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Snapchat's corporate parent seeks to raise more than $2 billion for the fast-growing social media group in the tech sector's largest public offering in nearly three years, documents filed Thursday showed. Outlining the financial details of its initial public offering (IPO), Snap Inc. said it expects net proceeds of some $2 billion. It will offer 145 million new shares and sell 55 million from existing share owners, with an expected price range of $14 to $16, the documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission showed. The offering -- confirmed with a public filing on February 2 -- would be largest in the sector since the Chinese online giant Alibaba's US market debut in 2014. The listing would value Snap at between $19.5 billion and $22.2 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing sources familiar with the deal. The move is expected to be closely followed by Wall Street and the tech sector, with other highly valued peers such as Uber and Airbnb also s...

  Columnist Stephan Spencer explains the benefits of podcasting, as well as how to optimize your podcast for visibility in search engines, YouTube and platforms like iTunes or Google Play. Along with technical SEO and links, high-quality, interesting, engaging content is one of the three main pillars of any successful SEO strategy. Traditional content strategies use blog posts, articles, images, and sometimes video as the main sources of content. And while those can be awesome for driving traffic and supporting your SEO efforts,  podcasts  are an often overlooked and underestimated medium. Podcasts can build your brand and drive direct traffic, while at the same time adding rich content to your site and supporting your link-building efforts. Of course, you not only need to know how to leverage your podcasts for SEO, but also how to rank well on the platforms specific to podcasts. So whether you’re starting out or are an established podcaster, read on ...

Amy Gesenhues on February 10, 2017 at 1:46 pm Another Supercell video game made its way to the top of YouTube’s ad leaderboard last month with Clash Royale’s “The Last Second” spot earning 11.1 million views. While Supercell’s Clash Royale ad ranked No. 1, Apple was the winning brand overall — earning a combined 14.1 million views for two different iPhone 7 ads at No. 2 and No. 3. The 11.1 million views earned by the Clash Royale spot was significantly lower than the results Supercell saw in December of last year. The ad garnered just over a third of views generated by Supercell’s “Clash of Clans 360-Degree Experience — Virtual Reality Raid” spot that ranked No. 1 in December with 30.2 million views. In fact, the mobile video gaming company owned half of the  December 2016 ad leaderboard  with four of its ads for Clash of Clans ranking in the No. 1, No. 2, No. 5 and No. 6 spots, and an ad for its Boom Beach game taking the No. 9 spot. Of the more than 100 million com...

Don’t get me wrong — I love Likes. They continue to serve as a simple way for people to show support for a thought, product offering or opinion, and they have provided marketers with a valuable tool to measure media effectiveness. Unlike the one-way nature of other media, social feedback mechanisms allow you to see how your audience is responding to different types of content with one lightning-fast, simple metric. But ever since  Facebook Reactions  were introduced, things have become a bit more complicated. A Like has always signified support for a message, where negative thoughts had to be expressed in comment feeds, or perhaps, not at all. Facebook Reactions (represented as Love, Sad, Wow, Angry and Laughing icons) have changed the way users can express their feelings for a piece of content. As marketers who love data, we should be taking advantage of any information that can help us create better posts. Reaction data is exactly that — signals fro...

Rob Price   Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan.AP Mark Zuckerberg's wildly ambitious plan to treat and cure all diseases has made a step forward with the announcement that it is funding dozens of scientists over the next five years. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) is an organisation run by the Facebook cofounder and pediatrician Priscilla Chan, his wife.  Launched with a $3 billion (£2.4 billion) cheque book in September 2016 , its aim is to help "cure all disease" by the end of the twenty-first century, with a focus on investing in long-term scientific research that wouldn't necessarily pay off straight away. Part of the CZI is the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, a medical research organisation — and on Wednesday,  the Biohub announced it is providing $50 million (£40 million) in funding to researchers, TechCrunch reports . The cash is going to 47 different people, to fund their research for the next five years with up to $1.5 million (£1.2 million...

Bloomicon  /  Shutterstock.com YouTube is opening its  mobile live-streaming  feature to creators with, at least, 10,000 subscribers and has added a “Super Chat” feature that monetizes the live-stream chat function. According to the announcement, live streams will include the same features as regular YouTube videos — they will be searchable; listed in video recommendations and playlists; and, protected from unauthorized use. YouTube’s live streams also come with the new “Super Chat” monetization tool, allowing viewers to pay for more prominent messaging: “It lets any fan watching a live stream stand out from the crowd and get a creator’s attention by purchasing chat messages that are highlighted in bright colors and stay pinned to the top of the chat window for up to five hours.” YouTube shared the following GIF, showing how to start live streaming using the “”Capture” button built into the YouTube app, and included an example of a “Super Chat” message (the chat...

Tamar Weinberg tanuha2001  /  Shutterstock.com With Twitter’s  rampant  abuse problem, the company has been aggressively trying to find the right way to handle its crippling problem. An announcement  today  addresses Twitter’s overall improvements toward a safer, more pleasant tweeting experience, with the addition of three primary changes: abusive account creation prevention, safer search results and collapsing low-quality (or abusive) tweets. New Accounts Twitter says it’s being proactive about identifying users whose accounts have been suspended, primarily as a result of abuse and harassment, to ensure that they will not recreate new accounts. Safer Search A “safe search” will be implemented to remove tweets that contain sensitive content or tweets that have been made by blocked/muted accounts. The objective is for search to be less cluttered with more relevant (and possibly more interesting) results. Collapsing low quality tweets While Twitter ...

Facebook's ad policies have been updated to increase opportunity and prohibit discrimination. Tamar Weinberg Late last year, Facebook committed to updating  its ad targeting  practices to prevent discrimination for housing, employment or credit-related ads. Today, the company is  putting  its ad discrimination policy into practice with policy updates, tools and further education. Policy updates Facebook is strengthening its stance with clearly defined prohibitions against ads with discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, color, national origin, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, family status, disability or medical/genetic condition. Education Facebook has also updated its policy with a  section  about discriminatory practices. Advertisers are prohibited from wrongfully targeting or excluding audiences in their ads. This section expands to groups of individuals who are connected to the ACLU, Department of Justice — ...

  1990 was a year of life and death for Clark Martin. His daughter was born, and he was diagnosed with cancer. Over the next 20 years, as his daughter took her first steps, experienced her first day of school, and eventually grew into a smart, fiercely independent teenager, doctors waged a blitzkrieg on Martin's body. Six surgeries. Two experimental treatments. Thousands of doctor visits. The cancer never went into remission, but Martin and his doctors managed to keep it in check by staying vigilant, always catching the disease just as it was on the brink of spreading. Still, the cancer took its toll. Martin was riddled with the effects of anxiety and depression. He had become so focused on saving his body from the cancer that he hadn't made time for the people and things in his life that really mattered. His relationships were in shambles; he and his daughter barely spoke. So in 2010, after reading an article in a magazine about a  medical trial that involved giving peopl...

Snap and Google will be partnered for the next five years, according to Snap’s S-1 filing released last week. Completed on January 30, the deal commits Snap to purchasing $400 million in Google's cloud services annually until 2022, totaling $2 billion over the period. The new lease is a formal continuation of a partnership that began around 2013,  TechCrunch notes .  The deal is a big win for Google Cloud, as mobile video is poised to make up a larger portion of the data storage space. Snapchat users are highly engaged, with the average daily user turning to the app 18 times each day, according to Snap's S-1. And although Google doesn’t break out revenue from its cloud business, instead lumping it together with nonadvertising, which includes the Google Play store, the $400 million deal will give it a hefty annual bump. In Q4 2016, nonadvertising accrued $3.4 billion in sales. Mobile video already accounts for more than half of all mobile traffic. In 2015,...

The Facebook logo is displayed on their website in an illustration photo taken in Bordeaux, France, February 1, 2017 Social media companies Facebook, Google and a group of news organizations launched an initiative on Monday to tackle fake news stories in France, with the media in the spotlight as the country's presidential election approaches. Facebook said it would work with several leading French news organizations, including Agence France-Presse, BFM TV, and newspapers L'Express and Le Monde to ensure that false news items were not published on its platform. Google also said it was part of the initiative, dubbed "Cross Check" by the partners. Facebook has faced criticism that it did not do enough to prevent false information being republished on its platform during last year's U.S presidential campaign, and in response has set up measures to try to tackle the problem. There have been similar concerns that people could disseminate false information on Faceb...

Dave Kotinsky/Getty Images When Snapchat parent company Snap Inc. goes public next month, its sale will prove a windfall for a handful of executives who helped grow the company from a tiny startup to a $25 billion juggernaut in five years. That includes one unlikely addition: chief strategy officer Imran Khan. Khan, only at Snap for about two years, has been granted $145 million worth of shares, the company said in a filing on February 2. Those shares will likely be worth a lot more at the IPO price.  And  he was paid a $5 million bonus last year. Not bad for a guy who, not long ago, was working for "some bucket research shop." That's how one Wall Streeter described Khan's early career. (He did indeed work at a small company, called Fulcrum Global Partners, until about 2004; it  shut its doors in 2006.) Khan, 39, joined Snap in early 2015, in part to help chart the company's path to an initial public offering, though his official role has been to build up rev...

Alexander Historical Auctions, located in Maryland, has a unique lot available on its website right now:  Adolf Hitler’s personal bunker phone . The chipped, red, rotary handset was taken right from the German leader’s bunker following the capture of Berlin in 1945 and is expected to fetch as much as $300,000 from a specialist collector. While most people might shy away from items owned by history’s most notorious war criminal, some like an off-beat, creepy vibe with their collectibles. And there’s no denying that this is an important piece of history. The story of how the phone ended up on the auction block is an interesting bit of history in itself, though. Following the Allied occupation of Berlin, Brigadier Sir Ralph Rayner entered the city and was given a tour by the Soviets. Purportedly, they offered him Eva Braun’s phone as a souvenir, but eventually offered him this one instead, when he claimed his favorite color was red. More: ...

A mobile app helped Chinese authorities recover hundreds of missing children last year, Xinhua news agency reported on Saturday, in a country where child trafficking is rampant. The Ministry of Public Security said 611 missing children were found last year, Xinhua said. The "Tuanyuan", or "reunion" in Chinese, app developed by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd was launched in May and has allowed police officers to share information and work together. Users near the location where a child has disappeared receive push notifications, including photos and descriptions. Notifications are sent to users farther and farther from the location of the disappearance if the child is still not found. A new version of the app in November has expanded its reach through cooperation with other popular mobile apps, such as Alibaba's online shopping website Taobao, search engine Baidu, Tencent Holdings Ltd's instant messaging software QQ and mobile ride-sharing platform Didi Chuxi...

Facebook Inc cruised past Wall Street's earnings and revenue expectations on Wednesday with strong growth in its mobile ad business, demonstrating that controversy over so-called "fake news" and inaccurate advertising measurements had little impact on its financial performance. With quarterly profit of $3.57 billion, more than double the $1.56 billion it reported a year ago, the company showed no signs of slowdown in growth. The results handily beat analysts' expectations, and shares ticked up about 0.2 percent in after-hours trading. The company had warned in November that ad growth would likely slow "meaningfully" due to limits on ad load - the total number of ads Facebook can show to each user. But there was little sign of that in the fourth quarter as total revenue soared to $8.81 billion from $5.84 billion a year ago. "I think the rate of growth will decline, but it will remain very high," said analyst Michael Pachter of Wedbush Securities....