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It’s already Sunday?! Man, the weekends fly by so quickly in the summer. And at the speed this summer is passing, I’d say it’s time to hightail it to somewhere warm and sandy for a week and just relax ’til next weekend. Summer doesn’t fly by when you’re on a beach, right? If you need some reading material for the plane/train/bus/car, scroll on and check out the best inbound marketing stories we found this week across the web.

How Top Brands Are Using Instagram, From Simply Measured

This story comes to us from the Simply Measured analytics blog. Instagram recently made headlines with the news that it had surpassed the 80 million user mark (up from just 15 million in January 2012!). It shouldn’t come as a big surprise, then, that among those 80 million users are 40% of the world’s top brands, as classified by the Interbrand Top 100 list. B2C brands like MTV and Starbucks dominate on Instagram, and 25% of the brands that are leveraging Instagram post at least once per week. It seems like Instagram is going to keep growing, and the 60% of top brands who are missing out have created a unique opening for smaller brands to make a name for themselves on the photo-sharing social network. Check out the full story here.

Facebook Launches New Ad Creation Tool to Help Marketers Align Campaigns With Goals, From HubSpot

This week in Facebook updates, we covered the news of a new ad creation tool that will take some of the anxiety out of Facebook advertising. With Facebook elaborating upon an earlier-released feature allowing advertisers to measure the success of their campaigns based on their stated objectives, this updated ad creation interface will make it easier for Facebook advertisers to create ads and Sponsored Stories that are more closely aligned with those stated goals, such as generating more business page likes or promoting page posts. These changes will aim to give advertisers more guidance as they’re building their Facebook ad campaigns and help them achieve the right balance of Facebook ads and Sponsored Stories to achieve their particular goals. Facebook has also added a preview option to the process, allowing marketers to view what their ad will look like in actual news feeds. The changes will be especially beneficial to marketers trying out Facebook ads for the first time. Check out the full story here.

Brands Missing Out On Mobile Ad Opportunities, From MarketingProfs

MarketingProfs highlights the takeaways of a HipCricket study on mobile advertisement opportunities — namely, that many brands are leaving those opportunities on the table, and then walking away. Yikes. According to the study, 46% of mobile users have viewed a mobile ad, and 64% have completed a mobile purchase as a result of viewing a mobile ad. But an astonishing 74% of mobile users claim that their favorite brands have never advertised to them on a mobile platform. That’s a lot of brands missing the chance to convert some mobile purchases! Additional details in the study revealed demographic differences in those who take advantage of mobile ads: 55% of those who clicked have an annual income of greater than $75,000, and 29% who clicked have an annual income of greater than $100,000. Check out the full story here.

YouTube’s Built-In Video Editor Gets Better, From Mashable

Our last story this week is from the folks at Mashable. For about a year now, YouTube has been offering a built-in video editing tool as a feature that all users can take advantage of in their video publishing endeavors. But as of Thursday, video editing in YouTube has gotten even easier. YouTube shipped some new features, including quick views of every filter and a real-time, interactive preview of the changes you’ve made, consistently available throughout the editing process. The editor is gradually rolling out to all YouTube users. We’ve still noticed a few flaws with the editor, so we’re eager to see what changes YouTube has in store for the future. Check out the full story here.

Repurposing Content With a Purpose, From Smart Insights

The Smart Insights blog brings us this excellent guide to repurposing content — with a purpose! Aimed at making your content strategy more efficient, the post highlights the advantages of repurposing content, as well as eight ideas for efficient and effective repurposing. Some of the ideas we like best? Repurposing the audio track from video content as a downloadable podcast, creating textual transcripts from your video content, curating your best content into ebooks, and publishing the recordings of live webinars. We’d also venture to add that the reverse is also true; ebook and webinar content can be repurposed as blog content, too. Check out the full story here.

Did you come across any other excellent inbound marketing stories in the past week? Share them in the comments!

Image credit: kansasphoto

Hideman Masks Your IP Address and Location, Offers Anonymous Browsing

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Dear Lifehacker,
I have a messy desktop. It’s gotten so bad that there are files on top of files. I periodically throw various documents into folders to try and clean it up, but then I just have disorganized folders and the mess comes back. How can I get my desktop under control? More »

Hideman Masks Your IP Address and Location, Offers Anonymous Browsing

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Of all the hobbies you can have, making movies—or just recording great video—is one of the most difficult and expensive, but that’s all the more reason to invest in a little DIY. Here are some of the best projects you can do yourself and put together your very own video rig. More »

Reuters’ blogging platform was hacked today, allegedly by Syrian hackers loyal to President Bashar al-Assad. The hackers responsible posted a fake interview with Riad al-Assad of the rebel Free Syrian Army in which the  general was supposed to have said his troops were withdrawing after a battle.

Reuters blogging platform hacked, false Syria blog posted reut.rs/OOcntJ

—
Reuters Top News (@Reuters) August 03, 2012

Reuters tweeted about the issue immediately and has released a statement explaining the problem and retracting the “illegally posted” interview. Another bogus post apparently claimed that rebels had acquired chemical weapons.

The news agency’s blogging platform is still down now, hours after the attack, as Reuters combs through looking for any other fake posts — and, presumably, any backdoors or unauthorized users. There is no word on what kind of blogging platform Reuters used, or whether the attacker used a zero-day exploit.

Apparently the cause of the hacking in this case was political, which can of course be extremely damaging if undetected.

I can just see the dollar signs in hackers’ eyes now, however, as this may have opened eyes about the possibilities of planting fake news for economic gain.

This incident was quickly found out, but with the speed stories propagate on the internet, a few stories such as Microsoft sanctioned by EU; $10 billion fine or Samsung acquired by Apple; Lawsuits all over could lead to some serious stock manipulation.

Image credit: Jmiks/ShutterStock

Filed under: media, search, VentureBeat

If a health insurance rebate check arrived in your mailbox this week, how about putting it towards your health? The checks are part of the Affordable Care Act, which requires insurers to pay out if they don’t spend a certain amount of the premiums they collected towards paying for actual care. Rather than blow the money on apps, fast food, and other ephemera, why not reinvest the money in one of these 10 body- and mind-improving endeavors? Hell, if enough of us use the money to stay healthy, maybe we’ll get even bigger checks next year… More »

Unemployment is worryingly rampant in the US right now — which makes the ongoing “hiring crunch” in Silicon Valley even more absurd. It’s fair to say that nearly every single company that TechCrunch covers is hiring. But they’re not looking for just anyone. They’re looking for programmers. And good programmers are really hard to find.

A startup called Gild says it can help, and it’s raised $2 million in new seed funding from Globespan Capital Partners and Sequoia Capital’s Mark Kvamme to do so. Gild, which currently has 20 full-time employees at its headquarters in San Francisco, says it will use the funds to grow its team and build out its technology.

So, what exactly is that technology? Gild’s chief product is called “Gild Source,” a program that sifts through and analyzes open source code repositories to identify programmers that specialize in different languages. Gild Source associates these developers with other public personally identifying data — such as LinkedIn and Facebook profiles, and participation on sites such as Quora and Stack Overflow — and gives each one a score according to their abilities, productivity, and the feedback they receive on their works. Gild then provides its findings in a database to tech companies looking to hire developers for a monthly subscription rate starting at $700 per month. Today, Gild clients include Facebook, Box, Red Hat, and Akamai.

Helping Recruiters Actually Recruit — Not Spam

“Everyone has been very focused on simply bringing more profiles and resumes to recruiters, but we think that is the problem, not the solution. If you talk to any developer that’s on LinkedIn, what they’ll tell you is that they sometimes get 10 to 12 messages a day from people trying to hire them,” Gild CEO Sheeroy Desai told me in an interview this week.

This is obviously not effective, he said, though, he stressed that Gild aims to be complementary to existing tools such as LinkedIn and recruiting firms — not competitive with them. “We want to have recruiters recruit again. Today, they’re just spamming,” he said. “We want to give them the right information, the right people, so that they can use their time to actually recruit them.”

Another aim of Gild’s is to fundamentally change the way that potential tech employees are evaluated. “One of the things we don’t give a weighting to is where you went to school or what company you’re working at,” Desai said. “We really are trying to drive meritocracy in the recruiting process. One of the reasons companies claim that they can’t find talent is because they are hanging on to some of those criteria, which we believe has very low correlation to how good someone is.”

This is not Gild’s debut on the startup scene, but this is a new direction for the company. Desai first launched Gild nearly two years ago at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco. At that time, Gild was positioned as a “gamified job platform” for developers. The company went on to raise some $2.4 million in seed funding from backers including Globespan, but late last year it decided to change direction.

“Towards the end of last year, we realized there is a remarkable amount of publicly available information available about developers on the Internet,” Desai said. Indeed, if Gild Source can actually put that data to smart use, it could definitely have made something worth its weight in gold (see what I did there?)

Yelp today reported its earnings for the second quarter of 2012, its second ever financial report as a publicly-traded company. Overall, the reviews site showed continued top-line revenue growth and a smaller net loss than it has posted in the past — a performance that bested the estimates of Wall Street analysts.

Yelp’s Q2 revenue was $32.7 million, up 19 percent from the previous quarter and up 67 percent year-over-year from the second quarter of 2011.

The company’s operations are not yet in the black, but the bottom line performance was better than many expected. Yelp’s Q2 net loss was $2 million, or negative 3 cents per share. That’s a big step up from the $9.8 million loss the company posted in the first quarter of 2012. It’s still more than its Q2 2011 loss of $1.2 million — however, that was notably before the company started incurring the costs associated with trading on the stock market. On an adjusted basis, Yelp’s EBITDA was $1.6 million, nearly 1.5 times more than the $649,000 in adjusted EBITDA it brought in during Q2 2011.

Analysts estimated that Yelp would have a loss of negative six cents per share during Q2 2012, so the Street may well be pleased with these results.

Also today, Yelp boosted its projection for full-year 2012 revenues: It now says it should make between $135 million to 136 million during 2012, representing growth of 62 to 63 percent from 2011. Previously, the company expected it would make between $128 million to $132 million in 2012, so this is certainly a much sunnier outlook.

Here is a graph illustrating today’s earnings as compared to Yelp’s history, cooked up by TechCrunch graphic designer Bryce Durbin:

And here’s a statement from Yelp co-founder and CEO Jeremy Stoppelman:

“Yelp’s second quarter performance highlights the underlying power of our model. By focusing almost singularly on cultivating rich, authentic local content, we have created a unique platform that is rapidly becoming the de facto local search engine for connecting consumers with great local businesses.

We are now active in 90 Yelp markets around the world and are seeing an increase in our consumer engagement, especially on mobile, where their connection to local businesses is enhanced by the location-based capabilities of their mobile devices.”

Readers offer their best tips for making our favorite smartphone car dock even better, remapping annoying Windows shortcuts, getting unique wallpapers for individual spaces in OS X, and always having enough fresh ice water to drink in your hotel room. More »