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"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."

"Several companies have successfully built cooperative marketing structures online. Companies such as OwnerIQ, for example, enable online retailers like Crutchfield to retarget people who visit the web sites of electronics manufacturers, offering the flatscreen TVs they were just studying - at a discount. When it comes to driving brick-and-mortar sales from online, though, Facebook appears to offer the best solution yet. CPG brands gladly pay for retail circulars to help sell their products, and there's reason to believe they could buy Facebook advertising to drive consumers into retail locations. One company with which we work, ShopLocal, puts a retailer's circular content into a database, including images and all the sale prices and details. In so doing it makes local data portable and extendable, so retailers can build online-only pages of the circular, or utilize QR codes to generate more content than exists in the print world."

""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."

"Coke's involvement in Spotify is notable, as the soda marketer has tested the platform's various ad units repeatedly, while also helping to launch the digital firm's presence in Germany and Australia. Spotify has appeared on 100 million Coke bottles in Australia during the last five months, while receiving a similar on-package treatment recently in Germany. The music upstart is now in 17 countries and goes head-to-head in the U.S. with the formidable Pandora. For its past, Coke seems to be in a music-based turf war of larger scale, battling rival Pepsi for high school and college-aged consumers. Both brands have sponsored various concert series, with Pepsi spending significant resources in the last three years at South by Southwest."

"Big brands and agencies are used to lots of attention from Facebook and Google, so it's no surprise the presidential campaigns, with their vast ad budgets, got some, too. But as the election fades, Ad Age has learned more about just how closely the two largest sellers of digital advertising worked with the campaigns, even sending employees to work onsite at campaign offices and their respective digital consultancies. "Google staffers were hand-selected by Google to sit in our office and help us," confirmed Zac Moffatt, digital director for Mitt Romney's campaign. Multiple people who worked closely with the Barack Obama campaign did not respond to requests for interviews."

"Sam Glassenberg, CEO of Funtactix, which develops social games for major motion pictures like The Hunger Games, said the in-game ad market presents both huge opportunities and new risks for brands and agencies. He cited statistics from NPD and said that there are almost 200 million online gamers out there who play games for an average of 13 hours a week. Yet, the majority of ad spend still goes to TV or banner ads and only a fraction to games, he noted. "How are we going to close that gap?" he asked. The discussion was organized by SponsorPay, a Berlin-based engagement advertising company whose application rewards users that watch an ad with virtual currency and other goodies. SponsorPay is one of a handful of companies out there including SocialVibe, Flurry and WildTangent seeking to help games developers monetize their product and brand advertisers engage consumers with such ads. Games entrepreneur Wilson Kriegel, formerly with Zynga, addressed this potential by discussing his involvement with mega-hit Draw Something, an online drawing game developed at his former company OMGPop, which Zynga acquired in March. The game allows people to draw things and share them with their friends. Since its launch early in 2012, it has seen over 90 million installs, 10 billion drawings created and was a top trending topic on Twitter.  Companies including McDonald's, Disney and Sprint have incorporated their ads into the game. Kriegel said that ad features including in-game banners, game features and in-game call to actions seen a clickthrough rate of 1 percent to 10 percent-unheard of in an industry where average CTRs are 0.7 percent."

""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."

"Walmart began recruiting top Silicon Valley talent and acquiring start-ups last year. For instance, Walmart acquired Kosmix, a company that specializes in making web design more seamless, for $300 million. That team has been working for over a year to fix Walmart's systems and improve its website.  Walmart is investing in the "social gifting" market. A year ago, Walmart launched "Shopycat," which makes gift recommendations based on friends' Facebook profiles. The site is now called "Walmart Gifts" and allows customers to log in and get personalized recommendations based on Facebook and Twitter profiles.  The retailer got a better search engine. A dozen top engineers took 10 months to build it, and while the company won't discuss sales figures, they said the new system is more user-friendly. "If you search for cotton socks now, you'll actually find them," Manjoo writes.  Walmart is trying to lead the charge in same-day shipping. Its at an advantage considering that 96 percent of Americans live within 20 miles of a Walmart.  Walmart is investing like crazy in its mobile app. "Walmart imagines that as you go through an average day, you'll remember things you need--milk, bread, a new tennis racquet, a toy truck for your nephew's birthday--and tell the voice-enabled Walmart app. The app will list each item's location inside your local Walmart and include product info; eventually, it will also learn your preferences and offer recommendations. And once you're actually in the store, you'll be able to summon an associate to help you," Manjoo says. "

"Here are five lessons in the art and science of storytelling I learned by studying the pros ... 1) Adopt a newsroom mentality Make content development a core part of the way you do business - just as it is in journalism. Embed it in every department. Hire journalists just as LinkedIn, Qualcomm and others have done. Curate voices like we do on edelman.com. 2) Hand-craft your content for each venue Some companies try desperately to create singular pieces of content that can be simply be dumped in different places. That no longer works. Instead, hand-craft your content for each venue. Jonah Peretti, Buzzfeed's co-founder, summed it up best when he said: "Twitter is for your head, while Facebook is for your heart." 3) Cultivate superstars who have a POV News and information, to some degree, is commodity content - it's everywhere. Deep, thoughtful analysis, however, is in high demand. Just as the New York Times has Nate Silver and ESPN has Bill SImmons, you too can grow and cultivate rock stars who create thoughtful content with unique analytical point of view. 4) Be relentlessly data driven Speaking of Mr. Silver, if there's one thing he taught us this year it's that data rules. Follow in his footsteps in not only how you use data to inform and deliver your storytelling but also in how you measure your results. Many newsrooms, for example, now have real-time dashboards that help shape their decisions. 5) Let constraints fuel creativity Finally, it's often hard to convince management to put resources behind content until there's proven ROI. However, constraints can breed creativity. The Wall Street Journal's daytime video network, for example, was challenged to cover the Olympics without footage. So instead it creatively turned to using puppetry - and with great success. Be creative to get around constraints."

"Medium, the new self-publishing platform from two of Twitter's co-founders, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, promises to eliminate the need for bloggers to also be marketers. "We want to help the best ideas and stories have the biggest possible impact," Williams said in an email. "For the vast majority of people, Medium will have a higher return-on-investment for writing than publishing one's own blog.""

"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."

"OrderGroove, a startup that allows brands to create subscription and membership commerce, has raised $7 million from Fung Capital USA, with additional investment from Lerer Ventures, Legend and SWaN Ventures, Allegro Venture Partners, Bee Partners, as well as former Walmart.com CEO Raul Vazquez and NEW Corporation's Chairman Fred Schaufeld. Brands turn to OrderGroove to add subscription commerce models to their e-commerce sites. For example, L'Oreal uses OrderGroove's SaaS to offer a monthly box of skincare products."

"New York-based startup Tinypass, which helps small publishers and content creators charge for content online through existing platforms like Google, is rolling out metered content options to all of its clients."

The Follow tab will allow Spotify users to follow their friends and celebrities to help better discover what they're currently listening to as well as their feedback on certain tracks. Think of it as Spotify's own personal network that revolves squarely around music available on the service. - See more at: http://www.ubergizmo.com/2013/02/spotify-gradually-rolling-out-new-social-network-features/#sthash.RakJaSX0.dpuf

South Korea-based Moneual, meanwhile, has created the SCS1000 wristwatch, which could help those who are hard of hearing become more aware of their surroundings by providing alerts.

Microsoft Research Cambridge team built an augmented reality system to help brain surgeons visualize 3D brain scans.