Preference centers are a popular object of disdain for email marketers, but it’s not because they don’t work. It’s because they work for such a small portion of your customers that engage that the value to your business is negligible. But this is because email marketers misuse or underuse preference centers. They should rethink and […]

Instagram, in case you haven’t heard of it by now, is the wildly popular mobile photo-sharing app with more than 80 million users. While it’s obvious that brands can’t ignore the social platform, how can they actually use it to their advantage? Instagram, when used properly, can give businesses more visibility and better engagement with […]

Google’s Motorola Mobility is acquiring Viewdle, a Ukranian imaging- and gesture-recognition company that will give Google the technology to automatically tag photos. The acquisition has been in the works for more than a year. Viewdle’s technology should come in handy for users of Google+, Android, Picasa and some of the search giant’s other services. The […]

On Sept. 14, at 12:45 p.m. PDT, Facebook reached the mark of 1 billion monthly active users. “Helping a billion people connect is amazing, humbling and by far the thing I am most proud of in my life,” wrote founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a brief announcement post. “I am committed to working every […]

Rap Genius just got $15 million of funding from prominent venture capitalist Andreessen Horowitz. Though that sentence might sound strange, it’s really not

TimesDeal, a daily-deals website in India, has had a traditional revenue model up until now, charging an upfront fee of about 20-40 percent of the deal value when selling deals. However, the market in India is struggling, so deal providers are looking to shake things up a bit. TimesDeal has found its approach: free deals. […]

This is the first in what will be a running series of profiles of local-commerce companies.

Facebook began testing a feature allowing its users to pay to promote their posts in New Zealand back in May. Now it’s opening up the test to users in the U.S. The feature allows Facebook users with fewer than 5,000 friends and subscribers to pay about $7 to promote a post. After paying for the […]

Twitter is partnering with Nielsen to give a small set of advertisers the ability to test brand surveys. These tweets, which will come from @TwitterSurveys, will appear in users’ time lines. They’ll ask users to fill out a survey within the tweet. “This is a native experience for the user, and we believe it will […]

Olivia Munn is giving PETA a celebrity face in its campaign against Groupon’s promotion of circuses that have received citations for violations of the Animal Welfare Act. “Groupon is selling out animals who are forcibly taken away from their mothers, have their spirits broken, are kept in chains, and are threatened with beatings if they […]