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Another big change is afoot in the world of mobile advertising. Millennial Media — the largest independent mobile ad network, and itself the subject of buyout speculation — announced today that it is acquiring mobile analytics firm TapMetrics. The news follows Google’s recent acquisition of Admob for $750 million, and Apple’s purchase of Quattro Wireless, another mobile ad firm, for $275 million. Further details on the deal were not disclosed.

The addition of TapMetrics will allow Millennial Media to offer mobile developers an online dashboard for managing application sales and revenue, as well as more analytics-rich features. Such additions include extensive real-time analytics, feature and version adoption, device types, user feedback, and more. TapMetrics also offers a free Mac OSX application, Tapmini, to let developers keep track of their sales and financial reports.

The deal makes Millennial Media an even juicier acquisition property, and makes it a prime target for Yahoo or Microsoft — who must both be eager to catch up to Google and Apple’s mobile advertising acquisitions.

Based in San Francisco, Calif., TapMetrics received seed funding from Launchbox Digital in April 2009. Millennial Media is based out of Baltimore, Md., and has received a total of $37.3 million in funding from Bessemer Venture Partners, Columbia Capital, Charles River Ventures, and New Enterprise Associates.

Companies: millennial media, Tapmetrics

If you’ve taken the leap and hosted your domain email and other services with Google Apps, no doubt you’ve noticed that you miss out on services that “regular” accounts get: like Google Reader, Voice, Wave, Analytics, and right now, Buzz. Here’s why:

After complaining about the disparities on a recent episode of This Week in Google, a helpful Googler unofficially got in touch to clarify. Let’s call her/him “Helpful McGoogler.” Here’s what HM said.

To the user, it may appear that there are three types of Google accounts: Gmail accounts, Google accounts, and Google Apps (for your domain) accounts. In truth, there’s only one kind of account: a Google Account.

Helpful McGoogler explains:

Abstract the idea of a “Google Account” from being associated with Gmail or Google Apps. You can tie ANY email address to a “Google Account.”

Check out https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount and notice that it asks you for your “current email address.” So let’s say I go to school at Big University and I have an email address helpfulmcgoogler@biguni.edu… I can use that email address while signing up and that will be my login name to access Google services.

Some of the confusion that leads to “you must have a gmail.com address” to access Google services is because a “Google Account” comes “for free” when you open a Gmail account. So using a gmail address always ‘just works.’

Google Apps accounts provide “hosted services,” which don’t include everything vanilla Google accounts get.

Helpful McGoogler says:

When you open a Google Apps domain account. You are essentially creating a branded Google Account world for the Google services your domain is hosting. You can see your services at https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/[domain.name]/Dashboard.

So, let’s say you have a Google Apps domain that is example.com and you created a user gina@example.com. You will be able to log-in with gina@example.com for all your Google Apps hosted services. Typically this is email, docs, calendar, and contacts… but you can click the “add more services” link to expand that. Right now, you won’t find stuff like Reader, Google Voice, AdWords, Finance, Analytics, etc… but still there is some interesting stuff in there.

But what if you want to access ALL services through a single email address?

Helpful McGoogler says:

What you do is create a NORMAL Google Account (described at the beginning) and associate it with your gina@example.com email address. That “vanilla” google account will now have access to all (well, I think all) Google services. You can have a Reader account, a Voice account, an Analytics account, etc all associated with your non-gmail address. It can even have the same password—but it doesn’t need to—to make it seem like it’s the same account… but in reality, it’s a very separate account.

Still, this just means you have two different Google accounts, with different Contacts and Calendar and Google Docs data on each. Google Apps accounts provides a subset of the services you get with a regular Google Account, and so duplicates those sets of data on those services. This is the scenario I complained about on TWiG.

Helpful McGoogler acknowledges that this is indeed a problem:

Here is a scenario that really trips people up… Let say you are using your gina@example.com email and are all happy that you have your contacts all in-line and organized and filled out. Now you go and create a vanilla Google Account using your gina@example.com email address (mostly because you want to use Google Voice and Google Reader with the same log-in as your Apps account—btw, this was totally me a couple years ago). When you set up something like Google Voice, you will expect your contacts to be full of all the goodness you set up in your gina@example.com “hosted gmail” instance… you will be disappointed to find your contacts are empty.

This is because the vanilla Google Account that is being used for Google Voice will be accessing a DIFFERENT “Contacts” service which has no data (sadness). My ugly solution was to initially export the contacts from my Google Apps Account and import them to my Google vanilla Account and try to keep them in sync when I make edits.

This double set of Contacts especially stinks for Android users who sign into Android with their Google Apps account, because your Google Contacts and Calendar are baked into your phone setup.

Helpful McGoogler is with me on this:

When you add Android into the mix, Contacts get weird. Because, I think, you can add your Google Apps account to Android and not your gina@example.com “vanilla” Google Account. (GT: Yes, this is true.) But, when you sign in to Google Voice on Android, you will need to enter the password (which might be the same) of your vanilla Google Account. BUT, on Android, your Contacts are read from the system’s phone book. Not necessarily the vanilla Google Voice Google Account that has its separate contacts (accessible through the normal Google Voice webapp). Ugh. The “Contacts” issue is by far the most ‘hurting’ in this whole scenario.

Yup. Calendar is also an issue.

I thought this was the full extent of the problem, so it’s nice to have even unofficial confirmation from the horse’s mouth. Helpful McGoogler DID say s/he thought the teams at Google are aware of the issue and are working to address it. It also sounds like some bits of Android need to get refactored to work seamlessly with both vanilla Google accounts and Google Apps accounts.

After that episode of TWiG aired, at least three listeners emailed me saying they use third-party service Soocial to sync Contacts across their multiple Google/Google Apps accounts. I haven’t tried this myself—and you may have to enter your Google account password into Soocial to set it up, which is a big red flag—but it’s something.

Are you having the Google Apps account dilemma? What are you doing to deal with it? Let’s hear it in the comments.

Smarterware is Lifehacker editor emeritus Gina Trapani’s new home away from ‘hacker. To get all of the latest from Smarterware, be sure to subscribe to the Smarterware RSS feed. For more, check out Gina’s weekly Smarterware feature here on Lifehacker.

It’s the first thing you see when you open your browser every morning or fire up a new tab; it’s your blank page, dashboard, or gateway to the web. This week we want to hear about your favorite start page.

Photo by whiteafrican.

Two years ago we did a Hive Five for Best Start Pages, but in light of all the changes in the major browers as well as some really innovative start pages that have cropped up between then and now, we’re back to revist the topic. Whether you use a web-based start page or a start page generated by your web-browser natively (whether it’s an extension or the default), we want to hear about it. Whatever method you use to load your start page, tell us what makes it your start page of choice.

Hive Five nominations take place in the comments, where you post your favorite tool for the job. We get hundreds of comments, so to make your nomination clear, please include it at the top of your comment like so: VOTE: Best Start Page. Please don’t include your vote in a reply to another commenter. Instead, make your vote and reply separate comments. If you don’t follow this format, we may not count your vote. To prevent tampering with the results, votes from first-time commenters may not be counted. After you’ve made your nomination, let us know what makes it stand out from the competition.

About the Hive Five: The Hive Five feature series asks readers to answer the most frequently asked question we get: “Which tool is the best?” Once a week we’ll put out a call for contenders looking for the best solution to a certain problem, then YOU tell us your favorite tools to get the job done. Every weekend, we’ll report back with the top five recommendations and give you a chance to vote on which is best. For an example, check out last week’s Hive Five Best Netbook Operating Systems.

Although many businesses are starting to embrace social services and networks to connect with potential customers, such tools are still by and large built for end users, not for businesses. That can make managing multiple social media accounts, moderating comments and scheduling posts difficult.

Syncapse launched its SocialTALK social media workflow tool this week, which is designed to help companies control their presence on different platforms, as well as monitor feedback.

Social management tools are slowly starting to become more relevant. ContexOptional, Vitrue SRM and Salesforce.com are all targeting this space in various ways. SocialTALK’s approach to it is to plug into various platforms that can all be managed from one dashboard.

Check out this video:

Right now SocialTALK supports Twitter, Facebook, WordPress and MoveableType. You can create new posts, moderate comments, schedule when posts go out and push the same content across to multiple networks at once.

The organizational features are great, but the features that have the most potential are the real-time analytics. We’ve discussed measuring social media ROI before and as we said then, finding trends and tracking them back to their point of origin is the key to measuring ROI.

While analytics aren’t going to do that for you, if you can get a real-time measurement of traffic, discussion points and comments as they relate to various social media campaigns — and if you can add in identifiers to track that data to either a transaction or other measurable goal — taking control of social media ROI becomes much less difficult.

How does your business manage its social network presence? Let us know!

Tags: social media roi, social media tools, socialtalk

Filed under: Accessories, iTunes, iPhone

Parrot also has a line of more intricate Bluetooth devices that either integrate with your car stereo or replace it altogether.

• The Parrot MKi9000 US $299.00 (installation required) puts the same functions as the Minikit Slim on your dashboard or console and comes with two microphones; one for the driver and one for the passenger. It also connects to any iPhone, iPod touch, USB flash drive or just about any MP3 player, and plays your music through the car stereo.
• The Parrot MKi9200 US $299, adds a screen that gives you full utility of your iTunes library, including playlists.
• The Parrot RKi8400 US $399 replaces your car stereo entirely. It’s a small panel that you snap your iPhone or other device into and then hide it in the capacious enclosure that previously housed your radio. The RKi8400 is a thin panel that snaps onto the front of the enclosure, and contains a screen mimicking all the controls of iTunes or other musical sources. If you’re worried about theft, just take the panel with you.

Whichever unit meets your needs, the Parrot line seems to do a very nice job of turning your car stereo into what it should have been the day you bought your vehicle without buying a bunch of wires and boxes that can get complicated.

Take a look at these videos to see the Parrot MIi9200 going through its paces:

TUAWMake your iPhone hands-free for less than the price of a ticket originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 10 Feb 2010 16:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In an effort to remind you that WordPress can be just as flexible and e-mail-friendly as Posterous, the company has released a Posterous importer for users who want to “graduate” from the mini-blogging site to “a full blog with the features, flexibility and reliability of WordPress.com.”

The new WordPress.com utility can be found via the Tools section within the Dashboard. All that’s required to run the import is your Posterous host name, user name and password, and it can import all of the following: posts, tags, comments and images.

On the flip side, Posterous has supported the inverse functionality — import from WordPress (and other blog platforms) — for several months, along with an autopost to WordPress option.

Now that you can get your content both in and out of Posterous and WordPress, it seems as if there’s a battle brewing between the two services, which serve overlapping purposes but offer unique advantages. We see the value in both, but we’re curious if WordPress’ we’re-just-as-dead-simple-as-the-other-guys strategy will convince you to switch over. Share your thoughts in the comments.

Tags: posterous, Wordpress

When pushbutton-simple free blogging site Tumblr launched in 2007, friends of mine with a lot to say but no interest in tinkering with HTML jumped onto it. Not only did they create their own personal blogs, they spun off temporary joke blogs for topics of the day. A coworker of mine at Valleywag created fakepaulboutin.tumblr.com, where she posted my wisecracks from Valleywag’s private chat room.

But if you want your own personal domain rather than _____.tumblr.com, you have to set it up yourself. It’s a multi-step process: Buy domain. Get domain’s A record registered in DNS, whatever that means. Deal with technical problems. Deal with more technical problems. Forget to renew domain. Lose domain to squatter in Ukraine.

Wouldn’t you pay to have someone else deal with this stuff for you?

ZooLoo sells subscription blogging services for as little as $1.99 that includes a custom domain and backups, email for the site, plus a dashboard for managing your blog. ZooLoo’s Graffiti blog platform is a lot like Tumblr: Simple, attractive, easy to use because it’s not complicated.

For $4.99 a month you can remove the ads from your ZooLoo site and double your storage capacity to 2 gigabytes. (There’s no limit on image uploads, which aren’t stored on your personal space.) For $8.99 monthly, you can run your own ads and use ZooLoo’s search engine optimization (SEO) tools.

You can use ZooLoo for free, if you’re happy with just a blog, a dashboard, and the ability to check and update your status on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Linkedin.

The company, founded in Scottsdale, Arizona in May 2008 by CEO Jeff Herzog, is privately funded. The one-minute video below shows how ZooLoo works for beginners.

This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.

Name: Plan.fm

Quick Pitch: Plan.fm collects the plans you make on other services and organizes them into a single source that you and your friends can access from anywhere.

Genius Idea: By collecting notifications and invites from multiple sources, Plan.fm has the makings of a very convenient service for people who have a hard time managing their various social calendars.

One of the best things about the social web is that it’s now incredibly easy to find out about events or parties and RSVP quickly. One of the worst things about the social web is that if you’re not careful, you can wind up with a million different calendars that don’t talk to one another. CalDAV is great, but not every service utilizes it, which makes it hard to reliably attach that data to iCal or Google Calendar.

That’s why the idea of Plan.fm is so appealing. If all your events could be aggregated in one place, it would be much easier than trying to figure out the export or subscribe options with each service. Right now Plan.fm supports Facebook, Meetup, Eventbrite and Twitter, plus iCal subscriptions URLs.

Facebook, Meetup and Eventbrite all have their own calendar systems, but what about Twitter? How does that work? You can make plans with Twitter by using the #plan hashtag, and you have the option of tweeting when you make or join other plans on Twitter.

Facebook is probably the best example of how convenient Plan.fm can be. When you allow it to access your Facebook account, all of your invitations and Facebook events come into your Dashboard. You can easily view what’s going on, make comments and respond to requests. It’s very streamlined and the data is displayed alongside all of your other events.

Plan.fm is still very much in its early stages, but the idea shows lots of promise. However, there are some bugs that do need to be worked out. While the service let me add an iCal feed to my dashboard, it didn’t actually read any of that data, even though it recognized the title and the URL went directly to that calendar.

Removing services from your dashboard (once I figured out how) also currently doesn’t work — although I’m sure that will be fixed soon.

What I’d like to see for Plan.fm would be integration with more services — LinkedIn and Upcoming, for instance — and either an export or CalDAV subscription option. I don’t mind going to a website to view all of my online social events, but if I’m on my phone, I’d rather have the option to sync to a calendar so that I can set alarms and e-mail reminders. A good export option is essential to any scheduling tool, at least for me.

Still, in these early stages, I like where Plan.fm is going. How do you manage your social graph calendar? Let us know!

Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark

BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

Entrepreneurs can take advantage of the Azure Services platform for their website hosting and storage needs. Microsoft recently announced the “new CloudApp()” contest – use the Azure Services Platform for hosting your .NET or PHP app, and you could be the lucky winner of a USD 5000* (please see website for official rules and guidelines).”

Tags: caldav, calendars, plan.fm

4Home, maker of software that allows you to control all the appliances and electronics in your home from a central dashboard (spanning your television, computers and smart phones), has just raised $4.27 million in fourth-round equity, according to a filing with the SEC. Riding the trend toward greater household automation, the Sunnyvale, Calif. company is poised to become a Smart Grid contender as well as a major home media service.

Right now, its offerings are indirectly related to the Smart Grid, but the potential is there. You can use the software to control some appliances remotely — particularly programmable thermostats. In the future, 4Home’s software could allow you to turn off your clothes dryer, dishwasher or even pool filter from your smart phone when you aren’t at home. The system can also be set up to track how much energy is being used overall or at the device level. This brings it into competition with a bevy of home energy management startups like Control4, Tendril, EnergyHub, OpenPeak and many more.

Still, the product’s coolest capabilities are related to media organization. For example, it can serve as a hub for all of your family’s music, movies, web videos and more — both storing them and delivering them to televisions, computers and even mobile devices on-demand. No longer do 4Home customers have to worry about some music being on one computer and not on another. They can stream any content they want at any time via almost any entertainment device.

A third functionality for the 4Home software is home surveillance. If customers have security cameras installed, recordings can be fed directly to the dashboard where they are accessible from anywhere. Eventually, you could go on vacation and check in to make sure your sprinklers came on at the appointed time, no matter where you are. Home surveillance is also an area of increasing consumer interest, demonstrated by recent investments in RelTel and chip-maker Stretch, and the rise of Ugolog.

Recently, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, 4Home announced that it is partnering with Verizon Wireless to use 4G networks, which are set to be rolled out in 25 to 30 markets in 2010. This will give 4Home users even more choices about what and how they can control their household devices from remote, even more distant locales.

4Home has now raised more than $9 million to date. It previously brought in $4.88 million over three rounds of financing from Pond Ventures among others. Most recently, it landed $525 million in convertible promissory notes in September 2009.

Filed under: Hacks, Tips and tricks, Odds and ends, iPhone

So, like me, you’ve been doing a lot of driving around with your iPhone lately, and you’ve come to the conclusion that just having it sit next to you on the seat isn’t the best way to do things. You need an in-car mounted dock, but you’re not ready to shell out a bunch of money for something with “premium” in the title. Solution? Follow these directions and make your own. For just a couple of bucks in materials, you can build what looks like a pretty worthwhile way to mount your iPhone in the car.

It’s basically a little PVC pipe with some foam to hold it in place on whatever extra ridges or slots you might have free in your dashboard, and some plastic coated wire at the top to hold your phone for you. Hey, you get what you pay for — it won’t pair with your iPhone, and any charging it provides will have to come from an external charging cable that you buy. But if you just want something to keep your iPhone handy and up off of the seat next to you — or out of the cupholder, I do that one a lot, too — this weekend project might just do the trick.

[via Lifehacker]

TUAWA DIY iPhone car mount for just $2 originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 23 Jan 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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