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From March 13 – 22, the South by Southwest Conferences & Festivals, commonly referred to as SXSW, hosted its annual festival in celebration of unique music, independent films and emerging technologies. Often over-shadowed by its musical showcases, SXSW is a breeding-ground for new media presentations where the most innovative and creative industry leaders come to showcase new products with the festival’s numerous audience members, many of whom are tech enthusiasts and early adaptors in addition to music and film aficionados.

While performances by popular artists such as Stromae, Best Coast and Miley Cyrus were highly anticipated, according to an article by Time, it was Meerkat, a new iOS livestreaming video app that “stole the show away.”

Recently launched on February 27 by a local startup tech company from San Francisco, Meerkat connects users on Twitter to broadcast themselves through video capabilities. Meerkat facilitates conversation between audiences in a simplistic manner. This new technological avenue is creating an enormous opportunity that brands should take advantage of in order to help promote business and create buzz. Meerkat is an example of the “massive shift in the way people will consume news, sports or entertainment.”

The app lets users “like” follower videos, see how many people are viewing their posts and send comments that show up on-screen in real-time connecting to both Twitter and Meerkat accounts. Another feature of this app includes viewing other users to see which individuals have a high-level of watch frequencies and schedule embargoed streams to notify followers at a later time.

Many attendees at the SXSW festival used Meerkat to livestream their daily activities and location to keep their social groups constantly updated on their experience. Celebrity endorsers, such as Jimmy Fallon, are also using this app to connect with fans.

With Twitter’s recent acquisition of Periscope, Meerkat advocates will have to wait and see how it will differentiate itself from competition. Will Meerkat reach out to other social graphs to maintain popularity with users?

To read the full article, click here: http://time.com/3742746/meerkat

The month of March is an indicator that spring is right around the corner and with it, the frenzy of March Madness. Each year, college basketball fans spend copious amounts of time reviewing team statistics in hopes of accurately selecting and predicting a winning bracket. According to a recent article published by CNBC, social media users’ bracket should have the best picks:

“This is what the data folks at Prime Visibility are suggesting. According to their research, the company has accurately predicted 74 percent of games in the last two years, based on the public’s positive comments toward each team. It’s a better performance than simply picking the favorites according to gamblers—who win 71 percent of the time. Prime Visibility is a full-service digital marketing agency with experience in various channels including social media. The results for its March Madness bracket came by combing through Twitter and Facebook, looking for positive mentions throughout the entire college basketball season for each team. The company has analyzed 4.25 million positive mentions—ignoring neutral or negative ones, such as ‘Kentucky is playing a game today.’”

David Neuman, Director of Social Media Services for Prime Visibility states that, “while social media mentions aren’t 100 percent accurate in predicting outcomes of a game, it can certainly provide insight into which team is more likely to win, as it factors in all of the positive things a team has done throughout the year.”

After Thursday night’s upset with Iowa State and Baylor losses, perhaps before next year’s season, you might want to think about looking through your social media feeds before finalizing your bracket. To add insult to injury, Prime Visibility has correctly predicted 13 out 16 games so far this season, and are currently ahead of 98.7 brackets at ESPN. Last year, they were perfect in their Final Four prediction including a seed eight and nine team, which is historical rare for the Final Four.

Time will only tell who will be this year’s winner leaving us to wonder, is the public voice a better predictor than the experts?

Here is Prime Visibility’s full 2015 bracket:

Read more of the article here: http://www.cnbc.com/id/102519662