Pinterest today is releasing a set of new advertising management tools that were previously unavailable for smaller businesses as its portfolio of advertising products — and revenue potential — continues to grow. All these tools continue to give smaller and medium-sized businesses new opportunities to manage advertisements on Pinterest. Around three-fourths of the content on… Read More
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Vessel, the video subscription startup headed by former Hulu CEO Jason Kilar, announced this week that it’s moving in a new direction in terms of the advertising displayed on its service. In a move that recalls YouTube’s venture into ad-free viewing with the debut of YouTube Red, Vessel is also making its service ad-free for all its paying subscribers. Meanwhile, those who… Read More
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No one else ever sees most of your camera roll. But if you’re brave enough, your close friends might enjoy peeking at every photo, video, and screenshot, not just the best ones. So call it creepy or the next frontier in social media, but that’s what Shorts does. It’s the new iOS app from the makers of Highlight, the hyped location app startup of 2012 that fizzled out and is… Read More
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Tired of watching (relatively) lengthy online videos when there’s only 10, 30 or 60 seconds that you really care about? Well, viral publisher and publishing toolmaker Playbuzz has a solution called Video Snaps. Basically, the Snaps product makes it easy for a publisher or anyone else to take an existing video and divide it into different segments, so viewers can go directly to the… Read More
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Wunder Capital, a provider of solar financing for medium-sized businesses, has raised $3.6 million in a new round of financing. The company has raised $4.7 million from Techstars Ventures, Fenway Summer Ventures, and FinTech Collective, alongside existing seed investors. Read More
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While Spotify is acquiring startups expand its messaging and social features, Pandora is also raising its game in the artist-to-fan communications sphere for musicians to better target Pandora’s 80 million users. Today, the music streaming company is launching a service called AMPcast — a service to let musicians “speak to their fans” by way of audio messages… Read More
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Music listeners are cheapskates. Few will pay Spotify or Apple $10 a month even to stream almost every song ever. Meanwhile, radio services like Pandora hardly scrape by on the meager ad rates after they pay out royalties.
So if Pandora wants to resuscitate the battered corpse of Rdio it acquired for $75 million last year, it can’t just be another unlimited monthly subscription. The… Read More
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In a world suffering from app overload, the Y Combinator-backed startup Prompt introduces a different way to interact with services, make purchases or even control “Internet of Things” devices — all by way of text-based interface. The application, which can be used via SMS, Slack or the web, lets you text to do things like request an Uber, change the temperature on a Nest… Read More
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Mobile marketing company Tune is releasing a new report, where 24.6 percent of survey respondents said that they’d downloaded an ad-blocking app or browser.
The company says it surveyed nearly 4,000 smartphone owners in the United States and Europe, and it found that adoption is growing quickly — only 2.4 percent of respondents said they’d downloaded an ad blocker in the… Read More
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Ryan Leslie gave every fan his phone number. It’s (646) 887-6978. But instead of a million unwanted phone calls, it’s making him money and giving him deeper intelligence about his listeners than anyone in the music business.
That’s why A16z’s Ben Horowitz, Betaworks, and more investors just put a $1.5 million seed round into Leslie’s startup Disruptive Multimedia. Read More
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