Mediaboss Marketing

Shoutlet, a social marketing solutions company based in Madison, Wisconsin has raised $15 million in Series C funding from FTV Capital. The company raised a $6 million Series B round in December from American Family Insurance, Origin Ventures and Leo Capital Holdings. The company provides an enterprise-focused social media platform to help companies conduct marketing campaigns through social media and then track their effectiveness. In a recent blog post, Shoutlet CEO Jason Weaver states: with Shoutlets Series C funding, we are going to double down on our innovation and invest heavily in our people by globally expanding our development, sales, marketing, and support teams.

PRESS RELEASE

Shoutlet Raises $15 Million Series C Funding From FTV Capital To Fuel Further Product Innovation

MADISON, WI June 7, 2012 Shoutlet, the leading cloud-based self-serve social marketing platform, today announced it has raised $15 million in Series C funding from FTV Capital, a growth equity investor focused on high growth businesses with innovative solutions. This round brings Shoutlets total funding to $24.2 million in outside investment.

Shoutlet is the most sophisticated and comprehensive self-serve platform available to create, publish, and measure social marketing campaigns and activities on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Its enterprise-level functionality, Social CRM intelligence gathering and segmentation capabilities, trigger-based campaign publishing, world-class design tools for Facebook pages and web apps, and ROI-focused analytics differentiate Shoutlet from all other social management tools.

With the financing, Shoutlet will accelerate product innovation, grow its strategic partner network, and increase staff across all departments, including expanding account management and technical support offices in San Francisco, New York, and London.

In recent months, Shoutlet has added global brands including Canon, Nokia, Wrangler, K-Swiss, NASCAR, Fairmont Hotels, and Sandals Resorts to its roster of more than 400 customers who manage 6000+ accounts in 50 countries. Year over year revenue growth now exceeds 200%.

The way brands and agencies manage social marketing is changing rapidly. For the first time, marketers can easily utilize a self-serve platform with power and flexibility not easily accessible via service-based tool vendors. The wave of customers making the change to in-house management has exceeded our wildest expectations and has validated our do-it-yourself model, said Shoutlet CEO Jason Weaver. This funding will enable Shoutlet to innovate at an even faster pace and aggressively expand our product offering to meet the needs of sophisticated marketers who desire a more rapid response form of social media management.

FTV has been an active investor in the digital marketing space, and we found Shoutlet to be far and away the strongest platform for sophisticated marketers to run their own campaigns. Shoutlets self-serve model, product innovation, and high customer satisfaction and retention rates combine to uniquely position the company as a leader in the SMMS category, said Liron Gitig, FTV Capital principal and new Shoutlet board member. To FTVs strategic investor network including many global financial institutions, Shoutlets permission-based, governance approach to enterprise management is extremely attractive. Were confident the strength of the Shoutlet leadership team, vision, and long term product roadmap will ensure tremendous and sustainable growth.

About Shoutlet Shoutlet is a leading cloud-based enterprise social marketing platform that enables marketers to publish, engage, and measure social marketing campaigns and activities on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Its industry leading functionality includes a Social CRM for Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube management; Social Canvas for Facebook tabs, HTML5 pages, and custom contest and web app design; Social Switchboard for trigger-based campaign publishing; Social Profiles for data acquisition and interest segmentation; Social Enterprise for corporate-level control of multiple brands, franchises, and agents; and Social Analytics for metric tracking and custom reporting. For more information, please visit http://www.shoutlet.com.

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Social marketing firm Shoutlet raises $15 million

Film industry insiders lament that the criteria by which films are judged are too vague and say the process is plagued by bureaucracy

Scenes from Bay Cap 3 (literally Level-3 trap) by Vietnamese-American director Le Van Kiet, which has been banned in Vietnam

The teen horror film Bay Cap 3 (literally Level-3 trap) by Vietnamese-American director Le Van Kiet is the third and the latest film to be banned in Vietnam this year.

Vietnamese-made films are seldom banned, as Vietnam actively promotes its film industry.

Bay Cap 3 was banned for its inappropriate content to Vietnamese culture and tradition, raising questions about the process of censoring films and the criteria which is used to determine what is inappropriate.

According to the Vietnam Cinema Departments May 7 decision issued to leading local film distributor Megastar, nine members of the National Movie Censorship Council disapproved of the film which tells the story of an ignored, disregarded high school student.

On a field trip to Da Lat with his friends, he kills them with a series of unexpected traps.

On one hand, the statement continues, the film highlights sexual lust among the teenagers, on the other hand, because the student hates to such an extent that he does not hesitate to consciously kill people, it describes and incites violence.

The films content is inappropriate for Vietnamese culture and tradition, especially for high school students. Therefore, the Vietnam Cinema Department does not approve the release of Bay Cap 3 in any way, and makes this announcement to Megastar in order to keep the film from spreading around the local market.

The films content violated article 9 of decree 54/2010/ND-CP, which details the type of content prohibited by Vietnams Cinema Law.

Excerpt from:
Trap of censorship

Vedomosti

Demyan Kudryavtsev

Two high-ranking media executives have been pushed out of their jobs in shake-ups that both said were business driven, but that still raised worries among some observers about politically motivated censorship.

Kommersant holding company CEO Demyan Kudryavtsev was fired, it was announced Thursday just months after the companys owner, Alisher Usmanov, sacked an outspoken editor at Kommersant Vlast under reported pressure from the Kremlin.

Bolshoi Gorod editor-in-chief Phillip Dzyadko also unexpectedly announced Thursday that he would resign as head of the popular lifestyle magazine.

Both said that politics had nothing to do with their departures, but in his farewell column published Thursday, Dzyadko painted a bleak picture of the media landscape.

In the first summer month of Putins third term, a purge of sources of independent media is taking place in front of everybodys eyes, he wrote.

Kudryavtsev said his exit from Kommersant was largely driven by new business priorities.

Its not a corporate secret, he said in an interview with business news website Slon.ru. Its just that people who have proved their success in media have been given the task of developing strategies for growth. There is no need to seek a direct political connection.

But Galina Timchenko, editor-in-chief of Lenta.ru, told Openspace.ru that Kudryavtsevs dismissal means that they are shutting off our channels of access to independent information.

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Media Shake-Up Stirs Worries of Political Control

A new study published in the journal Science has revealed that, in addition to the destruction of natural habitats and the widespread use of industrial chemical pesticides, the global bee die-off witnessed in recent years is also caused by a deadly virus carried by bloodsucking parasitic mites.

Varroa destructor is a bloodsucking parasite that feeds on honeybees and has spread globally, destroying colonies worldwide. (Photograph: Alamy) The report in Science is available to subscribers only, but according to The Guardian's Damian Carrington, the researchers who conducted the study warn that the virus, called Varroa destructor and carried by the varroa mite, is now one of the "most widely distributed and contagious insect viruses on the planet." Equally troubling, the new dominance of the killer virus poses an ongoing threat to colonies even after beekeepers have eradicated the mites from hives.

The research team, led by Stephen Martin of Britain's University of Sheffield studied the impact of Varroa in Hawaii, which the mites have only recently invaded.

"This data provides clear evidence that, of all the suggested mechanisms of honey bee loss, virus infection brought in by mite infestation is a major player in the decline," he told Reuters in a telephone interview.

* * *

Reuters: Bee-killing virus gets supercharged by mites

Bee populations have been falling rapidly in many countries, fuelled by a phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder. Its cause is unclear but the Varroa mite is a prime suspect, since it spreads viruses while feeding on hemolymph, or bee's "blood".

To clarify the link between mites and viruses, a team led by Stephen Martin of Britain's University of Sheffield studied the impact of Varroa in Hawaii, which the mites have only recently invaded.

They found the arrival of Varroa increased the prevalence of a single type of virus, deformed wing virus (DWV), in honey bees from around 10 percent to 100 percent.

At the same time the amount of DWV virus in the bees' bodies rocketed by a millionfold and there was a huge reduction in virus diversity, with a single strain of DWV crowding out others.

Continue reading here:
Killer Insect Virus Helping to Decimate World's Bee Population

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Man’s Facebook F-word Blast