Super Bowl Social Media...

With the Super Bowl being this weekend and the fact that two major metro teams, the New York Giants and the New England Patriots, are participating there is A LOT of press coverage. Usually the Super Bowl hype is overbearing but even to this sports fan (and New York Giants fan) this one is getting a bit ridiculous. One reason is social media. I decided to follow a few athletes just to see what they might say. I usually don’t do this for two reasons: 1. I like the games. The rest of the “stuff” that goes with it I can live without. 2. I don’t want to know too much about the players Seems odd, right? Wouldn’t the players thoughts and insights be great and add value to the game? Well, that can happen but based on this tweet, which I have decided to keep anonymous rather than pick on one person, my theory of knowing too much played out in a way I wish it hadn’t. Of course, there are hints as to the possible ID of the player so if you want to sleuth it you can. Every giant fan know’s that we are here to get a job done and we are going to play are hearts out this week. Damn I just can’t wait to play. This shows great passion and desire which is great. That’s fun. That’s good. The pitfall for this player and many others, I suspect, is the revelation that whatever time they spent in college may not have been too close to the classroom. A person’s proficiency with the English language can be important for any athlete for one main reason: the ability to get endorsements which is additional income. 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. Additional income for professional athletes you ask? Are you nuts?! They already make enough! That’s a popular perception but one that, like so many other popular perceptions, is wrong in most cases. The truth of the matter is that most of these players are not making multi-million dollar salaries. Also, most of these players have a very short window of opportunity to capitalize on being in the NFL since the average career is somewhere between 3-4 years. Finally, there are a lot of people dipping into these players’ salaries; agents, hangers-on, family etc. You name it. Why else would 70% of the players in the league be bankrupt just three short years after leaving the game? So what you ask? For these athletes and for marketers who want to attach their brands to them, this kind of thing is critical. It may not be to everyone who follows these guys but it could restrict opportunities for the athletes in the rest of the world. These social media “interactions” are like tryouts for the athletes with advertisers. It’s like an advertising NFL Combine. Marketers can see who may have the chops and who may not. So unless someone is coaching these athletes or “handling” them they may be doing themselves a larger disservice than service through social media. What are your thoughts? Do you care about any of this? As a marketer would you tie your brand to a player who may not be able to represent your brand to your standards? Oh, and no matter what any of the players say or do it doesn’t change my mind one bit. GO GIANTS!

Shopkick: We Helped Dri...

After recently announcing the milestone of 3 million active users , geo-coupon system a Shopkick is revealing that its mobile app helped drive more than $110 million in-store revenue for partner retailers and brands in 2011 in its first full year operating the app. Shopkick, which is backed by Kleiner Perkins, Greylock, SV Angel and others, provides an in-store, location-based mobile shopping platform, Instead of checking in, as you would with a geo app like Foursquare, Shopkick automatically recognizes when someone with the free Android or iPhone app on their phone walks into a store. Once a Shopkick Signal is detected, the app delivers reward points called “kicks” to the user for walking into a retail store, trying on clothes, scanning a barcode and other actions. Kickbucks can then be redeemed across all partner stores for gift card rewards or for Facebook Credits. User can also receive special discounts on specific products at partners stores like Macy’s, Best Buy or Target. National retail partners in the loyalty program include Target, Best Buy, Macy’s, Crate & Barrel, Old Navy, American Eagle, Sports Authority, Toys R Us, Simon Malls and others, and 40 brands (P&G, Unilever, Kraft, Colgate, Clorox, Disney, HP, Intel). To date, Shopkick has seen 1 billion in-app deals and offers viewed, and as of December, saw 5 million walk-ins to partner stores, doubling in four months. The app has seen 10 million product scans, up from 7 million in August 2011 and 3 million in February 2011. So how does Shopkick measure the revenue contributed to retailers and brands. Founder Cyriac Roeding tells us” Conversion rates of walk-ins to sales can be measured directly by counting specific shopkick offers in the basket at retailers, by rewards for purchases through POS integrations, and conversion rates of product scans to product sales can be measured through in-app questionnaires and POS integrations. In 2011, Shopkick built these measurement approaches together with its retail and brand partners, to make it a more trackable and performance-based marketing platform in the physical retail world. Shopkick’s technology is clearly helping physical retailers drive traffic and conversions in the store, which has been a challenge of late.

Location-Based Shopping...

Shopkick , an innovative geo-coupon system that is backed by Kleiner Perkins, Greylock, SV Angel and others, is debuting a number of momentum numbers today. The startup’s service now has 3 million active users, up from 2.3 million active users in September. Here’s how Shopkicks works. Instead of checking in, as you would with a geo app like Foursquare, Shopkick automatically recognizes when someone with the free Android or iPhone app on their phone walks into a store. Once a Shopkick Signal is detected, the app delivers reward points called “kickbucks” to the user for walking into a retail store, trying on clothes, scanning a barcode and other actions. Kickbucks can then be redeemed across all partner stores for gift card rewards or for Facebook Credits. User can also receive special discounts on specific products at partners stores like Macy’s, Best Buy or Target. National retail partners in the loyalty program include Target, Best Buy, Macy’s, Crate & Barrel, Old Navy, American Eagle, Sports Authority, Toys R Us, Simon Malls and others, and 20 brands (P&G, Unilever, Kraft, Colgate, Clorox, Disney, HP, Intel). For example, one of the partner retailers is estimating $50 million in measurable incremental revenue as a result of the Shopkick mobile app. To date, Shopkick has seen 1 billion in-app deals and offers viewed, and in December, saw 5 million walk-ins to partner stores, doubling in four months. The app has seen 10 million product scans, up from 7 million in August 2011 and 3 million in February 2011. During the 2011 holiday shopping season, shopkick users interacted with stores through the app more than 3.1 million times per day on average, up from just over 1 million in August 2011. Sixty-four percent of all shopkick users are now women and the average shopkick user is 30 years old. As we’ve written in the past, Shopkick’s technology is helping physical retailers drive traffic and conversions in the store, which has been a challenge of late.

News Aggregator Wavii W...

The problem of how to find relevant content on the web has yet to be solved on a mass scale. You’ve got cyborg news aggregators like Techmeme and Google news and social aggregators like Reddit and Digg competing with Twitter and the Facebook Newsfeed, all of them trying to get you the news that you want to know, as fast as possible. The Seattle-based Wavii , which has been in super stealth mode until now , takes a different approach to the problem. The startup uses natural language processing and machine learning to parse far corners of the web and bring users personalized content based on their Facebook Likes and feedback. Upon entering Wavii via Facebook Connect, you are asked to pick a combination of 12 topics that pertain to you and rinse, repeat. Wavii picks these initial interests by processing your Facebook Likes, and adjusts itself as you give it more data. Your decisions in this onboarding process generate a preliminary “interest graph” from which Wavii draws your content timeline. Like on  Quora , you can follow individual topics and people at any time — the Wavii algorithm eventually learns what you like and drills down, offering pared down summaries, visualizations, related data, images and videos tailored to your tastes. Wavii presently only covers the Tech to Entertainment verticals (arguably the most popular topics online) but founder and former Microsoftie  Adrian Aoun wants to expand it eventually to cover Politics, Sports, Music, Cities and Gaming. Using NLP to aggregate and simplify content around its verticals and topics, Wavii attempts to eliminate bias and unnecessary information — boiling down web articles to just the facts. “We care about what happened,” says Aoun, “We don’t care whether the SAP acquisition of SuccessFactors was the most boring acquisition ever , we just care that SAP acquired SuccessFactors [note: Wavii designates different forms of content with tags like "Acquisition""Break"] We teach our system very much the same way humans read language.” Aoun explains that one of the difficulties of aggregating content via NLP has been the de-duping of sentences like “Ashton and Demi break up” versus “Ashton dumps Demi.” A computer will have issues with words like “break” and “dump” in this context because those words can mean many different things other than “stop dating.” The Wavii machine focuses on clustering these articles together, no matter how they’re written. Aoun views Wavii’s goal as making Facebook out of Google, “Facebook’s feed has proven itself as the best way of connecting with and staying on top of your friends, but it’s limited to friends. Users want the rest of their info that way too, whether it’s their interest in politicians, movies, cities, or startups. Wavii lets you follow everything else (e.g., politicians, celebrities, companies, products, etc). Instead of your friends’ check-ins, photo tagging, relationship status, etc., you get company acquisitions, movie trailers, celebrity sightings, etc. “ Wavii crawls over a million online sources, from RSS feeds to links from tweets in order to generate personalized content for users. Aoun wants each post on a Wavii feed to function as conversation starter about what is happening in the world. To further enable this, the startup has a conversation function onsite, with the additional ability to post a Wavii thread on Facebook. You can tag other Wavii or Facebook users by mentioning them using an @ symbol — the service will figure out which is which and proceed. Aoun tells me that he is also planning to have Twitter integration in the next month. Wavii is seed funded by SV Angel ,  Felicis Ventures ,  Max Levchin ,  Mitch Kapor  ,  Fritz Lanman , Max Ventilla , Shawn Fanning , Ron Conway, Rick Marini , Dave Morin and Crunchfund . Rumor has it that the 20 person team – with engineers from Amazon Web Services, Powerset and Last.fm — was fielding acquisition offers from biggies like Yahoo before it was even finished baking (Interestingly enough, Prismatic is a still-in-stealth Wavii competitor with an emphasis on Twitter versus Facebook). Aoun hopes to fully launch Wavii within the next month or so. Five hundred interested TechCrunch readers can pick up an early invite to here.

Vodio Brings Personaliz...

Vodio is a new iPad app  that’s somewhat along the same lines as iOS app Shelby.tv . Like Shelby, it also brings you videos being shared by your friends on social networks. But where Shelby.tv only focuses on those “socially shared” videos, Vodio instead uses its social features to bring “a dash” of personalization to its video recommendations. In Vodio, you get to see what the crowd is watching too. To get started, you configure the app around your interests, by telling it which categories of videos you like to watch. For example, Comedy, Entertainment, Movies, Music, News, Science, Sports, Tech, etc. You can even drill down into these categories further to select the sub-categories that match your interests. So in Sports, you could choose Basketball, Football, Soccer, Tennis, etc. But you can also customize your favorite content sources. Yes to Fox Sports, perhaps, and no to the UFC. Great idea, in theory. In practice, Vodio seemed a little buggy. You can check the content sources you want to include, but good luck un-checking  them. Tapping the categories again does nothing. Apparently, that’s by design. You don’t un-check your channel selections. You go into “Edit” mode and remove them. OK then. Maybe that seems like a minor complaint, but it’s very unintuitive to have a one-way checkbox. Try it yourself if you don’t believe me. (The company says it’s working on this). Petty complaints aside, the rest of Vodio’s user interface is attractive and fun to use. You swipe horizontally to move between channels and vertically to scroll through the videos in those channels. In addition to the personalization and (optional) social networking connections, Vodio simply shows you what’s hot on various video sharing platforms and from top media publishers. Videos come from TV shows, networks, comedy sites like College Humor, NASA, newspapers, newswires, movie trailers, music videos, blogs, and more. But for now, the only supported players are YouTube, Vimeo, AOL Video, Facebook Video and Daily Motion. Vodio Labs Ltd., the company behind Vodio, was founded in early 2011 by Jonathan Messika, Uri Twig and Ishay Weinstock in Tel Aviv, Israel. Last July, it raised a 200K Euro seed round led by Kima Ventures , with Jaina Capital and Orefa Investment participating. The company is now working on simplifying the channel set up and personalization process, adding more video-driven features like HD enabling, and partnering with premium content players. The Vodio app is a free download from iTunes here .