Local News

In case you’ve been living under that metaphorical rock these past several weeks, Facebook‘s much anticipated IPO happens on Friday. The Facebook IPO will mark the final step in the evolution of Mark Zuckerberg‘s social networking baby, all the way from Harvard dorm room to publicly traded company. Facebook’s (FB on the Nasdaq market) official IPO share price was officially set on Thursday. Hundreds of Facebookers will become millionaires once the stock becomes tradable, and many observers have ideas for how they can avoid common pitfalls of the newly rich. Othe...

Remember the jaw-dropping vinyl record tricks we showed you Wednesday? Well, they’re still amazing. The video is real. But the reason given for the making of it is not. The five guys in the video repeatedly claimed to have done those stunts purely as a cure for “boredom”. That wasn’t exactly true — in fact, vinyl video star Jason Richardson tells Mashable, this is an unbranded guerilla marketing campaign for the app MusicBunk When originally pitching the video, Richardson and his team shared a link from various Gmail accounts, each purportin...

When you get a lot of smart and interested people together to make a prediction in aggregate, it can be scary accurate. Anyone who has read the James Surowiecki business science classic The Wisdom of Crowds, and a host of corroborating authors such as Malcolm Gladwell, knows that. So what if you applied that brave new world of expert prediction markets, of crowdsourcing the future, to the Facebook IPO? That’s what famed investor Chris Sacca wondered aloud on Twitter, and programmer James Proud endeavored to find out. And thus was born Facebookipod...

Ecommerce is booming worldwide, but especially so in Australia. eMarketer forecasts that B2C ecommerce sales in the country will rise from $10.5 billion in 2011 to $13.3 billion in 2012, an increase of 26.7%. In the April 2012 issue of GroupM’s semi-annual report “This Year, Next Year,” the media investment management firm forecast total ecommerce in Australia to reach AU$36 billion ($37.1 billion) in 2012, up from AU$32 billion ($33.0 billion) in 2011. While GroupM’s absolute figures are more bullish, the growth rate is lower at 12.5%. Although the two growth estimates show a huge var...

Women have flocked to social sites, and marketers are eager to reach them there. Not only do they participate in a number of social media activities at high levels, but they are also more likely than men on such sites to click on ads, according to an April release by Facebook ad management solutions provider AdParlor. Worldwide, AdParlor found that the average clickthrough rate for men on Facebook ads was 0.066% in Q1 of this year and 0.048% in Q2. Women, by contrast, clicked at rates of 0.073% in Q1 and 0.063% in Q2—differences of 10.6% and 31.3%, respectively. Though click rates for bot...

Kevin GeorgeSVP and Global CMOBeam Kevin George, SVP and global CMO, spoke to eMarketer about how spirits producer Beam is moving beyond traditional channels to create digital campaigns that tap into the social behaviors of its consumers and leveraging online video to maximize campaigns' viral spread. eMarketer: What top trends are you seeing in digital marketing in the spirits industry? Kevin George: They’re probably not unlike a number of other trends you see in CPG, but clearly digital is growing for spirits companies, who traditionally have spent quite a bit on billboards and print. ...

Actress Alyssa Milano will take over the National Hockey League’s official Twitter account for Thursday night’s playoff matchup between the Los Angeles Kings and Phoenix Coyotes. The game starts at 9 p.m. EST. It’s the first time the hockey league has relinquished control of its @NHL handle to a celebrity. But Milano is a perfect fit — she’s a noted social media enthusiast, and tells Mashable she’s a “huge Kings fan” as well. NHL reps say the takeover will be a treat for fans. “You may see a celebrity on the jumbotron, but fans don...

What Is a Hashtag? The hashtag was invented as a label for groups and topics in IRC chat. By adding the '#' sign before a string of text, users made that string easy to find in a search. But the hashtag went mainstream thanks to Twitter. In 2007, as Twitter was just picking up steam, Chris Messina - an open-source software champion currently at Google - tweeted what is believed to be the original proposal that Twitter users adopt hashtags as well. how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]? — Chris Messina™ (@chrismessina) August 23, 2007 Relat...

If you ask an average American whether they’re happy about the sluggish economic recovery, many would answer with a resounding “no.” Put the same question to a startup owner in the white-hot technology sector, however, and you’ll probably get a much warmer response. About 72% of startups reported optimism about the economy this year in a study conducted by Silicon Valley Bank. Compare that to the 71% of Americans who rated economic conditions as poor and 58% who said their own economic condition would be better off a year from now in a recent USA Today/Gallup...

More and more companies are seeing the value in social login. However, when researching providers, there is no industry standard on pricing or features making budgeting difficult. Here is a crash course on what to look for and how to estimate your cost.Decoding the Pricing ModelRegistrations: most social login provider fees are based on unique user registrations per year. This means paying for each user only once for the year. At the end of the year, the clock restarts and you pay again for the registered users.Annual vs Monthly: paying annually is a good way to save on your annual budget, bu...