Founded in 2008, Posterous, which has gone head to head with Tumblr (a more popular simple blogging site), emerged from the well-known Silicon Valley technology incubator, Y Combinator.
The company’s team will be joining Twitter’s developers, as part of the deal, the company announced in a blog post.
Today we are welcoming a very talented group from Posterous to Twitter,” a Twitter spokesman wrote on the company blog. “This team has built an innovative product that makes sharing across the web and mobile devices simple—a goal we share. Posterous engineers, product managers and others will join our teams working on several key initiatives that will make Twitter even better.”

Read more: The Telegraph
3 Proven Ways to Convert Traffic From Search
Most marketers have discovered effective ways to drive qualified traffic to their websites by optimizing paid search campaigns. But for all of the effort that organizations put into testing and optimizing AdWords buys, many overlook ways to improve the rate at which traffic converts after a search campaign successfully brings them to their website.
Currently there is a 92:1 ratio in the amount of money spent to encourage consumers to visit a website versus the amount spent to convert them after they’ve clicked through to the brand. With an average online conversion rate of just 2.5 percent, marketers are presented with a huge opportunity for improvement by investing additional resources into making the website experience more relevant for traffic driven to their sites via paid search.

Here are three ways for brands to optimize the website experience to maximize conversions from paid search traffic.

1. Make Every Page a Landing Page An important first step toward maximizing conversions from search traffic is echoing keyword copy with website messages that reinforce the trigger that brought the visitor to your site in the first place. Keyword copy can have multiple triggers up front, but the key is understanding what will resonate with visitors when they arrive at your website after clicking on an ad and carrying that messaging throughout the entire user session.

To optimize the customer experience and achieve improvements in everything from your add-to-cart rate to the total number of conversions, marketers must find the right messages that resonate with customers and be agile enough to change those messages.
Read more: ClickZ

Can Location-Based Social Networks Reach the Masses?

In today’s online world, mass can be reached in months, not years. For proof, all you have to do is look at Pinterest’s explosion over the last six months, becoming the fastest standalone site to surpass the 10 million unique monthly visitors mark.
So why haven’t location-based social networks had this kind of explosive growth? After all, services like Foursquare and Gowalla have both been highly regarded and used by digital early adopters. Facebook even tried to launch its Places functionality as a standalone piece before folding it into the status update feature. Interestingly, Facebook places so much importance on this functionality that even after it shut down Places, it purchased Gowalla for its developer expertise. All social networks would love to have the size and engagement rates that Facebook receives, with a user base of 850 million and an average spent time in January 2012 of 405 minutes.

However, location-based services are dependent on smartphone penetration. Yes, people can use tablets for these services, but I think we can all agree that the majority of activity will be on smartphones. If we look at smartphone penetration according to the International Telecommunication Union (November 2011), there were an estimated 1.186 billion global active broadband subscribers in 2011, and 796 million smartphones have been sold in just the last two years according to IDC (Feb 2012).
Read more: ClickZ
Pubmatic Acquires MobiPrimo, Integrates Mobile Into Ad Platform
As hot for mobile as its publisher clients, PubMatic just announced the acquisition of MobiPrimo. An established mobile development technology firm, MobiPrimo clients include Nokia, Motorola and Microsoft. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Per the deal, PubMatic is planning to integrate the mobile platform with top mobile networks, ad servers and demand-side platforms.

“Integrating mobile into our platform simplifies a previously complex effort,” said Josh Wetzel, vice president of mobile at PubMatic. “Now, we’re giving publishers a single platform.”

Mobile or otherwise, PubMatic needs every edge it can get. According to 34 distinct criteria, Forrester recently deemed AppNexus and Admeld to be superior sell-side platforms.

PubMatic and Rubicon Project were both recognized by Forrester as strong competitors in the sell-side space, and credited search for aggressively ramping up their development efforts, as well as turning once-distinguishing platform features into standard offerings.

Read more: MediaPost

Media buyers are always looking for better ways to evaluate expected campaign performance. Video ad network YuMe on Thursday is expected to debut a proprietary algorithm that aims to identify the best placement of video ads across digital properties.

Publishers such as MSN, MSNBC Digital Network, IDG Entertainment and Glam Media use YuMe’s ACE ad management platform.

The new Placement Quality Index (PQI) measures key performance metrics, including interaction rate, video completion rate, video player size and player on-page location.

A baseline PQI is calculated continuously for YuMe’s Connected Audience Network, so new campaigns can be evaluated in real-time against the average performance of the entire network.

As a marketer’s campaign progresses, the real-time PQI calculations allow YuMe to automatically adjust campaign placements in an effort to optimize performance.

With a continuously updated stream of metrics, the PQI does away with “outdated or oversimplified data,” claims YuMe CEO Jayant Kadambi.

As such, YuMe is selling brands on the promise that their campaigns will reach “the right audience and run on sites that yield the highest possible performance,” according to Kadambi.

Read more: MediaPost
Will Facebook’s Premium Ads Be a Game Changer?
The most successful brands on Facebook share a common trait – they’ve figured out a way to connect with users around a shared interest or passion. They build upon that foundation and success by creating unique and engaging content, encouraging conversations, and adding value. While “likes” can build quickly through word of mouth, they are often accelerated through the integration of the brand’s Facebook address across all key touch points and via promotions and advertising to Facebook’s more than 126 million active users in the U.S. and Canada. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that Facebook was the U.S. display advertising leader for the second straight year according to eMarketer, with $1.73 billion, followed by Google and Yahoo. But with Google nipping at its heels, Facebook is once again looking to change the game, and it starts this month with the launch of Premium Ads, its new ad format.
Facebook’s Premium Ads, announced officially at Facebook’s “fMC” confab on February 29, combines the strengths of Facebook (where connections, conversations, and community flourish) with the triad of marketing disciplines (paid, earned, and owned media so central to every leading brand’s media strategy). Premium Ads not only puts a brand’s page and relevant post in front of the right audience, but it leverages an individual’s connections, i.e., “social context” to amplify its relevance and trust. The result, according to Facebook’s internal testing, is expected to delight advertisers. Specifically, according to Facebook, Premium Ads are:
Read more: ClickZ