TechCrunch
Stipple Partners With Getty Images For Smarter In-Image Advertising
Stipple is announcing a partnership with Getty Images that integrates Stipple’s technology for in-image advertising with Getty’s library of photos.
Technically, there was nothing stopping someone who published Getty’s photos from including Stipple ads inside those photos. However, the new integration should make those campaigns more effective, particularly by tapping into the Getty metadata. Stipple co-founder and CEO Rey Flemings said that one of the things that has “hindered” the use of photos online is the fact that most publishing systems strip the relevant metadata from those images.
Thanks to the new partnership, Getty’s tags will be applied to its photos throughout the Stipple network, and those tags can then be used to place ads. For example, if a Hollywood studio wanted to advertise its new film, it could run a campaign across Stipple’s network that targeted all Getty photos that feature cast members from the film. The companies say this should improve the reach of brand campaigns and increase monetization for publishers.
You can view a sample image with Stipple links here.
Craig Peters, Getty’s senior vice president of business development, said the company is always looking to help its publishers monetize (after all, they’re probably going to be happier about paying for Getty’s content if they’re actually making money from those photos), and that Getty is working with Stipple specifically because the company “can basically align the interest of advertisers and publishers,” delivering ads that are effective and don’t annoy users because they’re actually relevant to the image.
“It really does unlock a lot of the value that sits in that visual asset online that has been under-monetized and under-appreciated up until this point,” Peters said.
In order to take advantage of the new integration, publishers have to be working with both companies, but that’s a group that includes People.com, Condé Nast, and Gannett.
Adobe Buys Satellite For Tag Management Technology, Makes Deeper Move Into Marketing And Ad Tech
Following on from its $600 million purchase of marketing platform Neolane, which closed earlier this month, Adobe today made its fourth acquisition of 2013. To further strengthen its marketing and analytics business, Adobe has bought Satellite, a tag management technology that helps marketers with analytics and media tracking across web sites. Satellite is part of a larger interactive marketing agency called Search Discovery.
The news was passed along to us via an email from Atlanta-based Satellite, which it sent out to customers and partners. We’re trying to find out the financial terms of the deal and whether Search Discovery is spinning off just the Satellite business, or if the whole company is joining Adobe as well.
Satellite says in its customer letter that it will continue to operate a business-as-usual service “for the time being.”
It looks like the main significance of this for Adobe is two-fold. First, it is bringing one more piece of functionality to its Marketing Cloud. That portfolio already offers services such as Analytics, Target, Social, Experience Manager, Media Optimizer, as well as the new services from Neolane.
The main idea of tag managing services is to consolidate code for different analytics, marketing and advertising services, implemented by websites to monitor how their content is used. Each piece of analytics/marketing/ad code means speaking with different third-party services, and that can slow a site down. Satellite claims to speed up loading times for sites by consolidating that code and taking it out of the markup language behind the site. It’s aimed at both small and large enterprises, who can use the platform to handle multiple sites. (That could mean that Adobe may use it itself as an SME-targeted, cloud based offering.)
And this also points to the other important part of this acquisition: it appears to put Adobe closer into the domain of marketing services where Google also is playing. Google in October 2012 launched its own tag management service, appropriately called Tag Manager.
Like Satellite, Tag Manager attempts to take some of the pain out of managing all of the different bits of analytics and tracking code that comes across a web site to make it more usable by marketers.
Satellite today notes that the Adobe acquisition doesn’t mean that Satellite will become an exclusively Marketing Cloud-shop: “Adobe will allow the use of Satellite for the deployment of services within and outside the Adobe Marketing Cloud,” it notes. But it also notes that while Adobe will continue to support existing integration between Satellite and Google Analytics, it will “no longer provide professional services to implement Google Analytics.”
Satellite notes that there is some overlap already between what it offers and what Adobe already does, which should help Adobe drive more business to its platform.
“Both Adobe and Satellite have robust partner networks that help facilitate the delivery of our market-leading technology and services to marketers worldwide,” it notes. “Due to our common focus on providing the best solutions available to marketers, we expectedly share some of the same partners. The addition of Satellite to the Adobe Marketing Cloud will enable the combined partner network to deliver the world’s leading set of marketing solutions to an even broader base of customers.”
We’ll update this post as we learn more.
Socrative Gets $750K From True Ventures, NewSchools To Bring Realtime Student Response System To K-12 Education
TechCrunch has learned today that Socrative, an intelligent student response system aimed for K-12 classrooms, has quietly raised $750K in seed financing from True Ventures, NewSchools Ventures and a handful of angel investors in Boston — where the startup is headquartered — including Jean Hammond and Eileen Rudden. According to our sources, the startup closed the majority of its round in April, but has added a few investors since then and has mostly remained mum in regard to its financing and investors.
The initial prototype for Socrative was developed in 2010 by Amit Maimon at MIT, who then brought on co-founders Benjamin Berte and Michael West after graduating. The co-founders bootstrapped for two years before joining Imagine K-12′s incubator and picking up a bit of seed funding as a result. The startup has grown steadily since. Berte tells us that, over the 2012-2013 school year, Socrative saw 116 million questions answered and 278K quizzes created and shared across 3.2 million individual teacher and student users. Towards the end of the school year, Berte says, the platform was adding new teachers at a rate of 1,000/day.
For those unfamiliar, Socrative is a free, cloud-based student response system, which is available via the Web or mobile apps for iOS and Android that allows teachers to create and distribute quizzes and conduct polls in class. Students can then respond via their laptops, tablets or smartphones, allowing teachers to get a more “realtime” understanding of student comprehension and to aggregate and store that data to track student learning curves.
The idea is to allow schools to upgrade their old hardware, or their “clickers” (and clicker systems) that one might use in a large introductory class, for example, replacing them with a more digital system. Socrative and its clicker platform 2.0 allow teachers to create and distribute a number of types of quizzes, including true/false, multiple choice, graded short answer or short response, whether they be teacher-paced or student-paced.
To put it simply, Socrative is doing for K-12 what Top Hat does for higher education. (It also follows Pearson’s acquisition of student response startup, Learning Catalytics, in April.) Like Top Hat, the system allows teachers to add gamification elements to quizzes so that students can compete against each other, view leaderboards, or display live results to get class discussions started. All in all, it’s a way to update the formal assessment standards that still exist at most schools today.
Going forward, Socrative plans to launch a design overhaul in early August, with multi-selection multiple choice questions, Common Core assessment tagging, back channel-style discussions and student quiz navigation being a few of the enhancements one can expect. Berte also tells us that Socrative is in the process of integrating with Google Apps for Education so users can access Socrative via Google Sign-on and export assessment reports and so on to Google Drive.
For more, find Socrative at home here.
Evernote Competitor Catch.com Shuts Down Its Note-Taking Apps, Company Heading In “Different Direction”
Catch.com (formerly known as Snaptic) is shutting down its Evernote competitor, called Catch Notes, which allowed users to capture and save notes on iOS and Android, as well as on the web through browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox and IE, and even via email.
The company announced the closure in a message posted to its website and in an email sent to former Catch.com users yesterday (see below) which explains that the service is closing August 30. Users have until then to export their data from Catch.com via this provided export tool. The tool produces either a CSV or ZIP archive of your data, which can be imported into OneNote, Springpad or Simplenote, per Catch’s further instructions.
The startup, which had previously raised $9.3 million in seed and Series A funding led by Boston-based Excel Venture Management, hints in its announcement that the team is now taking the company in “a different direction” following the Catch.com closure, but didn’t provide any other details about what their plans are at this time.
It’s unclear what will become of Catch’s other applications, like AK Notepad and Compass, following the news of the Catch shutdown, as the company has not yet responded to our requests for more information.
While it’s odd that no mention was made of those applications in the brief announcement, the timing of the news is odder still, given that only a month ago, the company announced the debut of a business-level collaboration service called Catch Team. Interestingly enough, that product’s homepage is still live today instead of redirecting to the notice about the Catch shutdown. That could indicate that this is indeed the new direction the company has chosen to pursue. Unlike the personal note-taking service, the Team product is focused more on project management and offers enterprise-level features.
The company’s consumer-facing mobile apps were fairly popular in months past. For example, the Android application had reached somewhere between 5 million and 10 million installs, according to Google Play, where more limited competition had allowed the app’s solid design to stand out a bit more than on iOS. Users there are already lamenting the loss, begging Catch.com to reconsider, or release a paid version.
The iOS app was only moderately popular, having reached the top 100 in Productivity apps in 14 countries worldwide, and was ranked 198 in Productivity in the U.S.
In past years, many news outlets and reviewers had listed Catch’s app as a “top” productivity tool for mobile. And, as a TechCrunch reader just pointed out, the app also benefitted from promotions in Apple’s own retail stores, as well as being featured on the Apple.com homepage.
But Evernote has long since surpassed Catch as the preferred note-taking tool for PC, web and mobile, with native applications for desktop, phones and tablets, as well as a standalone web app. (Oh, and some $251 million in outside funding, too.)
We’ve reached out to Catch.com to see if its founders can share any more details on how they came to this decision, or what the company’s future plans now involve. We’ve yet to hear back but will update with details following that conversation if and when it occurs. In the meantime, Catch’s current users should proceed to grab their data from the service before it’s too late.
Below, the full announcement:
Catch has made the difficult decision to take the company in a different direction. As such, we will be terminating service next month. We value our users and have greatly enjoyed providing Catch to millions of people over the last several years, but it is time for us to move on.
Catch will no longer be available after 30 August 2013. Please follow these directions to download your data before this time.
We thank you for your support. If you have any questions or concerns, please email us at support@catch.com. We apologize if we are not able to respond to all emails.
- The Catch Team
Google Testing Local News In Google Now, As Well As The Limits Of Feature Bloat On The Android Assistant
Google is testing out local news cards for Google Now according to a new report from Quartz, which cites Google’s VP of Search and Assist as the source of the info. The local news card is in the experimental A/B testing phase, with the aim of gathering feedback from users about whether it should go live to the broad Android user base.
The news would tell you things like nearby crimes, as well as restaurant openings and more, but tailored to your specific interests and bound to geolocation coordinates. It’d be kind of like having your town’s daily newspaper delivered directly to your phone, but perhaps more hyperlocal and having that change depending on where you are at any given moment.
It sounds like a good idea, despite the general failure of local news initiatives like Patch, since it works by collecting news from other sources and is probably a better and more sustainable approach to digital local news than new reporting bodies. But in the larger picture of Now, it begins to beg the question of what Google wants its Android assistant to really be.
Google Now is a service that provides quick access to the information that’s most immediately pertinent to you at any given time. Right now that means popping up flight schedules, transit stops and travel ETAs to key locations like home and work, as well as weather and more. It’s the “more” that becomes potentially troubling; Now is currently pretty easy to pick up and understand, but Google has to think carefully about what new features it brings on, lest it become feature-burdened and unwieldy.
The good news is that Google is doing A/B testing with this and other new features it’s contemplating bringing to Google Now. And it’s also true that not all of the cards need to be activated, or turned on by default. But even just making them available risks overcomplicating the service and making it less intuitive and natural for users, which is a big part of its appeal. Also, local news, while a neat trick, doesn’t seem all that useful in an instantly digestible context like this one.
I have one request for Google around Now: keep it clean. There’s a lot the personal assistant ‘could’ do, but that doesn’t mean there’s a lot it should.
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