Betting big on live sports data, Perform lays €120 million on RunningBall

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After online sports broadcast specialist Perform Group went public a year ago, it promised it would succeed its acquisition of Goal.com by buying more sports sites. Now it is making a big one - Perform has offered up to €120 million ($153 million) for sports data provider RunningBall . The company employs match scouts to log over 1,000 in-game events for over 30,000 soccer games annually and is also growing in to logging data for others sports.

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Does your Facebook mobile app suck? Here’s why

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For the past year or so, I’ve noticed that my Facebook mobile apps have slowed down with each screen tap. I used to tap the screen and see the latest posts or photos fairly quickly.

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Your data has a secret, but you — yes, you — can make it talk

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Who needs a Ph.D. in statistics when you have the cloud? Machine learning is high data science — a discipline focused on algorithms that automatically detect complex patterns hidden within datasets — and it’s fast becoming something that anyone leverages to sell more handbags, or solve a research problem, or build the next LinkedIn or Facebook.

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Buddy Media arms marketers with more social tools

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Social marketing platform operator Buddy Media is rolling out a bunch of updates to its suite of tools that should give marketers more flexibility and resources in using social channels to reach consumers. The update includes a unified social data API, the ability to track conversions and campaigns across entire social media efforts, and a new mobile content development platform that makes creating native mobile apps easier

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How a Mormon VC ended up betting everything on Mexico

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What’s a Mormon white guy from Southern California doing running a tech fund in Mexico? Paul Ahlstrom , the founding partner of one of Mexico’s rare venture capital firms Alta Venture s, says he gets that question all the time

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Smartphone customer satisfaction is hard to get right

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The annual ratings of customer satisfaction with mobile phone manufacturers will be released by the American Customer Satisfaction Index Tuesday morning, and for the first time, feature phone makers will be judged right alongside smartphone makers, who are newcomers to the list.

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Market Research Startup EyeTrackShop Raises $3M

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EyeTrackShop , a startup that develops eye-tracking technology for measuring ad effectiveness, has raised $3 million in Series A funding from Northzone . The company says its technology works through a regular webcam, allowing market researchers to gather data quickly and affordably. You can run the test before you spend money on a campaign, or test how well the advertising works once it’s live, and how it performed in different formats and sites.

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DoubleClick co-founder targets publishers with content-meets-commerce service

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In the mid-1990s, DoubleClick co-founder and CEO Kevin O’Connor developed a platform for data-driven advertising. With his latest startup, FindTheBest , he’s aiming to do the same thing for content.

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Cosmos: A useful free 3-in-1 software utility for Androids

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Got room for another useful utility app on your Android smartphone?  Cosmos is a new mobile app that combines three handy features for Android smartphones : A battery optimizer, a trash cleaner and a very informative security function specific to third-party application permissions. Cosmos officially launches on May 21 , but I’ve been using it for a few days and you can too.

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With Smartphone-Assisted Shopping, How You Shop Depends On Where You Shop

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This morning, Nielsen is putting hard numbers to how consumers like to shop with their smartphones, backing up trends we already suspected to be the case. In particular, the new report examines how consumers use their phones when shopping out there in the real world (what’s that?) – using phones to compare prices, scan barcodes and even redeem coupons.

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