Social Media

MONACO —     Ushahidi, the crowd-sourced mapping platform, which launched during the disputed Kenya elections in 2007 and has been used recently by the BBC around the Tube strike and The Guardian for the Pope's visit to London, is now in seven languages and is becoming a commercial venture, founder Ory Okolloh told Beet.TV in […]

While there are several companies who are syndicating Web video content through various strategies, one San Francisco start-up is syndicating online video ads including branded clips, throughout the Web and on social media.

Real time data is one of the hottest new areas in the online ad business because brands and marketers want to know how to harness real-time information and interactions with consumers to make digital marketing decisions on the fly.

NEW YORK — With last month's launch of the new Twitter Web page, selected beta users have been able to embed videos from YouTube and Vimeo. 

Social media monitoring company Networked Insights has found that media agencies are improving efficiency in their TV buys by 5% to 12% when they consider the social media ripple effect surrounding a TV show.

Palo Alto-based Gigya, which started out as widget company, has become a "social optimization" solution for media companies seeking to connect their content into several social networks.

Loic Le Meur, the French technology entrepreneur who launched Seesmic with the functionality to upload video clips as blog comments, says that his timing was not right. 

As the HTML 5 versus Flash debate rages on, the yeoman's Web work being done by many media companies still relies on Flash-powered video. 

Facebook is not in a rush to go public and is being careful about financial guidelines that could compel it to go public, says David Kirkpatrick, longtime Fortune writer and author of the just-released,  "The Facebook Effect."

LOS ANGELES — The Huffington Post, one of the first publishers to integrate Facebook Connect and the first to publish a Twitter edition, will soon integrate with LinkedIn, says the HuffPo's CEO Eric Hippeau in this video interview.

RAMP,  a white label video search engine for a number of leading publishers, has a system to allow publishers to post rich metadata in the form of text on customers'  Facebook walls.

Foursquare, the fast growing location-based social media platform, which now has 1 million active users and is adding about 15,000 per day, is dealing with problems in scaling the service to keep up with demand.

SecondMarket, a new New York-based electronic market place for shares of privately-owned companies and other illiquid assets, has recorded $100 million in sales of Facebook shares over the past 12 months.

"Video is not boring," it is dynamic and useful as social medium, says seventeen year-old Andrey Ternovskiy, the creator of the international phenomenon Chatroulette.

Facebook is inevitably moving towards becoming a major e-commerce destination, says Leena Rao, a reporter with TechCrunch.

MG Siegler, a reporter for TechCrunch who follows Facebook closely, says that sources tell him that Facebook's much anticipated location-based function has been put on hold for now, a result of the recent uproar over breaches of privacy protocol at the giant social site.

Women-centric network Oxygen has seen ratings growth of 70% for some of its shows year over the year, resulting from social media engagement with its audience, said the network's General Manager Jason Klarman. 

Kyte, a San Francisco-based online video platform company, announced today the integration of its video player and tools into Facebook with a product it calls the Facebook Application Framework.

Chris Hughes, one of the three founders of Facebook who left the social media giant to manage social media operations for the Obama presidential campaign, is launching "Jumo" a site to help charitable organizations in fundraising and outreach.

LONDON — STV, the digital arm of Scottish Television, is gaining 10 percent of new registered users through its integration with Facebook Connect, according to Alistar Brown, who heads new media for the company.