NFL Will Allow Players to Tweet Inside the Pro Bowl


The NFL is going to allow players to tweet during the game from this Sunday’s Pro Bowl.

As first reported by CNBC’s Darren Rovell, players will be allowed to tweet from a designated area on the sidelines.

The NFL, often called the “No Fun League,” famously disallowed in-game tweeting in July of 2009. The NFL later fined a player for tweeting from a training camp.

Still, the league’s position regarding social media has evolved over time.

Of course, this is the NFL, so the sanctioned Pro Bowl tweets will have some caveats. Rovell says that players “will not be able to tweet from personal devices” and instead will have to use a computer station set up on each sideline. Additionally, Rovell cites the NFL’s Brian McCarthy as saying that the league is not considering changing its stance on in-game tweets during the regular season.

The Pro Bowl is the NFL’s all-star game — less of a game and more of a show — so it stands to reason that the league is willing to make changes to its official social media policy in this case.

Still, we have to question the rationale of “designated computer stations.” Rovell tweets that these stations are unsponsored, which means there doesn’t seem to be a fiscal motive to limiting the type of device. Maybe it’s just us, but this doesn’t feel like the league is really ready to embrace social media. After all, if players have to go to a certain area and use a computer, doesn’t that limit the “realness” of the messages they send to fans?

In any event, progress is progress. What do you think of the NFL’s decision? Let us know in the comments.

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from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/01/25/pro-bowl-tweets/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_med...

Paramount Movies lets you stream UltraViolet films from the cloud, for a price

Paramount became the first studio to offer UltraViolet-based movies this week, with the launch of Paramount Movies. With this new service, users can purchase a film in either digital or physical form, and automatically store a copy of it within Paramount's cloud-based digital locker. This effectively allows you to stream a film to any iOS device, though support for Android and Windows Phone remains unavailable (as does compatibility with most set-top boxes). It's all part of DECE's "buy once, play anywhere" ethos, though it should be noted that the studio's UV offerings are somewhat limited. At the moment, Paramount Movies boasts about 60 titles, all of which are available at comparatively steep prices: $20 for HD quality movies, and $13 for SD versions. Check it out for yourself at the source link below.

Paramount Movies lets you stream UltraViolet films from the cloud, for a price originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 25 Jan 2012 07:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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from Engadget http://www.engadget.com/2012/01/25/paramount-movies-lets-you-stream-ultraviol...

Obama’s State of the Union Address Sees 760,000 Tweets [INFOGRAPHIC]


Twitter has released the official stats showing the activity of its users during President Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday, providing an interesting insight in how the Twittersphere reacted to various parts of the speech.

During the event, Twitter promoted five official hashtags: #jobs, #manufacturing, #energy, #education and #fairness. Unsurprisingly, those were among the hottest topics of the day, with #education being number one with 35,972 tweets.

The highlights of the event, in terms of Twitter traffic, were Obama’s mention of Steve Jobs, the part about energy and the President’s “Spilled Milk” line, which caused less than enthusiastic response from the listeners.

According to Twitter, the top tweeter on the Democrat side was Gabrielle Giffords. “Team: Last year, a seat for Rep. Giffords was left empty between Reps. Flake & Grijalva. This year, they sit beside her. #bipartisan,” she tweeted during the address.

The top tweeting republican was Aaron Schock, who tweeted: “The top 5% pay over 58% of all income taxes. These are job creators. Mr. President, when is it enough? #4jobs.”

We followed the event as it unfolded on Twitter, and you can now see Twitter’s official stats in the image below.

Did you tweet during the address? If so, what parts prompted you to take to Twitter? Tell us in the comments.

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from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/01/25/state-of-the-union-twitter/?utm_source=feedbur...

Time Warner Helps Social TV Startup Bluefin Labs Raise $12 Million in Funding


Social TV analytics startup Bluefin Labs has raised $12 million in a Series B round of funding, which means the company will be expanding its resources to help TV networks and marketers keep track of how audiences are responding to shows via social media sites.

Time Warner Investments led the round with participation from new investor SoftBank Capital and return investors Redpoint Ventures and Lerer Ventures.

Bluefin Labs is best known for its flagship product, Bluefin Signals, an analytics platform that analyzes and organizes social media conversations about U.S. national television. The dashboard interprets the social media response — including tweets and Facebook posts — to more than 11,000+ TV shows and 346,000+ individual airings of those shows. It looks at 5 billion public-facing social media comments each month and then pairs those comments with more than 2.5 million minutes of linear TV time.

Although the product debuted in July 2011, Bluefin Labs was founded in 2008 and came out of the MIT Media Labs, with the goal of applying machine learning and cognitive science to the broader goal of understanding how audiences respond to TV shows and ads.

SEE ALSO: Bluefin Signals Measures the Social Media Response to Television

Companies that use the platform — which include mix of television networks, marketers and agencies such as CBS, MediaCom and MTV — gain access to social data about TV shows and commercials to inform the buying and selling of TV media.

Bluefin Labs said in a press release that it plans to use the new financing to accelerate growth of its sales and client services efforts. The company will also “continue to invest heavily in technology and R&D [research and development] to lead further innovation in the field of social TV analytics.”

“We are witnessing a huge shift in consumer behavior, as people now naturally turn to social media to voice their opinions about what they are watching on television,” said Deb Roy, co-founder and CEO, Bluefin Labs. “We are continuing to build out Bluefin’s services that allow us to provide enhanced data which enables our clients to glean more of an understanding of their audiences and target consumers.”

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from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/01/24/time-warner-helps-social-tv-startup-bluefin-la...

Time Warner Cable's app goes universal

Time Warner Cable released an official iOS app early last year that let subscribers watch live TV. Despite some early issues with channel agreements, the app is still going strong, and appears to be popular with customers. So popular, in fact, that the company has just updated the app to also work with the iPhone and iPod touch, so now no matter what iOS device you have, as long as you're a TWC subscriber, you can tune in to some live television.

The app is called TWC TV, and it's a free download on the App Store. As you might guess, it requires a good, reliable Internet signal, so you'll need a Wi-Fi connection for streaming. You can also browse through program schedules and information, and even set your compatible DVR to grab your favorite shows.

The Time Warner app was a nice surprise when it appeared, and it's one of the best things that old media companies have done to work with iOS. It's good to see that it's not only popular enough to support with an update, but that Time Warner is getting dedicated about making its content available even on Apple's platforms for customers.

Time Warner Cable's app goes universal originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 24 Jan 2012 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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from TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog http://www.tuaw.com/2012/01/24/time-warner-cables-app-goes-universal/

State of the Union address to get crowdsourced captioning online

President Obama will present the annual State of the Union address to Congress this evening. Mozilla and PBS have teamed up to add an interactive facet to the event. Volunteers will be able to help transcribe and translate the President's speech.

The crowdsourced captioning will be attached to a Web-based video stream. Viewers around the world will be able to experience the State of the Union address with subtitles in their own native language. The captions will also help make the speech more accessible to viewers with hearing impairments.

The browser-based transcription tools are built on the Universal Subtitles system created by the Participatory Culture Foundation, the same organization that develops the open source Miro video player. Captioning the State of the Union is part of a broader program launched by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting called Open Election 2012. The initiative will bring similar volunteer transcription to election coverage.

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from Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/01/state-of-the-union-address-to...

Live From the White House: The State of the Union, Tweeted


Tonight, President Obama will be addressing the nation in the annual State of the Union address. Mashable has been invited by the White House to attend a State of the Union tweetup.

The event (using hash tags #sotu #whtweetup) will be held at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, D.C, next door to the White House. We’ll be watching the White House’s enhanced version of the State of the Union, which will include graphics, data and statistics that TV audiences won’t see (If you’d like to see the stream, visit the White House’s website).

During the speech, we’ll be watching for any technology-related announcements the president might make. We’ll keep you updated about what those announcements could mean for you.

SEE ALSO: How to Watch and Interact With the State of the Union Address Online

After the State of the Union, we’ll be attending a panel with White House deputy director of the Domestic Policy Council Mark Zuckerman, special assistant to the president for education policy Roberto Rodriguez, deputy director of the National Economic Council Brian Deese, deputy national security adviser for strategic communications Ben Rhodes and deputy White House communications director Jen Palmieri.

They’ll be taking questions from the tweetup audience and over Facebook, YouTube and Google+. If you’ve got a question you’d like Mashable to ask, tweet @mashusworld with the hashtag #sotu.

The tweetup will begin at approximately 7:30 p.m. ET Tuesday and conclude at 11 p.m. Follow along with the Mashable US & World team as we bring you the speech and panel live:

[View the story "The State of the Union, Live From the White House" on Storify]

Images Courtesy of The White House

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from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/01/24/state-of-the-union-live-tweeted/?utm_source=fe...

Super Bowl Ads Will Get a Second Life on Facebook [INFOGRAPHIC]

If you were a Super Bowl viewer in 1984 who left the room during Apple’s famous “1984″ ad introducing the Mac, you would have soon discovered you made a massive mistake.

In those days before YouTube, if you missed a Super Bowl ad, you really missed it. That was especially true for Apple’s ad, which ran only once. In 2012, of course, it’s a different story. With about two weeks before the big game, some ads are already available online. As for the rest? Try not seeing them after the game.

That’s because even if you avoid YouTube, chances are one of your Facebook friends is going to post one. That’s the upshot of a survey by ad agency Venables Bell and Partners. The San Francisco ad shop polled 1,000 people online who watched the 2011 Super Bowl and planned to watch this year’s as well.

Venables Bell extrapolated those responses and found that there will be a tremendous amount of sharing going on after this year’s game. Most notable: Some 40 million people are likely to post their favorite ad on Facebook. Since the average user has 130 friends, that comes out to 4.5 billion impressions. All of the sudden, the reported $3.5 million for a 30-second spot during the game seems like a huge bargain.

What do you think? Do you intend to share your favorite Super Bowl ads? Let us know in the comments.

Click the image to enlarge.



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from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/01/24/super-bowl-facebook/?utm_source=feedburner&utm...

20 TV Shows With the Most Social Media Buzz This Week [CHART]

With 1.9 million instances of social media chatter, the CNN Southern Republican Presidential Debate generated more activity than any other debate to have topped our past social TV charts.

During the event, CNN posted five Facebook topics, which produced over 6,000 Likes and comments. In response to CNN’s 28 Twitter updates regarding the debate, users retweeted 4,500 times, up 258% from the average of the three debates last year. And those are just CNN’s stats…

American Idol came in second, squeezing into the charts Sunday night, right after the NFL Championship game ended on FOX. Not too shabby.

The data below is compliments of our friends at Trendrr, who measure specific TV show activity (mentions, likes, checkins) across Twitter, Facebook, GetGlue and Miso. To see daily rankings, check out Trendrr.TV.


Image courtesy of iStockphoto, narvikk

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from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/01/23/social-tv-chart-1-23/?utm_source=feedburner&ut...

How to Value a Startup

I have had a lot of conversations lately with entrepreneurs about how to value their businesses. This is always an emotional topic but a very important one nonetheless. In this blog post, I will put forward three methods for valuing a start-up, all three of which I believe should come in to play for most businesses.

Method #1 – using financial metrics:

No duh, right? This is how you are supposed to value a business. This is the kind of stuff they teach in business school. When we look at public companies, we talk about their value in terms of their P/E ratio in an effort to collapse all companies into a common measurement where we can understand their value (price) relative to how much cash they generate on an annual basis (earnings).

However, start-ups do not have any E yet. Let alone earnings, they may not even have any revenue in the early days! Notwithstanding, it still makes sense to think about value relative to key financial metrics. I like to understand a company’s financial opportunity from both a tops down and bottoms up perspective. This is probably enough material for another blog post, but basically, entrepreneurs should be able to talk about their market opportunities from a tops down perspective and be able to demonstrate that they are attacking a large and growing market that is ripe for whatever disruption they are bringing into it. Likewise, they should be able to talk about their business strategy from a bottoms up perspective and demonstrate just how much of that market they will capture, when they will capture it, and at what level of gross margin. Tops down proves that the market is worth pursuing, and bottoms up is the litmus test that measures just how well the entrepreneur can pursue the market. The bottoms up approach should walk the thin line between ambition and realism, as entrepreneurs are so often required to do.

So, for early-stage ventures, valuing a company on financial metrics is almost always forward-looking. Looking backward to trailing revenues (as is common with traditional companies) is unattractive to the entrepreneur because an early-stage company is typically in hyper-growth mode. However, looking ahead is entirely subjective. There are two key considerations:

1) What is the likelihood that the forward-looking revenue can be attained? Answering this question demands an evaluation of the entrepreneur, the plan, the market conditions, the resources (i.e. cash, sales people, etc.) required to get the company to the sales milestone. The chief evaluator in this question is whoever is trying to value the company, most likely an investor or potential acquirer.

2) What type of multiple can be assigned to the forward-looking revenue? This is really a market driven metric and it ranges from as low as 2x in bad times to 10x+ in good times. Check around with other entrepreneurs or advisers (call me!) to check on this metric and how it is trending. Also, consider your gross margin, not just your top line revenue. It is a pet peeve of mine when gross margin is ignored. If your gross margins are low, it does not make sense to peg your value to a forward-looking revenue multiple, similar to what a company with high gross margins can get.

Admittedly, this is all very subjective, which is why it is so important for an entrepreneur to be able to articulate a plan to attack a large and growing market and also to incite confidence in others that he or she is the one to do the attacking.

Method #2 – using strategic metrics:

All of us in the start-up ecosystem love “strategic value” because it basically means that some companies are willing to pay well beyond what makes financial sense because the asset is so strategic to them. That is the positive side of strategic value. The negative side is that there is almost always a limited universe of players who will view the company in such a way.

As a result, strategic value is a great thing to leverage when selling your company, but it is a much harder thing to leverage when financing your company. Sure, entrepreneurs can bring in strategic investors to a round of financing, but they need to be well aware of the timing and impact of such a move, especially if it means that business opportunities with another strategic partner are limited as a result. If the entrepreneurial company’s strategic direction can remain open and unencumbered, then bringing in a strategic investor can be a great move.

Within the strategic value framework, especially with respect to acquisitions, there are three ways to think about assigning value:

1) Financial assets: you may hear this referred to as an “accretive” acquisition – i.e. one that has an immediate impact on the acquiring company’s bottom line. The valuation method here will be more similar to the financial metrics described above, although the acquiring company may think about costs they can strip out of the target business as well as scale they can achieve because of their established sales & marketing infrastructure, branding, etc.

2) Technology assets: oftentimes, the entrepreneurial company’s advantage is that it can develop technology and products faster and better than large companies. A “technology” sale proves that out as the superior technology of the smaller company becomes part of the product offering of the larger company. This can be a great outcome for an entrepreneurial team, especially if going to market would have been difficult for the smaller company due to cost, competitive pressure limiting access, etc. The valuation exercise here is to assess how much further investment is needed to prepare the technology for commercial success inside the larger company and then to weigh that cost against the financial upside (again using the financial valuation methods described above).

3) People assets: another key differentiator for entrepreneurial companies is their ability to attract intelligent and creative people who are excited to attack problems on the bleeding edge of the market. This is incredibly valuable to large companies as well, especially once the entrepreneurial teams have amassed market knowledge and domain expertise. Therefore, large companies will sometimes acquire companies to get access to their employees. This is especially true in times like this when hiring advanced engineers is difficult and competitive. One caveat: the acquirer is valuing the people much more than the company or the assets it owns (i.e. technology, products, etc.) and that is reflected in what they are willing to pay. These acquisitions are typically good for the employees (salary, bonus, long term incentives like stock options, etc.), but they are not as good for the shareholders (i.e. the acquirer is not really willing to pay up for the company’s stock).

Method #3 – using practical metrics:

Everything above needs to be tempered with a level of common sense and practicality. We are at a point in the market where certain companies – i.e. Facebook, Twitter, etc. – are able to raise money at astronomical valuations based on very forward looking multiples (in the case of Facebook) or highly differentiated strategic value (in the case of Twitter). Those kinds of extremes do not apply to 99% of entrepreneurial companies.

When entrepreneurs think about the value of their company, they need to consider the business objectives of those who are buying in. For example, when raising a round of venture capital financing, the venture investors need to own enough of the company to be incented to spend their time, continue to invest capital as needed, etc. and the need to buy in at a price where there is reasonable upside potential for them. This is the practical governor that kicks in when entrepreneurs think about valuing their companies, even when things are going great and the valuation methods described above point to a big number.

In summary, companies are ultimately valued on the cash they generate. Start-ups are not yet at a point where that is a reasonable metric, so valuation is an art more than a science, and the key in understanding value is to assess the likelihood of how much cash can be generated, when it can be generated and for whom (i.e. for the current company, for another company that may acquire it someday and for its investors). Beauty is undoubtedly in the eyes of the beholder, and the best entrepreneurs know how to paint the most attractive picture, accenting both their financial and strategic highlights, all while keeping practical considerations in mind.

Want to learn more? Join The Capital Network next Wednesday January 25 for our Evening Roundtable: Negotiation and Valuation where you can test our your skills and see how they compare to the real thing as we walk through the Endeca story. More info

This post originally appeared on Dan Allred’s personal blog. You can view the original post here.

from BostInno http://bostinno.com/channels/how-to-value-a-startup/