The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- France Gets Startup Fever As New Fund Launches With €24 million
- Gist Launches A Xobni-Like Plugin For Lotus Notes
- Myxer’s Android App GeoPix Blends Wallpaper Images With Geolocation
- The Curious Case Of Vancouver Incubator Bootup Labs
- Daily Grommet Raises $3.4 Million For Invention Marketplace
- PubMatic Raises $7.5 Million For Ad Optimization Platform
- Social Media Management Startup Spredfast Raises $1.6 Million
- Spanish readers: Interested in an iPad meet-up in Toledo and Madrid?
- WebVisible: SMBs Spent Average Of $2,201 On Search In Q1, Bing Share On The Rise
- Watch Live Online As Aircraft Clear The UK’s Ash-filled Skies
- Opera Mini iPhone App Downloaded 1 Million Times On First Day In App Store
- Details On Imeem Founders Next Startup: Picplz (Updated)
- MySpace Gets Serious About Events
- Sorry Bit.ly, Twitter Confirms It Will Launch Its Own Link Shortener
- Amazon Goes Pro With Bit.Ly
- (Very Short) Interview With MySpace Exec Dani Dudeck
- Twitter Will Have An Official Android App
- Q&A: Twitter Execs Answer The Tough Questions At Chirp
- Investors On The Evolving Twitter Ecosystem: There Are Still Opportunities
- Apparently, Mark Zuckerberg Still Writes Code
- Twitter CEO Ev Williams: Revenue Is A Feature
- Twitter Execs Address The Big Question: Monetization
- UMusic Is My Favorite Android Music App
- Social Travel App Where I’ve Been Raises $750K From Groupon Co-Founders
- Facebook Shares Hit $50 On SecondMarket
| France Gets Startup Fever As New Fund Launches With €24 million Posted: 15 Apr 2010 07:39 AM PDT  In previous years it's fair to say that France has not exactly been a hotbed of entrepreneurship, despite actually coming up with the word entrepreneur. There is a general anti-business culture and talking about business or money is seen as beneath mainstream society. For instance, there are 65,000 psychology students in France - that is a quarter of the European total for that subject. However, to think this is still the case is to completely miss the sea-change that is happening right now. Our recent TechCrunch Paris event was buzzing with entrepreneurs, and TechCrunch France has relaunched with a bang. So it's fascinating to see that ISAI, billed as the French internet entrepreneurs' fund, has announced the first closing of its "ISAI Developpement" fund, dedicated to early stage internet investments. It will have €24m under management and brings together about 60 internet and software entrepreneurs under one umbrella.
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| Gist Launches A Xobni-Like Plugin For Lotus Notes Posted: 15 Apr 2010 07:32 AM PDT  Gist, a recently launched web service that aims to organize your communication streams, is bringing its tool to Lotus Notes with a new plugin. Gist offers services that help you keep tabs on the people in your professional network. The service's web interface allows you to see past messages and attachments from each contact, news about their company, and their recent messages on services like Twitter. Gist also offers an Outlook plugin that shares similarities with Xobni. The Lotus Notes plugin will track individual and company profile information as emails are sent/received and calendar events are created and will bring in professional network information to the inbox from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, a number of blogs, and 50,000 news sites. The plugin also uses Lotus Notes' Live Text technology to give detailed profile information anywhere an email address appears. If you are using the Gist Lotus Notes plugin, you can also connect Gist to your Gmail account. 
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| Myxer’s Android App GeoPix Blends Wallpaper Images With Geolocation Posted: 15 Apr 2010 07:27 AM PDT
Using the Android device’s geolocation technology and its ability to run apps on background, GeoPix allows users to save any number of locations for customized wallpaper. Users choose their own images for wallpaper or can choose from Myxer’s catalog of wallpapers. For example, if I was driving across the Golde Gate Bridge in San Francisco, GeoPix would update my wallpaper with a picture of the landmark. It makes sense for Myxer to use its vast amount of mobile content towards building compelling applications. The company has seen considerable success in the mobile content space. Myxer delivered 10 million ringtones to iPhone users (and 1 billion ringtones in all) and offers over 2 million free ringtones, wallpapers and videos. Users can also make their own ringtones, videos and wallpaper from music and files a customer already owns. And according to the company, its mobile site sees six million monthly unique visitors downloading over 85 million content items from Myxer each month. The startup also recently launched MobileStage, a suite of mobile marketing services aimed towards the music industry. Competitors include mSpot, Playphone and SendMe.      
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| The Curious Case Of Vancouver Incubator Bootup Labs Posted: 15 Apr 2010 06:17 AM PDT
The multiple-sided story has been circulating on Hacker News since last night and covered here and there, but we thought we’d recount what’s happening because there are important lessons to be learned here. Let’s start with the take of young entrepreneur Jamie Martin, who kicked off things with the announcement that the startup he had co-founded, Statusly, had been cut from Bootup Labs’ Startup Accelerator. Make sure you read the blog post before continuing. The gist of his side of the story: he and his co-founder Steven Rogers applied to a good number of seed funds and incubators all over North America and ended up choosing Bootup Labs in Vancouver, relocating to Canada (and everything that comes with it) with practically no money and sleeping on the floor of an apartment while working on Statusly for 2 months. Then, Bootup Labs co-founder Danny Robinson tells the pair that the incubator was unable to secure as much money as they had originally anticipated. As a result, they had to “reduce their portfolio” of 7 startups to 3, giving Martin and Rogers 3-4 business days to get a job – which proved impossible, ultimately forcing the duo to return to the USA and put up their startup’s assets for sale on Flippa. It’s important to note that Martin acknowledges that there were good sides to the experience as well, and that he shouldn’t have claimed that Bootup Labs was running out of money (which he did in the original title of his blog post). On the flip side, he was never given a decent explanation of what went wrong, exactly. Bootup Labs responded to the fuzz that originated from Martin’s blog post, first in comments on his blog and on Hacker News, and ultimately by publishing a blog post. In this post, the incubator announced that it has raised funding from local VC firm Growthworks and Canadian entrepreneur and investor Boris Wertz, and that the latter would be joining the board. On to the “unfortunate part” of the announcement. Bootup Labs says they had informed its ‘2010 cohort’ upon arrival that fund closing would be delayed due to some new Canadian venture regulations, and that one investor backed out unexpectedly when the capital call was made. Robinson writes that the delay was “outside of our control, unintentional, and communicated immediately”. He goes on to say:
Personally, the final part of the blog post vexes me, after thinking about both sides of the table in this story. Nobody said being an entrepreneur was going to be easy, but what kind of message is Bootup Labs sending to the 4 startups that were cut in question? That you have to roll with the punches but fortunately Bootup would be alright, thank you very much? If I were Bootup Labs, I would be going out of my way to amend things with the 4 startups that were abruptly cut. I’d do more than what is strictly necessary, and not for publicity reasons, if only to make my own mission statement ring true for future startups and partners. That would help to avoid getting commentary like that by Ian Bell, founder of another startup that was cut out of the program, who writes:
Again, if I were Bootup Labs, I’d apologize a million times, explain in the greatest detail possible what went wrong when, where and how, and what measures I’m going to take to avoid such a situation ever to happen again in the future. (To be fair, the other Bootup Labs founder, Boris Mann, appears to be more apologetic about the whole thing.) I sure as hell wouldn’t be boasting about the fact that my own company at least got “back on solid ground” and is “continuing to lead” anything. Update: Robinson responds in comments:
     
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| Daily Grommet Raises $3.4 Million For Invention Marketplace Posted: 15 Apr 2010 06:00 AM PDT
The site features one creative invention or product per day, with an in-depth video review. Daily Grommet will also sell the product on its site and take a small cut from sales. Think Etsy meets social product development platform Quirky. Daily Grommet features products of utility, style or invention that haven't hit the big-time yet. For example, today’s product is a gardening wheelbarrow and cart. Other products include organic cotton socks, and collapsible flower vases. The company receives submissions from consumers and spotlights products with a video review explaining what's compelling about each day's product and the story behind its creation. Founded in 2008, DailyGrommet.com has nearly 400 products and video reviews in its online catalog. Daily Grommet founder Jules Pieri says that the site incorporates Citizen Commerce, which allows consumers to connect with the investors and manufacturers of products in order to encourage innovation. Pieri declined to tell us how much of a cut Daily Grommet takes from sales, but says that its “healthy.”      
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| PubMatic Raises $7.5 Million For Ad Optimization Platform Posted: 15 Apr 2010 05:56 AM PDT
PubMatic’s ad server that sits between online publishers and online ad networks like Google AdSense, Yahoo Publisher Network and Value Click. Its service helps publishers manage and maximize their advertising inventory by communicating with multiple ad networks to help them find the optimal ad layout and the highest paying ad network. PubMatic also provide users with a central dashboard to track all their ad networks and ad configurations. The company will use the funding accelerate the adoption of PubMatic’s recently launched set of new offerings, including: an impression-level ad auction with real-time bidding; global demand representation; audience analytics and monetization; enhanced brand control and data safety; guaranteed inventory yield management; and enterprise ad operations support. Competitors to PubMatic include YieldBuild and the Rubicon Project. AdWhirl also does dynamic ad optimization, but only for iPhone developers.      
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| Social Media Management Startup Spredfast Raises $1.6 Million Posted: 15 Apr 2010 05:14 AM PDT
Spredfast enables companies to manage social media campaigns and customer acquisition initiatives through one dashboard, across multiple platforms including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Flickr. It also supports WordPress, Blogger, MoveableType, Lotus Live Connections, Drupal and most XML-RPC enabled blogging platforms. Spredfast's platform integrates with Omniture and Google Analytics, thus complementing traditional web analytics with ’social media analytics’. Additionally, users can automate their social media processes and allow multiple users to collaborate at once with its content management and workflow features. Pricing ranges from free (limited in features) to $100 per initiative per month. The startup, which counts five employees, competes with CoTweet, which was recently acquired by ExactTarget for over $8.1 million. Some of the customers it has already signed up since its public launch in January: IBM, HP, AOL, Doner and Oracle.      
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| Spanish readers: Interested in an iPad meet-up in Toledo and Madrid? Posted: 15 Apr 2010 05:00 AM PDT  I'm going to be in Spain next week and I'd like to plan a few meet-ups. I'll be in Toledo and Madrid, and I thought we could meet at a bar, have a little Cava, and talk about the iPad. If you're interested in meeting up, the estimated schedule will be: Toledo - April 25 Madrid - April 27
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| WebVisible: SMBs Spent Average Of $2,201 On Search In Q1, Bing Share On The Rise Posted: 15 Apr 2010 03:28 AM PDT
Year-over-year spending was up 111 percent in Q4 2009 and 91 percent in Q3 2009. WebVisible posits that Bing saw its share of search spending increase by 10 percent in Q1 over the previous quarter, while Google's share increased by 3 percent over the same period. Yahoo's share of spending dropped by 9 percent. The data from WebVisible’s Report on the ‘State of Small Business Online Advertising Q1 2010′ is said to represent nearly $23 million in U.S. small business advertiser spending from more than 12,000 individual advertisers in Q1 2010. This is obviously only a small part of the total paid search spending, but it depicts a trend. WebVisible CEO Kirsten Mangers says small businesses will spend their money wherever they can get the most bang for their buck, and that Bing is king when it comes to that: Microsoft’s search engine maintains the highest click-through rate at costs that are lower than Google's overall, according to Mangers. Small businesses also saw positive results from their increased search spending in the first quarter of this year. From Q4 2009 to Q1 2010, WebVisible says there was a 35 percent increase in the percentage of search clicks that resulted in a phone call for advertisers using call tracking numbers. Click-through rates continued steady year-over-year improvement in Q1 2010, with Google's CTR up 29 percent, Yahoo!'s CTR up 138 percent and Bing's CTR up 53 percent. While each of the three major engines saw cost-per-clicks (CPC) decline in Q1 compared with the same period last year, overall CPCs have remained relatively stable since Q2 2009. Similar to previous quarters, the most popular advertiser categories in Q1 2010 were attorneys, general contractors and dentists. The categories that showed higher-than-average spending levels were attorneys, roofers and plumbers, while general contractors and landscapers showed lower-than-average spending in Q1 2010. To obtain a full copy of the WebVisible report, head on over here.      
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| Watch Live Online As Aircraft Clear The UK’s Ash-filled Skies Posted: 15 Apr 2010 02:34 AM PDT  In case you hadn't heard, Iceland's volcanoes are sending tonnes of volcanic ash towards the UK right now. Yeah, so that's not the tech story. The tech story is that courtesy of FlightRadar24 you can watch as the skies across the UK clear of aircraft. FlightRadar24 receives information from several ADS-B receivers in real time. This is presented as airplanes on a Google-map.
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| Opera Mini iPhone App Downloaded 1 Million Times On First Day In App Store Posted: 15 Apr 2010 02:15 AM PDT
Opera this morning announced the milestone, and added that Opera Mini is currently the number one iPhone app in the 22 featured Apple App Stores on their site, as of 8 AM CET on Thursday. Update: app store analytics company Distimo posted more stats. Granted, there has been a ton of coverage for the occasion of Apple letting a competing mobile browser product from a major software company into the App Store, and reviews have been getting published all around the world ever since, but it’s still a noteworthy achievement. According to Apple's download count, Opera Mini has to date been added to 1,023,380 Apple devices. If you’ve downloaded the app and tested it, we’d love for you to tell us if you’re going to keep using it, and what your general thoughts are. Be sure to reach MobileCrunch’s hands-on review of the app – it goes into great detail. For your reference: the widely anticipated Skype iPhone app was downloaded 1 million times on the first two days of availability in the App Store, and it took PayPal close to three weeks to reach one million installs despite its 81 million-strong user base.      
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| Details On Imeem Founders Next Startup: Picplz (Updated) Posted: 15 Apr 2010 12:20 AM PDT
There’s not much on the site yet except for this picture of a router and a really out there blog (the site sorta reminds me of the random photo stealth search engine Blekko used to have up). But that website hasn’t stopped some top tier investors from putting some money into the company – Andreessen Horowitz, among others, are rumored to have invested already. So what will picplz be? One person who has seen a demo says it’s a new photo site and sharing service, sort of a mixture between Flickr and Twitter. “But that doesn’t explain it because it sounds lame, and the service is really cool.” There is real room for a new kind of photo sharing service, says one source, if they get the user experience right. picplz, says the source, may have gotten it right. Ok by us. We’re just looking forward to seeing it. Imeem, once a mighty music service, suffered an ignoble fate when it was scooped up by MySpace late last year for next to nothing. But Caldwell and his team showed a real warrior mentality over the years with Imeem, and kept adapting to try to find a model that worked. In the end they failed, but one thing is marketable above all else in Silicon Valley – failure, if it’s done on a grand and courageous scale. These guys have more of that than they can use. We’ll continue to add data to the Mixed Media Labs and picplz CrunchBase pages as we gather it. Update: A reader finds a live signup URL for the service. Screenshots:      
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| MySpace Gets Serious About Events Posted: 14 Apr 2010 09:44 PM PDT Here’s a ray of product sunshine in an otherwise overcast MySpace world. Tonight they are launching a new MySpace events and calendar platform that integrates technology from MySpace Music, iLike, Social Plan and Facebook Connect (told you). It includes new tools for Artists to add concert events and allows users to add those events, share them, and even purchase tickets right from MySpace. It’s an elegant weaving of products that plays to a core strength of MySpace – music, and a huge database of event information – around 1 million concert events in 2010 alone. You can see the new MySpace Events page here. It’s also a huge improvement from the existing event and calendaring apps on MySpace. Here’s what a concert event used to look like on MySpace: Here’s what an event might look like now, after the new launch: Users are also encouraged to share events with friends in the MySpace stream, on Facebook or on Twitter. And artists are being given new tools to actually create attractive concert listings. All of these events are aggregated into the users’ MySpace Calendars along with their normal calendar data. In the coming months, says MySpace, they’ll add additional features around mobile access, concert notifications and movies and DVD releases and premiers.      
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| Sorry Bit.ly, Twitter Confirms It Will Launch Its Own Link Shortener Posted: 14 Apr 2010 06:44 PM PDT Another hole is about to be filled in Twitter’s product features. CEO Evan Williams just confirmed plans to launch its own link shortener on stage during the final Q&A session at Chirp. HE noted that it would be “stupid” not to add native link-shortening capabilities into Twitter, since most Twitter clients already have that feature. “We want to solve that problem,” he said. “Everyone else has solved that problem. We are probably not going to give people a choice. If they want to use a different shortener, they can use a different app.” It is not clear how the new feature will affect bit.ly, the third-party link shortener Twitter currently uses as its default, but it sounds like that may change soon. Clues to just such a change have appeared recently. Twitter investor Fred Wilson singled out link shorteners in a post urging Twitter developers to stop filling holes in Twitter’s product. Twitter already owns its own short URL, twt.tl, which it uses as an anti-spam mechanism in direct messages. But it also owns Twee.tt, which is more in keeping with its brand since it already uses Tweet throughout its product. Williams did not address bit.ly’s status specifically, so maybe it will continue to have a role. It certainly grew on the back of Twitter. But even if it is no longer used on Twitter.com, Twitter clients may still continue to use bit.ly. If it proves to be a more useful shortener, especially to brands such as Amazon, the New York Times, and others via bit.ly Pro, it may have enough momentum to survive being delisted, as it were, from Twitter.      
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| Posted: 14 Apr 2010 06:08 PM PDT Amazon has launched it’s own shortened URL, amzn.to, powered by bit.ly’s new Pro service. Twitter’s default (for now) URL shortener has 6,000 corporate clients, including Amazon. The online retailer joins other corporations like nyti.ms (NYTimes), huff.to (Huffington Post), on.cnn.com (CNN) and yes, tcrn.ch (Techcrunch). Last year, the company rolled out it’s own truncated URL (internally created): amzn.com/ (followed by a product code or a category). While that extension still works, Amazon has emphasized bit.ly’s urls on its Twitter pages, and now its custom amzn.to. Every Amazon link and every product in the online marketplace can now be shortened to an amzn.to url. For example, Kindle’s url goes from this mess:
To a more elegant:
With hundreds of Amazon links floating through Twitter on a given day, “Amzn.to” becomes a powerful branding tool for the company. On Tuesday, bit.ly revealed phenomenal stats (3.4 billion shortened links in March) and new features on its Pro Service (its platform for corporate clients). Under bitly.Pro, the entry-level (includes custom domain) will continue to be free but customers can opt for the enterprise product, a $995 a month service that includes a dashboard with traffic data, automatic shortener for all links from a client’s site and a real-time feed of click data. Update: Well this could throw a wrench in bit.ly’s plans: Twitter’s CEO says the site will launch its own link shortener. No word yet on how this will affect bit.ly.      
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| (Very Short) Interview With MySpace Exec Dani Dudeck Posted: 14 Apr 2010 05:23 PM PDT The new rule around here is that if someone interesting comes through our office, we do a video interview. There are no exceptions, and your only real choice is to grin and bear it, or run away. MySpace VP Dani Dudeck came by today to brief us on a new product launch, and sat stoically through the “interview.” You can listen to her patiently not answer questions about morale at MySpace, whether the new co-president structure is working, and other important issues that we want to understand.      
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| Twitter Will Have An Official Android App Posted: 14 Apr 2010 05:19 PM PDT
Last Saturday, Twitter acquired Tweetie, the very popular and highly polished Twitter application for the iPhone. The application will now be called "Twitter for iPhone, " and will be free. And on Friday, Twitter announced that RIM’s new BlackBerry app would be an “official Twitter app” for the device. These announcements came after investor Fred Wilson wrote a post telling Twitter start-ups to stop filling holes in Twitter's products and to instead look to launch killer apps that start entirely new businesses. That led some third party developers to question if Wilson was hinting that Twitter may start filling in these holes itself, displacing third party apps with official ones (he later said that while he was on the Twitter board, he didn't know their plans). Twitdroid and Seesmic’s Android app are among the most popular Twitter clients for the device.      
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| Q&A: Twitter Execs Answer The Tough Questions At Chirp Posted: 14 Apr 2010 05:13 PM PDT
The participants: Q: What about an Android app? Promoted Tweets (long question). Q: What is needed to access the firehose? Money? Q: Will geo be included in the firehose? Q: Is Twitter going to host rich media (images/video/etc)? Q:Facebook..Is Facebook copying you, are you copying them. Is Zuckerberg losing sleep? Q: What do you say to a developer weighing how they allocate time vs Twitter/FB? Q: What if the recent events do put a chill on investing in the ecosystem? Ev: I’m curious.. let’s do a poll. Who is more excited to develop on the Twitter platform? *maybe 50%..* Q: What is a Twitter app going forward? Q: Today there’s this theme of empowerment. Is the playing field going to be level? Are developers going to have fair access to the same stuff? Are you going to be doing stuff on the side? *missed part of this question*Jason: China.. we don’t plan to grow there now. We do have plans to offer translation tools. Ev: We’re going to launch a link shortener, we’ve started using it in DMs. We needed it as spam/phishing defense mechanism. On topic of friction free, it’s stupid that a user can’t put a URL in our tweet box and we make them go away and come back and tweet something. We want to solve that problem. Everyone else has solved that problem. We are probably not going to give people a choice. If they want to use a different shortener, they can use a different app. Q: As Twitter search relevance improves, how would a promoted tweet work compared to most relevant one below it (Google faces similar issues) Ev: We have less than 200 people, we’re going to be a lot bigger. We are at a sweet spot where smallish number of people making a big impact. Q: There are a lot of devs, thinking maybe they’ll be acquired. What’s the path to acquisition? Q: Could somebody give some clarity into the dictionary box. How can smaller apps compete with these? Ev: 75% of traffic comes from API. Majority of users have only used website. Which means we can do better. The goal is to have people find the best apps for them. The #1 way people find out about apps is from the via link. Q: Is there a way the hack day tomorrow will continue past tomorrow? Q: How are you going to give more clarity about roadmap in the immediate future? Are you going to give guidance? Q: What would you like to see built? Q: With user streams it sounds like a couple different dev streams had access before others. Who gets access? Q: What did you learn over the last couple weeks? There are people who think you stepped on the ecosystem.      
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| Investors On The Evolving Twitter Ecosystem: There Are Still Opportunities Posted: 14 Apr 2010 04:55 PM PDT
Yes, according to the VC’s, though it’s clear that the atmosphere has changed. The VCs (particularly those that have stakes in Twitter) said they have to exercise more caution. There was quite a bit of talk on how tension between developers and platforms was natural and that it was overall a good thing for developers because the platform is growing more mature. Mike Hirshland was the lone dissenter, stating “I’m not buying all the feel-good make-love-not-war talk.” But he isn’t opposed to investing in the Twitter ecosystem either, though he did say he would like more clarity on Twitter’s roadmap. So what should developers be building? David Pakman probably gave the most concrete request: he wants companies that give you information not in real-time but at the right time. He’s also keen on companies that are taking huge datasets and deriving value from them. Here are my notes from the panel (note that quotes are paraphrased): Q: Talk about the changes in the Twitter dev ecosystem.
Bijan: The responsible thing for Twitter to do is to make sure it’s as good as it can be. Getting to half a billion users is the healthiest thing it can do. I don’t think if you’re building Twitter clients today that you’re not going to have your own audience. There’s diversity. There’s going to be more innovation with annotations, @anywhere. David: We’ve seen platforms evolve for several decades— it wouldn’t be uncommon for PC/Mac to similar issues. Should we bundle Disk Defragmentation or virus software? We knew we’d put a bunch of devs out of businesses. But we’ve seen this evolution before. We want to get the platform to the way that lots and lots of people can get on it. Mike: I’m not buying all the feel good make love not war talk. But tension is inherently the idea of a tech platform when it comes of age. If you want to be a player in the platform ecosystem you have to go in with your eyes open. I’d like more clarity on the roadmap. We’re at the dawn for the evolution of Twitter as a business. Peter: Facebook has historically owned the customer. Twitter started out open, day one started with API. I think the Twitter DNA allows for a degree of open innovation. Q: What kind of business would you make? Would you worry that if you had something successful Twitter would try replicating it? Bijan: Going forward our feeling about investing in the Twitter ecosystem…We have to be very careful, making sure we’re not putting ourselves in a position that’s going to be awkward. I’m looking forward to doing more in 2010 because the platform is more capable. David: There’s no service today that’s taking information we’re putting out there, and giving it to me when I need it. We need things that aren’t in real time, but at the right time. Twitter has created a new medium. Customers are having conversations around brands, brands have to engage there. We’re thinking of who will best optimize targeting, finding followers, advertising, that’s an opportunity. Mike: I think there will be venture backable opportunities. We’re all sensing some short term pain. But Twitter getting more serious about the platform and having a platform biz is better for the ecosystem in the long run. To me what’s most important about Twitter — it’s the reason the web has started to shift from static sites to streams. Q: Where are the valuations? Sometimes I think you just make them up. How do you look at valuations?
Mike: Clearly we’re all seeing the highly saught after deals. Deals get bid up. On the other end of the spectrum, a lot of the exciting stuff I’m seeing is at earlier stages. Young 3-5 person teams. Right now is a particularly exciting time to be at that level. David: I think Peter is right on. There’s 15-20 companies a year started in the tech sector that will achieve $100 million in rev. Those are the companies that can drive fantastic returns to venture. Q: Has anything you’ve seen recently horrified you? David: There’s pressure on venture. There’s pressure on firms to make investments that show potential of some breakout success. A lot of people look at Greylock investment in FB that could be 100x… Bijan: I paid a good price for Twitter. Our feeling is that we don’t care about VC rules that you have to have 20% of the company. Q: Of all the investments that you’ve seen that wasn’t yours what is most exciting to you? And perhaps one that isn’t interesting that is getting lots of attention.
Q: Are you worried about Foursquare with Yelp? Peter: I’m biased… but Yelp also solves a different problem (great reviews) Q: Any companies you think are overhyped? Any you think will take off? Bijan: Overhyped… I don’t know. I think a lot of them deserve the attention (foursquare, quora, etc ) David: If you’re a sick team of data scientists, look at huge data sets and derive value. Look at companies like Blippy, Swipely, encourage users to share information and aggregate it in some interesting way. That is a mine of data lots of interesting companies could be built on. Mike: I think social commerce is going to be big. Blippy looks great. Groupon my concern is all the clones, but that rumored 1.2-1.3 billion doesn’t seem frothy to me. Q: Who is Twitter’s biggest competitor?
Bijan: What he said. At some level you have to think about Facebook from an attention standpoint, but they’re different. David :If Twitter’s model is about delivering targeting tweets through search, then Yahoo/MS/Goog is a fierce competitor. If primary place ads are being delivered is through the Tweet stream, I think less of competitive threat. Mike: Facebook. They’re fighting it out for attention.      
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| Apparently, Mark Zuckerberg Still Writes Code Posted: 14 Apr 2010 04:23 PM PDT
I wonder when Bill Gates last wrote code for shipping products, and if that was 5+ years after Microsoft launched. Would be interesting to know.      
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| Twitter CEO Ev Williams: Revenue Is A Feature Posted: 14 Apr 2010 04:14 PM PDT Twitter executives shed some more light on its revenue model and its first attempt to inject advertising into its service today at its Chirp conference. COO Dick Costolo explained Twitter’s new advertising product, Promoted Tweets, and ensured the audience that Promoted Tweets will eventually be available to anyone with a Twitter account, not just the handful of early partners it is launching with. He also revealed that developers who show Promoted Tweets in their apps will get a 50/50 revenue split. CEO Evan Williams voiced some frustration with the constant questioning of why Twitter is still looking for how it will make money. “As much as we want to tell people to shut the hell up, it's important,” he acknowledged. But it is not “like we haven't checked the couch cushions and there might be business model there.” Rather, Twitter has been taking its time to roll out its business mode to make sure it is part and parcel of the product. “The revenue portion of Twitter becomes a significant feature,” he says. Williams elaborates: “There are lots of ways to make money, if you have a lot of traffic. It is kind of a solved problem. We want to make more money than a short term opportunity provides. We want a business that is organic to the product itself.” The first phase of that will be Promoted Tweets, which act just like regular Tweets and go everywhere regular Tweets go. They can also be retweeted, replied to, favorited and so on. “It didn't take long to conceive of,” says Costolo. “It had to be organic, and had to be a monetization that went everywhere the tweets went.” Promoted Tweets will be sold on an impression-basis at first (CPM), but will quickly be priced on an ROI-basis using Twitter’s new “resonance” metric, which is like a quality score for Tweets. Resonance takes into account how much a Tweet is seen, retweeted, favorited, and other actions. Once Twitter understands resonance, which Costolo admits they don’t yet fully grasp because the program has just launched, then the pricing model will quickly move away from a CPM model. Promoted Tweets were designed as a new feature, as a special kind of Tweet. But as Costolo says, “You can do everything to a promoted tweet that you can do to a regular tweet.” Whether or not it it is really a feature and not just another set of intrusive ads will depend on whether users actually interact with them.      
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| Twitter Execs Address The Big Question: Monetization Posted: 14 Apr 2010 03:40 PM PDT
Starbucks/ John Battelle have taken the stage for a Q&A: Q: Do you let anyone post? Q: Real time interest graph. Can you say more on that? Q: With Promoted Tweets, your goal is for a brand to go to a dashboard.. see how tweets resonate.. Q: Can third parties curate out promoted tweets? Q: You have 105 million users. How many engaged active users do you have? Q: You do know how many active users, in terms of people who use their accounts to tweet. Q: Can you give a timeline for rolling out monetization? Q: Will anyone be able to use Promoted tweets? Q: If Starbucks needs to have a tweet resonate for it to appear as a Promoted Tweet, wouldn’t it already be shown in your search engine (which will eventually incorporate resonance) anyway? Costolo: You don’t get paid you retweet a promoted tweet. There are already so many kinds of sophisticated spam people try to create spam. We have ideas about what they will do with Promotion, we are already working on that. We don’t wan to add fuel to the fire by offering money to people retweeting. Other thing, if someone says something great about Starbucks, can Starbucks retweet and promote it? We’re not allowing that at first. Answer two re: it’s not 50% if it’s less tax/costs. That’s standard in the industry. There’s a net revenue number that comes in. Q: Is this the long term rev model, or just a response to market demand for a model? Q: Any forbidden tweets/links?      
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| UMusic Is My Favorite Android Music App Posted: 14 Apr 2010 02:56 PM PDT Android phones just aren’t very good media consumption devices yet. You’re mostly limited to buying songs from Amazon to play locally, or dragging your own MP3 files onto the device. Pandora and other services are great for radio (non-on demand music), and there’s a variety of paid streaming music services that you can choose from, with more coming soon (like MOG and Spotify). Google knows about this weakness, which is why they so strongly considered adding Spotify as a default app to Android. If you don’t want to wait, and just want to stream music on demand right now for free, UMusic is a great choice. The app itself isn’t free – it’s $2 – but after you’ve purchased it there aren’t any more fees. All of the other streaming services on Android either charge or will charge per month once they launch. Like a number of desktop websites, UMusic is grabbing songs from YouTube and stripping out the video. It works just fine, so long as Google doesn’t shut it down. And even if they do, you’ll likely get at least $2 worth of value before they do. You find songs via search. The songs are automatically added to a playlist that you can later edit, and you can create new playlists as well to sort music. If the song is on YouTube, you’ll be able to find it on UMusic.      
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| Social Travel App Where I’ve Been Raises $750K From Groupon Co-Founders Posted: 14 Apr 2010 02:23 PM PDT
The Chicago-based Where I've Been plans to use the new funding towards user acquisition efforts. Where I’ve Been is best known for its Facebook app, which currently has over 1 million active users. The app allows users to share maps of all the countries and cities they’ve traveled to. The startup uses proprietary software to power its social mapping technology that captures users’ past travel history, future plans, and allows them to share their maps and profile with their social networks. Where I’ve Been previously raised $1 million in angel funding in 2008. The startup was rumored to have been acquired by TripAdvisor a few years ago for $3 million, but that report ended up being false. This round of funding marks one of Lightbank’s first investments since its launch a few weeks ago. Lightbank was established as a quasi startup incubator and investment fund to help support the entrepreneurial talent in Chicago. Lefkofsky and Keywell also seeded and co-founded Groupon, which reportedly raised a new round of funding at a $1.2 billion valuation. Disclosure: My husband is an employee at Groupon.      
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| Facebook Shares Hit $50 On SecondMarket Posted: 14 Apr 2010 02:05 PM PDT
That’s a 100% increase since January, just a couple of months ago. Part of the quick increase may be due to tightening supply. Current Facebook employees are no longer allowed to sell stock, we’ve heard but have not confirmed, due to possible securities laws violations. If that’s accurate, and it makes sense, it can partially explain the bubble like price increase in Facebook stock.      
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Mobile content delivery company 
Vancouver startup incubator 
According to the latest quarterly report by local online advertising company 
On its first day of availability on the App Store since it was – surprisingly, to many – 
There are two financing rumors buzzing through Silicon Valley this week. The first is the 
At Twitter’s 
To close out Chirp today, five key Twitter employee/execs have taken the stage to answer audience questions. This will likely be one of the most interesting portions of the entire event, as many developers have been feeling angst over Twitter’s recent moves with Official BlackBerry/iPhone applications. And there are also plenty of questions about all of the news that’s come out today.
Today at Chirp, four VCs took the stage to answer questions about investing in the Twitter ecosystem (some of them have invested in Twitter itself). The topic on everyone’s mind: given the increasing tension between Twitter and third party developers, are these third party services and apps still viable investment opportunities?
You’d think Facebook cofounder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg would have abandoned coding long ago. But if his recent status update is to be believed, he’s still at it. “Mark Zuckerberg Just checked in some code and unit tests for f8,” he said via a status update. When asked what the code was, he responded “You’ll have to wait for f8 to find out.”
For its next talk at Chirp, Twitter execs Ev Williams and Dick Costolo to discuss something that hasn’t really been associated with Twitter before: Monetization. I’ll be live blogging my notes on his his talk below.
Popular social travel application 
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