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Want Web companies to stop using our personal data? Be ready to suffer the consequences.

First impressions...

"Steve Yankovich, eBay's VP of mobile, said the average transaction on eBay's mobile apps runs between $30 and $45, in contrast to companies that sell 99-cent mobile games or virtual goods. On the high end, he notes that more than 9,000 cars are sold every week through the app, some of which are priced above $100,000."

"The native advertising side consists of Federated's conversational marketing products, conversation targeting and native conversational ad units. While some of what Federated calls conversational marketing is similar to content marketing (that is, helping brands produce content much like media companies), Federated is clearly looking to embrace native advertising units, such as Facebook's Sponsored Stories or Foursquare's Promoted Updates. Federated founder John Battelle has been blogging extensively about the move toward ads-that-don't-look-like-ads of late."

""We're a direct response shop and we are held to a strict ROI metric," said Will Ferguson, senior director of online marketing, display advertising & social media at 1-800 Flowers. The company uses AddThis--which offers a toolbar that enables users to share content over Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere-to help it collect data from billions of search queries, domains and URLs. "We are able to leverage this data to introduce new audiences to our product," said Ferguson."

"News Distribution Network isn't a household name, but news consumers sure watch a lot of the videos the company distributes. In fact, NDN broke the top 10 in comScore's ranking of top online video properties in October, with an audience topping 53 million. It just signed a deal with CBS Local to distribute video from 13 local CBS stations including New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. And a handful of sites are now starting to let NDN remotely program video on their sites."

"The new section, which Spotify is labeling "Discover," surfaces content such as songs, playlists, and live-performance videos that Spotify users haven't discovered yet but which they may like based on their past listening habits. The section is laid out in a visual-driven experience incorporating images and videos in a big-tile grid that has some traces of Pinterest.  "It's another new canvas for us to look at the right way for brands to participate in the music experience," Mr. Levick said in the interview. "

"At any rate, the 10.4 million figure seems to be at least marginally good news for Foursquare, which, according to one investor capital source, is having to work harder for funding these days than in years past. ComScore earlier this year reported Foursquare drew just between 5 million and 6 million users monthly from March to June.  The Nielsen number is likely informative for brands still in the consideration stage about cultivating their Foursquare presence through organic features on the app or via the platform's nascent ads offering. Whether or not it's a good number for three-and-a-half-year-old Foursquare is probably a matter of opinion. And it's worth noting that Nielsen ranks the geo-social company only behind Facebook (78 million) and Twitter (23 million) in terms of July mobile app users. Overall, Foursquare usage, per Nielsen, was up 118 percent during the month year-over-year."

""DMPs were initially built to inform display, but more and more marketers understand they have to utilize that data across channels. They're all interested in finding ways to leverage those insights in all the different ways they speak to a consumer," said Cory Treffiletti, senior vice president of marketing for BlueKai. Nevertheless, 64 percent said improved ROI was a main driver for use of a DMP, and 60 percent said the technology would help the company to more effectively centralize, organize and leverage first-party, online and offline audience data for targeting, whether that first-party data was internal or a client's."

"Line, a Japan-made WhatsApp rival that is owned by Korean content giant Naver, just announced that it has hit 10 million registered users in Thailand at a press conference in Bangkok today, marking the first time it has provided a figure for a market outside of its native Japan. The company has more than 75 million users worldwide, so a pretty significant chunk of its user base is in Thailand, but more impressive than that is the fact that Facebook itself has 17.9 million users in Thailand (it is Facebook's 17th largest market)."

"In the case of Electiongrams, NBC is relying on a start-up called Chute that provides back-end tools for large-scale photo management to brands and large media companies. Chute helps its clients pull in photos that people share through email or sites like Facebook, but also offers human and automated moderating tools."

"The company is running its new mobile advertising campaign within The Weather Channel's iPhone application. Home Depot has used mobile advertising in the past to bolster brand awareness and engagement. "By adding store location functionality to the ad unit, the brand expertly displays their understanding and appreciation of the unique contextual requirements of an audience made up of a sizable percentage of likely moving targets," said Scott Forshay, mobile and emerging technologies strategist at Acquity Group."

The company now boasts 175 million registered users. According to Pandora: Listener hours for Pandora during the month of December 2012 were 1.39 billion, an increase of 54% from 906 million during the same period last year. Share of total U.S. radio listening for Pandora in December 2012 was 7.19%, an increase from 4.71% at the same time last year. Active listeners were 67.1 million at the end of December 2012, an increase of 41% from 47.6 million during the same time period last year.

So cool!

Google's latest Chrome Experiment aims to make playing a computer game more like playing on a console in front of the TV. The company announced the Chrome Super Sync Sports game this morning. Once you get it all set up, you'll be able to use your smartphone or tablet as a game controller and watch the action unfold on your computer screen.

Good way to foster connections and a sense of community among employees based on their personal hobbies and passions. ShareBox Pro aims to help companies discover these and then use them to foster community and interaction by creating short videos of the employees in question demonstrating their skills and then sharing them with the company through its platform and via lunchtime sessions at work.