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How Bing Search Compliments The Facebook Graph Search

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Almost two-and-a-half years ago, Bing and Facebook started down a path to make search more social. They both firmly believed that people possess the keys to unlock a world of knowledge previously inaccessible via traditional search. There was increasingly an opportunity to improve discovery on the web by giving people an easy way to use their friends as a “search signal.”

Even before they started making search more social with Facebook, Bing provided web search for the social network. It was, admittedly, only the beginning.

Earlier today during a press event at Facebook headquarters, Facebook showed the work they have done to allow you to search the content you have shared on Facebook – called Graph Search. This means people can search across all their content and connections on Facebook to discover new people, places and things.

As part of this product, our two engineering teams worked together to advance a unified search experience. That means that when people want to search beyond Facebook, they see web search results from Bing with social context and additional information such as Facebook pages.

To the Facebook user, they will not only see useful results, but we think have serendipitous experiences. Imagine searching for Jay-Z concerts on Facebook, and not only finding Facebook content, but also web results from Bing including concert tickets, news about the tour and other web results—annotated with Facebook Likes and Shares. We think this is a powerful combination.

Now when you do a web search on Facebook, the new search results page features a two-column layout with Bing-powered web results appearing on the left-hand side overlaid with social information from Facebook including how many people like a given result. On the right hand side, you will see content from Facebook Pages and apps that are related to your search.

Over the next several weeks the two teams will continue to experiment and innovate towards our shared vision of giving people access to the wisdom of their friends combined with the information available on the web.

Google+ iOS App Arrives In 48 Additional Countries [Download NOW]

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iPhone Screenshot 1

Google+ iPhone and iPad apps available in 48 more countries and territories (see below). To get started just visit the App Store on your mobile device, search for “google+”, and download the app! You can also visit the App Store via desktop: http://goo.gl/jDB9D.

#googleplusupdate
New countries & territories: Albania, Anguilla, Barbados, Benin, Bermuda, Bhutan, Brunei Darussalam, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Cape Verde, Cayman Islands, Chad, Republic of Congo, Dominica, Fiji, Gambia, Grenada, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Kyrgyzstan, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Liberia, Macau, Malawi, Mauritania, Federated States of Micronesia, Mongolia, Montserrat, Mozambique, Namibia, Nepal, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Saint Lucia, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Solomon Islands, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Vincent and The Grenadines, Suriname, Swaziland, São Tomé and Príncipe, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Turks and Caicos, Ukraine, British Virgin Islands, Zimbabwe

Zia Imran And Team Brings About Duddoo Aur Dhobi : A Tale Of Making Toddlers Learn About Nursery Rhymes

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Duddoo Aur Dhobi

Duddoo Aur Dhobi by JugnooMedia is an interactive digital musical toy for toddlers 1 – 3 years of age. Based on two popular South Asian nursery rhymes, it has relevant desi cultural images, icons, rhymes and characters.
Duddoo Aur Dhobi provides a fun learning environment for your kids to explore – with characters and stories that you yourself grew up with.

Duddoo Aur Dhobi is a mobile app aimed at toddlers 1 – 3 years of age and based on two such popular nursery rhymes that were sung by parents and grandparents to the younger generation.
Like the jugnoo, the tradition and the lyrics are threatened and on the verge of being forgotten. We believe this app would bring joy and a smile to a toddler and will be much enjoyed by older kids.

http://www.jugnoomedia.com/

Kim Dot Com Launches Mega : The New Version Of MegaUpload

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Mr Dotcom launched Mega early on Sunday. Megaupload boss Kim Dotcom has set up a new cloud storage and file-sharing site.

Mega, a web-based service that lets people upload and store files of any kind, is a sequel to the Megaupload system that was shut down last January. Police raids on the offices and home of Kim Dotcom led to the closure of Megaupload.

The Mega site went online on Sunday, followed by a lavish launch party held at Mr Dotcom’s New Zealand mansion. Mr Dotcom, who was born Kim Schmitz, has said the new site complies with the law and warned that attempts to take it down would be futile.

“This is not some kind of finger to the US government or to Hollywood,” he said on Saturday.

“Legally, there’s just nothing there that could be used to shut us down. This site is just as legitimate and has the right to exist as Dropbox, Boxnet and other competitors.”

Extradition hearing

Hours after the site was launched, Mr Dotcom tweeted that it had received 250,000 user registrations, although limited server capacity meant Mega was unreachable to many.

In a series of earlier tweets Mr Dotcom said every customer would have 50 gigabytes of free storage – far more than is offered by rival services such as Dropbox or Microsoft’s SkyDrive.

Kim Dotcom at his launch party for Mega

Kim Dotcom held a lavish launch party for Mega at his mansion in New Zealand. Mega will be encrypted so only those who upload data have access to it.

Data is also being held in the cloud to make it easy for users to get and share files. The 2012 raids on Megaupload were carried out because, said US law enforcement, many users of Megaupload were engaged in pirating content and illegally sharing it.

They accused Mr Dotcom, and other managers at Megaupload of profiting from piracy. At the launch party for Mega, Mr Dotcom made light of the incident, re-enacting the raid on his mansion by New Zealand authorities with a helicopter and actors dressed as armed police.

He has rebuffed the accusations of piracy and is fighting a legal battle to stay in New Zealand from where he ran Megaupload.

A hearing on whether he can be extradited to the US is due to be held in March. The case has generated controversy in New Zealand over the way the police and intelligence services gathered evidence before the raid and won an apology to Mr Dotcom from the country’s prime minister.

Mr Dotcom has also won support from prominent computer pioneers such as Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. The raid on Megaupload put 25 petabytes of data uploaded to it by its 50 million members into a legal limbo.

In one message, Mr Dotcom said he was working with lawyers and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which campaigns on digital rights issues,to get access to that seized data and return it to users.

Via BBC

How Facebook’s Nearby Application Gets Local Businesses Get Dicovered Easily

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New ways for people to discover your business with Nearby

Local businesses have always relied on word-of-mouth recommendations to gain new customers and grow their sales. Whether they’re a new restaurant in the neighborhood, a favorite salon, or a trusted tailor, small businesses often depend on social endorsements to get discovered. 

And recommendations from friends become even more important when people are on the go. In fact, 150 million people visit Pages on Facebook every day globally. And in the US, over half of visitors to Facebook Pages are visiting them from a mobile device. 

Facebook nearby is accessed via the Facebook mobile app: now, in addition to showing which friends have checked in at a particular place, Nearby helps people discover places near them based on their friends’ recommendations. People can explore by category (ex: restaurants or hotels); connect to businesses directly from their phone (by liking, checking in, calling, or getting directions); rate the places they visit via a five-star system; and share their recommendations with friends.

If you have a Page on Facebook with a location, your business now has another way to be discovered by Facebook’s 600 million-plus mobile consumers. 

When someone looks for a place, the results that appear in their Nearby list are based on things like their friends’ recommendations, ratings, check-ins, and likes. If you’re a business with a physical location, here’s what you can do to ensure your place is more easily discoverable in Nearby:

  • Update your Page to include all of your basic information, including your address, store hours, phone number, and details about your business in the About section
  • Update your category to make sure you appear when people are looking for your specific type of business
  • Encourage your consumers to like, check into, rate, and recommend your place

Nearby is available on the Facebook app for both iOS and Android. For more information on Nearby, click here.

Determining Optimal Social Media ROI [Infographic]

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Even as social media becomes more and more of an accepted digital marketing tool, the nagging question of how exactly to determine its Return on investment (ROI) remains. A recent infographic from MDG Advertising attempts to shed some light on the controversial topic.


Marketers Take Optimistic Outlook

One thing the MDG Advertising infographic makes clear is that for the most part, marketers are not letting ROI uncertainty affect an overall optimistic outlook on social media. Seventy-four percent of chief marketing officers (CMOs) believe they will tie social media efforts to hard ROI this year and 96 percent are considering factors other than sales goals and metrics in trying to identify social media ROI. 

In addition, 76 percent of businesses use social networking to obtain business objectives and 64 percent of marketers are integrating social media into their efforts. It seems that the vast majority of businesses in the social media marketing game have been playing for about one to three years, as only 11 percent have been using social media marketing for more than three years and a smaller 9 percent have been at it for less than one year.

Recognizing the Intangibles

Many marketers recognize the “intangible” benefits social media can provide that do not easily fit into an ROI equation. The benefits most often mentioned by marketers are higher site traffic (68 percent), higher conversion rates (66 percent), and increases in the numbers of fans/followers and positive customer mentions (63 percent each). Furthermore, 72 percent of CMOs said social media has helped them close business. Sixty-five percent of marketers who invested at least six hours a week in overseeing social media campaigns said that search engine results have benefited.

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Facebook, YouTube Leading Platforms of Today, Tomorrow

Facebook is the social media platform that CMOs say currently provides the highest ROI. However, 77 percent of CMOs plan to increase their investment in YouTube, narrowly beating out Facebook (75 percent) as the most popular social media platform of the future. Other popular social media platforms for future investment include Twitter (73 percent) and LinkedIn (61 percent).

Social Recruiting Soars

About 80 percent of CMOs said they used social media to recruit employees in 2011, with another 9 percent planning to start. Sixty-four percent of companies using social media to recruit employees report success.

Does Social Media ROI Matter?

Some observers believe that ROI is not even an important consideration when evaluating social media’s effectiveness as a marketing tool. For example, in a recent column, CMSWire columnist Jim Belosic, CEO and founder of custom Facebook Page-building tool ShortStack, very directly stated, “Social media isn’t only about ROI. And it isn’t only about sales. Social media is about branding, opening channels of communication with customers, building loyalty, being transparent and establishing good will. And if you cover all of those bases, then guess what? If your product or service is worthy, you will most definitely see a return on your investment.”

Social Media Users Favor Certain Products

As reported by Business 2 Community, statistics from Business Insider suggest that marketers in certain product niches may have more to gain from social media efforts. For example, the top shopping priorities of social media users are music, shoes and sex — in that order. To target these users, marketers spent more than US$ 1 billion on social advertising each quarter, with US$ 992 million of it going to Facebook.

How Facebook’s New OpenGraph Search Can Help Your Business Grow And Be Found

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Introducing Graph Search: Help People Discover your Business

Every day people use Facebook and discover things from their friends and the businesses and brands they’re connected to. Whether it’s seeing a movie recommendation from a friend in their News Feed, finding out about a great sale from their favorite store’s Page, or checking out a new game a friend just played, people are getting relevant information through the social graph.

But beyond discovering things in News Feed, people on Facebook are also seeking out information via Facebook Pages: in fact, every day over 150 million people visit Pages, not just via their News Feeds.

Facebook recently limited beta release of Graph Search, enabling people to find information through the filter of their friends. The limited beta of Graph Search is available only to people who use Facebook in US English. The rollout will be gradual, starting with a very small number of users. 

With Graph Search, people can search the social graph by looking for things like “sushi restaurants that my friends have been to in Los Angeles,” “hotels near the Eiffel Tower,” or “TV shows my friends like.”

If you have a Page on Facebook, Graph Search can make it easier for people to discover and learn more about your business. And if you have a business and you’re not on Facebook, invest in creating a Page – it takes minutes.

Here’s how Graph Search works:

  • The search bar first returns the top search suggestions, including people, Pages, apps, places, groups, and suggested searches. People can search for things like restaurants near them, hotels in places they want to travel to, photos posted by Pages they like, or games that their friends like to play.
  • These search suggestions take people to a unique results page. The results returned are based on factors that include information that has been shared by your business and the connections of the person searching.
  • As has been the case for some time, we may also make search suggestions in the search bar that then can trigger web searches. Web searches will display Bing results and Bing ads, similar to results on Bing.com.
  • Pages and apps can still use sponsored results, which appear to people whether or not they have Graph Search (sponsored results have been globally available since August 2012). There are no new ad formats available today. Here is more information on creating a sponsored result.

What you can do for your Page:

As always, continue to invest in your Page by making sure your Page is complete and up-to-date.

  • The name, category, vanity URL, and information you share in the “About” section all help people find your business and should be shared on Facebook.
  • If you have a location or a local place Page, update your address to make sure you can appear as a result when someone is searching for a specific location.
  • Focus on attracting the right fans to your Page and on giving your fans a reason to interact with your content on an ongoing basis.
  • You can learn more about fan acquisition and Page publishing best practices here.

As mentioned above, Graph Search is in limited beta and will be rolling out gradually. Learn more here.