While Google’s software platforms  ranging from Gmail and Google Maps to Google Docs and Google.com continue to receive praise the company has failed to keep up with its competitors in terms of media offerings.

To reach a level playing field with Apple and Amazon the company reportedly signed licensing deals with Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment. Those two media conglomerates make up a large portion of the mainstream music market and are considered must have partners for any serious online streaming partner. 

According to reports the Google music streaming platform will resemble Spotify by playing on-demand songs on desktop and mobile devices via subscription service.

Google has not confirmed the report but if true it would mean that the search giant will beat a Apple to the music streaming market. Apple is believed to be working on an iRadio feature that would also compete with the likes of Spotify and now Google.

A name for the new Google service has not been revealed at this time.

Are you ready to test drive a Google run music streaming service?

Twitter on Monday announced the acquisition of big data analytics firm Lucky Sort.

Lucky Sort is a firm that focuses on natural language data-mining and visualization tools that are used by various online partners.

The company StockTwits is powered in large part by the data provided from the Lucky Sort system.

Lucky Sort will begin to shut down its services over the next few months and the company’s employees will transition to new roles at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters.

Among the company’s employees joining the team at Twitter is Lucky Sort CEO and founder CEO Noah Pepper.

In a post regarding the acquisition Pepper writes:

“In building Lucky Sort we had an enormous amount of support from friends, employees, advisors and investors. It has been uplifting to have so many people help us and it highlighted just how much business is a social endeavor.”

Twitter has been putting a lot of focus on big data firms in recent weeks. The social giant recently purchased Ubalo, a company that aims to make large-scale computing more accessible and easier to manage.

Do you think Lucky Sort is a big win acquisition for Twitter?

Social media management software company Expion examined all brand mentions for top beer brands and found that between April 24 and May 6 the Dos Equis brand was the top mentioned beer product.

The marketing geniuses at the beer manufacturer were helped along by the ‘Dos de Mayo’ campaign which helped it earn 4,746 brand mention. The next closest mexican beer manufacturer was Corono with 464 mentions.

According to Expion CMO Mike Heffring:

“For consistency’s sake, Expion is tracking only @ mentions of each brand, which may be why some of the numbers seem low. We feel that @ mentions are the best representation of users engaging or responding with the brand messages.”

The #DosDeMayo hashtag generated 1,979 mentions on Cinco De Mayo with 227,668 mentions of  #CincoDeMayo overall.

Here is the most popular Cinco De Mayo tweet from Dos Equis:

The line to his #CincoDeMayo party started forming on Ocho de Febrero.

— Dos Equis (@DosEquis) May 5, 2013

Bud Light, Miller Light, Guiness and other beers received barely any Twitter mentions during the same time period.

As expected mexican manufactured beers scored better than other alcoholic beverage on Twitter during Mexico’s independence day.

In describing the new app update Foursquare says:

“Love checking in and seeing that you’ve passed your record for weeks in a row at the gym? Now we’ve made it easier to share the insights you see after you check in on Twitter, Facebook, and more. Just tap the share button to show off your 30-week gym streak, an awesome special that you unlocked, or a great tip from a friend.”

When a user checks in they are shown how many similar businesses they have checked into recently and now data from their account can be shared with a users social networks. 

Foursquare has been repositioning itself as a local search app more along the lines of Yelp than the original Foursquare application. Foursquare now offers tips and information about local businesses via the Explore feature.

Relevant tips still require Foursquare users to check-in at locations which explains why the company is putting more emphasis on developing a share friend version of its platform.

The team at Potomac College recently examined the most sought after degrees in business and as expected they can all offer something to enterprising up and comers in the connected space.

As anyone who has ever started a new website can tell you there is a degree of entrepreneurship that can’t be understated. From learning about online marketing to building partnerships with other company’s to developing a strategic point of attack for your content or products, understanding how to build a business is an important first step. 

With the rapidly increasing number of e-commerce sites a degree in e-commerce has also emerged in 2013. From data mining and analytics to understanding the global products markets this degree is most definitely the future of B2C.

Throw in degrees in marketing, finance and economics and you can quickly see how all of the degrees can be used in various ways via the online market.

Take a closer look at Potomac’s 7 most popular business degrees of 2013 and let us know how you think they can be used in the online business sector.

Via: Potomac College

Employees from Tunigo will move to Spotify’s offices in Stockhom and New York City.

In the short term the Tunigo app will remain as its own entity within the Spotify eco-system.

The move echoes an industry shift towards stronger music discovery practices. Twitter most recently purchased We Are Hunted in an effort to gain access to the music discovery sector.  Tunigo however is more closely related to apps such as Songza and 8tracks. Those apps curate playlists and then suggests lists to users based on genre, theme, and mood.

The company has a staff of 17 people and before the acquisition had raised €2.4 million.

Tunigo was built on the premise that pressing a single button can generate the perfect playlist for music lovers in real-time.

Since Spotify debuted its app platform in November 2011 the Tunigo platform has remained a top ten app.

A spokesperson for the deal notes:

“The acquisition fits into our overall strategy around music discovery, basically helping our users make sense of over 20 million tracks.”

Tunigo CEO and co-founder Nick Holmstén further adds:

“Tunigo helps users find great music for every moment, and we’ve been working very closely with Spotify over the past few years. This is the perfect match from a music discovery perspective. We’re passionate about music and technology, and looking forward to further innovating within the music discovery space.”

With Apple edging ever closer to iRadio and other competitors emerging in the music discovery space the Spotify acquisition of Tunigo couldn’t have arrived at a better time.

Okay, corny I know, but on April 30, 1993 the internet’s daddy Tim Berners-Lee and his employer CERN made available for free the very software that would eventually become what we now refer to as the internet.

In a statement released on the CERN website, the agency on Tuesday said:

“By making the software required to run a web server freely available, along with a basic browser and a library of code, the web was allowed to flourish.

Berners-Lee hosted the world’s first public website on his NeXT computer, and today CERN revived that website on the very same NeXT computer that ushered in the web generation.

We have come a long way since 1993, when WAIS and Gopher powered servers and easily accessible internet was just a pipe dream. Yes it is absolutely true that “internet” systems existed before CERN and Berners-Lee took them public but it was their software that gave birth to the internet as we know it today.

Here is the original world wide web page published on the NeXT computer:

The Twitter self-serve platform allows account administrators to run their own campaigns by promoting accounts or individuals Tweets to specific groups within the social network. Advertisers can also track the results of their campaigns via Twitter analytics.

The self-serve platform provides pay for engagement activities which includes favorites, replies, and retweets.

Twitter started the advertising platform as an invite-only option. Twitter used feedback to adjust the platform before taking it live. 

Self-served engagement advertising is already a popular option on Facebook and LinkedIn. With Twitter’s focus on conversations, it will likely be a popular advertising solution for the micro-blogging service.

The move also marks one of Twitter’s first attempts to offer reasonably priced advertising that doesn’t cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

If you are interested in Twitter self-serve advertising you can sign up here.

The company is currently seeking out advertisers who want to re-target ads to Web users based on their check-ins and to serve up interstitial ads via the Foursquare mobile apps platforms.

Foursquare has had a hard time raising money lately, relying on a funding round based around loans instead of outright investments. Many analysts have questioned whether or not the Foursquare business model is feasible.

Under the new system, users who check into stores might see a pop-up for that store’s products immediately upon check-in. Users might then see the same or similar ads the next time they are sitting at their desktop or using their notebook. 

Foursquare hopes to launch the retargeting platform next month. Foursquare is currently asking for $50,000 per expenditure.

Foursquare is likely to come under fire for retargeting because of its focus on user tracking; however, many apps now retarget and the practice is becoming more commonplace.

Pop-up ads, in the meantime, are expected to surface in June or early July. Foursquare is asking for interactive ads since they perform best on mobile devices.

Do you think Foursquare can still pull itself out of the dumps and turn itself into a different, more involved internet-based platform?

In a statement regarding the acquisition Facebook said:

“By making Parse a part of the Facebook Platform, we want to enable developers to rapidly build apps that span mobile platforms and devices.”

Facebook should benefit from Parse’s ability to offer server support and software development kits (SDKs) that make app development easier. 

According to Gartner analyst Brian Blau:

“This will help them on all mobile platforms, and will be used to help attract developers to better integrate with Facebook’s other services.”

The Parse platform will likely continue to support its third-party partners, thus providing a new source of revenue for Facebook.

One of Parse’s services provides the ability to support social integration by “linking accounts across networks, resetting passwords, and keeping everything safe and secure.”

Facebook says it will continue to supports apps even if they do not use Facebook integration.

The team at ThingLink is bringing its specialized brand of interactive images to Facebook.

The Helsinki-based company allows users to create interactive images with its online tool, those images can then be shared in fun and unique ways.

Using the program, users can place links inside of multimedia content. Once added to a users timeline, ThingLink creates a new type of interactive photo that engages the curiosity of users. 

ThingLink CEO Ulla Engeström tells PRWeb:

“Images are becoming forums for conversation and discovery that include sharing, touching, commenting, and remixing rich media content created by others.”

Users can insert image links to music and videos, websites, and social profiles. The program works by pointing different icon types to different types of content.

Once images are created, ThingLink then providers users with analytics so they can determine how well their new interactive images are engaging with customers.

Other than GIFS, the use of images has long been considered a headache. In the past ,a simple Alt Text tag was the only way search engines could even read images. ThingLink, it appears, is changing that “dead weight” perception of the common internet-based image.

Do you plan on using ThingLink on your Facebook timeline?

On its official company blog a Tumblr employee writes:

“It works very simply: Every now and then you’ll see posts from our partners as you scroll through your mobile Dashboard.”

Tumblr began offering and testing promoted posts to desktop users one year ago via the post highlighting Radar feature.

The blogging platform has not revealed its successes with promoted tweets but a shift to mobile devices appears to speak volumes for the programs success.

According to Tumblr:

“Our fashion, entertainment, and brand partners have created some truly delightful blogs and racked up tens of millions notes on their posts.”

The Radar platform currently receives 120 million pageviews per day.

Tumblr, a privately owned company earned $13 million in revenue through 2012. Tumblr is still seeking to become profitable.

The real question at hand will be whether or not Tumblr users, a younger and more tech savvy crowd, will continue to embrace the network if its ads give the appearance of a corporate culture. Many younger users turned away from MySpace and Facebook as those networks moved towards mainstream success.

Are you okay with Tumblr Promoted Posts showing up in your mobile dashboard?

The team at web printing company Moo has compiled a list of some of the biggest blogging names and services on the planet.

Starting in 1994 when Justin Hall began blogging on links.net, the team quickly pushes forward to modern day heroes in micro-blogging, including Evan Williams and his launch of the Blogger.com network in 1999.

In 2003, gossip blogging becomes big with the launch of gossip network Gawker and Jason Calacanis’s Weblog network.  By 2007, more than 70 million blogs are being indexed by Technorati and that growth has continued.

By 2009, Tumblr alone was hosting 11 million blogs, a number that has increased at a rapid rate over the last four years. 

63% of businesses now operate blogs which typically outline their products, new hires, and other facets of their businesses. There should also be no surprise that WordPress still dominates the webspace with WP 3.5.x making up 45% of the blogging atmosphere with 54.9 million websites using the system followed by Blogger.com with 35%.

Here is the rise of blogging infographic starting in 1994 and heading through the present:

Studying hundreds of Facebook users, the team at Fierce Inc. found that most social media users don’t want a personal social media relationship with the people they work for.

In polling 800 Facebook participants, the study found that a whopping 80 percent of workers use Facebook on the job while 50 percent of those surveyed thought it was a bad idea to mix Facebook with work.

16 percent of respondents also claimed that they have “lost respect for co-workers because of things they posted on Facebook.”

Fierce Inc. CEO Halley Bock says the best decision for a company would be to allow employees to communicate openly in order to foster an open forum of ideas and chatter.

Bock says companies should hold exploratory conversations with employee to determine which type of online communications should be allowed while on the clock. Companies should also put into place clear guidelines for Facebook use at work.

Do you think friending your boss is a good idea or should work and personal relationships remain separate, even in an online scenario?

The team at Skyscanner recently conducted a Social Media Use Poll in the UK and they discovered that most travelers have turned to social media in place of paper-based postcards.

The study found that only 6 percent of travels send postcards while 26 percent like to use Facebook to share their experiences. Two percent of users like to use Twitter for their vacation sharing needs. 14 percent of travelers also admitted that they would not attempt to contact anyone while taking their vacation, ruling out social media and paper-based postcards all together.

The study involved 1,200 travelers who took vacations to various locations.

As we move towards an ever increasing number connected social media users we will likely see less dependency on paper travel documents as a whole and more emphasis on digital products. 

Would you prefer to send a postcard or simply post your daily vacation photos? What social network do you like to use while on vacation?

Here is the full Skyscanner study results as an infographic:

While Twitter has put a lot of stock in the Twitter Cards system, specifically Twitter Photo Cards, it turns out that most users would rather click on a link to view Instagram photos.

The team at Column Five visualized the entire shift from Twitter to Instagram in a new infographic. Column Five worked with Simply Measured in February 2013 to determine the shift caused by the Twitter shut down of Instagram.

What Column Five and Simply Measured discovered was that engagement with brands since that time has grown by 35% on Instagram while brand follower count grew by 41%.

They also offer some helpful tips for tracking your social media photo sharing, for example, use Instagram for photo sharing on Facebook to increase engagement.

If you want to increase Twitter engagement you need to upload pictures directly to the Twitter photo sharing system and not through Instagram.

Here is the full infographic:

Blab works by listening to 60 million conversions that take place on 50,000 websites. The company uses both text and image matching to detect a websites pages content.

Blab then categorizes the conversations it collects into different general topic areas such as sports and news. Blab claims that it can take patterns from one conversation and then use them to compare new patterns as they emerge. The platform then makes an educated guess at the conversations that will occur over the next three days.

Essentially Blab is a trending tool that aims to predict trends rather than simply reporting on them.

According to the company the process is so data-intensive that it had to build its own proprietary software that is running on Amazon’s Web Services.

The program is so server intensive that it literally died when running on Hadoop, a framework built to support large sums of data.

By predicting what conversations will trend in the coming days the company could become a big help for companies looking to strategize crisis response communications.

Blab monitors many websites including Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, Instagram, Flickr, and others.

Twitter purchased the popular app in late 2012 and launched Vine in January 2013.

Vine allows customers to record 6-second long videos and then share them on the Vine platform and through Twitter and Facebook.

Starting in March the Vine platform began allowing users to embed users with basic and postcard setups. The Vine embeds have begun to show up on various news reporting websites.

The Twitter Vine app is the most downloaded free app among Apple users but WhatsApp still reigns supreme as the top downloaded premium application.

Here is the Twitter update for the Vine milestone:

Hey guys, remember that time we made the No. 1 most popular app in the world? @ckb @dhof @bobby @vineapp twitter.com/rus/status/321…

— Rus Yusupov (@rus) April 8, 2013

Have you downloaded and played with the Twitter Vine app?

Gnip will now use public posts from its new services along with their APIs to fold further data into its subscription based reports.

In a blog post Gnip notes:

“Our customers care about every public conversation that happens online.”

Using the new platform marketers will be able to monitor Instagram posts by keyword or by geolocation. With Bitly and Reddit brands will be able to track links that are being shared about their products. 

Gnip will also implement the Reddit API to find negative stories that emerge about its brand partners. With 50 million active Reddit users the data collected should prove invaluable. Reddit with its finger on the pulse of creating trends could help marketers quash bad press before it has time to brew.

Speaking about its decision to add Instagram location based info Gnip writes:

“We have consistently found that our customers are eager for more social data with geotagged content.”

Approximately 15 to 25 percent of all Instagram users geotag their photos.

With billions of social interactions occurring on a daily basis across hundreds of social platforms we can likely expect to see more partnerships with Gnip and other networks in the near future.

LinkedIn on Tuesday released its annual Consumer Technology study in which it learned that  “88 percent of LinkedIn members own smartphones, compared to 46 percent of the general population.” The company also found that “62 percent of LinkedIn members own tablets, compared to only 22 percent generally.”

Realizing the pull it has among tech savvy buyers the social network examined the purchasing behaviors of its users in December 2012.

According to LinkedIn Marketing Solutions lead Michael Weir, 56 percent of LinkedIn members turn to their social networks for advice before they make a purchase.

The study also found that 53 percent of LinkedIn members share information about what they buy after making the purchase. That information in turn helps other tech savvy buyers on LinkedIn make their next buying decision. 

In many cases LinkedIn customers post a link to an articles about a new product or a production update and then ask other users to rate the product and share their experiences with potential products for purchase.

LinkedIn users also use the social network to ask about add-ons such as additional apps, cases for products, etc.

Weir says that because of its tech savvy customers questions and responses there are not a lot of problems with products. It turns out that LinkedIn uses the same type of feedback about its own product to avoid issues. According to Weir:

“We’re fortunate in that LinkedIn members give very positive and constructive feedback on our platform.”

The best part about product opinions on LinkedIn? Users tend to tell the truth since lies and bad talking can come back to haunt them as they attempt to build out their own business network on the social enterprise platform.

Have you used LinkedIn to determine which tech products to purchase?

Facebook’s automated systems and unfortunate choice of words might be directly effecting the perceptions of racism for some users. A new study has found that the social network is finding unexpected ways to spread racist messages.

While we often think of Facebook and racism as something that happens among bigoted commenters, the truth is the network’s user logs reveal a more prevalent problem. The study published in the Computers in Human Behavior examines racism based on how long a user remained logged into the social network.

The study finds that the longer one is logged in, the more a user absorbs negative racist sentiments. Examining more than 600 participants, including 70 percent females, the study asked each user to read three different Facebook “notes” about race. Each of the notes had a different focus.  The first note was a ”superiority message” focused on white superiority, the second was a “victim message” that suggested white people were victims of racist behavior and the third was “the egalitarian message,” which was written to indicate the writer still believed that racism was an issue for black people. Researchers, upon completion of the study, found:

The ability of racist messages to spread via social networks is of concern as people are increasingly using Facebook not only as a way to connecting with friends, but as a primary source of information. Frequent users are particularly disposed to be influenced by negative racial messages.

The egalitarian message was adopted by most light users of Facebook.

The team at Conduit decided to check out Twitter’s worst users and put together a hilarious infographic that examines the social networks most obnoxious people.

Talking about Twitter’s worst offenders Conduit’s Sivan Cohen revealed:

“With over half a billion users, it’s no surprise that Twitter has its fair share of awful tweeters.”

The company specifically examined eleven awful tech tweeter types. From “know-it-all developers” who attempt to always look brilliant, to eventaholic Twitter users who brag about all the cool events they are attending, the group really hits the nail on the head.

Copycats, wannabe founders, and tech noobs all make the Conduit list.

Read through the infographics’ list of top offenders and let us know what obnoxious Twitter users are missing from the tech based list:

The fragmented groups known as Anonymous have attempted on various occasions to bring down social networks with no success, that of course does not mean they will stop now.

Anonymous is calling the campaign #OpTruthForce.

According to AnonNews:

“In past years we have seen a growing force around the world. Governments and corporations are working strategically to stop free speech by the people. In more recent months we have witnessed an increased number of account blocking and deletion by Facebook, of users who dare to ridicule, mock, satirize, or speak out against political leaders or corporations heavily involved with politics.”

If Anonymous can’t take down Facebook it appears that its new attempt will be to troll the social network as much as possible.

In it’s message Anonymous writes:

“All anons WORLDWIDE hit facebook with uncensored material. We shall continue this bombardment of material as long as we can—hopefully 24 hours. We will flood their system—their admins won’t be able to keep up. THEY CAN’T BAN US ALL AT ONCE!”

According to SocialNewsDaily: ”April 6 was chosen because it is the same day Mahatma Gandhi civilly disobeyed British law.”

Are you going to be joining Anonymous during its Facebook trolling attempt on April 6?

Twitter has rolled out a new embed feature for its Vine platform. Users can now choose to embed Vine’s based on three different sizes. The company also unveiled stronger Facebook and Twitter sharing options.

In a company blog post  co-founder and general manager Dom Hofmann writes:

“When we launched Vine, we described posts as ‘little windows into the people, settings, ideas and objects that make up your life.’ With today’s update, you can display them almost anywhere.”

Users can now embed Vine’s 6-second looping videos via its iOS app and through the official Vine.co URL. Google Android users are still unable to take advantage of the platforms growing feature base.

The Vine embed comes in “simple” and “postcard styles” with sizes of 320px, 480px, and 600px. The “simple” version is just a basic video embed, while the postcard option provides the original format alongside a text description and location.

With company’s quickly adopting the Vine platform for their advertising needs we can expect to see many new features in the near future.

RedditRewind is yet another reason for site visitors to spend their time endlessly clicking through Reddit posts. Developed by platform creator and back-end developer Parham Negahdar and front-end developer Morley Zhi, the RedditRewind feature allows users to use Reddit as a virtual time machine. Redditors can find old photos, videos, and links that have been posted to popular subReddits over the last few months.

Speaking about the need for such a platform Negahdar explains:

“I saw there was lots of interest in such a thing so I launched my existing project as quickly as I could. At the time it was purely a utility. The UI was simply a list of links with dates, months, and years to visit a cache, and the result was simple list of links on the page (think 4chan-level UI). I knew the design sucked and made an edit to my post asking if anyone would be willing to design the site.”

Negahdar not only created the platform, his front-end developer made it look so nice that they actually use it instead of the Reddit Enhancement Suite and the actual Reddit website. 

The two men chose to remove a few subreddits such as atheism, politics, and gaming to avoid “quality reasons” but then “added some others we thought deserved to be included (like mildlyinteresting and /r/games).”

RedditRewind caches the front pages of popular subreddits every hour and users can search those cached pages using a sliding timeline. Users can also filter stories by time of day. Reddit in comparison chooses popularity over date timestamps.

When users click the “open link” they are taken to the original Reddit.com post.

The content goes all the way back to August 29, 2012 although the timeline slider stops at November 24, 2012.