SEO Werkt!

“You used to have to sneak sex into advertising,” said comedian Colin Quinn. “Now you have to sneak advertising into sex.” Speaking at NCM‘s cinema upfront presentation in New York City today, he noted that messaging apps like Snapchat might not be the right place for an ad, but the presentation that followed showed more appropriate ways for brands to join the conversations that play out publicly on social media sites.

NCM Media Networks today announced a partnership with Foursquare and Twitter that will bring marketers on the big screen into the conversations on the small screen. We caught a glimpse of how it will look on the big screen at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square movie theater.

NCM is behind the “First Look” and other advertisements that appear in big U.S. theaters owned by AMC, Cinemark, and Regal Entertainment Group. The integrated media company also reaches Americans online and through mobile devices.

Tweeting through a movie is still considered rude, which is why the advertisers who pop up on the big screen during the previews are looking for new ways to catch up with audiences before and after it’s time to turn off their phones.

Foursquare

Movies are one of the most popular categories on the local discovery app Foursquare, which is why NCM hopes to catch moviegoers on their way to or from the theater with relevant offers and local content. NCM’s regional sales team will be presenting their local and regional clients with ways to incorporate Foursquare’s check-ins, local search, and consumer loyalty features into their current strategies, the company said.

Twitter

To harness the hundreds of millions of Tweets that have popped up about movies in the past year, Twitter will develop a multi-platform series to highlight the hottest trending movie topics of the week. The series will appear on the big screen and on Twitter, NCM said, and will incorporate fan feedback to influence new series episodes. The companies are currently looking for a presenting sponsor.

Do people tweet about the ads they see in movies? Apparently they do. During the presentation, one slide showed quotes from several Twitter users who, after a movie screening, said they were excited to see a Cool Ranch Doritos taco from Taco Bell in 3D.

Seeing a Taco Bell commercial in 3D is life changing.

— CASSIDY (@casszeh) May 12, 2013

THEY MADE GREAT GATSBY MOVIE IN 3D! AND TACO BELL NOW SELL WAFFLE TACO! APPARENTLY DRUNK HULK NOT ONLY ONE DRUNK!

— DRUNK HULK (@DRUNKHULK) May 13, 2013

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The partnership announced between Starbucks and credit card processing service Square underscores the potential demand for mobile device payments, lending some light into why Apple is promoting its new Passbook app as a key feature in iOS 6.

CapLinked, which offers tools to help manage the fundraising process, just announced a partnership with the Startup America Partnership, the program launched by the White House in early 2011.

In the announcement press release, Scott Chase, CEO of the Startup America Partnership, notes that the fundraising can be “an extremely difficult and time-consuming process as founders are focused on running and growing their companies” and that CapLinked will allow members to “easily manage their capital raise.”

CapLinked’s platform includes private workspaces where entrepreneurs and investors can share fundraising documents and manage other transactions, as well as a network tools for connecting the two groups can meet. Now startups who are enrolled in Startup America will now get access to the company’s premium features, says CEO Eric Jackson. Those tools include workspace activity reports, multiple workspace administrators, the ability to create additional workspaces, plus more tools for networking with investors.

This isn’t the first time CapLinked has made these features to a large group of startups. Just last month, it announced the CapLinked Elite Accelerator Program, making premium accounts available to companies in programs like TechStars, Science, and 500 Startups. With more than 6,500 companies enrolled in Startup America, this partnership could potentially offer a nice boost to CapLinked’s user base, but Jackson insists that this is “not really about acquiring customers<’ but instead “helping Startup America with their mission of empowering entrepreneurs to build great companies.”

Founded in 2010, CapLinked says it has managed $37 billion worth of deals from more than 135,000 users.

Kim Dotcom, whose file-hosting service Megaupload was shut down by the New Zealand and U.S. governments for copyright infringement at the beginning of the year, has had plenty to say about the case until now. But as he awaits news about extradition to the U.S. from New Zealand, he’s become unusually quiet.

I’m wondering if his silence is due to the fact that the judge who was overseeing his extradition case to the U.S. has stepped down — presumably making Dotcom’s future a bit more tremulous.

The New Zealand Herald is reporting that Judge David Harvey, who was overseeing the extradition case, has removed himself after voicing his opinions on the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade agreement that could be expanded to make circumventing a DVD’s region code illegal. And for those of you who don’t know what region codes are, they are codes that allow certain DVDs to work only within certain countries to limit piracy.

Harvey, who previously looked favorably on Dotcom, referred to the U.S. as the enemy for its part in upholding silly matters of copyright law internationally. In this instance, it had to do with DVD region codes, but obviously those comments could paint him as biased in the case, which is why he decided to step down.

“Under TPP and the American Digital Millennium copyright provisions you will not be able to do that, that will be prohibited… if you do you will be a criminal – that’s what will happen,” Harvey said, adding, “We have met the enemy and he is [the] U.S.”

Harvey was previously responsible for reinstating Dotcom’s Internet access based on good behavior. He also allowed him to visit a recording studio to finish his politically charged hip-hop album, as VentureBeat previously reported back in April.

Photo illustration: Jolie O’Dell/VentureBeat

Filed under: media

Secure messaging service TigerText announced a partnership today with Dropbox that will allow users to send documents securely, with features like a pre-set lifespan and the ability to recall a file attachment at any time. Documents will be encrypted and cannot be downloaded, copied or forwarded.

TigerText president and Co-founder Brad Brooks tells us that the partnership has a wide range of targeted users, from “anyone who uses Dropbox” to businesses that need to send secure files. Brooks sees wide-ranging applications of the technology, from transporting confidential legal and medical files (the platform is HIPAA compliant) to facilitating group collaboration in financial services firms to delivering event tickets with an expiration date and recall ability. He says a large agency in Los Angeles approached TigerText because they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars per year on courier services driving around scripts.

“Anyone who has information that they would like to be able to share through messaging but won’t build a platform themselves can now have an extension to communicate in a secure fashion,” Brooks tells us.

He adds that TigerText will introduce the feature to their consumer-side immediately to test it while tweaking any issues on the fly; they will then migrate the collaboration to TigerText’s enterprise-side by the end of the week. Users will be able to access their Dropbox accounts through the TigerText iOS app immediately. The company says the feature will be made available on Android and Blackberry “in the coming weeks.”

This announcement comes months after TigerText released “TT2,” an updated platform with new features like group messaging and message recall.

Brooks and co-founder Jeffrey Evans came up with the idea when they were out to dinner and Evans, who was supposed to be picking up the tab, left early. Brooks told him to text his credit card number, and the two began discussing secure messaging channels. They realized there was an opportunity and began working on a prototype for the consumer side. They realized it could also have a significant impact with enterprise clients, and started focusing on industries, especially healthcare.

“We fully expect that there will be a lot more competitors coming into this space,” Brooks says. “It’s time has come. It’s the confluence of four different trends: bring your own device, the rise of SMS, the rise of mobile and associated tablets and the cloud.”

However, Brooks added that he believes the time TigerText has been in the space, their extensive capital supporting them and their 1.5 million downloads to date gives them a significant advantage.

Update (10:02 PM): Brooks has clarified that it is an API integration with Dropbox, not a formal partnership.

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Facebook, CNN Team Up for U.S. Presidential Election Initiatives (Inside Facebook)
Facebook has partnered with CNN to offer apps and insights related to the 2012 U.S. presidential election, the social network announced Monday. Facebook and CNN will launch an “I’m Voting” application for users to commit to vote and endorse particular candidates and issues. San Francisco Chronicle The app will display votes on Facebook members’ timelines, news feeds and real-time tickers and then be used for a state-by-state interactive map. The two companies are also teaming up to measure the Facebook discussions of the campaigns of President Obama and challenger Mitt Romney and to survey voting-age U.S. residents. CNET While Facebook has long been used as a political tool — many noted how social media gave Obama an advantage when he ran in 2008 — and a way to promote one’s causes, but this takes an official stab at voting transparency. And Facebook is big on transparency. Adweek With ratings falling to a 21-year low in the second quarter of this year, CNN needs to make bold moves to draw viewers to its broadcasts, and it’s betting that Facebook is the answer. If the app catches on with users, CNN may be able to take the pulse of the electorate in useful, real-time ways. continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Stop the presses! Facebook and LinkedIn are about to become archrivals in the recruiting market! At least, that’s the implication of a Wall Street Journal article, which reports that Facebook plans to launch a job posting board later this summer.

It’s a nice scoop if true (the Journal cites “people familiar with the matter”), but reading the story is a strange experience. Basically, it starts out by explaining why the job board isn’t a big deal. Then, having established that it isn’t a big deal, the story talks about what a big deal it is.

The board will reportedly aggregate job listings from third-party services like BranchOut, Jobvite, and Work4 Labs, making them searchable for Facebook users. One of the quoted sources describes it as “lightweight” and says, “It doesn’t feel like a big effort that they’ve worked on for a long time.” Someone also says Facebook didn’t build the site itself, and instead got a third-party developer to do it. The Journal reports that Facebook doesn’t plan to monetize the service initially, and says it’s “unclear” whether the company will do so in the future.

Apparently, the job board might be an extension of the Social Jobs Partnership that Facebook announced with the US Department of Labor last fall. In fact, if you read the program announcement, one of the partnership’s plans was to “explore and develop systems where new job postings can be delivered virally through the Facebook site at no charge.”

A Facebook spokesperson, meanwhile, sent me the obligatory statement: “We don’t comment on rumor or speculation.”

Add that all up, and what do you get? A cool-sounding feature, possibly part of an existing partnership, but not a major new direction or revenue source for the company. So … why talk about how it could be “more of a threat to other professional networking sites such as LinkedIn”? Or the stuff about the evolution of recruiting and the size of online recruiting industry? All of this speculation comes with caveat of, “If Facebook decides to get serious about this … ” but the story doesn’t offer any real evidence that that’s going to happen.

Again, I’m not trying to take away from the Journal’s scoop. It’s just that parts of the article are … puzzling. And as someone who’s had his own moments of pressure (from myself or from my editors) to make news seem like a bigger deal than it is, I’m seeing some familiar signs. With all the “ifs”, “shoulds”, and “coulds” it almost feels like the Journal had a dramatic story in their head about Facebook vs. LinkedIn. When it turned out to be less of a page turner than expected, they weren’t quite willing to let it go. (I’m also not opposed to blue-sky speculation — speculation is fun! — but a little dodgier when mixed in with real reporting.)

Put another away: Could Facebook become a more serious player in recruiting? Sure, anything is possible. But there’s nothing here to make me think it’s more likely.

Yesterday, we heard that the New York Times was partnering with Flipboard to make its content available to its own paying customers on a new platform. Today, Flipboard competitor Pulse is launching its new Premium Sources feature in partnership with the Wall Street Journal to make some of the newpaper’s content available on its platform through in-app subscriptions. Pulse users will be able to subscribe to three WSJ channels for the time being: a tech and a politics section for $3.99/month each and an editorially curated feed called the Water Cooler for $0.99/month. For the Wall Street Journal, which has been using a paywall on its site since 1997, this is the first time it is unbundling its content and reselling it this way.

It’s important to note that this project is very different from the one the New York Times is working on with Flipboard. Flipboard is not selling in-app subscriptions to the New York Times, after all. Instead, New York Times subscribers now have another avenue for accessing the content they already subscribe to.

As Dmitry Shevelenko, who is responsible for Pulse’s monetization efforts, told me earlier today, “the most basic difference between our partnership with the Wall Street Journal and the Flipboard/NYT integration is growth vs. retention.” Pulse wants to help the WSJ (and other partners it plans bring on in the future) reach new audiences and expand their subscriber base.

A typical WSJ online subscription starts at $4.99/week, so users who don’t need access to the whole site can save quite a few dollars by using Pulse. The WSJ and Pulse will share the revenue from this venture (after Apple takes its 30% cut).

As Pulse co-founder Akshay Kothari notes, “there is significant opportunity to transform the consumption of premium content on mobile devices. Pulse users come back every day to discover exciting new content and they will love these new offerings from the Journal.”

Shevelenko also stressed that the company focused on making the content as “snackable” as possible, allowing users to spend a few minutes on reading an article on the bus or a few hours on the couch. For the time being, in-app subscriptions are only available on iOS. Once subscribed, though, users can also read these channels on their Android devices.

The updated Pulse for iOS app is available in the App Store now and the company promises to add more premium sources in the near future.

The next time you want to show a loved one just how much you care you can send more than just a bouquet of flowers.  Today UK florist Arena Flowers has announced a partnership with business video hosting platform vzaar to let customers upload special video messages to be delivered along with their flowers.
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Clearly I’m not the only one excited by CloudOn and its goal of making tablets more productive with software like Microsoft Office. The company announced today that it has raised $16 million in a second round of funding led by The Social+Capital Partnership.

CloudOn offers apps for the iPad and Android tablets that give you access to fully-featured versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, as well as Adobe Reader. The apps connect to cloud storage services like DropBox and Box, allowing you to easily save and access your existing files, and forgoing the need to deal with the iPad and Android’s confusing file systems.

Not surprisingly, CloudOn says it will use the funding to scale its operations — which could mean more productivity apps making their way to the service. The company is also working on expanding group productivity features within its apps, and it’s also working on bringing its software to smartphones and PCs.

With its ability to run complex software remotely, and its integration with cloud storage, CloudOn is essentially attempting to create a virtual desktop computer. In many ways, it’s preferable to a traditional computer, since you don’t have to worry about managing files or installing software.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based CloudOn is also adding Mamoon Hamid, general partner at Social+Capital, to its board of directors. This latest round of funding also saw participation from Translink Capital and existing investors Foundation Capital and Rembrandt Venture Partners.

Design is determining the winners in everything mobile. The most successful players are focusing on one thing: How to make products, services, and devices as compelling and delightful as possible – visually, and experientially. MobileBeat 2012, July 10-11 in San Francisco , is assembling the most elite minds to debate how UI/UX is transforming every aspect of the mobile economy, and where the opportunities lie. Register here.

Filed under: deals, mobile, VentureBeat