Facebook Helps Musicians With Subscribe Button For Any Page’s Nearby Events

Phhhoto Tops 1 Million Users

You don’t want to miss your favorite band’s concert in your town, even if you don’t care to see every one of their News Feed posts. To give you a hand and appeal to musicians by boosting their ticket sales, Facebook last night added an Events subscribe button to the Events section of all Pages on desktop and mobile. Once clicked, you’ll get a Facebook notification when that Page hosts an event near where you live.
The move could help bands sell more concert tickets, which is critical in an era where recorded music is hard to monetize and touring is an increasingly important revenue stream for musicians. Local businesses running events or promotions, sports teams, and more could also benefit from the new way to tell people about IRL get-togethers.

You can see the Events subscribe button above on the desktop Events tab and below on mobile via the Page of one of my favorite artists, Robert DeLong. He’s like The Postal Service meets Skrillex.
Perhaps the Event subscribe button will win back some trust from bands after Facebook’s rocky past supporting musicians.
Many musicians are currently pissed at Facebook because of the drop in organic Page reach, which I’ve detailed is not vindictive but a natural result of competition. People reading the News Feed for a finite amount of time while Liking more Pages and adding more friends that all share more content. Still, artists assuming they’d reach all their fans with every post (which was never true) aren’t happy.
In the 2010-2011 era, Facebook was looking like the successor to Myspace for musicians. Many artists used the option to set a default landing tab to show a screen built by BandPage or ReverbNation that let people stream their music and see their tour dates.
But in 2012, Facebook removed the ability for Pages to set a default landing tab. BandPage lost 90% of its traffic on Facebook in a few months, and musicians’ Pages started looking just like everyone elses, making them much less useful for promoting songs and concerts.
Facebook has since tried to give musicians some help. Its Open Graph tie-in with Spotify and other music apps broadcasted what people were listening to to their friends, helping artists score new fans. More recently, Facebook added a Call To Action button for Pages that let them show a “Shop Now” button that would lead to their iTunes or website’s store.
The new Events Subscribe button will appear beneath the Like button on the Events section of all Pages. Events you get notifications about will also appear in your Events Dashboard as if you’d been invited. Facebook will also suggest you subscribe to events from artists and Pages you Like in the Events dashboard. Similar to Likes, your friends will be able to see which Pages’ events you’ve subscribed to.

On mobile the Events subscribe is pushed a bit down the screen in the Events section before the Timeline starts, but at least it’s visible by default. On desktop, the Events subscribe button is still quite buried. It’s on the Events tab as shown above, rather than the Page’s homescreen. Not all musicians or Pages select to have their Events tab visible by default on their Page, so users may need to click the “More” drop-down navigation button on desktop to access the Events tab.
While the feature is sure to get more fans to shows, which makes artists more money, it could also strengthen artists’ loyalty to Facebook as it tries to fend off competitors. Twitter, SoundCloud, and more are vying to own the communication channel between musicians and their fans. Now, artists will have extra incentive to set up a Facebook event for every one of their shows.

By: Unknown On 06:20

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Fiberead Helps Foreign Authors Break Into China’s E-Book Market

Notes From The Game Developers ConferenceChina’s book publishing market is worth about $20 billion and e-books are a fast-growing segment, but it’s difficult for foreign authors to gain a foothold. First they have to find a publisher and then wait for their book to be translated and edited, a process that can take up to a year. Fiberead, a Beijing-based startup, wants to make the process faster and more straightforward.
Founded by Runa Jiang in 2011, Fiberead is currently taking part in 500 Startups’ accelerator program. Jiang says she launched the company because digital book platforms are proliferating in China and there is strong interest in works by foreign authors, but the traditional publishing industry can’t keep up with reader demand.
At the beginning, Fiberead focused on books about entrepreneurship, startups, and the Internet, but its catalog has expanded to include fiction, self-help, biographies, and other genres.
Fiberead currently has 100 authors on its roster and 200 titles available on its website. Thirty-three of those have also been released through other distribution channels, including Amazon.cn, Alibaba, JD.com, Dangdang, NetEase, Baidu, and iBooks). One novel, “Sugar & Spice” by British author Saffina Desforges, made it to the number one spot on Amazon.cn.
“Before Fiberead, these authors would have to go through traditional publishers. There are over one million English books published every year, but only 10,000 are translated into Chinese and published in China,” says Jiang. “With such odds, getting published in China is very competitive. Most of the best writers in the U.S. never get the chance to be published in China.”
Fiberead streamlines the process with its online platform. After a publishing agreement is signed, authors upload their manuscript and metadata to Fiberead’s site, where it is made available to translators and editors.
One of the reasons Fiberead is able to get book ready for the Chinese market more quickly than traditional publishers is because it works with about 300 qualified translators, which it narrowed down from a pool of 2,000 applications after posting information on social networks like Weibo, WeChat, and Douban. This allows Fiberead to get a book to market in about two to three months.
Mike Moyer, a tech entrepreneur and the author of “Slicing Pie,” says he decided to work with Fiberead after a previous collaboration with a traditional publishing house.
“I didn’t have a practical way of accessing the Chinese market on my own and working with them was very easy,” says Moyer, who lives in Illinois.
“I have another book that was licensed to a Chinese publisher through a traditional U.S. publisher,” he adds. “It took much longer to get to market and the royalties are so small that I have no interest in personally working to promote the book. The Fiberead model feels more collaborative.”
Fiberead’s revenue-sharing model gives 30 percent of money earned by a book to authors and 40 percent to its translators and editors. The company, which does not require a down payment from authors, keeps the rest.
Desforges says she sold almost 7,000 copies of her novel through Fiberead between November and the end of December 2014.
“The Chinese market is huge and growing fast. We wanted to be in there early and reach as many readers as possible,” she says.
Fiberead also keeps an eye out for pirated versions of books in its catalog. “We work with our authors to protect their IP in China by watching and reporting any illegal uses of our client’s IP,” says Jiang. “Chinese demand is high for international books and many titles are translated illegally and spread online because a legitimate translation is not available.”

By: Unknown On 08:05

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YC-Backed Valor Water Helps Utilities Keep The Water Running

You Can Now Embed Twitter Video On Your WebsiteDisrupt Battlefield finalist Valor Water is graduating out of Y Combinator just in time to help solve the world’s water crisis. Valor provides a suite of business-intelligence tools for water utilities.
In a drought, consumers are encouraged to conserve water and they often do. In California this past December, conservation was up from 10 percent in November to 22 percent in December, in year-over-year water-use comparisons done by the State of California. Since July 2014, consumers saved 134 billion gallons of water or enough to supply 1.8 million residents with water for a year.
But with that conservation comes a challenge for utilities: decreasing revenue. For every gallon conserved in a drought, that’s one more gallon a utility is not earning money on, over time putting the provider in a very precarious financial situation. Utilities, fearing for their survival, often end up issuing rate hikes to maintain revenue. This leads to a cycle whereby consumers are no longer incentivized to conserve, as they’ll end up paying the same water bill regardless.
Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, Valor founder Christine Boyle has long been familiar with the role water plays in society. She explains that whether you live in an urban or rural community, are trying to grow food or want basic sanitation, “if you don’t have access to water, you probably have a pretty poor quality of life.”
It is this sentiment that brought her to University of North Carolina where she pursued her doctorate. Like most water scholars, Boyle began her studies focused on water quality and wastewater management.
In 2007, everything changed. A major drought hit the Southeast United States causing North Carolina and Tennessee to experience the driest year on record. The drought led to restricted water use for citizens, extremely low reservoir levels, damaged crops, limited energy supply from regional hydro and nuclear power and went so far as to cause conflict between states trying to claim ownership of what few water resources existed.
For every gallon conserved in a drought, that’s one more gallon a utility is not earning money on, over time putting the provider in a very precarious financial situation.
With all of this, Boyle saw local utilities struggling to stay afloat. Conservation efforts had caused the City of Charlotte to lose $19 million that year. Even smaller utilities were coming up $1-2 million short of their expected revenue. Their only solution was to increase rates on the customer in hopes of maintaining their ability to provide water.
It was at that time in her PhD that Boyle began working with local utilities to find alternative financial strategies that could help them weather the crisis. She began analyzing utility data to more effectively segment their users and understand consumption at a more granular level, leading to targeted rate adjustment and pricing tiers that were more efficient. They also highlighted customers with potential leaks, broken meters or mis-reads, leading to potential “hidden” revenue.
In the years that followed, Boyle continued to consult for U.S. water agencies while completing a Fulbright Fellowship in China, also focused on financial water management. When she returned to the U.S., the demand for her services continued to rise.
“Originally, I didn’t think of the services I was providing as a product,” Boyle explains. But as a consultant, she added, you are usually involved with a utility over several months, typically on a project basis, and often are brought in too late in the game to make significant improvements. Ultimately, utilities need a tool they can be using in their day-to-day operations.
That’s when Boyle began to create Valor Water Analytics. The company first had to secure the right to use the technology from UNC and today has a non-transferrable, global license from the university for the financial tools Boyle developed as a graduate student.
We first heard from Valor in the Battlefield at Disrupt SF this past fall when it launched its Drought Conversation Toolkit. Today, it added additional backing from both Y Combinator and ImagineH20 accelerator programs.
Valor’s West Coast location puts the company in a good position to expand. Since launch, the team has brought four California utilities on-board with its system including the Sonoma County Water Agency. With this customer, they have released a case study to assist others in the water space understand the planning process.
Valor has worked quickly to diversify its product offerings. On top of the Drought Toolkit, Valor now offers four additional products as part of their subscription service — Hidden Revenue Generator, Water Revenue Profiles, SMART Targets and Cutoff Analyzer. These tools enable more detailed customer segmentation, water consumption and payment trends. The Cutoff Analyzer allows utilities to model the impact of proposed future rate changes on their customers to predict how behavior and thus revenue could change.
Using Valor, existing utility customers have experienced an average of 6 percent net revenue increase and are using that money to invest in infrastructure and ensure water continues to be affordable to communities.

By: Unknown On 22:50

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YC-Backed SigOpt Helps Customers Optimize Everything From Online Ads To Shaving Cream

in its name, but Clark said that SigOpt goes beyond A/B testing. Put (relatively) simply, it doesn’t just let you test different variations, but instead examines the data and recommends

By: Unknown On 22:57

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Twitter Acquires Niche, A Startup That Helps Advertisers Work With Social Media Celebrities

Twitter just announced that it has acquired social marketing startup Niche.
Founded by Rob Fishman and Darren Lachtman, Niche helps advertisers work with influencers on Vine and other platforms. It pitches itself as a place where marketers can find

By: Unknown On 00:34

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