Unified Hires Googler B...

Unified , a company offering tools to help agencies and brands manage their social advertising campaigns, has lured someone from Google to run it sales team. Specifically, it’s announcing the hiring of Brian Murphy as its new vice president of sales. His past experience includes leading Google’s ad sales to the financial industry, overseeing AdMob’s East Coast advertising team, and managing international sales at DoubleClick. When I met with co-founder and CEO Sheldon Owen a couple of months ago, one of his points of pride was the fact that Unified executives come from the enterprise technology industry, not just from the ad world — but hiring Murphy should help build the company’s connections on the ad side. In its announcement blog post, Unified says Murphy “will help top brands and their agencies change the way they use social media advertising.” (Beyond selling its own social advertising products, the company tries to train its customers on best practices through a program called Unified University .)

Nokia Faces $55K Fine f...

No company is too big to avoid strict SMS spam laws, as evident with Nokia who’s being forced to pay a $55K fine for violating Australia’s Spam Act. According to Australia’s communications regulator, Nokia “sent or caused to be sent CEMS (commercial electronic messages) with an Australian link, without the consent of the recipients.”  In addition, it claims the spam messages didn’t contain “clean and accurate sender information” or “functional unsubscribe facilities.”  All of which are huge no-nos when it comes to sending SMS messages — no matter which country you’re in. At mobileStorm, following digital messaging best practices and guiding our clients through the many rules and regulations associated with SMS is always a top priority — no matter how big or small the campaign is.

Best Practices: How mHe...

How to decrease cost while providing quality care – this is surely one of the key discussion points in every healthcare board meeting over the past decade.  At mobileStorm, we work with healthcare providers on a nearly daily basis to make sure the that healthcare communication solutions that we are bringing to market match the demands of the marketplace as well as the demands of the real world. Dr David Lee Scher, a pioneer of mHealth monitoring techniques, has released a new list of ways that hospitals can decrease readmission rates and it matches most of our experience as well.  The list is as follows… 1.  The use of bioinformatics 2.  Bedside computer tablets 3.  Mobile apps with cloud-based patient portals 4.  Mobile technologies for instruction and medication 5.  Telehealth conferencing Read his full list and explanation HERE .

Q&A: Jeff Nicholso...

Jeff Nicholson, VP of global marketing at Pitney Bowes Software, discusses email best practices and an oncoming "opt-down" movement.

Silverton, Automattic P...

WP Engine, a powerful hosted WordPress platform for existing WordPress.org users, has raised $1.2 million in new funding led by Silverton Partners with angels Eric Ries, Loic Le Meur, Dharmesh Shah, Jeremy Benken, Bill Boebel, Rob Walling participating. Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, also made a strategic investment in WP Engine. WP Engine, which launched in July of 2010, provides a enterprise-level hosting service for WordPress.org users who are tired of managing servers and doing IT work themselves. WP Engine makes sure blogs have super fast page load times, and scale when hit with a ton of traffic. Additionally, WP Engine provides all customers with a managed CDN for static content delivery, full daily backups, a complimentary staging area, and consultation on themes and plugins. Monthly plans start at $50 per month. In fact, WP Engine now has an install base of over 30,000 personal and professional WordPress blogs. This round of funding towards scaling the product, for recruiting, and to ramp up partner relations with other elite WordPress service providers. Today, Automattic also announced VIP Support for Web Hosts, a new partner program for hosting WordPress sites and blogs (WP Engine is the launch partner for the program). VIP Support for Web Hosts includes advanced systems and developer support for infrastructure-wide issues and improvements; annual review of the client’s entire stack as it relates to WordPress hosting; annual security audit and review of best practices and more.