Bottoms up! Vivino uncorks $10.3m in follow-on funding to grow its wine-scanner app globally + MORE

The co-founder of location app Gowalla, which Facebook acquired in 2011, as well as an Instagram designer are reportedly leaving Facebook, according to AllThingsD. Gowalla co-founder Josh Williams and Instagram designer Tim Van Damme will pursue other ventures, but the departures are not related, sources told AllThingsD…

Do you want your company to be seen as a thought leader in your industry? Are you B2B in a niche market and wondering if social media is relevant to your audience? Drillinginfo, a software as a service (SaaS) company serving the global oil and gas industry, is a B2B provider in a very specialized [….

There are numerous encouraging statistics about social media generating a positive return on investment (ROI), but some businesses struggle to adapt to this new approach to building customer relationships. The good news is that there are social media management tools, like Sprout Social, that can make it much easier to make sure that your social media efforts are having a positive impact on your brand…

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Foursquare Displaying Ads After Check-Ins (SocialTimes)
Foursquare is gradually rolling out post check-in intersticial advertisements, according to reports in AdAge and About Foursquare, with Captain Morgan rum as an early taker…

Most people are inherently lazy.
No, not you of course… but those “other folks”. Those individuals make up about 90 percent of the digital landscape, at least if you subscribe to the 90/9/1 rule. Though these numbers are highly debatable, the concept at least creates a clearer picture of our responsibility in empowering others to make our content contagious…

Parse, which was acquired by Facebook in April to boost Facebook connection with mobile apps, will have a conference for app developers in September. Not much has been said since the acquisition about how Parse will work with Facebook going forward, but this conference (Sept. 5 in San Francisco) should give the public an idea of what Parse can and will do moving forward…

Oct. 29-30, 2013
Redwood City, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale
Nexon announced it has invested in SecretNewCo, a game startup created by Brian Reynolds, former chief game designer at Zynga.
The deal is a coup for Tokyo-based Nexon, which has made its name in Asian free-to-play downloadable online games…

Just seven months after wine-centric startup Vivino nabbed a $1m Series A round, the Danish company has announced a follow-on round of funding that sees it garner another $10.3m for its coffers.
Founded in 2009, Vivino is proving to be a popular tool for wine-drinkers, with an iOS, BlackBerry and Android app that lets users snap a photo of a wine label which is then matched against a database of more than one million tipples to reveal the bottle’s producer, brand, name, varietals and even the vintage…

The home of toy building blocks might not be your first guess as the biggest producer of tires, but it all makes sense when you think about it. By number of units, the LEGO corporation makes more tires than even Goodyear or Firestone.
Plenty more tidbits and gags await you in this week’s episode of 5 Facts, including Pepsi’s big mistake in the Philippines, manic minnows and a failed pigeon educational program…

Hulu has decided to move away from frictionless sharing on Facebook, starting July 18. Many Hulu users have started to see a notification that the site will no longer auto-post to Facebook whenever someone watches a video. An Inside Facebook reader brought this to our attention.
While users can still manually share to Facebook, Hulu is rolling out an end to automatic sharing…

Weary of invites in your notification bar to play Facebook games or try apps? Wishing you could delete a Facebook app from your profile? Here’s how to become a pro at managing Facebook applications and cut back on unwanted notifications and News Feed stories.
Blocking apps
So you don’t play Candy Crush Saga or listen to music on Spotify, but your friends do…

Hey, remember when everybody used to “surf the web”?
Of course you do. It was, after all, a pretty common turn of phrase just a few years ago. But in the crazy world of technology, particularly since the birth of social media, life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it…

Facebook’s sales team suffered another blow Tuesday as the company’s head of U.S. sales, Tom Arrix, announced that he is leaving the company. Arrix, who has been with Facebook since 2006, has not yet announced where he’s going. According to AllThingsD, Facebook’s vice president of global marketing solutions Carolyn Everson will take over for Arrix until a replacement is found…

While messaging has become a veritable war with apps like Line, KakaoTalk, WeChat, Path and Facebook Messenger across Asia and Western markets, there’s been one longstanding app that’s presided over the space with very few apparent changes.
WhatsApp, the Sequoia-backed messaging app that dominates in Europe and that is often tipped as an attractive acquisition candidate for companies like Google and Facebook, just went freemium finally on iOS…