, Tumblr and frankly any uploading service, exempt.

Influencers within the industry joining forces is a positive move and Why Music Matters will at least give artists faith that something is being done. That said, call me a cynic but if we see teenagers (and other illegal music sharing fiends) stop and look for the ‘trustmark’ before using a site, I’ll eat my hat. I hope I’m wrong.

Original title and link for this post: iTunes, Spotify, Amazon, MySpace and More Unite to Combat Illegal Music Sharing Sites

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Twitter is Winning Its Fight Against Spammers

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twitter logoNot too long ago, spam on Twitter was quickly becoming a serious issue that made searching for any popular topic on the service's own search engine almost pointless. Spammers would regularly hijack popular terms by polluting the search results with nonsensical tweets that included the popular keyword and a link to a spam site.

Since Twitter started implementing better spam controls last year, however, the number of spam messages on the service has gone down dramatically. According to the latest data, the percentage of spam tweets per day is now down to under 1%.

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twitter spam reduction stats

According Twitter's chief scientist Abdur Chowdhury, the company's Trust and Safety team is "constantly battling against spam to improve the Twitter experience and we're happy to report that it's working." Between May and October 2009, the percentage of daily of spam messages on Twitter regularly exceeded 9% and spiked to over 10 on a few days. As Twitter's primary monetization strategy currently involves selling access to its firehose stream to search providers like Google and Microsoft, it is definitely in the company's best interest to keep the number of spam messages as low as possible.

Report a Spammer

If you want to help Twitter in its fight against spam, remember that you report a spammer directly to Twitter's anti-spam team from every user's profile page. Just look for the "report for spam" link in the right sidebar or in the drop-down actions menu.

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Google Bookmarks Gets Public and Private Lists, Collaboration Tools

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google_bookmarks_logo_mar10.jpgGoogle Bookmarks is one of Google's lesser known services. The new star marker in Google Search - which syncs with Google Bookmarks - gave this tool some added exposure, but most users are probably still unaware of this service. Thanks to some new features Google just introduced today, Google Bookmarks may soon become more of a household name, however. Starting today, you can organize your bookmarks into lists (instead of just labeling them) and - more importantly - share these lists publicly and collaborate on creating and editing lists with others.

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Getting Started With Google Bookmarks

If you are not an active Google Bookmarks user already, you can start using the service by starring a few items in your search results on Google Search and Google Maps. These links will then appear on your Google Bookmarks page (note: to see the lists feature, you have to follow this link - the standard Google Bookmarks URL does not feature lists yet).

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Features

One nifty new feature is the ability to add items to your lists without having to leave the Bookmarks Lists interface. By clicking on "Add Stuff," you can easily append links, images, videos and local search results to your lists, as well as any Google Docs document. Other features include the ability to rearrange lists through a simple drag and drop interface, the ability to comment on any item in a list and to preview videos, maps and Wikipedia entries directly in the Google Bookmarks interface.

What's Missing? Integration

As is so often that case with Google's products, the lists in Google Bookmarks are a great feature, but while they are nicely integrated with some tools (Google Docs, YouTube, Google Maps), some obvious integrations are still missing. Why, for example, doesn't Google Chrome's bookmark syncing feature work with Google Bookmarks? Using the stars in Google's search engine works well enough, but that same star feature on Google Chrome is linked to Google Docs and not to Google Bookmarks.

Tip of the hat to Alex Chitu at the Google Operating System for being the first to notice this update.

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Foursquare Lets You “Follow” Celebrities

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Foursquare has announced a deal with MTV & VH1, and with it, introduced a new “Celebrity Mode” that introduces the Twitter concept of following –- i.e. not friending — to users.

Starting with Jersey Shore’s DJ Pauly D, users can now sign up to “follow” celebrity users as opposed to establishing a reciprocated friendship. This is the same model used by Twitter and on Facebook Fan Pages.

Celebs will still be able to set up those two-way friendships on Foursquare if they want, though, and selectively update certain checkins to all or just to their actual friends.

On Foursquare, this makes a lot of sense –- a celebrity checking in to Starbucks could cause a mob scene, but checkins at a more controlled environment like an official appearance could help ensure a packed house. In addition to Pauly D, celebs from MTV/VH1 shows including The Hills, The City and The T.O. Show will be utilizing Foursquare in various ways.

For example, users will be able to earn badges relating to their favorite shows –- a concept already in action on Bravo. The celebs will also offer tips about venues in their cities, which isn’t a big leap from the way restaurants and clubs are already integrated into some of MTV and VH1’s programming. Pauly D already seems to be using his account to hype a number of locations in New York City.

Celebs were paramount to Twitter’s move into mainstream, so it’s not surprising to see Foursquare tweaking its service to accommodate them. Of course, whether or not this ends up providing value to followers or becomes a never-ending cycle of product placement ads depends on how the celebs go about using Foursquare.

Nonetheless, given what sounds like a heap full of cross-promotion, it could be just what Foursquare –- who increased its userbase by almost 20% in 10 days around SXSW –- needs to move into the mainstream.



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Reviews: Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter

Tags: foursquare, mtv, vh1

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Facebook Increasingly Evaluating, Rejecting Misleading Performance Ads

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Facebook is making new efforts to ensure that performance advertisers’ content accurately reflects what each ad is about. Facebook has ramped up its part-automated and part-human evaluation efforts to reject inaccurate ads over the last two weeks, according to ClickZ..

The issue is that some direct-response advertisers will use ad content that purports to be targeted, but without using Facebook’s specific targeting filters. An ad saying “37 and male in Los Angeles?” for example, is not being allowed if the ad does not actually target Facebook users who are 37 years old, male, and self-designated as being Los Angeles. Lead-generation campaigns for financial services and higher education are apparently seeing click-through drops as a result of this creative not being accepted. Some incentivized ads, like “Get A Free Laptop!”, are also not being allowed if the ad takes at least several pages to explain the details of how the offered item can actually be obtained.

While some marketers are complaining, Facebook’s enforcement is not surprising. Ads that are deceivingly targeted, or do not clearly deliver on their promises are not valuable to users. Facebook needs to make sure third-party ads are high-quality to, if nothing else, make sure users have a reason to pay attention to them. Many deceptive ads have run as offers or banners within third-party applications on Facebook’s platform over the years. To this end, Facebook has been refining its terms of service, and banning monetization companies and taking developers offline who don’t comply.

The evaluation systems described in the report appear to be new and Facebook hasn’t responded to our requests for comment. However, the terms they enforce appear to date back at least as far as January 4, 2010, when the company last updated its advertising guidelines. One clause, 5a, specifically prohibits “false, misleading, fraudulent, or deceptive.” advertising — which squarely nails deceptive incentive ads.

In terms of false targeting, though, the terms are not quite as clear. However, clause 7 — especially a. — seems close enough that no update to the terms is warranted. Here’s the full thing:

7. Targeting

a. Any targeting of ads based on a user attribute, such as age, gender, location, or interest, must be directly relevant to the offer, and cannot be done by a method inconsistent with privacy and data policies.
b. Ads with adult themes, including contraception, sex education, and health conditions must be targeted to individuals at least 18 years old.             Platform ads should do this via Demographic Restrictions, not by obtaining user data.
c. Ads for dating sites, services, or related content must follow these targeting criteria (does not apply to ads on Facebook Platform):

i. the Relationship Status targeting parameter must be utilized and set to Single;
ii. the Sex targeting parameter must be utilized and a single value of Male or Female must be selected;
iii. the Age targeting parameter must be utilized and the age range selected must start at least at 18 years old;
iv. the Interested In targeting parameter must be utilized and a single value of either Men or Women must be selected.

Some advertisers might be seeing a hit in terms of click-throughs and revenue, but Facebook is clearly trying to improve the user experience. The best advice for anyone seeing problems is to provide more obviously meaningful creative to users.

[via CNET]

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