Google recently launched its Chromecast streaming dongle in almost a dozen new markets, but now Roku is offering an alternative. The company’s new Streaming Stick, which plugs into the back... Keep reading →

Denis Duvauchelle is CEO and co-founder of team collaboration tool Twoodo. How many times have you read that procrastination is just a characteristic of a lazy person? That people try... Keep reading →

One of the most popular ad formats on Facebook right now involves the , prompting a user to sign up or buy now, among other commands. Rob Kischuk of noticed that Listen Now, previously available only for mobile, has been added to the API for desktop ads. He notes this could mean Facebook is preparing to have the Listen Now button be available as a desktop ad option.

Kischuk described to Inside Facebook what he’s been seeing, in terms of calls to action:

“CALL” is still present but still doesn’t work. They have also added MISSED_CALL and CALL_NOW to the API, which is curious. I speculated before that they were working on click-to-call like Twitter, but it almost seems like they might be building more phone capabilities into the feed.

Here’s a list of current buttons on Facebook:

• Shop Now
• Learn More
• Sign Up
• Book Now
• Download
• Open Link
• Use App
• Play Game
• Listen Now
• Watch Video

Positive statistics continue to roll in for , as the Facebook-owned photo- and video-sharing service’s announcement Wednesday that it had reached  was followed by a report by market researcher  that favorably compared Instagram usage in the U.S. with that of .

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Mozilla employees are calling for new CEO Brendan Eich to step down over his support for the Proposition 8 campaign that opposed same-sex marriage in California. As Ars Technica reports,... Keep reading →

As the , how can marketers take advantage? 4C, a Facebook  for ads and insights, released the results of a study of more than 150 brands in five major verticals and more than 800 TV programs on 14 broadcast and cable networks in the U.S., using public anonymized aggregate data from Facebook.

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Facebook’s oft-stated mission, per , is to make the world more open and connected. The social network joined tech giants Google, Twitter and LinkedIn to make this happen faster.

The four companies announced Thursday , described by Facebook Software Engineer Steaphan Greene as, “a collaboration among engineers from several companies that face similar challenges in running MySQL at scale and seek greater performance from a database technology tailored to their needs.”

So far, WebScaleSQL has already built a framework that will run and publish the results of each proposed change of MySQL’s built-in test system, as well as a new suite of stress tests and a performance testing system — among other things.

Greene explained the goal of :

Our goal in launching WebScaleSQL is to enable the scale-oriented members of the MySQL community to work more closely together in order to prioritize the aspects that are most important to us. We aim to create a more integrated system of knowledge-sharing to help companies leverage the great features already found in MySQL 5.6, while building and adding more features that are specific to deployments in large scale environments. In the last few months, engineers from all four companies have contributed code and provided feedback to each other to develop a new, more unified, and more collaborative branch of MySQL.

But as effective as this collaboration has been so far, we know we’re not the only ones who are trying to solve these particular challenges. So we will keep WebScaleSQL open as we go, to encourage others who have the scale and resources to customize MySQL to join in our efforts. And of course we will welcome input from anyone who wants to contribute, regardless of what they’re currently working on.

To learn more about this venture, visit webscalesql.org.

Image courtesy of Quka / Shutterstock.com.

At an event in San Francisco today, Microsoft announced Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS), a new service that brings together its existing enterprise management solutions, such as Intune and Azure Active Directory, into a “holistic offering.”... Keep reading →

Marketers are making significant investments in content marketing, and rightfully so. According to Rishi Dave, chief marketing officer at Dun & Bradstreet, today’s consumers are entirely self-directed in their buying... Keep reading →

At an event in San Francisco today, Microsoft Office General Manager Julia White unveiled Office for iPad, featuring Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The new apps, which supports viewing but not... Keep reading →

It seems Amazon is ready to break into the living room in a big way. The technology giant sent out invites today for an event in New York on April... Keep reading →

The field of 68 teams in the  tournament has been whittled down to 16, and the regional semifinals tip off Thursday night. The  created a  showing which Sweet 16 team tops each state in terms of Facebook mentions since the start of the tournament.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

There’s no doubt to it — mobile e-commerce is on the rise, with an IDC report predicting that by 2017 purchases on mobile devices will exceed $1 trillion. And Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten knows... Keep reading →

As Recode foretold back in February, Klout is being acquired by the social marketing company Lithium Technologies. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, although yesterday Fortune reported the... Keep reading →

Yahoo today updated its Transparency Report, revealing it received 21,425 data requests from various law enforcement agencies around the world during the second half of 2013. Those requests impacted a... Keep reading →

Some Facebook  in  are being prompted to add an “impressum” — or a legally mandated statement of the ownership and authorship of a document — to their page descriptions.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Google has been facing an antitrust investigation in India since late 2011, but apparently it didn’t comply with directions to hand in information and documents – and now the Indian government... Keep reading →

Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and Twitter today announced WebScaleSQL, a collaborative project bringing the engineers from these companies together to solve challenges working with massive databases. As its name suggests, WebScaleSQL... Keep reading →

Facebook appears to be testing the inclusion of a full-sized  in  for , in place of the small thumbs-up icon for users to like pages.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Mere days after it blocked access to Twitter, the Turkish government has done the same for YouTube. WebRazzi reports that the video-sharing site is now unavailable through all ISPs, and has... Keep reading →