Author: Blancer

If you work in online advertising, until recently there hasn’t been a very good way to find out which ads are running across the Internet. Search engines like Google index the underlying web pages, and strip out the display ads. But if you work at an ad agency or are a sales guy at an online publisher getting ready for a meeting with a big brand, it helps to know what display ads they are running. You could click the refresh button on a bunch of big sites a few dozen times, or you can go to Moat, which is a search engine for display ads.

Type in Apple, Android, or Blackberry, and it shows you all the creative ad units running right now across the web. It’s a pretty handy tool for anyone in the industry, or even casual observers.

But the ad search engine is just eye candy. Moat is working on so much more, including heatmap engagement analytics and a crowdsourced marketplace for display ad designers. The New York City startup is self-funded with $3 million from co-founders Jonah and Noah Goodhart (who are brothers), and Mike Walrath. All three were involved with Right Media, the ad exchange Yahoo bought for $850 million in 2007 (Walrath was the founder and CEO, and the Goodharts were investors).

“Part of the problem with digital advertising,” says Walrath, “is that we think we know what is happening with an ad and what makes it successful. Right now, all you have are clicks and conversions.” Walrath thinks the industry is measuring the wrong things: impressions on one end, and clicks on the other. Big brand advertisers care more about attention. (Walrath has discussed this before on Founder Stories).

Moat has a proxy for attention. It can generate a heat map of where people hover their mouse over an ad, and where they click as well. What you end up with is something like the heatmap shown above for HauteLook. An image of a woman in the ad, while more attractive, turned out to be too distracting, whereas an image of a shoe results in 2.6 times more clicks on the join button. Moat offers these heatmap analytics to brand advertisers, to help them figure out which display ads are the most engaging and to give them tools to fix the ones that are not working.

According to Jonah Goodhart, typical clickthrough rates on display ads are less than 10 out of every 10,000 visitors (or 0.1%), whereas about 500 of every 10,000 people (5%) spend at least half a second hovering their mouse over an ad, and 1,000 out of 10,000 (10%) touch the ad in some fashion without clicking on it. Moat wants to capture all of this data and deliver it to marketers so that they can test different images and wording in their display ads just like they do today with keyword search ads. The answer in display is to just make the ads bigger, instead of changing the elements inside the ad.

The final piece of the puzzle is a crowdsourced marketplace of designers that advertisers can tap to pump out different versions of their display ads. Each designer will be rated and ranked and placed into different categories. The marketplace for display ad designers was actually the initial idea for the company, but the founders realized that they first needed to provide a better way to measure engagement.

Unlike other automakers, Tesla is headquartered in the hills of Palo Alto next to beautiful rolling hills with lush green scenery and horse crossing signs. As you can imagine, a place like this would have some of the best driving roads in the country. We were slightly disappointed that the man behind it all, Elon Musk, was out of town. But coincidentally this gave us the perfect opportunity to borrow his personal Roadster Sport while he was gone.

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Walmart this morning said it is buying Mountain View-based Kosmix, a heavily funded social media technology provider that has built a platform that enables users to filter and organize content in social networks, in order to connect people with information that matters to them, in realtime.

The platform powers a site called TweetBeat, essentially a realtime social media filter for live events that saw more than five million visits last month alone according to its maker.

Additionally, the technology is used to power RightHealth, a popular health and medical information site as well as Kosmix.com, which lets you ‘explore the Web by topic’.

So what is the retailing juggernaut doing picking up a social media startup, which has raised $55 million in funding from a slew of investors over the past few years?

According to a statement, Kosmix’ founders and team will operate as part of a newly formed group dubbed @WalmartLabs and remain based in Silicon Valley. Walmart expects them to create technologies and businesses around social and mobile commerce that will support its multi-channel strategy, thus blurring the line between offline and online shopping.

The founders of Kosmix, entrepreneurs and investors Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, can be considered ecommerce pioneers. Their first company, database tech company Junglee, was acquired by Amazon for a boatload of stock back in 1998.

They later created crowdsourcing Internet marketplace Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Eduardo Castro-Wright, Walmart’s vice chairman, comments:

Social networking and mobile applications are increasingly becoming a part of our customers’ day-to-day lives globally, influencing how they think about shopping, both online and in retail stores. We are excited to have the Kosmix team join us to accelerate the development of our social and mobile commerce offerings.

It’s worth noting that Walmart has a director on its board that knows a thing or two about social networks and online commerce, namely Jim Breyer, partner at Accel Partners and an investor in companies like Facebook, Etsy, Brightcove, Art.sy and Prosper.

But notably, Accel Partners is also a major shareholder in Kosmix – the VC firm has participated in three of four rounds of funding according to CrunchBase. Other Kosmix investors include Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Lightspeed Venture Partners and DAG Ventures.

The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions – Walmart anticipates the deal to close during the first half of this year. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

Facebook Pages — the social network’s profiles meant for businesses, celebrities, and public entities — are becoming an increasingly important way to establish a long-term relationship with customers and fans. Many businesses are sprucing up their Pages with applications, and everyone is always on the hunt to get more Likes and Comments on their Updates (posts with higher user engagement will show up in more News Feeds).

Facebook’s built-in Insights tool does a decent job helping you keep tabs on your Page’s performance, but there’s some data that may be even more important: how your arch-rival is doing. Which is where ContentAide, a new startup from VentureBeat writer Cody Barbierri, comes in handy.

The service is pretty straightforward: tell it what Facebook Pages you’d like to keep an eye on, and the site will automatically generate a daily report on how that Page is performing. This isn’t just a Page’s overall ‘Like’ count either — ContentAide will also send you each individual status update and photo posted, along with how many Likes and Comments they received. You can receive reports for your own Pages and for competitors’ Pages as well.

Barbierri says that ContentAide uses an algorithm to figure out the relative success of each status update — if your page has hundreds of thousands of fans, then obviously it’s much easier to get 50 ‘Likes’ on a post than if you only had 1,000 fans, and the reports take this into account. Down the line, Barbierri hopes to add some deeper analysis, like automatic reports on what types of updates have been most effective.

ContentAide is charging $20 per month for one daily report and goes up from there — Barbierri says that in addition to individuals and small businesses, the service is looking to cater to consultants and firms that may want to receive multiple reports every day.

Exclusive – Elite Media Worx, the startup behind local deals bidding site Bidmyway, has secured $1.35 million in financing as it gears up for the public debut of its ‘eBay for deal-of-the-day sites’.

Four Directions Holdings led the round, joined by senior management and other investors, including Brad Ohlemacher, President of EMC Precision.

Bidmyway is billed as an ‘online-to-offline bidding service’ that basically allows people to name their best price, in true Priceline.com fashion, but for local goods and services, specifically.

Unlike collective purchasing sites like Groupon and LivingSocial, Bidmyway lets people individually determine what an offering for a specific restaurant, spa, hotel, or other local merchant is worth to them, based on their budget. Participating merchants can accept or reject bids based on an undisclosed threshold, and winning bids are kept confidential.

Bidmyway is also similar to the two fast-growing local commerce sites mentioned above, and many others who’re trying to emulate their business models, in the sense that you can also use the site “get daily deals now” at a given price. Elite Media Worx, the company behind Bidmyway, also operates a straight-up deal-of-the-day site over at Elite City Deals.

The startup, we should note, is the latest venture of telecommunications industry vet John Shave. The entrepreneur sold his previous company, telecom carrier Globalcom, to First Communications for close to $60 million a couple of years ago.

Shave says Elite Media Worx plans to raise a much larger round of funding in the near future, which will allow it to expand into 10 markets across the United States.

As far as I can tell, Chicago’s the only city where Bidmyway features deals for now.

Alright, who is up for a round of Lily Allen Tetris? Yes, that’s right, now you challenge your friends to various games on Facebook and select the music as well. But this is about more than just background music. MXP4‘s new social music gaming app – called Bopler Games – uses the company’s “automated level design” technology to automatically synchronize the game with the song, based on its melody, rhythm and structure. Translation: the difficulty of the game will reflect your selection in music.

The application currently features 4 different games – including previously released Pump it, which hit 1 million users within its first month. MXP4 is also in the process of developing another 6 games, which should be released shortly.

When Apple announced back in February that The Daily would be the first subscription news app on iTunes, it was seen by other publishers as the model going forward. Some like it, some don’t, but at least Apple knows how it wants to treat subscriptions going forward. Or does it?

Some subscription news apps seem to be in limbo right now while Apple figures out how to handle special situations. If you are a single-title publication like the New York Times, The Daily, or Businessweek, then it is pretty straightforward and the current rules apply. But what if you are a news reading app that brings together articles from many sources, some paid and some free? In other words, what if you are an aggregator app like Flipboard or Zite, but you want to charge a subscription for the app? How should that subscription be split up between the app and the publishers, and should Apple even be involved with policing those types of licensing and copyright issues? It’s all getting sorted out right now.

One of the issues revolves around Apple’s rules for listing subscription apps under free apps. They obviously aren’t free apps, but it helps with the marketing and getting people to try them out if they can start out free. In order to justify the free app description, subscription apps must offer something of value for anyone who downloads the app—perhaps a free issue of a magazine, or free top stories. Then the in-app subscription unlocks the full experience.

It’s a bait and switch because the apps become pretty much useless without the subscription. A free issue is a sample which becomes stale within a few weeks at most, then you have what amounts to a dead app on your iPad if you don’t subscribe.

For aggregator apps that want to go the subscription route, it is not clear what the free portion of the app would be. Is it just the open RSS stuff that comes free, and the subscription unlocks and articles behind a paywall? Or maybe you get the full app for a week and it doesn’t update unless you subscribe. But then you encounter the bait-and-switch problem.

Wouldn’t it be more honest if subscription news apps were listed under paid apps? Or at least under a new category: subscriptions.

Mobile app analytics provider Localytics, a graduate of the 2009 TechStars Boston class, has raised $2.5 million in new funding from Launchpad Venture Group, New York Angels and Hub Angels. This brings the company’s total funding to over $3 million.

Localytics offers a comprehensive mobile analytics platform to help give app developers and publishers with real-time reports on how customers use their applications on Android, Blackberry, iPad and iPhone devices. The startup’s product can be used to monitor basic usage, custom events, and enables publishers to dynamically generate custom segments and chart results with hourly granularity.

Today, Localytics is also unveiling a new premium offering, which includes a custom charting feature to build and share customized reports, additional analytics and more. time. Additionally, a new App
Comparison tool allows developers to compare performance across a number of apps. Developers can see which apps are contributing most to growth across different markets and platforms. The Premium version costs $95 per month for Android, BlackBerry, iPad, iPhone and Windows Phone 7 applications.

We have a number of discounts for the service. Readers that enter TC35X6 as a coupon code when signing up here for Localytics Premium before April 30, will get 35% off their first 6 months of the analytics service.

Localytics’s platform is being used by a number of well-known companies including News Corp., Skype, Bluefly, RueLaLa, Turner Broadcasting and more.

Digby, which helps retailers design, deploy and manage mobile commerce web sites and rich applications optimized for smartphones, has raised $8 million in Series C funding led by Battery Ventures with RIM’s BlackBerry Partners Fund, S3 Ventures and Daylight Partners participating in the round. This brings the startup’s total funding to $16 million.

Digby’s Mobile Commerce product helps retailers create mobile websites that display rich product images and live catalogs, expands the ways they can buy from merchants and more. Digby also allows retailer to create native applications for iOS, BlackBerry and Android devices. Digby has a number of well-known retailers using its offering, including Costco, Toys “R” Us, The Home Depot, Lilly Pulitzer, and 1-800-Flowers.

The startup also recently landed a deal with AT&T to power the telecommunications giant’s mobile commerce software platform for developers.

The new funds will be used to expand global operations including sales, marketing, client services, research and platform development, and for new client acquisitions. As mobile commerce ramps up, there’s no question that more retailers will be looking to platforms like Digby to create a seamless mobile shopping experience for consumers. Digby could also be an acquisition target for a retail giant like eBay, so it should be interesting to see how the company performs in the coming year.