Can Silicon Valley Beat Poverty with Crowdfunding? (SocialTimes)
Benevolent, a crowdfunding site that helps economically needy individuals pay for one-time items they need to work, is expanding beyond a Chicago beta into several additional markets including Detroit and Silicon Valley. While Silicon Valley tech workers are well compensated, the tech industry has brought many transient workers to San Jose, where the cost of living is 50 percent higher than the national average.
Vine has added sound and motion to the popular microblogging website, Twitter. Learn how to bring your information to life in our Vine webcast on Wednesday, June 19 from 4-5 pm ET. In this one-hour webcast, Gemma Craven (left), EVP, New York group director at Social@Ogilvy will discuss best practices for using the visual social platform and share some of her team's successful vine videos. Register here. 
Twitter Opens its Self-Serve Advertising Platform to All U.S. Users (SocialTimes)
Twitter will open its advertising platform to all users in the United States, the company announced on Tuesday. The self-serve advertising suite allows account administrators to run their own campaigns by promoting their accounts or individual Tweets to specific groups within the social network, and to track the results through Twitter analytics.
LinkedIn Rolls Out Address Book and Calendar Management App (SocialTimes)
LinkedIn Thursday launched a feature that imports a user’s email interactions and calendars and syncs them with his or her LinkedIn contacts. LinkedIn Contacts aggregates the user’s address books, emails, and calendars and keeps them up to date on the site. The user’s most recent email interactions and calendared meetings with each of his or her LinkedIn contacts appear on that person’s profile page.
Publishers who have tried using Google Reader and Google+ should not be too surprised to learn that the RSS feed drives more traffic to websites than the fledgling social network. But data from BuzzFeed show that Google+ drives a mere sliver of Google-related traffic to its partner sites compared to Google Reader.
We used Storify to create this recap of Fast Company’s Social Media Week panel at the Bloomberg offices in New York City on February 21, 2013. Fast Company social media editor Anjali Mullany moderated an all-star panel that included Lee Brown, global head of sales at Tumblr; Josh Miller, founder of Branch; Jared Cluff, senior vice president of marketing at Fab; and Jonathan Perelman, VP agency strategy and industry development at BuzzFeed.
New YouTube Button Sends Videos Straight from Mobile to TV (SocialTimes)
YouTube is working with television and cell phone manufacturers to bring YouTube videos to television screens. The company Thursday announced a “send to TV” icon that connects mobile devices to television sets like a remote control.
Buzzfeed has closed its fourth round of funding at $19.3 million. The latest round brings the social news website and media property, known for inspiring lolz ‘round the globe, to a total of $46 million raised since it was founded by Huffington Post co-founder Jonah Peretti in 2008.
Are Democrats more tech-savvy than Republicans? One GOP digital strategist thinks the answer may be yes, and shares what he thinks the party needs to learn from the Obama campaign in a post on Buzzfeed.
A celebrity photo agency, Mavrix, has sued the website BuzzFeed for using its copyrighted photos. At issue are photos of actress/comedian Kathy Griffin and photos of singer Katy Perry in Miami.
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Facebook Rolls Out Real-Time Ad Platform (The Financial Times)
Some of the world’s largest advertising companies have signed up to Facebook’s new real-time advertising platform, in a move that the social network hopes will bolster its revenue streams. On Thursday, Facebook officially launched the platform, called Facebook Ad Exchange, or FBX, following months of testing. GigaOM Through the new exchange, Facebook and its partners use cookies to track user Web-browsing behavior and then serve up related ads on Facebook. For example, if you go to a travel site to search for a flight but then don’t complete the booking, the Facebook Exchange makes it possible for the travel site to bid in real-time for the opportunity to show you a relevant ad when you return to Facebook. Mashable Company partners report that the social network’s Exchange ad-buying program has resulted in up to a 20-fold increase. One such partner, TellApart, reported a 10 to 20-fold increase in ROI for clients, including eBags, which saw a 15-fold return on its ad spend. AdAge One big player you won’t hear talking, though, is Google, whose Invite Media still hasn’t received an invitation. No one was permanently expelled from the Facebook exchange, but some believe Google’s access to the platform was delayed for breaking Facebook’s silence rules. Business Insider FBX leaves out the most important ad products Facebook is working on — its social and mobile ads. It simply brings that common Web-advertising technique known as retargeting to Facebook ads, while leaving out most of the things that make Facebook special. Read more
