First stock imagery site Shutterstock files for a $115 million IPO, and now rival Fotolia is selling 50 percent (note: link goes to a paywalled Financial Times article) of the company ...

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iZettle is one of the European companies doing what Jack Dorsey's Square is doing in the United States: trying to convince small businesses and individuals to take card payments with ...

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Today, Flipboard introduces a major new addition: sound. Now you can enjoy all kinds of audio—music, podcasts, news segments, ephemera and more—while flipping through your favorite sections on Flipboard. You can start your auditory adventure by tapping on the red ribbon and exploring the new Audio category or by connecting to SoundCloud in the Accounts area. As soon as you press play, a music note will appear in the bottom left corner of Flipboard. Tap the note anytime to control your listening...  show all text

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In today’s digital age, the world is fast evolving into a large global attention economy. Whether it’s an individual or a business, the kind of influence you have on others gains paramount importance. So, how do you determine what kind of influence you have on others? While there are services such as Klout which provide a good indication of your level of influence, it is largely based on your social media influence only. Last week, I posted a video about the 3 rules of engagement in the attenti...  show all text

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Tweet Big news came in from the folks at Buffer and Twylah this week. The two companies partnered up to give your Tweets much more impact than possible before. I’ve written about the magical Power Tweet before, which increases your engagement by 400%. As of today, you can make this Power Tweet from Twylah even more powerful and send it through Buffer. Buffer, if you haven’t come across it yet, is a super smart Social Sharing app. Any page that you read on the web and want to share with your f...  show all text

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In the white heat of the current tech market it’s sometimes easy to forget that some companies, although taking their time, simply become viable businesses – instead of waiting for a call from Facebook or Twitter that may never come. I’ve been covering web site and shop builder Moonfruit for longer than I care to remember (they launched in 2000), but along the way husband and wife team Joe and Wendy White kept on pushing the company until it was one of the most innovative of its kind out there....  show all text

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(Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife) Just days before Facebook's historic stock offering, General Motors said it plans to stop advertising on the social media site, concluding that its paid ads don't have a big impact on consumers. GM spends about $40 million a year on Facebook marketing, according to the Wall [...]

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Matt Galligan: Socialcam's Shady Secret  —  I had a hunch that Socialcam was doing some really shady tactics to get more of a bump in engagement at the detriment of user experience.  Looks like my hunch was right.  The app has been on quite the tear lately with how much it's growing and getting insane engagement.

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Mr. Sorkin said last year that he was inclined to adapt Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs for Sony. But no deal had been set until now.

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Japanese operator DoCoMo has revealed plans to introduce a series of cloud-based services for smartphone users.

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I charted the dirty tricks over user growth for all those viral video apps (more background @ http://t.co/zEp4ASK7) http://t.co/wGZAePXI

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When I was younger, my parents liked to listen to the big soft rock stations in Los Angeles. Once in a while, the sappy love songs would be interrupted by an emotional dedication from a boy/girlfriend to their significant other. It was awkward, but also kind of beautiful. But mostly awkward. Now it sounds like Pandora has made an impressive gesture toward keeping that tradition alive, while also demonstrating the power of its ad targeting. So yeah, this happened: Someone, specifically someone n...  show all text

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Germany’s Earlybird Venture Capital is on a roll. They’ve just moved operations to Berlin (PDF), raised $100 million for their new fund – target size $200 million – and a number of portfolio companies are doing very well (case in point: madvertise). Today, the company is announcing that Konstantin Guericke, a co-founder and former VP of Marketing of business social network LinkedIn, is joining the firm as a US-based venture partner. Fun fact: he was born and raised in Germany. Guericke, who left  show all text

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After winning an Oscar for writing a screenplay about Facebook, Aaron Sorkin is setting his sights on Apple. Variety reports that Sorkin has officially signed on to adapt Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, titled Steve Jobs, for Sony Pictures. Sony optioned the screen rights for Steve Jobs before the book even hit shelves. And almost immediately, the studio began courting Sorkin. Variety quotes Sony’s co-chairman Amy Pascal as saying, “There is no writer working in Hollywood today who is  show all text

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Facebook is nearing a billion users, but what could topple the big blue giant? Government intervention, the shift to mobile, and a loss of “cool” all have the power to violently disrupt the social network, or at least cause it to lose its strong grip on the market. Here’s a look at the four things that could ruin Mark Zuckerberg’s dream of a single site that connects the world. The thread that runs between all these pitfalls is their potential to make Facebook irrelevant. If you can’t access it,  show all text

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Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. People use Facebook to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, post links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet.

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Updated. Netflix clocked close to 42 billion API requests per day in January, according to the company’s director of engineering Daniel Jacobson, who revealed the number as part of a presentation he recently gave to the Paypal engineering team. In his slides, Jacobson pointed out that the number of API requests has grown 70-fold in just two years, from 600 million in January of 2010 to 41.7 billion in January of 2012. Providing an API that is resilient enough to handle these kinds of demands ...  show all text

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There are a bunch of ways to explain away GM’s decision to stop spending ad dollars on Facebook. We’ll get to those. But there’s one thing that even the most ardent Facebook fan can’t argue with: Facebook advertising is very much a work in progress. Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Facebook itself: “We believe that most advertisers are still learning and experimenting with the best ways to leverage Facebook to create more social and valuable ads,” the company says in its IPO filing. If you’...  show all text

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Four and a half years ago, I proudly joined the ranks of America's Finest News Source, a/k/a The Onion. For a comedian, tech geek and politics and news junkie, it was and remains an epic high in my life. Today, with a deep sense of nostalgia, I'm excited to move to the next chapter of that insane life having stepped down as Director of Digital to pursue more entrepreneurial ventures. It’s been an amazing ride. Acting as politics editor, I played a part in The Onion's 2008 "War For The White H...  show all text

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It couldn’t have happened at a worse time for Facebook, which has its initial public offering of stock later this week. General Motors has decided to stop advertising on the social networking giant, citing concerns about the site’s effectiveness. Meanwhile, a Forrester analyst says... Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

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Yesterday, Twitter launched a new weekly email digest that it will be sending out to all members. Contained within are a few hotly shared news stories, the Twitter accounts that have ...

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An ode to the father of the electric age. View

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Peter Sciretta / /Film: Aaron Sorkin To Adapt ‘Steve Jobs’ for Sony  —  Last year we heard that Sony wanted Academy Award-winning The Social Network/The West Wing writer Aaron Sorkin to write the screenplay for a Steve Jobs biopic based on Walter Isaacson's best-selling biography.  Sony had purchased the rights …

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Flipboard wants to be the first magazine with a soundtrack. The company is releasing an update on Tuesday that integrates music-sharing service SoundCloud as well as radio programs from NPR and Public Radio International (PRI). Flipboard’s app for iPhone and iPad (and soon Android) collects articles, images, photo albums and videos that your friends share on social networks and re-formats them in a personalized magazine. Its pages will now contain tracks that friends share through SoundCloud, i...  show all text

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Flipboard has launched its blockbuster app in Japan as it continues to tap international demand for the social magazine app.

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Last year we heard that Sony wanted Academy Award-winning The Social Network/The West Wing writer Aaron Sorkin to write the screenplay for a Steve Jobs biopic based on Walter Isaacson‘s best-selling biography. Sony had purchased the rights in a $1 million deal made just days after the Apple co-founder’s passing on October 5th 2011. Last we heard, Sorkin was “strongly considering” the project. Since then, another movie from an independent producer based on Jobs’ life starring Ashton Kutcher has ...  show all text

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“Social magazine” Flipboard may have to think up a new tagline for itself, as tonight the company is rolling out an update which greatly expands its focus beyond text-based content to also include audio. The rollout features integrations from NPR, PRI (Public Radio International) and social sound platform, SoundCloud. Also of note, Flipboard is launching its third localized edition with the debut of a Flipboard app for Japan, following its previous launches in China and France. And there’s an u...  show all text

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Web startups are made out of two things: people and code. The people make the code, and the code makes the people rich. Code is like a poem; it has to follow certain structural requirements, and yet out of that structure can come art. But code is art that does something. It is the assembly of something brand new from nothing but an idea. More »

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