marissamayr:

I’m delighted to announce that we’ve reached an agreement to acquire Tumblr! 

We promise not to screw it up.  Tumblr is incredibly special and has a great thing going.  We will operate Tumblr independently.  David Karp will remain CEO.  The product roadmap, their team, their wit and irreverence will all remain the same as will their mission to empower creators to make their best work and get it in front of the audience they deserve.  Yahoo! will help Tumblr get even better, faster.

Tumblr has built an amazing place to follow the world’s creators. From art to architecture, fashion to food, Tumblr hosts 105 million different blogs.  With more than 300 million monthly unique visitors and 120,000 signups every day, Tumblr is one of thefastest-growing media networks in the world.  Tumblr sees 900 posts per second (!) and 24 billion minutes spent onsite each month.  On mobile, more than half of Tumblr’s users are using the mobile app, and those users do an average of 7 sessions per day.  Tumblr’s tremendous popularity and engagement among creators, curators and audiences of all ages brings a significant new community of users to the Yahoo! network.  The combination of Tumblr+Yahoo! could grow Yahoo!’s audience by 50% to more than a billion monthly visitors, and could grow traffic by approximately 20%.

In terms of working together, Tumblr can deploy Yahoo!’s personalization technology and search infrastructure to help its users discover creators, bloggers, and content they’ll love.  In turn, Tumblr brings 50 billion blog posts (and 75 million more arriving each day) to Yahoo!’s media network and search experiences.  The two companies will also work together to create advertising opportunities that are seamless and enhance user experience.

As I’ve said before, companies are all about people.  Getting to know the Tumblr team has been really amazing.  I’ve long held the view that in all things art and design, you can feel the spirit and demeanor of those who create them.  That’s why it was no surprise to me that David Karp is one of the nicest, most empathetic people I’ve ever met.  He’s also one of the most perceptive, capable entrepreneurs I’ve worked with.  His respect for Tumblr’s community of creators is awesome, and I’m absolutely delighted to have him and his entire team join Yahoo!.   

Both Tumblr and Yahoo! share a vision to make the Internet the ultimate creative canvas by focusing on users, design — and building experiences that delight and inspire the world every day.

http://yahoo.tumblr.com/

Everyone a social media entrepreneur →

“Everyone in this room is a ‘social media entrepreneur’” (Marissa Feinberg, founder of Green Spaces, to fellow changemakers during Social Media Week NYC)

The Global Conversation: How Technology Is Powering Up New Solutions to Global Challenges →

theglobalconversation:

Guest post by Rick Leach, President & CEO, World Food Program USA

The world as we know it has entered an information age that’s powering up incredible new solutions to tackle global challenges, from solving hunger to ending extreme poverty. In working on these issues, I have seen the many ways…

Cultivating innovation communities: Social media as a key enabler

Given innovation is rooted in human-to-human interaction, how can we harness the power of social media to drive innovation for positive social change?

While ideas for positive social change abound, execution often seems lacking. With digital social media becoming a widespread form of communication, how do we leverage it to bridge the gap between thought and action? What resources from government and the private can we marshall to cultivate and sustain innovation?

Here are the responses from two consecutive Social Media Week Business and Entrepreneurship Hub panel discussions covering the nexus of innovation, entrepreneurship, and public policy:

Fostering Collaboration within Entrepreneurial Ecosystems

Cultivating Entrepreneurship Communities - #SMWOPENForum

Incumbents must think beyond their immediate self-interests. Rather than perceiving new companies as threats to existing business and lobbying for regulation to inhibit them, incumbents can play a constructive role in providing resources for startups and small businesses while learning from them in the process. One can look to American Express’s OPEN Forum for ideas on how incumbents and startups can be partners.

Talent development is critical. There is strong credence to the statement that there is ‘negative unemployment’ among startups, as founder after founder have noted the difficulty of finding developers and engineers. New models for post-secondary and continuing education may be helpful in this regard; General Assembly and Flatiron School present two different models of developing tech talent (part-time à-la-carte and full-time comprehensive, respectively), both of which can readily co-exist.

Public Policy and Social Innovation

Business, Social Innovation, and Public Policy - #SMWBBG

People want government that is personal yet ensures every voice is heard. With digital communication tools, citizens now expect government to respond to their specific needs and desires just as they expect from the private sector; the flip side is the pitfall that digital social media will amplify only the loudest voices. Public officials must be proactive when using digital social media to communicate with constituents, encouraging those other than the loudest to speak up.

Cross-sector partnerships at the local level have strong potential to facilitate innovation locally and globally. New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg leads by example with Mayor’s Challenge, an initiative to address major economic, social, and environmental challenges from the bottom up, starting with cities. The campaigns presented by 20 finalists can scale and adapt well to other urban contexts, due in large part to their breadth.

In both sessions, New York City was highlighted as an exemplar of best practices, substantiated by the rapid emergence of a flourishing tech startup community. In the spirit of Mayor’s Challenge, consider how these best practices could be applied to other cities.

Remember that social media is a social movement for empowerment. Think about what action you, as an entrepreneur, intrapreneur, or ally of one, can take to cultivate the innovation community locally and the innovation ecosystem globally.

Entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs, what challenges have you faced in terms of execution and how do you see social media as a means to chisel away the barriers inhibiting you from moving forward? Please share this post with your community and feel free to reply with your stories and insights.

Kicking-off Social Media Week hacking for education

How can social media and social business plus its technology enablers transform education?

This weekend at General Assembly New York, educators and the New York tech startup community gathered for 24 hours to design and build mobile and web applications for education. Given the importance of connection among educators, parents, and students in education (much like the company, its audience, and platforms in business), all projects involved a social component in some way; the following are a few highlights from the presentations.

Open Board transforms communication in the classroom from one-way to two-way, analogous to Salesforce Chatter and Microsoft Office Yammer for business. Messages from the teacher to students and back are displayed on a single screen, facilitating collaborative learning.

MCASTA enables teachers to evaluate tests from the test taker’s perspective and share findings with fellow teachers. While this version is specific to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, it can be easily adapted to tests in place in other states.

Colloquial uses big data from digital and social media to assist English-as-a-second-language learning. The user can discover and immerse oneself in English-language content from a wide variety of genre, including content from major media outlets.

Here are the full weekend’s proceedings via Storify:

#HackInteractive for #NYEdTech - Part I

#HackInteractive for #NYEdTech - Part II

The outcomes from #HackInteractive underscore how social media is about human-to-human connection more than anything else. It has been around since antiquity, with the Internet having facilitated its ubiquity and ease of use today. If business is social, education and other forms of human-to-human connection are social.

With the fundamental principle of social media in mind, think about how social media can empower you and your stakeholders to reach your objectives. Compelling reason to engage in the conversation during Social Media Week and share ideas and best practices.

Doing well and doing good: Jessica Jackley on money and meaning →

How do you view your relationship with money? Do you feel apprehensive or empowered? Jessica Jackley, founder of Kiva and partner at Collaborative Fund, compels us to think about how money is part of our story and how to put it in its place in our lives. Here are the proceedings from her talk with Creative Mornings New York.

Social entrepreneurs and social business architects, keep her thoughts in mind for Do Good Connect this May.

Bridging social media and social good? Join the conversation at Do Good Connect. →

A CONFEST for social enterprise, 27-29 May in New York

Aspiring to do well and do good at once? In the spirit of chiselling away walls and silos to enable and impel people driving meaningful impact, we are empowering social entrepreneurs through social media by partnering with Do Good Connect disrupting the social good scene through social business.

MediaWire will be covering Do Good Connect as the confest date approaches and through the three days of the event; stay tuned for more disruptive social good.

How do you see social media (social business) and social good (social enterprise) together? Share your thoughts and spread them widely.

NYCHA and the Hurricane: Public Housing and Sandy →

The New School Center for New York City Affairs, 12 February 2012

What can we learn from the post-Sandy response in New York?

Hearst Fashion Hackathon - Part II →

Continued from Part I, after a full night of hacking.

Hearst Fashion Hackathon - Part I →

Bridging the fashion and tech communities in New York City