Contributing blogger Matt Scherer recently interviewed Sheila Scarborough. Scarborough, the co-founder of Tourism Currents, will speak at the Austin Innotech eMarketing Summit Oct. 28 at 1 p.m. She discussed the changes within social media for the travel industry. Q: What inspired you to start blogging on travel? Sheila Scarborough: After doing some writing about maritime topics while on active duty in the Navy, I decided when I left the military that since I loved to [...]

Today, Karmaback, the only online engagement and sweepstakes platform that rewards the community’s engagement and evangelism, announced Social Coupons, a new feature targeted at enabling companies to grow their online community while in turn rewarding the community’s engagement and evangelism. Social Coupons are trackable and viral discounts and special offers that companies can utilize to grow Facebook fans, Twitter followers and website visitors. When used in conjunction with Karmaback’s Social Sweepstakes, Social Coupons can convert [...]

On March 12th, Infochimps, a startup data marketplace here in Austin, entered into a revenue sharing agreement with MySpace allowing the social network’s data to be available for sale on the Infochimps site.

A week later, after ReadWriteWeb wrote about the deal, a number of negative comments and ensuing articles were written, most notably a conversation thread on Slashdot.

What happened here, and what can this tell us about the possible futures for data privacy?

You may have seen them demo at Innotech at the Beta Summit, but today Spredfast is being launched to the world. It allows companies to manage, monitor, and measure their messages and voices across multiple social media channels. They are getting good coverage on the release today, with a story on GigaOM, and some coverage by Lori Hawkins at The Statesman. You can read the full release. As the first comprehensive social media dashboard, social [...]

Integrating search and social media is one of the biggest topics in  e-marketing channels these days. And, that’s one of the ones that  will be addressed at the Oct. 29 Austin Innotech e-Marketing summit.  Matt Scherer sat down with Ian Strain-Seymour, the director of  marketing at Apogee Search, about some of the things he’ll discuss at  this event. Q: How can social media and search work together? A: These two can work together in a [...]