Google Places community manager Vanessa Schneider is now producing weekly videos recapping the most exciting topics in the Google Places Help forum.

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Posted by: Marc Harris

Created on: Thu May 17 2012

and tagged with Social Media, Google Places, Location-based Marketing

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Hold tight, it's not out yet, but Facebook just announced the App Center, which they are touting as a new place for people to find social apps. The App Center will become the new, central place to find social apps like Draw Something, Pinterest, Spotify, Battle Pirates, Viddy, and Bubble Witch Saga.

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Posted by: Marc Harris

Created on: Thu May 10 2012

and tagged with Social Media, Facebook, Mobile, app

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On April 10, I blogged that Instagram had 30 million users at the time it was purchased by Facebook for $1Billion. Now that Instagram has released their Android version after being IOS only for their first two years, they have ballooned well pass the 50 million user mark. And, according to Instagram, they are adding roughly 5 million new users a week!

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Posted by: Marc Harris

Created on: Thu May 03 2012

and tagged with Social Media, Photosharing, Instagram

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StumbleUpon has passed the 25 million user mark this week which is a 25% increase over their numbers from last October. The recently redesigned discovery network still has a way to go to catch up with either Twitter, Tumblr or Facebook, but they seem to be having good solid growth.

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Posted by: Marc Harris

Created on: Fri April 27 2012

and tagged with Social Media, StumbleUpon

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Today Facebook filed an amendment to the documents that they originally submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in February to reflect their growth in the last quarter. The quarter, which ended on March 31st is showing some stunning numbers which the filing reflects in addition to their purchase of Instagram.

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Posted by: Marc Harris

Created on: Mon April 23 2012

and tagged with Social Media, Facebook

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A German court ruled today that YouTube, which is owned by the search giant Google, is solely responsible for the content that users upload and post on their website, a decision that could cause HUGE problems for the company.

In a worst case scenario, YouTube could be forced to pay royalties to anyone whose copyright was infringed upon, even if they were unaware of the video's existence on their website. The German court also ordered them to install filters to help prevent further infringement of any copyrighted work.

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Posted by: Marc Harris

Created on: Fri April 20 2012

and tagged with Email Marketing, Social Media, YouTube

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According to multiple sources, Google is about to launch a new cloud based storage service that will initially be free for up to 5 gigabytes (GB) of storage. The new service from Google will be called Google Drive and it's expected that users will be able to purchase more storage space, but details on how much space and at what price has yet to be released to the public.

Like other services, Google Drive will most likely enable users to store their pictures, files, and music in the "cloud", and then access them on their smartphone, desktop, laptop, or tablet computer.

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Posted by: Marc Harris

Created on: Tue April 17 2012

and tagged with Technical

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Last August, Pinterest added support for videos hosted on YouTube. Apparently this went very well as today, Pinterest announced that they have added support for videos hosted on Vimeo.

The addition of Vimeo, which is known for attracting the more artsy-fartsy crowd, should increase "pinning" even further as both websites seem to appeal to rather similar audiences.

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Posted by: Marc Harris

Created on: Thu April 12 2012

and tagged with Social Media, Photosharing

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When is $1 billion not $1 billion? When you spend it on a company that has yet to earn any income. Facebook has just agreed to purchase the popular photo-sharing application Instagram for about $1 billion in cash and stock.

Of course Instagram has 30 million users on just the iPhone platform and they just released their Android version last week, so they will at least get access to those users.

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Posted by: Marc Harris

Created on: Tue April 10 2012

and tagged with Social Media, Local Media, Location-based Marketing

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A new report from Experian Hitwise shows Pinterest received 21.5 million visits during the week ending January 28, 2012, which is almost 30 times as many visits over a comparable week in July of last year. The report also verifies the fact that more than 60% of the visitors are women!

Pinterest edged out LinkedIn with its 86 million visits for the third position just behind Facebook which had 7 billion and Twitter which had 182 million.

It should be noted that the report tracks visits, not unique visitors which are not the same thing.

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Posted by: Marc Harris

Created on: Fri April 06 2012

and tagged with Social Media

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Making your site viewable on smartphones is becoming increasingly important as more than 1/3 of all mobile searches are from people looking for a local business. Up to this point you would have to spend the time to create a stand alone mobile site which could take a lot of time and money.

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Posted by: Marc Harris

Created on: Thu April 05 2012

and tagged with Social Media, Local Media, Location-based Marketing

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Groupon, the largest of the current crop of daily deal sites has seen a substantial drop in its stock price after it was forced to restate its fourth-quarter earnings resulting in a drop in revenue to $492.2 million from the $506.5 million it had previously stated.

Apparently, the drop was caused as the estimated amount of money the company must set aside for customer refunds was much higher than anticipated. Groupon attributed this change to an update in the their refund model to more accurately track anticipated refunds.

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Posted by: Marc Harris

Created on: Tue April 03 2012

and tagged with Location-based Marketing

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As LivingSocial limps along trying to catch up with Groupon, they hit a pretty big bump recently when Eddie Frederick a co-founder and one-time president and board member left the company. An email obtained by StartupStats from CEO Tim O’Shaughnessy states:

"Today I’m writing with a little sadness and a lot of gratitude to let you know that Eddie Frederick will be stepping down from his current position on our leadership team and our board and moving on to new challenges and adventures (and if you know Eddie, you have no doubt that there will be plenty of new “adventures”). As friends and colleagues, we wish him the best."

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Posted by: Marc Harris

Created on: Mon April 02 2012

and tagged with Social Media, Location-based Marketing

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