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GLOBAL TIMES - Jan 21 - A large number of WeChat users on Wednesday received the first ads in their app's Moments section,. The advertisements came from an account named "WeChat team," which is automatically added to users' friend list and operated by Tencent Holdings as displayed on the account label. WeChat had accumulated over 468M monthly active users by Q3 of 2014. The total income from WeChat's advertising project could reach $1.6B annually.
by Hu Weijia
See full article at Global Times
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TECH CRUNCH - Jan 21 - The “While You Were Away” feature that helps users catch up on missed tweets is officially launching on iOS today (with Android and web coming soon).
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BOSTON HERALD - Jan 20 - The effort will be focused on taking top native YouTube talent and giving them the financial lift to execute programming concepts they couldn't otherwise achieve. In addition to financial support, the talent involved will be able to partake of marketing help, "matchmaking with off-YouTube talent," and the company's own production facilities. The originals initiative will likely sync up with Google Preferred, an initiative YouTube announced at its "newfronts" presentation last year that allows advertisers to buy into the top 5% of its ad inventory.
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TECH CRUNCH - Jan 20 - The investment, which comes in the form of Convertible Notes, is being led by U.S.-based Betaworks after venture partner (and head of new product development at Facebook) Josh Miller met with the startup in Vienna in December. The new funding will be used to grow the company’s engineering team based in Vienna, with a key focus on mobile applications and experts in the fields of artificial intelligence and language processing, along with “intensifying” ChatGrape’s collaboration with the ÖFAI, The Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
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BUSINESS KOREA - Jan 21 - Camp Mobile announced that its social networking mobile application for groups, BAND, has surpassed 40M accumulated downloads as of January this year, only 28 months after it was first launched. Monthly active users amounted to 16M, meaning nearly 40% of those who downloaded the service actually use it.
by Jack H. Park
See full article at Business Korea
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VENTURE BEAT - Jan 20 - According to a new report commissioned by Facebook and conducted by Deloitte, the social networking site had a global economic impact of $227 billion and indirectly created 4.5 million jobs in 2014. Deloitte says Facebook generates economic activity through its marketing tools, its app platform, and the incentive it creates among its users to consume more mobile broadband and data services.
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FAST COMPANY - Jan 20 - The professional networking platform was designed to increase the chances that you can bump into the person who could lead you to your dream job, invest in your startup, or simply give you some much needed advice. It has 2.5K users since launching a year ago, and has just finished raising $3M in seed funding from private investors including Frédéric Mazzella, founder and CEO of BlaBlaCar.
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TECH CRUNCH - Jan 19 - Twitter said about the deal “For many, their first online experience will be on a mobile device – but the cost of data may prevent them from experiencing the true power of the Internet. Twitter, in partnership with ZipDial, can make great content more accessible to everyone.” Twitter will use ZipDial’s platform to deliver itself to feature phones and others with irregular Internet connections. Facebook and Google are both exploring ways to get those without Internet connected to their services. ZipDial gets Twitter in the business of accessibility too.
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TECH CRUNCH - Jan 19 - The social network has launched a workaround to Apple’s longtime ban on “incentivized” app installs. Technically, users are being rewarded for creating content on Tsu and inviting others to join, but the money they earn for this activity comes from Tsu’s advertisers. That means Tsu serves as something of a middle man for companies that would otherwise want to buy app downloads, if that wasn’t in violation of Apple’s terms.
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THE NEXT WEB - Jan 20 - The popular iOS app from Sumoing that targets users interested in photographic social sharing, was released for the iPhone, but has now landed on Android. It offers the same suite of editing tools and live filters for photos and videos as the latest Camu 2.0 iPhone app. It also features a Tinderesque keep/delete feature for images shared with you.
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DAZEINFO - Jan 16 - Zuckerberg did not elaborate as to how we would be wearing a device to be able to Facebook with each other in a decade from now though he went on to assure that the wearable will not look weird like some of the stuff that exists today. In fact, he suggested that the Facebook wearable of the future could look pretty much like a pair of glasses does today. Zuckerberg owned network is now working on developing the next major computing platform which, according to him, is augmented reality and Oculus.
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REUTERS - Jan 16 - The app is capable of carrying conference calls and group messaging, DingTalk targets small- and medium-sized enterprises, many of which are already Alibaba's customers. The company has 8.5 million active sellers on its various e-commerce platforms.
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TELEGRAPH - Jan 15 - Controversial social network has announced its first ever safety advisory board is a bid to make the site a "safer and more positive place" for its users. The new board is comprised of digital safety experts including secretary of Children's Charities' Coalition on Internet Safety John Carr, author Anne Collier and Dr Brian O'Neill, director of the EU Kids Online initiative in Ireland. Ask.fm boasts more than 150m global users, and was acquired by Tinder owner IAC in August last year. The purchase resulted in a management overhaul, with the founders having no role in the company's future operations.
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WSJ - Jan 14 - MySpace users generated over 300M video views in November and has managed to attract a vibrant audience of 17 to 25-year-olds, particularly music and entertainment fans. Between desktop and mobile devices, MySpace reached 50.6M unique users in the U.S. in November, a surge of 575% versus the same month in 2013. MySpace still has access to over a billion registered users globally, and over 465M email addresses in the U.S., this pool of registered data can serve as the centerpiece of a major new cross-channel marketing initiative–something Viant is referring to as The Advertising Cloud.
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MASHABLE - Jan 14 - The company is developing products that can bring employers, employees and colleagues closer together. The platform can be better utilized to improve connections within the office, rather than outside of it. The tools will make it easier to access employee information, as well as share content relevant to your workplace. The first, allows users to send InMail to coworkers, even if they aren't already connected. The tool would also allow users to upload their contact information, making it easy for coworkers to access that information. The second product would allow company administrators to send out information to groups of relevant employees.
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