Pokki Gives Quick Acces...

It’s the Super Bowl season, when a host of services and apps debut just in time for the biggest television event of the year. And, if you’re a fan of Madden’s NFL Superstars (a web app that’s available through Facebook), then you’ll like this launch: the game is now available as a Pokki right here . Pokki , for those that haven’t used it, is a platform that lets you install lightweight apps that live in your Windows Taskbar (a Mac version is on the way). Each app gets its own icon — click on it, and the app will pop open immediately, click away and it’ll hide itself, and when you click it again, it’ll pick up right where you left off. The point is to give you quick access to apps without having to deal with browser tabs or standalone windows, and it works well.There are other apps and services that do something similar (Mac users may want to check out Fluid ), but Pokki’s platform features apps that are specifically designed for its quick, pop-over design. Pokki has landed two major gaming companies so far: Kabam and, with this launch, EA, and it seems likely that more will follow suit (the platform is well-suited for quick sessions of gaming throughout the day). And there are other apps available as well, including Gmail and eBay. The company says that Pokki is still in beta and hasn’t yet focused on marketing, but that its early numbers are very promising — so far they’ve seen “hundreds of thousands” of app installs, with users who have used the apps “tens of millions of times”. The platform is also seeing strong traction with its built-in app market: 60% of users are browsing and installing two new apps per month. Pokki is one of two main products from SweetLabs — their other major product is OpenCandy , which lets developers include targeted ads within their application’s install flow.

NFL Jumps the Shark Let...

While it may seem like a big deal that the most powerful sports league in the US (and maybe the planet), the NFL, is letting it’s players tweet during a game but let’s not run around ringing in the new era of social media and sports. It’s pretty fascinating to consider, right? A player comes off the field after an incredible catch or incredible hit and immediately tells his followers how he feels. It’s the ultimate in letting the fans in on the emotion and intensity of such an emotional and intense game like football. From Yahoo we read NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has been accused of turning the NFL into the “No Fun League,” but Wednesday, he took a bold step to fight back against that label. He’s not only allowing players to tweet during the Pro Bowl ‒ he’s setting up computer stations on the sidelines to help them do so. Which is exactly how a man who is no fun would combat allegations that he is no fun. The NFL policy for real games is that players are banished from Twitter 90 minutes before a game starts, all the way until all the postgame interviews are conducted. For this Sunday’s Pro Bowl, it’s a Twitter free-for-all. Players still can’t have their mobile devices on the sidelines, but again, the league will be setting up “computer stations.” But here’s the rub, it’s being done during a “game” that is as meaningless as anything the NFL does can possibly be. The league allowing and even enabling its players to tweet during a game sounds great but it’s really a completely hollow and insignificant gesture. In other words, don’t expect this to happen during ANY other game that the league has in the foreseeable future. This is a pure PR stunt that has no legs. Why? Because anyone who has any real understanding of the NFL knows that this game is a joke. The league has been trying to figure out how to make it work in the Internet age and thus far they have failed miserably. A game like this used to have value because there were limited ways for fans to see and hear about the players. It used to have value back in the 70′s and 80′s because there was no Internet and the 24 / 7 sports news cycle hadn’t taken hold as it has today. Marketing Pilgrim’s Social Channel is proudly sponsored by Full Sail University, where you can earn your Masters of Science Degree in Internet Marketing in less than 2 years. Visit FullSail.edu for more information. So how do you breath life into an event that traditionally has been held after the Super Bowl but had been pushed so close to the brink of irrelevancy that it is now played on the Sunday in between the last playoff game and the Super Bowl just so people would even remember it was being played? Make it a true gimmick, of course. Nice slippery slope you just stepped on Commissioner Goodell. As a sports fan this whole effort just reeks of desperation and brings out the absolute worst in the social media space. Why do I say that? It’s because now the game is more reality TV than it is football. Oh and by the way, most of the players don’t even want to be there. They don’t want to risk injury that could cost them their livelihood in a meaningless game which doesn’t even include players from the Super Bowl teams any more. I get what the league is trying to do. It is trying to boost the interest of the fans and the players (especially those who are smart enough to jockey for position regarding their post career options in a social media world) so that the game will be relevant again. But here is what will happen. Social media proponents will start to crow at the start of next season that this kind of thing should be allowed in pre-season and possibly even regular season games. They will not let this idea go. The league, however, will likely NEVER allow this to happen in game that matters because it could dilute their product which is a multi-billion dollar machine that can virtually print money the way it is now. Social media types will say that opening the game to the players will enhance the fan experience. Most of these people wouldn’t be able to hold a football without dropping it let alone understand what it takes to actually play the game well. It’ll be nerds dictating football. There is NO upside for the league in doing that because the egos and the like will turn the NFL into a reality TV show and it will alienate its fans that allow it to roll on and make tons of money. I’ve gone on long enough about this. I’ll wrap up by saying that I think this is a ridiculous idea because it throws open the door for the NFL to go down the road of being turned into a social media joke. By allowing this it has now given the social media world real traction in the game and it may not be able to turn back without having more No Fun league accusations hurled at it. Normally the NFL is pretty smart. This decision is just plain dumb.

Social Brand Marketing ...

With 300 new big brand customers and 2.5X revenue, 2011 was a landmark year for social media marketing software developer Buddy Media. As CEO Michael Lazerow told us that Buddy Media was on track to hit $20 million in revenue in 2010, it could have pulled in $50 million during 2011. It attracted premier clients such as Citibank, IBM, and the NFL with its reputation for helping brands promote through Facebook. The company grew from 100 to 225 employees, and opened new offices in London, SF, and Singapore. In short, brands are getting serious about social marketing, and Buddy Media is a tool they trust. The huge revenue growth came thanks to Buddy Media breaking out its software platform into 4 a la carte products. Agencies and brands were then able to customize a package for their needs and ended up spending more. To house its swelling work force , Buddy Media is moving its headquarters to a new 65,000 square foot office in New York City. Other milestones for Buddy Media this year include: A $54 Million Series D round that brings it a total of just under $90 million in funding The acquisition of ecommerce developer Spinback to tie promotions with shopping It became a developer partner for LinkedIn and Google+. A partnership with comScore to measure brand performance The added ability to deliver social content on brand websites in addition to social networks Its platform now supports clients in over 91 countries. The one piece of the marketing equation Buddy Media is missing an social advertising platform, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see it launch, acquire, or do a deep partnership with one this year. Buddy Media and other top-tier social marketing platforms stand to capitalize as brands increasingly shift marketing resources to social. While free tools are proliferating, huge multinational brands need the reliability and customer service these platforms provide. Competitors are vying with Buddy Media for the biggest spending brands. Vitrue  is aggressively innovating through acquisitions and partnerships, while Context Optional  offers an end-to-end social marketing service as it became part of the Efficient Frontier ad platform before being acquired by Adobe. To stay ahead, Buddy Media will need to continue improving its engaging apps, publishing capabilities, and analytics, and offer a better integrated ad buying solution. Buddy Media’s success could line it up for an IPO, or make it an attractive acquisition target for one of the world’s top traditional media publishers looking for big social play.

Bleacher Report Arrives...

Bleacher Report , the popular site for sports fans now boasting 22 million uniques per month, just released its Team Stream app for the iPad. Similar to Team Stream for iPhone and Android smartphones, the new Team Stream HD app features news and analysis and supports push notifications for breaking news. This is the first tablet-optimized experience from the company, but it’s not the only one: the company is also pushing out an iPad-optimized HTML5 browsing experience, too. Now when iPad users visit www.BleacherReport.com , they’ll be directed to a tablet-friendly version of the website with enhanced navigation, full-screen photo viewing and special transition effects in between stories. The site will also support sharing and commenting on its editorial pieces. Meanwhile, the Team Stream HD app offers a personalized dashboard on the homescreen, with the headlines, top stories and tweets from the teams and topics you’ve deemed your favorites. As on mobile, you’re able to select which teams, athletes and sportswriters you want to follow, including athletes from the NFL, College Football, MLB, NBA, NHL, College Basketball, Soccer, Tennis, Golf, MMA, Boxing, WWE and NASCAR. The new app is nicely laid out, too, with a bit of extra space in between the stories and an easy-to-use UI (user interface). BleacherReport, which just raised another $22 million this past summer, now includes an editorial team of more than 1,000 featured columnists and 6,000 contributors. Over 1.5 million users subscribe to its personalized email newsletters. And its content is now syndicated to national and regional publishers including USA Today, L.A. Times, Philly.com, San Francisco Chronicle, Houston Chronicle, and Seattle PI. To grab the new BleacherReport iPad app, head to iTunes here .

A Fantasy App Store? CB...

Depending on your familiarity, it might come as a surprise that fantasy sports is a huge business. In fact, according to the Fantasy Sports Ad Network , its total market impact is upwards of $4.5 billion. Oh yes, we love our sports. For the uninitiated, fantasy sports pretty much just consists of people (“owners”) building teams based on actual players in their sport of choice. They then pit their fantasy teams against those of their friends (or other owners), winning or losing based on the statistics produced by the actual players in competition. (As one commenter said, it’s like Dungeons and Dragons, for jocks.) Yes, fantasy sports are much beloved not only by regular ole sports fans, but by data and numbers geeks, who eagerly ply sports with every known statistical algorithm or formula to get the best teams. Fantasy football happens to be the most popular among fantasy sports enthusiasts, but there’s a fantasy league for just about every sport imaginable. As a data-driven pursuit, a multitude of sites have popped up over the years that aggregate the latest sports news, statistics, and everything in between to help owners get a leg up on their teams, many even apply algorithmic projections (like numberFire, which launched at TC Disrupt ) to the reams of data. Yahoo Sports and CBS SportsLine were among the first big companies to launch fantasy web properties in the ’90s. Now everyone and their mother are getting in on the online fantasy sports action, led by ESPN, NBC’s Rotoworld, Fox, MLB.com, NFL.com, Bloomberg Sports, etc. Fantasy sports, just like everything else, have also been making the transition to mobile, with news aggregating apps turning to fantasy sports ( a la Taptu , Evri , and more). But few of the big media properties have gotten with the times and opened their data-rich platforms to indie developers and data hounds. Today, it looks like CBS Sports is leading the way, as it is officially opening up its fantasy sports service to third party developers, companies, and startups looking to create apps for their products and services. Considering there’s a thriving ecosystem of fantasy sports news, media, analysis, and data crunching sites out there, this allows them to build products that can live on CBSSports.com, exposing them to a host of new fans and revenue generating opportunities. CBS is allowing for both free and paid apps, though it will be taking 30 percent share of paid app sales. Yahoo, once arguably the leader (and pioneer) of online fantasy sports, also offers its own access through its APIs, but they only allow use off-platform and on a non-commercial basis, meaning you can’t sell apps. CBS Sports, on the other hand, is hoping that by exposing fantasy sports enthusiasts (of which it estimates there are nearly 30 million — just in the U.S.) to a host of co-produced products and services and integrating them into their own products, it can make for a better overall user experience. Six companies (Advanced Sports Media, Bloomberg Sports, Rotowire, StatSheet, Major League Baseball Advanced Media, and Ziguana) have signed on as partners and will have free and premium apps available when “CBSSports.com App Central” — the app store — launches on January 31st. When App Central goes live, CBS Sports told TechCrunch, it will feature a rotating carousel at the top of the page that features different categories of apps, like “Staff’s Picks”, “Most Popular”, “Most Recent”, etc., following in the footsteps of other web app stores. The carousel will showcase up to eight apps in each tab, which are automatically/programmatically updated. It will also include App Lists, which will display apps by recently, and future iterations will include categorized filtering and search functionality. In preparation for the launch, CBS has already launched a “Fantasy Platform Development Center” to let developers learn how their products and services can work on the platform, including access to its set of APIs (which open up most of the data available on CBSSports.com Fantasy Games), and the tools needed to build customized fantasy apps. Developers can check it out here . It’s great to see CBS Sports following the lead of major tech companies, opening up their platform and data to third party developers, which is really a win-win for everyone involved. Surely, it will only be a matter of time before other big media properties follow suit, as fantasy sports (along with scores and stats) are the primary driver of traffic for most online sports properties. It’s a lesson to all companies — I mean, even EMI, a record label, is getting in on it — bring in the developers, and let the fun begin.