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Furthering its efforts to extend its social network to mobile users regardless of which handset they own, Facebook has today announced a partnership with mobile chip maker MediaTek to deliver social networking capabilities to millions of consumers with Internet-connected featurephone devices.

The partnership will see Facebook embedded into MediaTek’s mobile platform solutions, providing mobile device owners in emerging countries with access to Facebook via affordable handsets. It will use MediaTek’s Runtime Environment (MRE) to deliver social networking from the core of the device.

MediaTek says that phones powered by its chipsets accounted for 40% of the overall Indian mobile market, with the company predicting that more than 50% of its customers will utilise its new runtime environment to deliver Facebook functionality. Facebook use is growing in the country, pulling users from Google’s Orkut social network, with additional mobile partnerships set to extend its growth.

SoundTracking, a social mobile application that allows people to create “musical postcards” that can then be shared with friends on social sites,  announced Tuesday that it had received $4.75 million in financing.

To use SoundTracking, people take pictures, log their locations and attach the songs they are listening to at that moment.

“We are making sharing the core experience and discovery is a bi-product.”

Google Offers went live in Brooklyn, New York today, much to the happiness of everyone from Kings County to Gowanus. Google Offers, a direct competitor to companies like Groupon and Living Social, first landed in Manhattan this past July with Belgian fries and mango chutney at Pommes Frites. Today, Google’s daily deal service is offering $4 general admission tickets to the New York Aquarium, which is 73% off the normal $14.95 price tag. The Aquarium, which is located just off the Coney Island boardwalk is open year round and features animals such as California sea lions, stingrays, tropical fish, moray eels, penguins, seals, otters, walruses, starfish, sea turtles and sharks!

Location Media Microsoft Mobile Sessions Shareables Social Media Twitter Video Editions Africa Asia Australia Canada Europe India Latin America Middle East UK United States Languages France Nederland Polska Portugal Romania Russia Google Offers is now live in Brooklyn: Starting with $4 for SHARKS! 9th November 2011 by Courtney Boyd Myers Google Offers went live in Brooklyn, New York today, much to the happiness of everyone from Kings County to Gowanus. Google Offers, a direct competitor to companies like Groupon and Living Social, first landed in Manhattan this past July with Belgian fries and mango chutney at Pommes Frites. Today, Google’s daily deal service is offering $4 general admission tickets to the New York Aquarium, which is 73% off the normal $14.95 price tag. The Aquarium, which is located just off the Coney Island boardwalk is open year round and features animals such as California sea lions, stingrays, tropical fish, moray eels, penguins, seals, otters, walruses, starfish, sea turtles and sharks!

In the fourth quarter of 2011, 22pc of businesses polled in the sector were investing in social media marketing. This figure fell to 8.5pc in the first quarter of 2012 and to 6pc by the second quarter. Pearlfinders, a major business research company, spoke to more than 5,000 marketeers around the world about their budgets. “This represents an interesting about-turn. We saw investment in social media increase steadily throughout 2011, to reach the highest levels ever by the end of the year. However, as financial services brands embraced new methods for communicating with customers, they opened themselves up to criticism and negative sentiment,” said Anthony Cooper, Pearlfinders managing director.

putting spending on hold until they have developed a clearer picture of how social media can be harnessed to improve their brands.”

conversations directly linking to brands near impossible to control

Collaborate with Customer Support to Build Conversation MuscleIt’s a point worth underscoring, especially for marketers.  From the data we’ve gathered via our Social Media Maturity Diagnostic, we know that Marketing and/or Corporate Communications are leading the Social media charge in large (i.e., Fortune 1000) enterprises 65% of the time.  But when it comes to Customer Support involvement, more than 40% of large companies don’t involve support peers at all!  In another 50%, they are only moderately involved. That’s a huge problem.We need our customer support brethren to build the right muscles for Social media.  Let them spot you. Read more at mlcwideangle.exbdblogs.com

Rapportive adds dynamic contact previews to Gmail complete with profile picture, brief bio and links to their various social networking profiles. Part social, part CRM, Rapportive also features a minimalist notes area directly under the social profiles section of the sidebaat The Next Web Conference the startup is announcing the launch of a developer platform that will allow third parties to insert their products into Rapportivethese plugins, called ‘Raplets’ can be for any purpose. Rapportive suggests booking and time management, entertainment or internal corporate tools as other usesAlthough Rapportive is a Gmail-only service right now, it will be integrating with other email platforms in the near future

Social media has led to “Social sharing,” the broadcasting of our thoughts and activities. It’s not a fad. It’s a sociological phenomenon, accelerating at light speed. Social sharing is a major behavioral shift, the most important so far of the 21st century. And the information we choose to share with friends, co-workers and even strangers, is re-defining the idea of what’s private and public before our very eyes.Read more at blogs.hbr.org

Name one social platform that is focused on enabling long form conversations.

n advertising circles there is an axiom that says that a customer has to be exposed to your product or service at least three times before they will convert. It's called the rule of three. It's why companies run remarketing campaigns. It's also an explanation for two conflicting surveys concerning location based social media.

In the first survey by Dubit, a youth communications agency, they found that 48% of teenagers surveyed had never heard of location based social media services such as Facebook Places and Foursquare. And of the 52% of the teenagers that had heard of these services, few of them actually used those services. The survey consisted of 1,000 teens between the ages of 11 to 18.

The second survey by Comscore's MobiLens showed that 16.7 million mobile users accessed check-in services like Foursquare and Gowalla. And 95% of those users regularly accessed a mobile web browser. The medium age range was 18 to 34. So what's going on? How can teenagers, who practically live and sleep with their mobile phones, be so out of the loop when it comes to location based social media? The answer is that they simply haven't been exposed to the services often enough to see the value.

In the next decade, we’ll see more change in the commerce landscape than in the past 100 years combined.

Mobile

by 2020 and each consumer will have approximately seven devices connected to the Internet.

Ze Frank: Star.me is a cross between a social network and a social game that provides a playground for people to have more fun with their friends. We are in the midst of a major shift in media industry where social engagement is the new currency and real interactions are replacing impressions and clicks. That’s what I have been focused on for years, play and participation, and star.me is a distilled version of that thinking. Plus it’s super fun

Star.me boasts 20,000 users and is “growing fast!”, there have been 117,000 mini missions answered, 70,000 stars sent, and 84% of all users have contributed content. That’s engagement.

Rymble is an object connected to Internet social networks, merging the real and the virtual worlds. It is a “social compass” that, instead of pointing to the north, moves in different directions as news and alerts happen in the user’s social network, in the web page of a company, artist, sports team or any other subject.

That viral growth is deserved, too. Turntable.fm is arguably the most interesting social startup to emerge in a long time. Inventing a new subgenre, ‘social listening’, the site revels in something humans have enjoyed for millennia: shared experiences around music. If you haven’t tried it yet, here’s how it works: You can only sign up if a friend of yours on Facebook is already signed up. Once you’re in, the site lets you DJ, playing songs in an on-screen ‘nightclub’. Others come to listen to you in your ‘room’ and can join you on the decks if they choose. Multiple DJs (up to five) play a song each in turn and everyone else in the room gets to vote on the current DJ’s choice. If your choice gets voted up, you get a point. If it gets voted down by too many people it’s ditched for the next DJ’s choice.

when DJs demonstrate that they’re listening to each other by playing off each others’ track selections, there’s a commonality that transcends… individual achievements. Social games that offer the promise of individual success may be missing out on the uniqueness of shared experiences capable of creating shared surprise and pleasure. As when tracks flow well, as when it’s clear that DJs are not just picking their own favorites but show that they’re paying attention to each other, as when a “good” stretch of DJing attracts newcomers to the room, and so on.

A new way for media companies to interact with their audiences: Earlier this week, we experimented with setting up our own The Next Web room (you can often find TNW staff spinning tunes in there). One tweet brought in a crowded room and it was fun for us to be able to play music with our readers. Music is a brilliant bonding tool and being able to have direct group chat with readers can help media companies get to know their audience better, and vice versa. I even got teased with knowledge of a stealth startup over the chat function yesterday – so maybe we’ll get a few news tips this way too!

It is interesting to see gamification now being applied in a marketing/website/community context, because many marketers and community managers have already been using these techniques to build engagement for several years.

there are many ways to incorporate game mechanics into a community and which ones are appropriate depend a lot on the make-up of your community audience and what the ultimate goals for the community are.

my belief is that you need to gradually introduce new elements into a community and make sure that any new features are fully explained and documented.

The highest scoring “influencers” like to think they deliver widespread impact with their followings. Every single book I’ve read by a blogger on influence claims this. In actuality, that influence lies closer to home. When real researchers parse influence we get a different story than the blogger myth propagated by social scoring. Instead, we see that true influence comes from those who are closest to us in our on and offline social networks, our peers.

But generally, their writings serve as a credibility point for readers, just like Consumer Reports, and nothing more. Why? Because relationships — true meaningful interactions beyond social platitudes (Like, love, you rock, etc.) — don’t scale after a certain point.

By selecting our friends, we’re also choosing to be influenced by their ideas, beliefs and behavior systems

The business climate, it turns out, is a lot like the weather. And we've entered a next-two-hours era. The pace of change in our economy and our culture is accelerating--fueled by global adoption of social, mobile, and other new technologies--and our visibility about the future is declining.

Uncertainty has taken hold in boardrooms and cubicles, as executives and workers (employed and unemployed) struggle with core questions: Which competitive advantages have staying power? What skills matter most? How can you weigh risk and opportunity when the fundamentals of your business may change overnight?

Look at the global cell-phone business. Just five years ago, three companies controlled 64% of the smartphone market: Nokia, Research in Motion, and Motorola. Today, two different companies are at the top of the industry: Samsung and Apple. This sudden complete swap in the pecking order of a global multibillion-dollar industry is unprecedented. Consider the meteoric rise of Groupon and Zynga, the disruption in advertising and publishing, the advent of mobile ultrasound and other "mHealth" breakthroughs (see "Open Your Mouth And Say 'Aah!'). Online-education efforts are eroding our assumptions about what schooling looks like. Cars are becoming rolling, talking, cloud-connected media hubs. In an age where Twitter and other social-media tools play key roles in recasting the political map in the Mideast; where impoverished residents of refugee camps would rather go without food than without their cell phones; where all types of media, from music to TV to movies, are being remade, redefined, defended, and attacked every day in novel ways--there is no question that we are in a new world.

Exclusive: In a push to boost its payments platform for the gaming industry, American Express, has acquired virtual currency platform and in-game payments provider Sometrics. The total deal value is $30 million, but both parties declined to reveal further details about the split between cash and stock. Sometrics will become part of the Enterprise Growth Group, and will be used within American Express’ Serve digital payments platform to incorporate virtual currencies and loyalty programs.

Sometrics helps gaming publishers market free-to-play online games and monetize virtual currency with a consumer destination site and in-game payment solutions. Sometrics’ in-game payments platform basically powers virtual currency transactions and payments for game publishers. Sometrics also serves users with targeted offers based on their location, demographic, conversion history and social affiliation.

The company currently supports dozens of payment options (including mobile carrier infrastructure and credit card support) and hundreds of brand engagement ads, reaching a total global audience of more than 225 million consumers in more than 200 countries. And through Sometrics’ analytics capabilities, developers are able to view and analyze which audience demographics are responding to which payment options, respond by pushing traffic to the options that convert best, and optimize those conversions to help maximize revenue. Current gaming partners that use Sometrics include Nexon, NHN USA, IMVU, PopCap, BigPoint, Habbo, and many others.

NLP goes by many names — text analytics, data mining, computational linguistics — but the basic principle remains the same. NLP refers to computer systems that process human language in terms of its meaning.

Apart from common word processor operations that treat text like a mere sequence of symbols, NLP considers the hierarchical structure of language: several words make a phrase, several phrases make a sentence and, ultimately, sentences convey ideas. By analyzing language for its meaning, NLP systems have long filled useful roles, such as correcting grammar, converting speech to text and automatically translating between languages.

NLP can analyze language patterns to understand text. One of the most compelling ways NLP offers valuable intelligence is by tracking sentiment — the tone of a written message (tweet, Facebook update, etc.) — and tag that text as positive, negative or neutral.