Mediaboss Marketing

October 31, 2013

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports Your Universe Online

Social networking titan Facebook is testing new Web and mobile tracking methods that would drastically expand the breadth of data it collects from members in hopes of better understand user behavior, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.

Ken Rudin, Facebooks analytics chief, said the social network may start collecting data about user interaction with various types of content, such as how long members hover their cursor over an advertisement and whether a user is viewing parts of their news feed on a smartphone.

Ultimately, Facebook seeks to enhance its existing set of demographic and behavioral data on members, and would use the additional information to improve its products, Rudin told WSJ during an interview on Tuesday.

Facebook currently collects two kinds of data from its members demographic and behavioral. The demographic data captures a users life outside social media, while the behavioral data, such as a persons likes and friends, is collected in real time on the network itself.

The latest tests would greatly expand the behavioral data that is collected, and are part of an ongoing comprehensive technology testing program, although the company should know within months whether it makes sense to incorporate the new data collection into the business, Rudin explained.

It is a never-ending phase. I cant promise that it will roll out. We probably will know in a couple of months, Rudin told the Journal.

As the head of analytics, Mr. Rudin is preparing the companys infrastructure for a massive increase in the volume of its data.

Facebook uses a modified version of the open-source Hadoop distributed file system, which stores large amounts of data on clusters of inexpensive machines, to manage its data. There are additional software layers on top of Hadoop, which rank the value of data and make sure it is accessible, Rudin said.

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New Web, Mobile Tracking Methods Being Tested By Facebook

Building 16 at Facebook headquarters is home to the Fishbowl, Mark Zuckerbergs private all-glass corner conference room that sits beneath a red vintage sign that reads The Hacker Company. Not far from the sign a very visual proclamation that the social networking giant is eternally intent on building new stuff and improving the stuff it has already built youll find one of the companys most important operations: the News Feed engineering team.

These are the programmers who oversee the Facebook tool that instantly streams all sorts of new information including status posts, Likes, links, and photos to more than a billion Facebook users across the globe. The teams ultimate task is to make sure your news feed delivers content youre actually interested in. Thats important because Facebook wants you to keep using its social network, but also because this stream of information includes ads and other sponsored content, the stuff that makes the company money.

At the helm of this enterprise is Lars Backstrom, a 31-year-old with a computer science Ph.D from Cornell University. My day job is to improve the quality of News Feed, he says, during a recent interview at Facebook HQ, in Menlo Park, California.

This week, with a paper published on the online academic research site ArXiv.org, Backstrom revealed one of the recent fruits of his labor: an experimental algorithm that analyzes your personal network of friends, seeking to identify your strongest relationships. Developed alongside his former Cornell thesis adviser, Jon Kleinberg, the algorithm is strong enough to independently identity your spouse or romantic partner and even predict when youre headed for a breakup.

Eric Horvitz

Yes, odds are youve already told Facebook who your romantic partner is via your profile page. But this algorithm does much more than that. Its not a party trick. Its a way for Facebook to better understand who you are and, ultimately, serve you more stuff that you wan to see.

Backstroms research is part of a growing movement at companies and universities to use machine learning and large amounts of online data to better understand human behavior and interactions and interests. Extending our knowledge about people through the computational lens provided by large scale online services is unprecedented, says Eric Horvitz, managing co-director of the Microsoft Research lab in Redmond, Washington. These kinds of data analytics are revolutionizing social science and changing our deep understanding of people as social beings.

Some projects will even explore how information that ripples across the web can help us better analyze the effects of the world we live in how Google, Microsoft and Yahoo searches can be used to detect drug side effects, for instance, or how social media can predict epidemics. Backstroms algorithm predicts relationships, and as it turns out, that helps improve the online services that give us all that data in the first place. There is a deep scientific interest in the structure of human ties, says Horvitz. Understanding peoples preferences and interests is core in providing an engaging and informative service.

Whats more, an engaging and informative service can directly translate into profits in the form of improved sales and better advertising, and that means companies like Facebook, Microsoft and Google are doubly interested in this kind of research.

Backstroms project draws from studies done in the 1980s by sociologist Scott Feld on the organization of social ties (.pdf). But it introduces a new metric that can capture some of the complexity and nuances of social lives a metric that could be used to make predictions about peoples activities and interests.

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Why Guessing Your Romantic Partner Is So Important to Facebook

Indian apparel brands are finally getting up close and personal with consumers through social media.

Its Fashion Week all year round for some apparel brands, with social networking sites turning out to be the new age marketing tools that designers are now delving into to advertise and retail their collections.

Apparel majors have realised that no other medium provides room for such an up close and personal relationship with consumers on a mass scale. Though consumers need to like what they are going to buy and wear, and design and style is ever important in this category, brand is all important when it comes to establishing a real emotional connect with the customer.

Brand importance has increased tenfold for fashion consumers. And apparel manufacturers, who were once relegated to only receiving feedback from retailers, now have the power to engage directly with customers.

With social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube and even Instagram, Tumblr and Pinterest, apparel brands are hosting a Fashion Week round the clock, 365 days a year.

Adapting to the medium has helped prospective clients become aware about the latest happenings and launches regarding the designers brand, said Mahesh Solanki, social media artist, who consults at leading apparel houses in Mumbai.

He went on to add that creating a successful apparel line is very difficult as it is. Keeping it consistent and evolving with the audience over the long haul is more challenging.

Brands are not individual products. It is all about the products and marketing and multi channel experience and service and corporate identity, all sewn up together that bring on a greater deliverable to the consumer. Getting the right elements in place is not an easy task for many, said Solanki.

Fashion, he added, is discretionary. The promise of a brand must tug at a consumer's emotions to make a sale, for consumers express who they are or want to be by the brands they choose.

Tracking real-time social activity, which caters to audience growth, engagement, advocacy, and message propagation, is a tough task. However, with massive competition among fashion apparel brands, brands are in dire need of understanding what is in the minds of their consumers and which factors have influenced their shopping behaviour.

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Fashion Week, all year through

PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

Mobile computing, the cloud, APIs and social networking are opening doors to new business models and connections across employees, customers and partners. However, they are also spurring a proliferation of disparate resources that are difficult to access and often disconnected from enterprises strategic initiatives, core operational systems, and corporate policies. WSO2 is addressing this challenge with todays debut of WSO2 Enterprise Store, the first complete platform for managing and provisioning any type of digital assetapplications, APIs, gadgets, e-books and other resourcesacross the entire enterprise asset life cycle.

By 2017, 25% of enterprises will have an enterprise app store for managing corporate-sanctioned apps on PCs and mobile devices, Gartner predicts in the report, Enterprise App Stores Can Increase the ROI of the App Portfolio1. The report continues, Enterprise app stores can make end users aware of low-cost in-house, open-source and commercial alternatives, creating more diverse and competitive automated software requiring less procurement intervention.

The 100% open source WSO2 Enterprise Store expands on the concept of the enterprise application store. It enables IT organizations to set up their own Apple or Google Marketplace-like store where business users and developers alike can easily discover and subscribe to not only applications, but also APIs, e-books, gadgets, websites and any other asset types the enterprise chooses to offer. Only WSO2 provides a socially enabled enterprise store, so users can rate and review assets. Meanwhile, back-office life cycle management and governance ensure compliance with corporate and IT policies and procedures.

Todays connected businesses are capitalizing on technologies, such as the cloud, mobile, APIs and social networking, to gain a competitive edge through new models of agility, business collaboration, monetization and efficiency. However, accessing the many diverse assets supporting these initiatives is often like searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack, said Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana, WSO2 founder and CEO. With the launch of our WSO2 Enterprise Store, organizations for the first time have a cohesive and comprehensive platform for effectively managing and accessing all of their digital assets while providing an intuitive, social consumer-like experience that fosters adoption.

WSO2 Enterprise Store for Access to Any Digital Asset

WSO2 Enterprise Store enables users to manage and provision the entire enterprise asset life cycle, for any type of asset in one store. It provides both an Enterprise Store Front and Enterprise Back-Office.

Enterprise Store Front

TheEnterprise Store Front is a central multi-tenant store that helps to increase the visibility of enterprise assets, and it can be viewed by a range of devices, including tablets. The customizable Store Front displays all asset types, as well as providing a navigation menu for them, and it can search based on asset attributes, tags or other categories. Each asset is given an individual page with comments, rating, tags and other details of the asset for easy reference, and users are provided a personalized My Items corner to display subscribed assets.

The Enterprise Store Front facilitates social interaction by allowing users to add asset reviews, rate assets, and like or dislike the asset reviews. The asset reviews are automatically filtered based on their popularity and date added, enabling users to gauge the quality of the available assets based on the user feedback. Users also can take advantage of filtering to sort by name and category.

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WSO2 Launches 100% Open Source WSO2 Enterprise Store, First Platform for Managing and Provisioning All Digital Asset ...

30 October 2013 Last updated at 17:23 ET

Social networking giant Facebook reported a 60% surge in revenue, to $2.02bn (1.26bn), in the third quarter, generating profits of $425m.

Revenue from advertising grew by 66% to $1.8bn, with nearly half of that coming from mobile ads.

"The strong results we achieved this quarter show that we're prepared for the next phase of our company," said Mark Zuckerberg in a statement.

Facebook's shares surged 15% in after hours trading.

Shares in the company have nearly doubled in value since July, when it first announced a big jump in its mobile advertising revenue.

The company has made a concerted push to boost its mobile offering, and now says that 874 million of the site's more than one billion users access Facebook on their phone.

Speaking during a conference call, Mr Zuckerburg called Facebook a "mobile company" and noted more than half of people are only using Facebook from their phones.

"It's a pretty incredible sign of how Facebook has evolved as a company," he said.

By growing its mobile users, the company has also been able to sell more mobile ads, a crucial metric that is widely watched by analysts.

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Facebook revenue surges 60%