Business

On the heels of Google buying Wildfire and Salesforce nabbing Buddy Media, we have heard from two very reliable sources, plus a third anonymous source, that Gannett Co., the media giant that owns USA Today and other properties, is buying BLiNQ Media. The price for the Facebook advertising software and service is up to $92 million over a period of three to four years, with a quarter of that amount, $23 million, coming up front. We hear the purchase agreement has been signed and the pair are now marching towards a close at the end of this month. The rationale behind the deal is clear: when brands buy ad placements on Gannett properties, it could use BLiNQ to also sell them ads on social sites and collect a solid margin. Gannett is looking to BLiNQ, which has built up a profitable Facebook ads API business, to become G’s equivalent of the Washington Post Company’s SocialCode, its social media marketing and analytics agency (which picked up 15 Digg engineers in May). Gannett and BLiNQ, T...

Jordan Crook studied English Literature at New York University before entering the tech space. Prior to joining TechCrunch, Crook dabbled in mobile marketing and mobile apps as well as doing device reviews for MobileMarketer and MobileBurn. Crook is fascinated with alternative energy production and greentech. She is now a writer for CrunchGear. ? Learn More It’s a brave new world my friends. There were more tweets sent in a single day during the Olympics last week than there were during the entire 17-day competition in Beijing in 2008. In 2010, during the Vancouver Winter Olympics, there were around 307,000 mentions of the term Olympics during the opening weekend of the event, as opposed to 3.5 million this time around. And we may not even be prepared for just how social the 2012 games have been — spectators during a cycling event were asked to halt all tweets unless they were “urgent” as the data hungry onlookers were interfering with GPS equipment. It’s a truly social Olympics, the...

Billy Gallagher is a writer for TechCrunch. He is also the president and editor in chief of The Stanford Daily. Billy previously worked at The Stanford Daily for two volumes as a managing editor of news. He has also worked in sports and staff development at The Daily. In March of 2012 the Friends of The Stanford Daily awarded him... ? Learn More Users are complaining that Twoo, a social networking service, is sending unwanted messages to their contacts. Co-founder and CEO Lorenz Bogaert counters that this is a misunderstanding and the company is working to fix it. Users, both those who have emailed me and who have posted public reviews in the app store, say that the mobile app is intentionally designed to be tricky and cause the user to invite their entire address book. The app auto-selects all of the user’s friends with no unselect all button, meaning the user must manually unselect every friend. While the “connect” button fairly obviously pings all of the user’s contacts, the “next...

Anthony Ha is a writer at TechCrunch, where he covers media, advertising, and startups. Previously, he was a staff technology writer at Adweek, worked as a senior editor at the tech blog VentureBeat, and was also a reporter at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing.... ? Learn More Blake Commagere, who’s probably best known for building early, popular Facebook apps like Zombies and Vampires (hey, remember those?), has started a new company called MediaSpike to tackle one of the big problems he faced as a developer: Integrating sponsored product placements into the games. Commagere says those placements were one of the most effective and popular ways to monetize — in fact, when some of those campaigns ended and the sponsored content disappeared, “Users would actually complain.” On the other hand, he says that managing the process was “incredibly difficult.” Without any tools to help wi...

Colleen Taylor is based in San Francisco where she is a reporter for TechCrunch TV. Previously she worked for GigaOM, where she reported on startups and Silicon Valley. Earlier, Colleen reported for Mergermarket, an online newswire and subsidiary of the Financial Times focused on M&A. Before that, she was a contributing editor for Electronic News, the semiconductor industry trade newsletter. Colleen... ? Learn More ImageShack founder Jack Levin has certainly experienced the short end of the stick when it comes to building a company that works with the API of a larger social network. In February 2009, ImageShack launched the Yfrog photo-sharing service, which quickly became one of the most popular ways to share photos on Twitter — back in the day, you may remember, the only way you could share photos on Twitter was through third-party applications such as Yfrog and TwitPic. But in mid-2011, Twitter decided to get into the photo-sharing game after all and in August it rolled out its...

Billy Gallagher is a writer for TechCrunch. He is also the president and editor in chief of The Stanford Daily. Billy previously worked at The Stanford Daily for two volumes as a managing editor of news. He has also worked in sports and staff development at The Daily. In March of 2012 the Friends of The Stanford Daily awarded him... ? Learn More Buffer, a social media manager that aims to become a “widespread sharing standard,” opened its API to developers today. Buffer lets users post to their Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts (Google+ isn’t as lenient with its API) and offers the usual array of analytic feedback. However, its focus on non-original content sharing, especially photos, videos and articles, and individual users differentiates it from a crowded market. While competitors like HootSuite and Sprout Social mainly target companies by offering them a dashboard for managing media, co-founder Leo Widrich tells me Buffer has a wide variety of users, many of whom use the se...

Ryan has spent more than five years covering business, technology, and telecom-related subjects for a variety of publications based in New York and San Francisco. Ryan currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. ? Learn More Over the past year and a half, social TV analytics company Bluefin Labs has gone from being a stealth startup to becoming an invaluable provider of research for TV networks, brands, and agencies who want to delve into the social conversations that are happening around TV shows. Now, as it prepares to take its next steps forward, the company has hired veteran agency executive JP Maheu as its new CEO. Bluefin Labs provides detailed analytics around social messages that TV viewers send while watching television. It scours Twitter and other social networks in realtime to determine audience sentiment and affinity data around various TV shows. It can tell networks which shows viewers are most engaged with, what shows share affinity graphs, and the like. It can also pro...

Ingrid is a reporter for TechCrunch, joining February 2012, based out of London. She comes from paidContent.org, where she was a staff writer, and has in the past also written freelance regularly for other publications such as the Financial Times. Ingrid covers mobile, digital media, advertising and the spaces where these intersect. When it comes to work, she feels most... ? Learn More For those of you who get frustrated with the idea that in many social networks, you are not just a user but also a product, prepare to grit your teeth a bit more: a new forecast out from Gartner notes that advertising will remain the main way that social media services make money. The analysts predict that this year social media revenue will generate $16.9 billion in revenues, with more than half of that, $8.8 billion, to come from advertising. The estimates are coming out on the same day that social gaming giant Zynga is reporting earnings, and days before Facebook posts its results. That $16.9 billio...

Wajam, one of the most promising players in social search besides Google and Microsoft, today announced that it is partnering with Shopping.com to add comparison shopping to its social search results. With this, the browser plugin now goes beyond just showing you relevant social media posts from your friends when you use one the major search engines and look at sites like Yelp, YouTube, Tripadvisor, Amazon and eBay. Once installed, this update will show alternative shopping destinations and their prices right next to your friends opinions about a product when you shop online. The Montreal-based company indexes all the public tweets and status updates from your friends on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Wajam then uses its proprietary algorithms to rank this data and displays it next to your regular search results whenever you search on a supported site. With today’s update, the company now also lets users comparison shop right from every supported site. This, says Wajam founder and CE...

Ingrid is a reporter for TechCrunch, joining February 2012, based out of London. She comes from paidContent.org, where she was a staff writer, and has in the past also written freelance regularly for other publications such as the Financial Times. Ingrid covers mobile, digital media, advertising and the spaces where these intersect. When it comes to work, she feels most... ? Learn More Some more developments for Referly, the Y-Combinator/500 Startups company co-founded by Twilio’s ex-head of marketing, Danielle Morrill. In what may be a hat-tip to the adept use of APIs at her former employer Twilio, today Referly is launching an API program that will let any online merchant create a referrals program powered by Referly’s pay-per-action marketplace. At the same time, the company is launching a service that will drive more traffic to its own retail operation: a new shopping directory for people to browse products being recommended by users of Referly’s referral program. Referly describ...

Free speech activists in Afghanistan launched Twitter and Facebook campaigns on Sunday to fight government media curbs as well as to dispel incorrect information being perpetuated by clashing NATO and Taliban claims. Both NATO and the Taliban have used social media in the past to perpetuate arguments and campaign for individual causes. And Afghani journalists have been pushed against a wall with the government’s new, strict press freedom laws, leaving the public confused about the current state of affairs. Media advocacy groups like Nai have decided to fight back, encouraging the use of social media to provide the public with a more reliable and a somewhat more accessible form of information. In the past, social media has been used to fight conditions like limited women’s rights — a topic the country’s mainstream media can’t easily cover without widespread backlash. “Social media is a free tool to use to transfer information without the influences of the government, warlords, or Talib...

Facebook engineer Carlos Bueno posted a note to the official Facebook Engineering page detailing exactly how one should prep for an interview there. He admits that an interview for a technical job is difficult for both the interviewer and candidate.  Skills on your resume are fair game. If you say you're an "expert in X," Facebook will try to schedule you with a proven expert in that subject, so be prepared. If you are not, leave it off your resume. The interviewers would rather have a short list of the things a candidate is awesome at than pages of everything you've ever done. Keep reading for an inside look at what Facebook technical interviewers are looking for. Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook. Follow Kevin Smith on Twitter. x To embed this post, copy the code below and paste into your website or blog. View the original article here This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made a...