Salesforce.com has announced the arrival of Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM. This is a new crowd-sourced business data service for Salesforce CRM customers.

A spokesperson for Salesforce tells WebProNews today's announcement is significant for the following reasons:

- Breadth: With Jigsaw Inside, sales and marketing professionals will get  real-time access to the world's largest socially generated database, including 22 million business contacts and 4 million company profiles.

- Depth: Jigsaw Inside for Salesforce integrates Jigsaw deeply into Salesforce  Chatter for social collaboration and delivery of highly  accurate information in real-time.

- Immediacy: Sales and marketing professionals can get real-time updates pushed to them whenever the business data they care about changes.

- Resolution: Companies spend more than $3 billion a year struggling to keep pace with changes across sales and marketing operations by augmenting legacy data services and data management. Jigsaw Inside will solve marketers’ pain points around decayed, duplicated and dead data by delivering relevant, accurate business information in the cloud without the need for hardware or software.

"CRM systems are only as good as the information inside them," said Kevin Akeroyd, general manager, Jigsaw. "With Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM, customers can be alerted to changes in contacts through Chatter in real-time. This degree of operational agility is only possible with Jigsaw's data in the cloud."

Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM is now generally available and starts at $29 per user per month.

Salesforce bought Jigsaw for $142 million earlier this year.

Family reunions and quick getaways have become a Labor Day tradition for most people, but which apps work best for taking holiday trips? Grip’d.com spent several months testing various apps on each platform to see which ones make Gripd.com’s top five travel apps. If you have an iPhone, Blackberry or Android phone, here’s a quick rundown of the best 5 travel apps:

Weatherbug – The simplicity of Apple’s Weather app, but with a few extras for your phone. It’s the largest network of professional weather stations in the US and is the only source for truly live, local weather (as taken from their site).

BePut - enables users to share their whereabouts with people they want to find them. Users simply use the application to locate their exact position and with a touch of a button, have the opportunity to send an email or text message to the desired recipient with their exact location. The recipient gets a special FindMe Key which is secure. The only guaranteed way to not get lost.

Car Care & Roadside Emergencies - I don’t know about you, but I absolutely hate it when things don’t go according to the plan. You have this important presentation, and you end up with a flat tire in an express way. Or maybe you are trying to get home from a concert, and your car doesn’t start up. These situations happen all the time, and they usually tend to happen when you expect them the least. Now some of us have a knack for breaking and fixing things as far as cars are concerned.

Waze - Waze is a social mobile application that enables drivers to build and use real-time road intelligence. The service includes constantly-updated road maps, alerts on traffic and accidents, and data providing users with the fastest route to get to wherever they need to go. Map and traffic updates are automatically collected and generated as users drive with Waze activated, but drivers can also actively report and update other users with what's happening on the road.

Shazam – In the car for hours and can’t figure out the song playing on the radio? When you hear a song and wonder what it is, Shazam is there with the answer. Hold your iPhone to the music and within seconds Shazam will tell you the artist and track name. You can even download the song through iTunes on your iPhone.

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comScore announced today that it has acquired Nedstat, an online analytics and optimization firm based out of Amsterdam.

The acquisition enables comScore to substantially expand its presence in Europe, with offices in the Netherlands, Belgium, the UK, France, Germany, Spain, and Sweden. The company says this will help it reach out to new clients in these markets.

"Secondly, this acquisition will help comScore accelerate the development of our Unified Digital Measurement (UDM) platform, which combines measurement of individual users from a sample panel with measurements of machines and mobile devices from a census of users, to provide a unified view of digital consumer behavior," says comScore. "Nedstat clients will immediately have the option to incorporate their census-level analytics data into the UDM platform to provide them with a more unified set of reporting metrics. Eventually, Nedstat’s analytics and optimization architecture will be used in conjunction with comScore’s existing audience and mobile network analytics to provide more comprehensive, granular, and real-time analytics solutions that will enhance businesses’ ability to optimize their digital marketing strategies."

"As the demand for real-time information increases, these assets will enable us to deliver the measurement and analytics platform of the future," the company says. "The products we envision building simply do not exist today. While these products will likely have some overlap with current analytics offerings, they will offer a different value proposition.

comScore uses the analogy of what the iPad has meant to the world of traditional computing: "While it has certain similarities to what a personal computer can do, it is designed for a different kind of use that represents a fundamentally different utility to the end user."

The company believes that Nedstat has a solid analytics solution, it is their core infrastructure, which will benefit them the most.

Target said today it will be the first retailer to sell Facebook Credits gift cards at all of its 1,743 stores and on Target.com beginning September 5.

Facebook Credits gift cards will be available in increments of $15, $25 and $50. Facebook says its gift cards will be an “ideal gift” this holiday season for users who like playing games on the social network.

“One of Facebook’s goals is to create a great place for games – both for people who love to play and the developers that create fun and engaging social experiences,” said Dan Rose, vice president of partnerships and platform marketing at Facebook.

“Gift cards are easy to use and very popular. We’re looking forward to launching in Target stores and giving people the ability to purchase Facebook Credits for their own use or to give as gifts to their friends and family.”

More than 200 million people play social games on Facebook each month. According to Inside Network, Americans will spend more than $1.6 billion in 2010 on virtual goods and social gaming.

Facebook Credits are accepted by a number of popular games on the network, including Zynga’s FarmVille and Mafia Wars; CrowdStar’s Happy Aquarium; PopCap Games’ Bejeweled Blitz; Playdom’s City of Wonder; and EA SPORTS FIFA Superstars from Playfish.
 

Google is now indexing SVG files. SVG, which stands for scalable vector graphics, is a widely-deployed, royalty-free,  XML-based format for vector graphics and support for interactivity. The format was developed and is maintained by the W3C SVG Working Group.

"We're big fans of open standards, and our mission is to organize the world’s information, so indexing SVG is a natural step," a joint post from software engineers Bogdan Stanescu and John Sarapata on the Google Webmaster Central Blog says.

"We index SVG content whether it is in a standalone file or embedded directly in HTML," the pair add. "The web is big, so it may take some time before we crawl and index most SVG files, but as of today you may start seeing them in your search results."



Google says that if you host SVG files and you wish to exclude them from search results, you can use the "X-Robots-Tag: noindex" directive in the HTTP header. More info about robots exclusion protocol can be found here.

Google has a full list of the file-types it indexes here.

Facebook's won the support of a lot of people as it builds a data center in Prineville, Oregon; an official Facebook Page is full of positive comments from locals.  However, because the facility will primarily be powered by coal, Greenpeace - along with around 500,000 individuals - has sided against it.

A campaign to "get Facebook to unfriend coal" has been building momentum for some time, and it appears to have reached a critical mass of sorts today.  Kumi Naidoo, Executive Director of Greenpeace International, actually published an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg this morning.

In it, Naidoo stated, "Greenpeace and over half a million Facebook users have expressed significant concerns with your decision to power this data center with dirty coal-fired electricity from PacificCorp, which runs an electricity mix that is disproportionately powered by coal, the largest source of global warming pollution."

Naidoo would prefer it if Zuckerberg and Facebook would "[c]ommit to a plan to phase out the use of dirty coal-fired electricity to power your data centers" and "[u]se your purchasing power to choose locations that allow you to rely on only clean, renewable sources of electricity," instead.

These requests aren't likely to have much effect in the short term; the Prineville data center is already under construction and Facebook hasn't announced plans to build anything else.  Still, it's possible Greenpeace and its supporters will influence the social network to be a little more Google-y in the future, turning to solar and wind power.

Also, in fairness to Facebook, the company's already taken the issue of energy conservation into consideration to some degree.  On August 20th, a post on the Prineville Data Center page detailed several power-saving technologies that the facility will employ.

It is hard not to enjoy beer marketing. Even if you are not a marketer, this industry always offers creative advertising (particularly on TV) that is fun to watch and spends lots of money doing it. Every year at the Super Bowl, a good number of the Top 10 ads come from beer companies. In other venues beyond sports, beer advertising often promises good times, great parties and generally being able to escape from your daily life into a world of fun, travel and festivities.

When it comes to marketing strategy, however, it often seems like beer companies focus on being entertaining at the expense of being strategic. With campaigns that seem to change almost monthly and taglines that rarely last for more than a football season, it is easy to dismiss beer marketing as irresponsible spending to promote a high margin product. Is there more to beer advertising than 30 second eye candy and girls in bikinis? Here are a few popular marketing campaigns for beer - along with their corresponding marketing strategy that may yield some surprising lessons ...

1. Be Unique (Red Stripe Beer)

If you have ever had a Red Stripe beer from Jamaica, you know that it has a very unique bottle shape, shorter and stubbier than most others. The bottle sets the beer apart more than anything else, and this fact is brilliantly parodied in this ad featuring their central spokesperson - the Jamaican guy who loves nothing more than celebrating what beer can do with his trademark expression of Jamaican joy: "Hooray Beer!"

 

2. Demonstrate Loyalty (Bud Light)

The ad for Bud Light below follows the model this beer company has focused on for nearly every Super Bowl and football season - forget about your product features and focus on the simple message that guys will do almost anything for your beer. The strategy which seems buried in most of their ads is the unwavering loyalty that the guys in their ads have for Bud Light. They will build houses out of it, jump out of planes, and even walk around naked for a day just to get more of it. It is easy to argue that the name of the beer involved is entirely forgettable, but the ads stand out for being entertaining.

3. Create Associations (Estrella Damm)

A popular ad for European beer Estrella Damm - this campaign features a few ads which tell the story where the beer plays a supporting role and one of the tagline reads "Good times never end when you have something to remind you of them." Another ad features a growing relationship between two fellow travellers. While the taglines don't exactly roll off the tongue, the entire campaign creates stories that associate the beer with the common memory of moments like a short term romance on a backpacking trip through Europe that many of their target audience will remember nostalgically, and one that many people won't be able to help sharing.

4. Foster Aspirations (Dos Equis)

Probably the most popular campaign of the list, this inspired marketing from Dos Equis creates a persona for the Most Interesting Man In The World who, by his own admission, "doesn't always drink beer, but when he does he prefers Dos Equis." The image of this man is who every guy wants to grow up to be, and works because it places Dos Equis in a typically uncontested space as the choice for a more mature and refined guy versus an infantile male trying to relive lost days of keg stands and beer pong from college. That and irresistible lines like "he lives vicariously through himself" help position Dos Equis as the more aspirational choice in beers.

5. Reinforce Perceptions (Heineken)

The thing that European beers have always used to promote themselves against other brands is the sense that they are a more upscale and respectable choice when you go to a bar or similarly public place. Heineken's recent campaign takes this message and replays it with the powerful tagline - "give yourself a good name." The ads feature guys making bold decisions (like drinking with the scary bosses' daughter) and congratulating them on their choice. It helps reinforce the message that what beer you choose says something important about who you are, so choose well.

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The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Amazon is working on a subscription service for TV shows and movies. The company has reportedly been talking with NBC Universal, Time Warner, News Corp. Viacom, and others about such a service.

The offering would appear to be a direct competitor to things like Netflix, iTunes, and Hulu plus. According to the WSJ, it would focus on old catalogue content, and would work through the browser or connected devices like TVs, Blu-ray players, Xbox, etc - very much like Netflix.

Amazon already offers movies and TV episodes for download, but a subscription service could attract a different audience, and Amazon probably has the power to be a bigger threat to Netflix than some other competitors.



The battles for web television are seriously going to be heating up soon. Apple is expected to announce an update to its Apple TV offering today. Google TV will be here in the coming months. Yahoo has its Connected TV offerings. Samsung is pushing development on its platform hard right now. It's going to be very interesting to see how things unfold in this industry. 2011 is going to be a very interesting year for television.

Netflix itself is doing all it can to expand. The company is expected to be feature on the new Apple TV offering, and it has recently launched an iPhone app, with an Android app on the way.

Booyah, makers of the check-in app/game MyTown, have unveiled a new game today, and it is is the first standalone app to utilize the recently launched Facebook Places API.

"In addition to being the first app built exclusively for Facebook Places, it is the only app that accesses Facebook Search," says Booyah.

"In InCrowd, players create their own customizable avatar, socialize, meet new friends and track popularity when they check-in to their favorite real-life places using their iPhone or iPod touch," the company explains. "InCrowd players gain popularity when others respond using a series of in-game actions, such as hi fives, fist bumps, winks, or posting about a venue. Players can also utilize the always popular Dropkick to take popularity away from a chosen individual. The more a player socializes with others, the more in-game points are rewarded to them for use in upgrading and personalizing their virtual avatar."

The company also points out that it has spent a lot of time working on privacy features. There is an invisible function in the game that lets users hide their locations and check-ins if they wish to do so.

The InCrowd app is free and available in Apple's App Store.

Booyah recently launched product check-ins as a feature of its MyTown game, which gives businesses new product marketing opportunities.

Apple announced that it will be streaming an event online today at Apple.com, at 10:00 AM Pacific/1:00 PM Eastern.

"Apple will broadcast its September 1 event online using Apple’s industry-leading HTTP Live Streaming, which is based on open standards," the company says.

The whole thing is so open, you have to use a Mac running Safari on Mac OS X version 10.6 Snow Leopard, an iPhone or iPod Touch running iOS 3.0 or higher or an iPad. In other words you have to have bought an Apple device to view it.

It is also so open that the announcement makes it a point to say, "This broadcast is the property of Apple and is protected by US copyright law and international treaties. Any reproduction or distribution is strictly prohibited without prior written approval from Apple."

The event itself is expected to center around updates to iTunes, iPods and possibly TV. According to the Wall Street Journal, FOX and ABC will announce 99 cent rentals of TV shows through iTunes. "People familiar with the matter" are cited.

According to Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Apple will announce a set-top box for video that will include Netflix programming and a revamped version of Apple TV that will cost $99. The publication also says that Apple will release a revamped version of iTunes and an upgraded iPod Touch with higher screen resolution.

The whole thing should be a big win for Netflix.