Archive for the ‘innovation’ Category

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Steve Rosenbaum talks about Human, Accidental and Social Curation at SXSWi 2011

Apr 12, 2011 Author: Esteban Contreras | Filed under: curation, innovation, interview, media, sxsw

As you might have noticed by now, curation is one of those topics that I get excited about. That’s why I was very glad to meet and chat with Steve Rosenbaum, CEO of Magnify and author of the book Curation Nation, in the Samsung Blogger Lounge at SXSW Interactive 2011. We talked about the difference between human and manual curation, as well as the idea of becoming an accidental curator and a few other things.

Check out the video and some photos below.

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Storify Co-Founder Burt Herman talks about Stories, Curation and Facebook

Apr 9, 2011 Author: Esteban Contreras | Filed under: creativity, curation, innovation, journalism, marketing, media, social media

Burt Herman is a co-founder of real-time curation service Storify. I first heard about Storify on this Scobleizer post, and I’ve tested it for Samsung USA at SXSW and for myself at M2C (you can see an embeded example at the bottom of this post). I met with Burt at the Samsung Blogger Lounge at SXSWi and he was kind enough to answer my questions. You can follow Burt @burtherman

1. What’s the story of Storify?

Storify is founded by Burt Herman, a former Associated Press bureau chief and correspondent, and Xavier Damman, a Belgian engineer who was publisher of a crowdsourced student magazine. Both share a passion for media and technology, and about how to reinvent online publishing to embrace the social Web. They met early last year and joined together to launch Storify in private beta in September 2010. Storify is about enabling storytellers to find the best of social media to tell elegant stories that resonate and enlighten. We want to empower storytellers with simple tools that help them find the media that matters amid the flood of media.

2. Journalists have always been storytellers but they haven’t always been “curators” of social content. What does social curation mean for the future of journalism?

Curation is a buzzword that represents what journalists have always done: Finding sources for information and synthesizing it into concise stories that a general audience can understand. We now have more sources than ever due to social media empowering people to create content, so journalists now have a much richer pool of information to choose from. This is an opportunity and the start of a new golden age for journalism.

3. There are some people that have been “curating” since the beginning of the web. Are you targeting such curators or do you believe Storify is for the masses?

Storify is about empowering users to easily tell stories using social media, and it can be used by anyone — journalists, bloggers, companies or just regular people. Everyone has a story to tell, from serious news like the Japan tsunami to a personal story about a wedding or child’s birthday. (more…)

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Co-Founder of RockMelt Eric Vishria shares about Social Browsing and Hints at Mobile

Mar 1, 2011 Author: Esteban Contreras | Filed under: apps, innovation, social media, technology, YouTube

Eric Vishria is the co-founder and CEO of RockMelt, a social media web browser based on Google’s Chromium. RockMelt is backed by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen and was introduced to the world about 3 months ago.

1. RockMelt has been called a “social browser” because it has unique features around sharing and connecting. What differentiates RockMelt from social plug-ins and features of other browsers?

We’ve spent a great deal of time analyzing how people are using browsers today and saw a lot of inefficiencies so we built RockMelt to make browsing simpler and more enjoyable. We understand why people may think of RockMelt as a social browser but the social features are only one part of what we’re building.

The sharing and chat features were must-haves because of how much people use social media. But we also recognized people visit their favorite websites multiple times a day and click back and forth while searching for information – that’s why we integrated automatic notifications of website updates (and built a whole set of back-end services in the cloud) and included lightning-fast search previews.

Feedback from users so far has been very positive and most note that they enjoy how RockMelt makes them more efficient and productive in managing their online activities.

2. What is your dream and vision for the company beyond the browser?

We want to make people’s online experiences as simple and enjoyable as possible. To do that, we’ll have to understand, keep up with, and – at times – help guide changes in web usage. RockMelt was created because the way the web is used today is radically different than it was even a few years ago, and we understand that usage will keep evolving over time. (more…)

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Jascha Kaykas-Wolff explains Involver’s New Social Markup Language SML

Dec 10, 2010 Author: Esteban Contreras | Filed under: advertising, facebook, innovation, marketing, media, social media, social networking, Web 3.0

Jascha Kaykas-Wolff is the VP of Marketing at Involver, a company and platform that provides solutions for Facebook and social engagement. Involver recently announced the release of SML, a programming language for the social web.

I asked Jascha a few questions and here’s what he had to say.

1. What is SML?

Involver’s SML (Social Markup Language) is server side scripting language for front-end developers with knowledge of HTML, CSS, Javascript. SML offers the ability to utilize Involver’s application gallery to design and quickly create fully customized social applications. Those applications are hosted on our infrastructure (the same that supported the launch of Facebook Stories and Facebook’s Election Polling finder as examples) and can be deployed across social networks like Facebook and the open web. Once an application has been created and deployed, marketing teams can monitor their performance using Involver’s Audience Management Platform, which offers a full social marketing dashboard, powerful analytics, alerting, and multi-platform publishing tools.

2. Why should developers use SML?

It was designed by developers for developers with the objective to help them:

Do more:

They are able to create and deploy custom social marketing applications quickly reducing the cost of development and empowering the marketing team’s to experiment more. SML has been tested by over 100,000 customers; scale will never be an issue for the apps they build.

(more…)

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Badgeville CEO Kris Duggan on Loyalty, Game Mechanics, and Launching at TechCrunch Disrupt

Oct 29, 2010 Author: Esteban Contreras | Filed under: analytics, brand, business, creativity, entrepreneurship, featured, gaming, innovation, interview, marketing, media, social media, social networking

Kris Duggan is the CEO of Badgeville, a social rewards and analytics platform. The company was officially announced at this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt event, where it won the “Audience Choice Award.”

1. What’s the story of Badgeville and what’s your vision for the company?

We make it possible for any web or mobile publisher to reward users for behaviors that align with business metrics — site visits, pages read, photos uploaded, comments posted, links shared, and more. From the very beginning we wanted to design a clean API and turnkey widgets that could track and reward any behavior that occurs on a web or mobile site. We always wanted to include elements of game mechanics, but didn’t want to just add a game layer on top of a website. Instead, we see our offering as an interactive and real-time loyalty program.

Our vision for the company, which is largely a reality right now, is to partner with customers across many different verticals (publishing, travel, education, health/fitness, retail/ecommerce, and other sites with some community aspect) and continue to innovate in helping web managers increase user engagement and loyalty.

2. How would you define “engagement” on the web and why is it so important to have highly engaged audiences?

“Engagement” on the web means different things for different sites. For one site, engagement may be based on how many times a user returns to a site to shop for a product, and how long they spend on that site. For another site “engagement” might mean how many videos a user uploads to a community, or how many “liked” comments he posts. For any site, it’s imperative to have highly engaged audiences. Many quality sites obtain a certain level of traffic through SEO and other techniques to pull visitors into the site, but once they’re at the site, how do you keep them around and coming back? Adding social reward mechanisms to a site provides a quick and easy way to increase engagement in line with any web manager’s business metrics.

(more…)

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Guide to Samsung Galaxy Tab Initial Web Reactions and First TV Commercial

Sep 2, 2010 Author: Esteban Contreras | Filed under: advertising, android, apps, business, creativity, innovation, marketing, media, mobile, pop culture, samsung, social media, technology

The Samsung Galaxy Tab was unveiled today at IFA in Berlin. As Samsung USA‘s Social Media Manager, I’m a bit biased about all things Samsung (and Android in general), but I’ve seen the Galaxy Tab myself and it is truly an impressive device. I’ll keep sharing my thoughts on Twitter @SamsungEsteban & @SocialNerdia, but here are links to initial reactions from around the web so you read some previews/reviews and watch some videos/photos.

Stay tuned to @SamsungTweets and facebook.com/samsungusa for the latest news about the Galaxy Tab in the U.S.

Disclaimer: While I am employed by Samsung, the views expressed on this post are mine and do not necessarily reflect the views of Samsung.

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OMG: Samsung Galaxy Tab is Coming Soon

Aug 24, 2010 Author: Esteban Contreras | Filed under: android, gadgets, innovation, media, samsung, social media, video, YouTube

The Galaxy Tab is very real. I’ve personally played with this amazing device and it blew me away. Yes, I work for Samsung so I’m a bit biased, but as a geek and Android fan I can tell you that I’m extremely excited. And based on today’s hundreds of awesome tweets to @SamsungTweets, it is obvious that there are many out there who share the excitement.

Here’s a glimpse of the awesomeness that’s soon to come… Get ready.

http://galaxytab.samsungmobile.com