14 posts and columns on keywords

Bill Gross's UberMedia Raises $17.5 Million From Accel, Index and Steve Case

in News on February 14, 2011 at 9:04 am PT

UberMedia, which just bought TweetDeck for $30 million in equity last week, has raised $17.5 million in a round led by Accel Partners. The valuation for the Pasadena, Calif., start-up founded by well-known entrepreneur Bill Gross–which was actually struck some month ago–is $40 million.

News Byte

Twitter Testing Self-Serve Ads for Launch This Year [UPDATED]

in Media on January 26, 2011 at 2:19 am PT

Twitter wants to replicate Google’s and Facebook’s advertising success, and in order to do that it will have to have a self-service ad platform, just like the big guys. It’s now testing out the service, which it wants to launch later this year, and MediaPost has a lengthy preview. Takeaways: The platform is designed to sell Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts; buyers can use both search keywords and users’ interests to target the ads.

News Byte

NileGuide Acquires Decade-Old 10Best for Travel Content

in Social on January 25, 2011 at 6:33 am PT

San Francisco-based NileGuide wants to be the alternative to scuzzy keyword-stuffed travel information from content farms. The company, which pays local editors to maintain free, user-generated content, has acquired 10Best.com, a profitable edited travel recommendations site from EnVeritas that’s been around since 2000, to help boost NileGuide’s traffic to three million visitors per month. Terms were not disclosed, but NileGuide said it will keep a portion of 10Best’s staff in Greenville, S.C.

News Byte

Using Twitter to Read Investors' Minds

in News on October 21, 2010 at 2:20 pm PT

Keywords and patterns in the torrents of data sent each day via Twitter might be the key to predicting the movement of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, according to researchers from Indiana University and the University of Manchester. They’ve developed an algorithm to determine the mood across the service, and are working on tying it to real-time data.

Voices

REMcloud Opens Online Field of Dreams

in News on October 19, 2010 at 5:00 am PT

Some people dream of starting the next Twitter. Kim Muhota hopes to start a Twitter of dreams. He is the founder and chief executive of REMcloud, a startup that on Tuesday plans to formally launch a would-be social network based around stories people experience while they sleep. Like Twitter, users of the site post snatches of text, in this case brief accounts of what they dreamed.

Holiday Web Shoppers Are Spending. But Not at Mom and Pop’s Web Site.

in Media on December 7, 2009 at 3:00 am PT

Shoppers continue to spend more online, regardless of whether they’re doing so at the mall. But this tide isn’t raising all boats equally: Holiday shopping is up at the biggest Web retailers, but it’s down everywhere else.
jingle

CBS Digital Boss Quincy Smith’s Not-Quite Exit Interview: “Hulu’s a Great Service. That’s Part of the Problem.”

in Media on October 28, 2009 at 1:31 pm PT

The man who helped shape CBS’s standalone Web video strategy explains himself, for the record.
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Voices

Google Tries to Get Smarter, More Useful

in News on March 23, 2009 at 1:27 pm PT

Search engines are pretty good at finding Web pages closely related to exact terms users type in. They’ve had less success finding results that are conceptually related to what a user is looking for. For instance, a search for “abstract expressionism” may have missed certain results for the related artistic movement “surrealism.”

Voices

China Reportedly to Shut 10,000 Unapproved Web Sites

in News on February 24, 2009 at 11:12 am PT

China today is reportedly shutting down about 10,000 unregistered and unapproved Web sites, most of them operated by small businesses, according to Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster. He says that “multiple Chinese media sources” last night discussed the push to clean up unwanted Internet sites.

Voices

Baidu Bars Some Unlicensed Medical Firms From Paid Listings; They Account for 10-15 Percent of Revenue

in News on November 18, 2008 at 11:55 am PT

Baidu, the Chinese analog of Google, is fighting allegations that it has been allowing unlicensed medical groups to purchase the most popular keywords and appear high up in search results. (The offending listings have since been removed.) The company has also been accused of removing unpaid users who decline to become paid users by purchasing keywords. Obviously, there is also a Chinese analog of “The Godfather.”