Online radio service Pandora on Wednesday announced extending its app to the latest version of the Windows Phone platform. To entice users to download the app, Microsoft is allowing Windows Phone 8 users to get an ad-free version of Pandora through the rest of the year. The app offers certain unique features via the Microsoft platform. Through its signature “live tiles”, for example, users can pin their favorite personalized radio stations to the Start screen of their phone for easier access. Further, launching Pandora through the Kids Corner feature in Windows Phone automatically activates the explicit content filter for …

Online audience measurement firm Quantcast has launched a new service for tracking mobile app usage across iOS and Android devices. The company's free Measure for Apps offering provides data on app traffic, installs and return usage, which is especially important to help developers see how many engaged users they have. The service also includes information on visit frequency, traffic by app version, and top countries and top devices for a given app. Among initial publishers showcasing mobile app data along with Web analytics in their public profiles on Quantcast.com are Topix, Goodreads and Big Oven, with more on the …

  Reality TV on broadcast TV is seemingly live and well -- for the moment. ABC's "Splash", a reality competition show where celebrities make big dives into swimming pools, earned a Nielsen preliminary 2.6 rating/8 share at 8 p.m. on Tuesday night. That was the biggest rated reality show debut in a year and a half -- since Fox launched "The X Factor" in September 2011.

People spend the most time playing mobile games and using their devices to social network during weekday TV primetime hours—8 PM to 10 PM—according to a new analysis by Arbitron Mobile during the fourth quarter of 2012. The study, looking at U.S. mobile usage on an hourly basis,  found five activities—voice calls, messaging, browsing, social networking, and gaming—dominated weekday smartphone use. Average time per hour for each of those activities, except for voice calls, increases in the morning until 9 AM to 10 AM. Things start to change dramatically between 4 PM and 5 PM. Among the specific changes: -Starting …

Yahoo has acquired recommendations startup Jybe, founded in 2011 by three former Yahoo employees. The company’s stated mission was to help people find things they like to do based on what’s trending in their social circles. To that end, It released an iPhone app last year providing personalized recommendations for things to do, books to read and movies to watch, among other things. Yahoo’s latest “acqu-hire” brings back a total of five former Yahoos including Arnab Bhattacharjee, who was the VP of Yahoo Search Technology. The others were also part of the company’s search and Hadoop teams--Tim Converse, Christian Kunz, …

Second-screen devices combined with customized content, interactive apps and loyalty programs will fuel the growth of social TV activity over the next two years, according to a new Gartner study. Along with the rise of smartphones and tablets as companion viewing devices, the research firm highlights the emergence of three trends that together from a “holistic” social TV experience: -The use of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter to allow users to create and check status updates as they engage in real-time conversations related to TV programming. -Apps that deliver bonus programming, tighter community engagement and larger social …

Yahoo is in talks to buy a 75% stake in Dailymotion, one of the world’s top video sites, from France Telecom at a $300 valuation, according to a Wall Street Journal report. The move would give Yahoo a stronger foothold in the online video market in Europe and Asia, where Dailymotion draws most of its audience. In a research note about the potential deal today, Brian Wieser, senior research analyst at Pivotal Research Group, suggested Yahoo may be after more than picking up a smaller-scale version of YouTube, with Dailymotion featuring a heavy volume of user-generated content supported by …

Social-sharing service ShareThis on Wednesday announced raising $23 million in new funding as well as acquiring Socialize, a startup that provides developers a drop-in social platform for mobile applications. The move is aimed at extending the reach of ShareThis beyond the desktop and mobile Web to mobile apps. ShareThis has developed what it calls a “social quality index” (SQI) to determine engagement levels of audiences across 2.3 million Web sites. With the Socialize acquisition,  the company says publishers will now be able to use its platform to get specific sharing analytics on desktop and mobile in a single dashboard using …

Facebook on Tuesday announced a new tool allow marketers to reach audiences who have similar characteristics to existing customers they’re already targeting on the social network. The new lookalike audiences feature builds off the custom audiences services Facebook introduced last fall, allowing businesses to retarget customers on the site through contact information such as email addresses and phone numbers “Now with lookalike audiences, Facebook can use attributes like interests or demographics and show ads to people who share common attributes as their existing customers.  Advertisers can serve any type of Facebook ad to these new groups of potential customers,” stated …

Social e-commerce platform Chirpify today announced the rollout of its solution to brands widely on Facebook to power purchases through comments on the social network. Chirpify debuted on Facebook last month through a promotion that let fans buy a special edition of country singer Tim McGraw’s “Two Lanes of Freedom” album. Among select brands named as launch partners on Tuesday were Adidas, the Portland Trailblazers, Major League Soccer’s Portland Timbers, bands Owl City and Neon Trees. Through the platform, businesses and individuals can sell digital and physical items, seek donations and run giveaways directly within the Facebook news feed. …