Put Your Neighbors To Work With Zaarly, A Local Market for Odd Jobs. Breaking free: Yammer announces embeddable activity streams. Users of Yammer, a social networking service for enterprises, can now embed Yammer feeds and activity streams into just about any business application through the use of embed codes, the company announced today.
The feature functions similar to the way YouTube users embed videos on other websites. 73 Essential Social Media & Tech Resources for Small Businesses. STARTUP SCHOOL.
Ciekawe. Games. Ideas. Gobble raises $1.2M for “peer-to-peer lasagna” Marketing. Foursquare Checkins Get Customers Gas Discounts. Here’s one way to bring location-based checkins to the masses — use them to shave off a few dollars at the gas pump.
Murphy USA, a gas station chain with 1,000 locations situated in the parking lots of Walmart and Sam’s Club stores, announced Wednesday that it’s offering $2 off a $20 purchase of gas with a Foursquare checkin. To sweeten the deal, the chain is also offering a free pack of Stride gum. The chain announced the deal on its Twitter feed and Facebook Page. The offer comes as gas prices have hit $4 a gallon in many areas of the country. Startup Tweets You Offers Based On Where You Check In. The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.
If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. Name: Local Response Quick Pitch: Local Response tweets deals to customers based on where they check in. Genius Idea: Scanning Twitter for location-revealing checkins from Foursquare, Foodspotting, Instagram and other services. Gnip is the Social Media API. Hunch. Gigwalk.
5 Killer Social Media Tips for PR Pros. Get Hired With Help From Your Social Network Friends. Top Prospect, a startup that helps members find jobs for their social network friends, is enhancing its social recruiting service Tuesday with improvements for job seekers and job matchmakers alike.
As a primer, Top Prospect is a four month-old startup that rewards users with referral bonuses — $10,000 to $20,000 per position — should they successfully recruit their Facebook or LinkedIn contacts for open jobs. The site currently features more than 80 companies — including some of the hottest startups and venture capital firms — with 300 plus open listings. 10 Proven Strategies for Greater Likeability on Facebook.
Dave Kerpen is the CEO of Likeable, a social media agency that has worked with more than 200 leading brands including 1-800Flowers.com, Verizon and Neutrogena.
Airbnb Taps Facebook, Lets You Crash With Friends Of Friends. Airbnb, the vacation rentals site where users can rent couches, countries and everything in between, is personalizing the rental search experience with the help of Facebook's social graph starting Tuesday.
"Social Connections completely transforms the search experience on Airbnb," the startup says. "We've added a new filter, allowing you to quickly and easily find connections you have in any city around the world. " Social Connections is a new filter that returns places where there is a link between the user and the host through a Facebook connection. The idea is to give users insight and information about how they are connected to hosts and other travelers. Users can opt into Social Connections to more easily find places to rent from hosts who are direct Facebook friends, hosts who are friends of friends or hosts who share the same alma mater as they do. How retailers and brands will evolve through social e-commerce. One of the big shifts in online shopping last year was the emergence of social e-commerce.
Brands and retailers started to realize that social networks aren’t just a means to extend their visibility but also a way to pull in more revenue. The infrastructure of the Internet now enables the sharing of information among networks at a velocity and scale that has been impossible in the offline world. Consider the following statistics: 90 percent of people trust recommendations of friends above any form of advertising.U.S. Internet users spent 41.1 billion minutes on Facebook, surpassing Google 39.8 billion minutes for the first time (according to comScore).1 in 4 minutes spent on the Internet in the US is spent on Facebook.Facebook has 500 million users, adding over 100 million in the past 7 months, and 50% of the active ones log on daily. FindTheBest unveils a fun way to rank dogs, motorcycles, and more. When I last talked to Kevin O’Connor, who sold his online ad company DoubleClick to Google for $3.1 billion, he was trying to expand his new startup FindTheBest by adding as many “comparison apps” as possible.
Now, FindTheBest is also experimenting with new ways to show off all its data. The Santa Barbara, Calif. company’s goal is to become the definitive destination for finding the information you need to make choices, whether it’s buying a smartphone or choosing a school. The site’s data is arranged into charts (aka comparison apps) showing the relevant facts about each item. And if you find the charts a bit overwhelming, the site has added other ways to compare products. For example, FindTheBest just announced a new feature that lets you build slideshows ranking items on the site. FindTheBest has also added a question-and-answer feature. Social curation finds an audience: Pearltrees reaches 10M pageviews. With its slick visual interface for bookmarking content, Pearltrees is unique enough that I’ve been both impressed and slightly skeptical that a mass audience will actually use it.
But it looks like the site has found plenty of users. The French startup just announced that it crossed two big milestones in March: It has more than 100,000 users curating links, and it received more than 10 million pageviews. Not only does that show the concept is resonating, but it also suggests Pearltrees could reach the scale where it can build a real business around advertising or by offering premium accounts for publishers. When you share links on Pearltrees, they show up as little circles called Pearls. (The site can also automatically add links that you share on Twitter.) SEC may let startups use social networks to raise money. The Securities and Exchange Commission may adopt rules to let internet-age technologies be used in fund-raising.
The agency is considering whether to let fast-growing companies use social networks such as Facebook and Twitter to raise funding by tapping thousands of investors for small amounts of money, the Wall Street Journal reported. The move is part of a larger review by the Securities and Exchange Commission into whether to ease decades-old constraints on how companies can issue new shares to the public.
The new funding techniques, known as “crowd funding,” could usher in a new era of capital abundance for Silicon Valley’s startups. The technique has spread from artists looking to fund their creative works to entrepreneurs trying to bootstrap companies without giving up control to venture capitalists. 5 key ingredients for startup success. (Editor’s note: Tod Whipple is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of StartupAddict.com.
He submitted this story to VentureBeat.)