MocoSpace Gets $3.5M In Strategic Funding from SoftBank Capital to Expand with Mobile Browser-Based Social Games

Boston, MA (PRWEB) September 23, 2010

Company already profitable, adds strategic capital to build out groundbreaking social games platform

Boston - Sept 23, 2010 - MocoSpace, the largest social entertainment destination on the mobile web, today announced a $ 3.5 million round of strategic funding from SoftBank Capital. MocoSpace will use the funds to expand its mobile browser-based social gaming offerings and management team. Previous investors in MocoSpace include General Catalyst, Pilot Group and prominent angel investor Michael Dearing.

MocoSpace is the largest entertainment destination on the mobile Internet, with over 14 million users and three billion page views per month. The company, which is already profitable, plans to use this round of funding for the development of its MocoSpace Games platform. The platform will provide game developers with a robust environment and mobile web reach via smartphone browsers, as well as access to the MocoSpace audience - which already plays one million games on the site per month. MocoSpace will be launching its own browser-based mobile social game, and is currently developing partnerships with mobile web game developers to provide a wide range of game titles on its platform.

Vikrant Gandhi of Frost & Sullivan has followed MocoSpace's growth over the years, and describes the company's success: "MocoSpace has demonstrated a rare ability to build a large mobile internet brand and generate profits while appealing to a broad base of consumers. The mobile browser represents the next frontier of social games, and companies like MocoSpace have a great opportunity to lead this nascent market."

As part of the investment, SoftBank Capital's managing partner, Ron Fisher, is joining the company's Board of Directors. As founder of SoftBank Capital, Fisher has over 30 years of experience working with high growth and turnaround technology companies, and serves as a member of the board of directors of SoftBank Corp., Japan, as well as on the boards of several public and private companies, including Desktone, E*Trade Group, GSI Commerce, FooMojo, LiteScape Technologies and Nellymoser, Inc.

"MocoSpace is uniquely positioned for massive growth at the crossroads of powerful trends in mobile, gaming and social, as well as appealing to one of the fastest-growing segments of the U.S. population, the Hispanic market," said Fisher. "Softbank is excited to be an investor. MocoSpace has done a great job building an industry leading, profitable business, and we're excited to help the company broaden its entertainment offerings and innovate in the social games space."

"The chance to work with Ron and the Softbank team was a no-brainer for us. They have a tremendous amount of expertise both here and abroad in all the key parts of our business," says MocoSpace CEO and co-founder Justin Siegel. "I look forward to working with them in the coming years as we continue to expand our business."

About MocoSpace

For a young, multicultural, on-the-go generation, MocoSpace is the destination of choice for making friends, having fun and staying connected. MocoSpace has over 14 million registered users generating over 3 billion pages per month, making it the largest social entertainment destination on the mobile web. MocoSpace is free and available on any web-enabled mobile phone in the world.

Launched in 2005, MocoSpace is backed by General Catalyst and Softbank Capital and is based in Boston, MA. For more information on the company, visit http://www.jnjmobile.com

About SoftBank Capital

SoftBank Capital is an independent venture capital firm focused on early stage businesses addressing ubiquitous, social computing. The firm addresses opportunities that deliver socially-driven content, services and applications across platforms and devices. SoftBank Capital offers entrepreneurs and their management teams valuable experience and resources, including our close association with SoftBank Corp. in Japan. SoftBank Capital has offices in Newton Center, MA, New York City and Buffalo, NY. For more information, visit http://www.softbank.com.

Follow MocoSpace on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/mocospace

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Get Social with MailChimp's New WordPress Plugin

Atlanta, GA (PRWEB) November 01, 2011

MailChimp today announced the launch of Social, a WordPress plugin. Social manages the conversation on WordPress.org blogs, extending and tracking the discussion across social media outlets. Blog owners can now bring together all of the discussion about their content in their regular comment stream, including Tweets, ReTweets and Facebook comments.

The concept stemmed from necessity as MailChimp wanted a better way to handle the discussion surrounding the MailChimp blog. MailChimp would publish a post, but the responses were often scattered between comments on the site and a combination of tweets, comments, retweets, and likes across social networks. Social makes it easy to track the social discussion collecting external mentions and displaying them below the post in one stream of conversation.

Social supersedes WordPress' comment system, and supplements it with social media integration. Posts can be set to automatically broadcast on linked Facebook and Twitter accounts, while visitors to the site can easily add to the on site comments by logging in with their respective Twitter or Facebook identities, all within WordPress. Social keeps track of mentions outside of the blog by aggregating these external conversations when it sees a URL reference, and displaying them within the site's comment-stream. And just as Social allows the site owner to broadcast across social channels when they publish, commenters can automatically share their responses across Facebook and Twitter. Responses to these are automatically broadcast back into the blog (where they can be responded to), continuing the colloquial cycle.

What results is an easy blog comment system, where users can participate with their existing Twitter and Facebook identities, and where the entire discussion is on display, rather than fragmented across social media. Site owners' accounts are setup to post across platforms when posts are published, leading to a publish once model, rather than a write once, publish many times setup we all currently live with. Replies are simply aggregated on-site, where the community can see it all.

To see Social in action, head over to the MailChimp blog and comment away. blog.mailchimp.com

The Social plugin was developed for WordPress with the people at Crowd Favorite.

Links

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/social/

http://crowdfavorite.com/

http://alexking.org/blog/2011/08/11/wordpress-social-plugin

http://blog.mailchimp.com/introducing-social-a-wordpress-plugin/

http://mailchimp.com/social-plugin-for-wordpress/

About MailChimp

MailChimp supports more than 1 million subscribers worldwide, sending 2 billion emails per month. MailChimp is designed for the do-it-yourself power user -- someone looking for all of the power of the enterprise application, but built for anyone to use. MailChimp integrates with many third party applications including Facebook, Twitter, Eventbrite, Salesforce, Wordpress, Magento, Joomla, Drupal and Google Analytics. And best of all, prices start at free.

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Alfresco 4 Delivers Cloud-Scale Performance, Social Publishing & A Consumer-Like UI

London, UK (PRWEB) October 05, 2011

Alfresco, the open platform for social content management, today announced the release of Alfresco Community 4, the most significant release of the platform to date. Alfresco 4 features a wealth of new user features and UI enhancements that enable faster user adoption, along with improved tools to allow developers to create social and cloud-scale, content-rich applications.

Alfresco 4 is the result of a collaboration with our 2,200+ enterprise customers and 250+ global SI partners to create the most robust and extensible platform for a new generation of cloud-scale content apps, said John Newton, CTO of Alfresco. We have made dramatic improvements in Alfrescos ability to scale and perform, while making it easier for developers to customize and extend the platform.

Alfresco Community 4 can be downloaded now for development and testing here.

The announcement is being made in conjunction with Alfrescos exhibit at JavaOne, the annual Java developer conference in San Francisco on October 2nd through 6th.

Cloud-Scale Performance

Alfresco Community 4 significantly increases overall system performance. New features that enable cloud-scale deployments include:

Franchise Businesses Take Advantage of Local Search and Social Media to Drive New Business

San Luis Obispo, CA (Vocus/PRWEB) February 24, 2011

At this year's 51st IFA Annual Convention Franchises learned from industry leaders, fellow franchise executives and the likes of Ford Saeks that online marketing is about local search, mobile and social media.

The buzz this year was all about how franchises can leverage social media, local search and mobile apps. However, it was very promising to see that no one lost sight of the primary goal behind these tools: bring in local leads for franchisees. Saeks said it best when he said your website is your social proof.

Franchises clearly see that a comprehensive approach, from website to social, is needed to take advantage of online marketing. Below are ELEMENTS, Incs top 8 takeaways from the 51st annual IFA convention.

1. While at the previous years IFA Convention franchises were most interested in how to drive traffic, in 2011 those same franchises are now more interested in how to convert that traffic into leads or sales thereby create a positive impact with their already existing traffic. This is a direct reflection of how franchises are tightening their belts in these tough economic times by making the most of what they have already have. Rather than spending time and money generating new traffic that will effectively be thrown at a wall to see what sticks, spending time on conversion optimization through variant testing and data driven improvements can lead to a significant increase in overall leads both in the present & future.

2. Franchises are generally interested in a three step process for online success which begins with find-ability (how easy it is to find their brand online), usability (how easy it is for consumers to engage your brand) and profitability (how easy it is to convert leads into customers). If any of the links in this chain are broken the franchise risks never being found by potential customers, never converting those potential customers into paying customers and not being able to retain customers nor create brand loyal fans.

3. Another thing ELEMENTS noticed is that by and large franchises are becoming savvier in the realm of online marketing. Instead of franchise decision makers questioning whether they should have online marketing campaigns consisting of social media, pay per click advertising and search engine optimization, they are now asking how they can best utilize those campaigns for maximum profitability.

4. When it comes to social media, franchise companies are beginning to consider ROE (return on engagement) more appropriate than a typical ROI. This is a new way to look at social media where the end result isnt merely net sales or leads but can be measured instead by other factors including reach after reposts, number of subscribers and positive or negative sentiment. Social media campaigns judged merely on their conversion numbers look bleak, but by engaging customers in an open environment franchise companies can improve customer service which leads to improved customer sentiment and the creation of brand loyal fans.

5. Another big point of interest with franchises noted at the 2011 IFA Annual Convention was how effective your store locator is. Franchises have realized that not only can their locators help a potential customer find a local franchisee place of business but can be much more than that today. Locators can be integrated into a franchise website, have maps and directions, and also work seamlessly across both websites and mobile devices. We also saw conversations around exterior locators like a mobile or a Facebook app and Google Places.

6. While at the previous years IFA Convention franchises were mostly overwhelmed with local search and search engine optimization, in 2011 franchises there was a better understanding that its not a store locator or searches done solely on Google Maps. There was a general understanding of local search and the importance of it in Googles new merged Everything results that often place local results above national search results.

7. Mobile apps and mobile optimized websites were another big topic of discussion at the recent convention. Most franchise companies want a way to direct mobile users to their local franchisees which is exactly what the ElementsLocal mobile locator app does. Other franchises want their websites to be optimized to fit on a mobile device should one be detected. As mobile traffic continues to increase franchise companies want to make sure they are positioned to take advantage of this fluid demographic.

8. Perhaps the most important thing ELEMENTS took away from the 51st IFA Annual Conference was the testimony of corporations and noted speakers alike who claimed that success in all areas including social media stems from a good & valuable web property your website is your social proof, as Ford Saeks said. Without having a useful, easy to navigate, attractive website at both the local and corporate level none of your mobile apps, pay per click marketing or social media campaigns are going to be as effective as they could be.

About ElementsLocal

ElementsLocal provides online marketing solutions to franchise companies looking to leverage local franchise websites, email campaigns and social media marketing. The ElementsLocal platform can be seen at http://www.elementslocal.com which includes a virtual tour of the franchise solution software. Based in San Luis Obispo, CA, and founded in 1999, Elements clients include Maaco, Glass Doctor, Sport Clips, Paul Davis Restoration, Jiffy Lube, Weed Man and Curves.

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bryantBROWN Healthcare Offers "Social Media Made Simple," the Free, Easy-To-Read Guide to Using Social Media for Medical Marketers

(PRWEB) July 11, 2011

"Social Media Made Simple," by bryantBROWN Healthcare, is the new guide that shows how to incorporate social media into the marketing of pharmaceuticals, medical devices, diagnostics, hospitals, and other healthcare products and services.

"Social Media Made Simple" provides the critical facts about social media in an easy-to-read format with convenient links to the numerous websites discussed.

Social media has quickly become a powerful tool for marketing in a wide variety of industries. But using social media in the heavily regulated medical industry poses unique challenges. "Social Media Made Simple" is designed to be a practical resource for understanding and overcoming these challenges.

"Social Media Made Simple" contains eight short chapters:

1.

Wallop Redefines the Social Networking Experience and Unlocks the Potential of Self-Expression Online

San Diego, CA (PRWEB) September 26, 2006

DEMOfall Wallop, a company spun out of Microsoft and backed by veteran venture capital firms, today at DEMOfall launched its beta product, a breakthrough innovation in the social networking space with a unique business model. Wallop, an invitation-only network, for the first time combines a social computing site with a marketplace, enabling an entirely new way to self-express and enhance a persons increasingly important online image. Wallop also announced today that it has secured a $ 10 million series B round of funding led by Norwest Venture Partners (NVP). Previous investors, Bay Partners and Consor Capital, also participated in this round.

Now that social networking has become all the rage, we need to step back and examine whether current sites present the best images and practices for social networking, said Mark Levitt, IDC's VP for Collaborative Computing and the Enterprise Workplace. Wallop offers an innovative business model and user interface that is designed to attract select groups of users who will prefer to use their creative skills to express themselves on their sites without having to learn any programming and without advertising.

More than four years of research at Microsoft combined with Wallop founders Karl Jacob and Sean Uberoi Kellys vision for leapfrogging existing social networks, led Wallop to focus on the larger trend of self-expression online with the simplicity people experience in the real world. Wallop created an invitation-only, social experience that taps into the $ 3 trillion-a-year offline industry of self-expression as it moves online. A revolutionary new user interface evolved by the legendary Frog Design brings point-and-click simplicity to social networking and makes it dramatically easier to express a users individuality.

I am addicted to social networking, but like my friends, am sick of how hard everything is. I spend all my time browsing and searching and dealing with pop-ups on every page, said Katie Starkey, a 23-year-old private beta tester from Jacksonville, Illinois. The best thing about Wallop is that it really is easy, and I love that Im not interrupted by annoying ads. Im totally going to switch to Wallop!

Wallop unlocks the true potential for self-expression online with free, one-click customization versus the hassle of HTML coding necessary to personalize other social networking platforms. In addition, Wallops marketplace model empowers people to further enhance their online image by purchasing ready-made, interactive graphics and features, called Mods, from millions of the best Adobe