The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- What Are The Odds We’ll See An Android Version Of The Daily?
- Who Is The Daily For?
- Verve Wireless Acquires Mobile Ad Technology Company Deconstruct Media
- One-Click Subscriptions Come To the iPad
- Rupert Murdoch: “New Times, Demand New Journalism”
- Murdoch: The Daily Will Cost $0.14 Per Day Or $0.99 Per Week
- Skype Rival Viber Hits 10M Downloads, Poised To Release Android App (Video)
- The Daily Event Liveblog: Follow Along As The Newspaper Hits The Information Age
- Ning Ramps Up Network Engagement With Likes, New Themes, And More
- Exclusive: SolidFire Raises $11 Million For ‘Next-Gen’ Cloud Storage Platform
- ReadyForZero Launches Debt Management Platform To The Public
- BraveNewTalent Secures Funding From Northzone And Angels To Aim At U.S.
- Instagram Filters Through Suitors To Capture $7 Million In Funding Led By Benchmark
- Microsoft Fully Backs H.264 And Has 3,000 Words To Prove It
- IAC’s Match.com Acquires Online Dating Site OkCupid For $50M In Cash
- AOL’s Q4 2010: Revenues Dropped 26 Percent YoY, Beat Expectations
- WooMe: TechCrunch40 Finalist, $20 Million In Funding – And One Huge Scam
- Flickr Accidentally Wipes Out Account: Five Years And 4,000 Photos Down The Drain
- GeoSurf Is A Must-Have For Every Media Buyer’s Tool Belt
- Connected Adds A Comprehensive Personal Relationship Manager To Gmail
- Finland’s Applifier Grabs $2 Million In Funding
- GraphEffect Raises $2 Million To Increase Brand “Likes” On Facebook
- Japanese Social Mobile Games Company DeNA To Hit $1.3 Billion In Revenue
- Foodily Brings Social Goodness And Menu Sharing To Recipe Search Engine
- Bluefin Labs Reveals How It Is Tying Social Media To TV
| What Are The Odds We’ll See An Android Version Of The Daily? Posted: 02 Feb 2011 09:17 AM PST |
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So, now that the Daily is out there, who is it for? Who will read this bold new experiment in journalism and why? First, let me state that we just saw a sea change in journalism as its practiced online. Murdoch’s deep pockets have pushed through something publishers have tried to do for about two years now – namely create a compelling, interactive news source for tablet users. If I may be so bold, I would equate the efforts by Popular Science and titles that previously attempted to move to the iPad as the 1.0, pre-Internet CD-ROM days. The content was static and the old methods – commissioned text, carefully laid out on a page, released monthly at a premium price – are now over. That said, I wouldn’t wager the Daily will be the best or most popular of these new “streaming” newspapers but I do suspect that for the first few years it will be the most popular. First, the Daily features a fire-and-forget subscription. Once the initial two-week free period is over, fans of the daily will be able to pay $40 for a daily newspaper put out by an arguably strong team of journalists. The Daily seems like the sort of newspaper you read on the couch after work and not on the train before work and the images, design, and Murdoch’s statements about the “wit and humor” of the stories point to stories inspired by the blogosphere rather than the AP Style Guide. Another interesting thing: You’ll notice that the only real customization appears in the Sports section. News Corps’ private game preserve is Wall Street and once you convince the millions of chest-thumpers who subscribe to the WSJ to also subscribe to the Daily, you’ve got quite a revenue base. Add in the interactive features and you’ve pretty much hit on the early adopter/rich guy sweet spot. I don’t know where Americans will read the Daily. We won’t read it on the train, that’s for sure. So the assumption is that this is an “end of day” read or, if you’re at work, a guilty pleasure with a coffee and a dozen doughnuts. News Corp knows how to sell news. Whether you agree with some of their channels and outlets or not, they deal out supremely popular content produced on a daily basis. While I’d say I’m worried about who they’ll sell the Daily to, I believe that the subset of users who read the NY Times and other news sources in Safari on the iPad will welcome a move to a standalone app. Provided the content quality stays high and the news value is there, this could be the first iPad app to beat Angry Birds and, more important, truly bring journalism into the 21st century.        
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| Verve Wireless Acquires Mobile Ad Technology Company Deconstruct Media Posted: 02 Feb 2011 08:49 AM PST
Verve Wireless, which helps local media companies monetize their mobile inventory, has acquired Deconstruct Media, a mobile advertising technology company founded by a team of former Advertising.com product and engineering execs. Deconstruct offers an automated mobile display advertising system that allows mobile publishers to manage their ad sales and offer their ad inventory through a self-service interface. Advertisers, in turn, can review available advertising opportunities and buy ad campaigns directly using a credit card. The system manages pricing, targeting, creative management and reporting. As a result of the deal, said Deconstruct system will be integrated into Verve's Ad Manager platform. Brent Halliburton, founder and chief executive officer of Deconstruct, will join Verve as VP of Product Management. He was previously Senior Director of New Product Development at Advertising.com. Halliburton and the rest of the Deconstruct team – all former Advertising.com software developers – will be based out of Verve's DC office. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Verve Wireless basically lends local publishers a hand in monetizing their media by providing them tools and services to manage their mobile ad sales businesses. The company is led by Tom MacIsaac, who was previously CEO of ExtendMedia, the IP video software company that was acquired by Cisco in 2010.        
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| One-Click Subscriptions Come To the iPad Posted: 02 Feb 2011 08:36 AM PST Apple exec Eddie Cue announced today at The Daily launch, as expected, that Apple will be enabling subscription pricing for news apps. There will be one-click subscription billing either weekly (99 cents) or yearly ($39.99). Apple is starting with The Daily, but Cue says “you will hear an announcement very soon for other publications.” Cue also notes that consumers have downloaded over 200 million news apps so far,and that was without subscription billing and generally poor experiences. The subscription billing solves a business model problem for media companies, but now they have to create compelling products that people will not only want to pay for but keep paying for over time. Asked whether The Daily would come to other tablets, Rupert Murdoch says, “As other tablets get established, we expect to be on all the major tablets.” But he also notes, “We believe this year, and maybe next year belong to Apple.”        
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| Rupert Murdoch: “New Times, Demand New Journalism” Posted: 02 Feb 2011 08:22 AM PST
Today, Rupert Murdoch is introducing The Daily, his foray into an iPad-only newspaper. “New times demand new journalism,” he says. The challenge he says, is to “take the best of traditional journalism—competitive shoe leather joranlism, a skeptical eye, and combine it with the best technology such as 360 degree photographs. The iPad demands that we completely rethink our craft.” Murdoch notes that a growing population of news consumers no longer read print or even watch TV. His aim with The Daily is to combine “the magic of great newspapers” with the magic of technology. “The Daily is not a legacy barnd moving from the print to the digital world. We have license to experiment. We believe The Daily will be the model for how stories are told.” A new edition will come out every day, with updates throughout the day. it will feature a carousel navigation that looks like Coverflow, an dinclude video and 360-degree photographs. Since there are no trucks and no printing costs, The Daily will cost 14 cents a day or about $1 a week. The first two weeks are free, thanks to a sponsorship by Verizon. You will be able to download it live at noon ET. Murdoch also revealed that the total cost to get the Daily up and running—the technology, the staff, everything—has been $30 million, and that operating costs are half a million dollars a week. I asked Murdoch why he thinks it is better to charge a subscription versus gaining a larger audience via free downloads and selling that larger audience to advertisers, who are lining up anyway because their ads look so much better in an iPad app. “I think they will pay much less per thousand if it was free,” says Murdoch. “We feel this is better for advertisers and will draw a better class of advertisers at a better rate.”
       
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| Murdoch: The Daily Will Cost $0.14 Per Day Or $0.99 Per Week Posted: 02 Feb 2011 08:22 AM PST
Murdoch revealed that The Daily will cost $0.14 per day ($0.99 per week) and says the app will be “the model for how stories are told and consumed.” The app will also include “stunning photography” and HD video. Murdoch adds that Apple’s Steve Jobs has changed “the world of technology and media” and that Jobs has been a “champion of The Daily since day one.” Murdoch reiterates, these “new times demand new journalism.” Yearly subscriptions to The Daily will cost $40 per year. In terms of cost of production, Murdoch said that the development of The Daily set News Corp. back by $30 million or so, but will only cost the media conglomerate $500,000 per week in operation costs.        
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| Skype Rival Viber Hits 10M Downloads, Poised To Release Android App (Video) Posted: 02 Feb 2011 08:09 AM PST
Viber, which debuted its free calling service for the iPhone back in December, says 10 million people have already downloaded its mobile app (iTunes link). Pretty impressive feat when you consider the service is currently iOS-only and the milestone was reached in under two months. But as MobileCrunch found out last week, Viber is poised to hit the Android platform in March. Consider that confirmed, as we can exclusively show you a video of the app in action:
With the app, Android users will be able to make free calls to both Android and iPhone users, which should make quite some waves upon launch. Users will still be able to dial cell numbers directly without having to register a username or add friends to a contact list, and make and receive calls over 3G or WiFi, free of charge. Quite a compelling proposition. Next big feature: free text messaging. Can’t wait for that one (should land this month).        
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| The Daily Event Liveblog: Follow Along As The Newspaper Hits The Information Age Posted: 02 Feb 2011 07:58 AM PST
Erick is on his way to the event proper so we’ll be doing a tag-team liveblog of News Corps’ The Daily launch. It is happening at 11am Eastern – about two minutes from now. Refresh this page to see updates or you can watch the entire thing right here. 11am – Still chilling. The app is going live at noon Eastern, right after the event.11:23am – Eddy Cue from Apple on stage.        
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| Ning Ramps Up Network Engagement With Likes, New Themes, And More Posted: 02 Feb 2011 07:55 AM PST
One of the most important additions to Ning networks is the newly launched Ning Engagement System, which provides creators with intelligence on member activity level, identifies loyalists, and gathers insights on popular content or activities on networks. Ning also allows creators to add a Ning “like” button that allows visitors to vote up popular content. And Ning now gives network creators the option to add Facebook’s Like button easily on their social networks, although the two types of Like buttons could be a little confusing for members. Additionally, Ning is unveiling the Ning Design Studio, which includes new ways for creators to customize the look and feel of networks. The studio includes 80 different customization settings to change the design of networks, a theme gallery, new layouts, and a design marketplace which will eventually allow users to sell their designs to network creators. Rosenthal says that the company is looking for ways to help creators make networks a primary social destination for their members. He adds that Ning will be making a mobile product announcement soon and will also be rolling out “transformative” monetization options at end of Q1.        
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| Exclusive: SolidFire Raises $11 Million For ‘Next-Gen’ Cloud Storage Platform Posted: 02 Feb 2011 07:28 AM PST
SolidFire, a stealth Atlanta startup building a ‘next-generation’ cloud computing storage platform, has secured $11 million in Series A funding led by New Enterprise Associates with current investors Valhalla Partners and Novak Biddle Venture Partners participating. This brings the total of capital raised by the company to $12 million. Not too shabby for a company that can only commit to launching a beta product ‘later this year’. SolidFire will be using the capital to expand in preparation thereof by hiring new people and the opening of an office in Boulder, Colorado. According to the company, investors were stumbling over each other to get in on the financing deal, which closed way ahead of time, in less than 30 days from start to finish. They won’t discuss the valuation other than that it was ‘very attractive’, though. Here’s what we know about what they’re building: it will be an enterprise-class cloud storage system that aims to provide reliable, high performance primary storage at low cost for even the most demanding public cloud and enterprise private cloud environments. SolidFire’s solid state architecture is said to enable independent virtualization of both capacity and performance, allowing complete flexibility in cloud-scale storage provisioning and management. GigaOm has more info. SolidFire was founded by Dave Wright, who earlier founded Jungle Disk, which leverages Rackspace and Amazon S3 infrastructures to provides reliable, virtually unlimited scalability for any level of data storage. Jungle Disk was acquired by Rackspace in October 2008. Wright certainly knows his way around complex IT systems. Prior to Jungle Disk, he was Chief Architect at IGN / GameSpy / Fox Interactive Media. In conjunction with the funding round, NEA General Partner Harry Weller will join SolidFire’s board of directors alongside Valhalla GP Charles Curran, and Novak Biddle GP Phil Bronner. Also joining the SolidFire board is former LeftHand Networks CEO Bill Chambers. Update: thanks to TechDrawl, a video interview:
       
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| ReadyForZero Launches Debt Management Platform To The Public Posted: 02 Feb 2011 07:25 AM PST
Consumers sign onto ReadyForZero with their credit card accounts and passwords (leveraging Yodlee), and similar to Mint.com, the startup will evaluate all of the balances and minimum balances and give users a 360-degree view of their financial situation. ReadyForZero will build a personalized plan for consumers, charting out how much interest is being charges on each credit card account, minimum payments and when each card’s balance will eventually be paid off. Based on your minimum payments, salary and balance, ReadyForZero will figures out an optimal strategy for what to pay and when. And qualified ReadyForZero members can obtain lower-interest, fixed-rate The startup, which just raised $260,000 in new funding, seems like it could be complimentary to personal finance management Mint.com.        
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| BraveNewTalent Secures Funding From Northzone And Angels To Aim At U.S. Posted: 02 Feb 2011 07:15 AM PST
Lucian Tarnowski, BraveNewTalent's Founder & CEO said the investment would be used to hire and scale in the US market. BraveNewTalent already has a network of corporate clients starting in London which has brought in revenues and pushed the startup towards profitability already. Clients include IBM, Tesco, L'Oreal and McAfee. Northzone, one of Europe's leading venture funds which invested in Spotify and Lastminute.com, has experience in this market, previously backing Stepstone, the recruitment site launched during the dotcom boom.        
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| Instagram Filters Through Suitors To Capture $7 Million In Funding Led By Benchmark Posted: 02 Feb 2011 06:01 AM PST
Benchmark Capital is leading Instagram’s $7 million Series A round. Also participating is initial investor Baseline Ventures and angels: Square’s Jack Dorsey, Chris Sacca (through his Lowercase Capital fund), and Quora’s Adam D’Angelo. Benchmark’s Matt Cohler, who spearheaded the deal alongside Peter Fenton, will join Instagram’s Board. He joins Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom and Baseline’s Steve Anderson there. Systrom declined to give Instagram’s valuation based on the funding, though it’s probably safe to assume that it’s well north of $20 million. Thus ends months of speculation about the Instagram funding. Rumors started flowing back in November after it was revealed that original Instagram-backer, Andreessen Horowitz, would be backing Instagram rival PicPlz for their Series A. Initial reports had Sequoia leading the way, though we debunked those. Then back in December, VentureBeat reported that Benchmark was likely the winning suitor. We had heard that was likely the case, though the deal was far from done at that point. Now it is. So, they have the money. Now what are they doing to do with it? “We’re going to grow the team to support the scale and massive growth we’re seeing,” Systrom tells us. “We want to build a world-class engineering team,” he continues. I can already see the comments: why does a photo-sharing app for the iPhone need a world-class engineering team? Because they have much grander goals. ”Instagram has an underlying ambition to change the way we see the world – to connect people from all over the world, and enable people to tell their story through a rich visual dialogue. Our new capital will allow us to scale to the opportunity at hand across platforms both on mobile and the web,” Systrom says. Instagram addicts will read that last bit and wonder if that means a richer web presence is coming soon? Yes, though Systrom won’t pin down a specific date. “We’ve got some special stuff up our sleeve,” is what he will say. What about the API? “The API is coming along really strong and should be out soon. We already have select partners playing with it,” he says. And yes, Android is coming soon too — though again, no firm date. More firm is “some special stuff in store” for the upcoming SXSW festival in Austin, Texas in early March. The team will be there hoping to capture the fire that first Twitter and then Foursquare were able to capture before them during the event. Of course, they don’t really need to catch anymore on fire. The service currently has 1.75 million users. They’ve already seen some 78 million “likes” on pictures by users. And there are currently some 290,000 photos posted per day. Also interesting, roughly half of Instagram’s users are not just outside of the Silicon Valley bubble, but outside of the entire United States. Japan is an especially large region of activity. And with their recent launch of a new hashtag feature, they’ve already seen some 500,000 pictures upload to take advantage of it, he says. Instagram’s funding follows rival Path’s new round yesterday. Expect this space to continue to get hotter.        
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| Microsoft Fully Backs H.264 And Has 3,000 Words To Prove It Posted: 02 Feb 2011 06:00 AM PST
Dean Hachamovitch, the man in charge of Internet Explorer for Microsoft, has taken the time to write a nearly 3,000 word piece about the situation today. It’s a long, great post well worth the read. But just in case you can’t make it through the entire post, I’m summarize it simply: Microsoft is fully behind H.264 as the codec for web video going forward. Why? Because they have just as many reservations about WebM as Google all of a sudden seems to have about H.264. I had a chance to speak with Hachamovitch last night about his thoughts on the situation. His take is very clear in that he’s confused by Google’s motives to ditch H.264. Specifically, he notes that at one point not too long ago, Microsoft, Apple, and Google all supported H.264 as a codec for HTML5 video on the web. Yes, believe it or not, Microsoft was actually on the side of many of the main players of the web when it came to a future technology. The one major player not on their side was, of course, Mozilla. But Microsoft was happy to make the plug-in to ensure that they supported H.264 for HTML5 video as well. “We had a somewhat stable state in web video,” Hachamovitch says. Then something odd happened. Google decided to pull their support for H.264 as the web video standard. The reason? The patents controlled by the MPEGLA group scared them. Or something. I’ve made my own thoughts pretty clear on this matter. I think that’s a total red herring. Google is pulling support for H.264 as a tactic in their war with Apple. At first, they touted the maneuver as being all about supporting “open” formats. But if that’s the case, why not pull support for the Flash plug-in baked into every version of Chrome currently? Further, why not pull H.264 support out of the browser included with Android? The answer is because it’s not about open — it’s actually about control. Worse, by turning their back on H.264, Google is ensuring that Flash will continue to remain the dominant force in web video for years to come. Flash supports H.264, which is great, but the issue here is that we need the HTML5 standard to fully support H.264, and that’s simply not going to happen without Google on board. Some would say it wouldn’t anyway because of the potential patent issues. But as Microsoft (like many others) points out, it’s still not clear that the new WebM format also isn’t infringing on any patents. Hachamovitch points to the fact that when the JPEG patents were dug into, everyone from shoe sellers to the Green Bay Packers came out of the woodwork claiming ownership of some part. Further, Microsoft sees no reason why MPEGLA will all of a sudden go hostile for the sake of making money. “It’s counter to their reason for existence,” Hachamovitch says. Instead, H.264 has proven to be a format with wide adoption both from a hardware and software perspective. And that, fundamentally, is why Microsoft is backing it, and will continue to back it. At the same time, they recognize why WebM could be a good format for some level of unification. So they’ve developed plug-ins to allowed both Internet Explorer and Firefox to play videos with that codec within Windows. But again, they just don’t see WebM as the ultimate HTML5 video standard. There are simply too many barriers to entry. And too many unanswered questions about patents. In other words, Microsoft and Apple seem to see eye-to-eye on this level. And I’m right there with them. WebM sounds great on paper — until you actually read the paper. At that point, you quickly realize that it’s a crapshoot at best, and one that will take several years to go anywhere — if it ever does. And it’s one that could ultimately face the same type of patent questions currently surrounding H.264. So Microsoft, like Apple, is taking the more sure bet. While it appears Google is once again out of touch with reality. Which is really too bad, because web video needs them.        
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| IAC’s Match.com Acquires Online Dating Site OkCupid For $50M In Cash Posted: 02 Feb 2011 04:31 AM PST
While Match.com has a significant userbase, OkCupid singles tend to be younger, which is why Match found it to be a useful acquisition. The site, which is free, apparently generates revenue via advertising and according to IAC, has “been the fastest growing dating site in the advertising-based category.” OkCupid, which has raised $6 million in funding, was co founded by Max Krohn, Sam Yagan, Chris Coyne and Christian Rudder. Match has previously acquired dating site People Media for $80 million and most recently Singlesnet. Yagan will continue to operate OkCupid from the startup’s offices in New York. Hopefully the acquisition doesn’t prevent OkCupid from publishing its anonymized data about the online dating scene. Or better yet, the reports will include data from both Match.com and OkCupid.        
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| AOL’s Q4 2010: Revenues Dropped 26 Percent YoY, Beat Expectations Posted: 02 Feb 2011 04:08 AM PST
Our parent company AOL just reported its Q4 2010 earnings, so let’s take a look. Total revenues for the quarter were down 26 percent (the exact same drop witnessed in Q3), from $806.7 million in Q4 2009 to $596 million last quarter. The company was expected to earn $0.42 per share on revenues of $587.37 million, so the results handily beat expectations. Display advertising revenue came in at $151.1 million, down 14% compared to the same period the year before. Search advertising revenues dipped below the $100 million mark, coming in at $96.4 million. Total ad revenues were $331.6 million. Advertising revenue thus declined 29%, or $137 million, compared to the fourth quarter of 2009, of which $80.2 million relates to shutdowns of operations in Europe and de-emphasis of “low margin search engine campaign management and lead generation affiliate products” and the absence of revenue from Bebo and ICQ which AOL sold earlier in 2010. More useful facts: AOL acquired two companies in Q4 2010, Pictela and About.me, for an aggregate amount of $31.4 million. AOL’s subscription revenues for the quarter shows a 23% decline in subscribers year-over-year. Subscription revenues came in at $235.9 million. AOL ended the year with $801.8 million of cash. Says AOL chief exec Tim Armstrong:
We’re focused on winning, folks. You heard it here first. Here are a few highlights from the earnings call: Armstrong says that Patch is now 775 sites strong, and is churning out one piece of content every 9 seconds. Expenses for Patch for Q4 came in at $40 million; but the company says that it expects Patch to start contributing to AOL’s profitability this year. AOL rolled out 554 local Patch sites in Q4. AOL Video views are up 400 percent year-over-year. AOL actually sold its minority stake in video platform Brightcove, worth $17 million. Armstrong says “There are incredible opportunities in the mobile space;” but adds that a lot of innovation will be focused on mobile video.
       
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| WooMe: TechCrunch40 Finalist, $20 Million In Funding – And One Huge Scam Posted: 02 Feb 2011 03:43 AM PST
A friend just said I should sign up for WooMe with a picture of a horse instead of my own handsome face, just to see what happens next. Wow. I know there’s a lot of fierce competition in the online dating industry, but I’ve rarely seen a site with tactics as aggressive as WooMe’s, which I should point out was a TechCrunch40 finalist back in 2007 (albeit with a slightly different positioning than today). Since I’ve signed up for the site, again with a horse as my picture and in the middle of the night in the United States, I’ve been receiving a ton of unsolicited emails, direct messages, pop-ups, live chat sessions and alleged visits to my obviously fake profile by hot women. And I only signed up about 15 minutes ago. Now all I need to do to see who visited my profile or sent me all these private messages, is sign up to become a VIP WooMe member ($24.99 per month). Ok, it may be a hefty sum, but I would love to virtually meet all these American babes that are trying to get a date with a (granted, beautiful) horse in the middle of the night. Plus I’ll gain privileged access to 10 million members according to WooMe. Yeah, but no.
It’s crystal clear that WooMe targets anyone who signs up for the site with automated messages from women (WooMe staffers for all I know), within minutes. And there’s not a single thing you can do on the site that doesn’t lead to the payment page, where the company tries to lure you into registering for $9.99 per month (if you sign up for 6 months, and pay the whole amount upfront). It’s classic bait-and-switch, from the horrible kind. I’ve never used online dating sites, so maybe all of them employ such aggressive tactics, but tough luck for WooMe that my friend thought I should see how a TechCrunch40 finalist behaves. My advice: stay far, far away from this site. Shady as the company might be, it has attracted a slew of high-profile investors, who’ve pumped about $20 million into the company. Let’s see: all three of Europe’s finest venture capitalists, Index Ventures, Mangrove Capital Partners and Atomico Ventures have backed the company, together with leading angel investors Klaus Hommels and Oliver Jung. And then there’s the experienced management team, which includes CEO Stephen Stokols (previously BT’s SVP of Strategy and Business Development) and VP of Marketing Steven Sesar (who previously led business development efforts for Shopzilla). All should be ashamed for pulling stunts like this. Update: Stokols got in touch with me to ‘clarify’ things. He says I make inaccurate accusations, and that WooMe does not send messages from “fake” users. I would thus like to apologize to Georgia, Jenny, Anna, Jen, Britanny, Ann, Siriorn, Adriana, Sarah, Angie, Bri, Erica, Lana, Olly, Michele, Otu, Dream, Miracle, Catherine and Elizabeth (I kid you not) for claiming they’re not real women just waiting for new horses to make their appearance on the site. Seriously, Stokols told me new users appear on top of people page results, which is why they get disproportionate attention after they just signed up. The only problem for him is that I’m talking seconds, not minutes after I registered. There was a message waiting for me by the time I signed up, which I had to pay for to read. There’s no way someone could have contacted me that quickly – even I weren’t such a pretty horse. Update 2 (from the Hacker News comment section):
       
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| Flickr Accidentally Wipes Out Account: Five Years And 4,000 Photos Down The Drain Posted: 02 Feb 2011 02:56 AM PST
Yahoo’s Flickr may have another PR nightmare on their hands. IT architect and Flickr user Mirco Wilhelm couldn’t log on to his 5-year old account yesterday, and when he asked the Flickr team about this issue they flat out told him they had accidentally flushed his entire account, and the 4,000 photos that were in it, straight down the drain. Apparently Wilhelm reported a Flickr user with an account that held ‘obviously stolen material’ to the company last weekend, but a staff member erroneously incinerated his account instead of the culprit’s.
Ouch. What amazes me most about this story is how calmly Wilhelm reacts to the termination of his account:
I’ve never been a big Flickr user, but I had always assumed a simple click of the button couldn’t delete an account and its content altogether, rather than simply deactivate it. It never occurred to me that a team member could just wipe out accounts without the means to reactivate them if it turned out to be a mistake. And what about backups for Christ’s sake? For what it’s worth, Flickr’s Zack Sheppard commented in the Flickr forum thusly:
So basically there hasn’t been a way for Flickr to restore accidentally removed paid accounts since the company was founded, maybe they can do something about Mirco’s account (you have to wonder what would have happened hadn’t he raised a big stink about this in the first place) and users should be so lucky that Flickr is letting them know they might be able to restore erroneously terminated accounts at some point in the future. Duly noted.        
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| GeoSurf Is A Must-Have For Every Media Buyer’s Tool Belt Posted: 02 Feb 2011 01:46 AM PST
I have a thing for money-making, simple solutions to obvious problems, and GeoSurf sure is one of those. This may come as a surprise to some, but even though it’s 2011, if you’re a media buyer, you pretty much work in the dark. I mean this in the sense of media buyers’ ability to actually see their ads on the properties they bought digital real estate on, as well as the ability to see which advertisers are bidding against them. To tackle this issue—a paradox caused by IP and geo-targeting employed by media professionals themselves—proxies have to be used. These, however, tend to be tricky to use and are often plain unreliable. GeoSurf’s solution fills this void. Launched in 2009, GeoSurf provides a browser add-on (IE & Firefox), VPN client and iPhone/Android solution that allows media buyers to view ads and web content with a local perspective in 60 countries and 20 US metros. The range of products is currently used to view who is bidding on ads in a variety on mediums, such as: display, affiliate, video, in-game, in-text, mobile and even desktop applications. If you’re in the media-buying business, the benefits are pretty obvious: new advertisers can be discovered, campaigns can be optimized, better analysis can be performed prior to launching a test campaign, and campaign deployment can be executed in real-time. To make this happen, BI Science, the company behind GeoSurf, deployed a network of servers around the world that runs an infrastructure that dynamically allocates bandwidth based on real-time analysis, historical demand and physical proximity. This allows the company to provide a fast and secure browsing experience for media buyers. Co-founder Cameron Peron explained to me that usage of GeoSurf is dynamically priced depending on consumption and type of channels used. For example, ‘light usage’ (checking ads on PPC or affiliate channels) will be more priced lower than ‘heavy usage’ (performing business intelligence and spot checks over video, in-text or Facebook apps).
       
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| Connected Adds A Comprehensive Personal Relationship Manager To Gmail Posted: 01 Feb 2011 11:58 PM PST
Connected is similar in a lot of ways to Gist, except that it hyper-focuses on your relationships within Gmail. Via a web app, Connected integrates with Gmail, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google Contacts, Google Calendar, and Google Voice to become a personal relationship manager. Connected builds comprehensive profiles for each of your contacts with your entire conversation history as well as their latest status updates, photos, and work history from across their social profiles. So you can easily access any relevant information in one place about a contact. One of the more useful features that Connected offers is a personalized daily agenda that includes relevant information about all attendees of meetings on your schedule. The service will email you a daily agenda with conenctions’ latest correspondence with you via Gmail, Tweets, and updates on both facebook and LinkedIn. Connected will also intelligently discover opportunities for you to reconnect with your network by notifying you of birthdays, job changes, and more (via Facebook and LinkedIn integration) and send you notifications when you have not kept in touch with a contact. Like Etacts, Connected takes a more human, personal approach to contact management. Connected’s founder, Sachin Rekhi was previously an entrepreneur-in-residence at Trinity Ventures, where he hatched the idea of Connected. Rekhi previously founded and sold Anwhere.fm to Imeem (which was then bought by MySpace).
       
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| Finland’s Applifier Grabs $2 Million In Funding Posted: 01 Feb 2011 11:38 PM PST
Applifier, a Finnish startup, helps those developers compete by creating a network of independent games, and then cross promoting them. It works a little bit like LinkExchange did back in the 90s. You allow other apps to be promoted around your game, and you get the favor returned. See this article from last year for a good overview of the service. It’s had unusual success in a somewhat crowded space, boasting 55 million monthly users of the games in its network. And now they’ve raised their first round of financing, we’ve heard from a source. Some $2 million in a round led by MHS Capital. We’ve reached out to the company for details and confirmation.        
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| GraphEffect Raises $2 Million To Increase Brand “Likes” On Facebook Posted: 01 Feb 2011 11:20 PM PST
Facebook marketing platform GraphEffect has raised $2 million in financing from LowerMyBills founder Matt Coffin and x+1 president Stephano Kim as well as VC firms Thrive Capital, CrossCut Ventures, Rincon Venture Partners, Founder Collective, Lerer Ventures and Baroda Ventures. GraphEffect helps brands and agencies leverage Facebook for advertising and lead generation purposes. The company, formerly called Focused Labs, relies on social performance algorithms to target Facebook ad campaigns, increase user engagement with Facebook fan pages and increase downstream conversions through the Facebook feed. With the cost of advertising to convert a user into a fan on a brand’s Facebook page being estimated at $1.07 a fan, GraphEffect is in a lucrative business. The company is also participating in the Facebook Advertising API Beta, getting a first mover advantage in the Facebook ad management department. The LA-based GraphEffect was co-founded by Clark Landry and James Borow and reached profitability in 2010. It will be using the new cash to bulk up their sales and technology divisions as well as expand the platform. Said Borow about the new financing, “Over the past year we have driven millions of new fans and customers for our clients. Our goal from day one has been to become the leaders in the social advertising space, and we are confident in our ability to achieve this with the help of our new partners.”        
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| Japanese Social Mobile Games Company DeNA To Hit $1.3 Billion In Revenue Posted: 01 Feb 2011 10:39 PM PST
In this time frame, DeNA’s revenue reached $359 million, up 153% from the same quarter in fiscal 2009 and up 9% from Q2. The company’s operating profit grew 182% year-on-year to $181 million (up 8% from Q2). DeNA is projecting revenue for the entire fiscal year to reach $1.3 billion (up from $590 million last year) and operating profit to grow from $260 to $675 million. It’s tough to make comparisons with Zynga (which doesn’t publish financial data), but even big Z shouldn’t be able to match these numbers, at least not this year. In a nut shell, Mobage-town is like Facebook and Zynga rolled into one – exclusively available through mobile phones registered in Japan. The site currently boasts 764 games offered by over 300 companies. 90% of DeNA’s revenue and profits come from Mobage-town (sales of virtual items, avatar-related sales, ads etc.). In other words, the company is expecting over $1 billion in revenue to be generated by mobile phone users and in Japan only. These are mind-boggling numbers, especially when you consider that the company is sharing Japan’s mobile social gaming market with a big competitor that follows the same business model, GREE (which is also listed and boasts a market cap of $3.7 billion itself). DeNA is currently trying hard to diversify its product and business strategy, with a focus on bringing Mobage-town to international markets this year. The latest moves include acquiring San Francisco-based mobile games maker ngmoco for up to $400 million, expanding its game platform to PCs (through a collaboration with Yahoo Japan) and inking a deal with Samsung to have Mobage-town pre-installed on every Samsung smartphone ships from spring this year. We will keep you posted.        
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| Foodily Brings Social Goodness And Menu Sharing To Recipe Search Engine Posted: 01 Feb 2011 09:44 PM PST
Foodily aggregates recipes from big name chefs on sites like FoodTV to up and coming bloggers. Results are actually presented side-by-side, which makes comparing recipes and ingredients side by side. It also makes searching for a recipe more like browsing through your latest Food&Wine magazine. Through an integration with Facebook, recipes "liked" on Foodily will appear in your Facebook feed, and recipes your friends like will appear in your Foodily recipe search. Foodily also will allows anyone to create a Facebook event invitation that includes a menu, allowing friends to see what dishes are planned for events like dinner parties or pot lucks. Friends can comment on the menu, share their feedback and add additional dishes they want to bring. While the recipe search engine space is crowded, what could help Foodily stand out is its social features, especially the menu integration with Facebook. Founded by former Yahoo employees, Andrea Cutright and Hillary Mickell, Foodily has raised $5 million from Index Ventures.
       
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| Bluefin Labs Reveals How It Is Tying Social Media To TV Posted: 01 Feb 2011 09:01 PM PST On the Web, we have links, which makes all media trackable. But on TV there are no links. So how do you track the audience response to a TV show or an ad? It’s all guesswork, panels, and surveys pretty much. But Deb Roy thinks he has a better answer: treat social media as a realtime “focus group in the wild” and tie that commentary back to TV. He wants to infer links from what people are talking about. In the video above, he explains his approach with Bluefin Labs. “Think about a switchboard that links realtime TV with social media,” he says. Roy is the founder and CEO of Bluefin Labs, a video and language analytics startup in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Bluefin is creating a console for advertisers and TV programmers to measure the social resonance of their content. Using sophisticated semantic analysis, Bluefin can determine what peopel are saying about a particular TV show or commercial across various social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and blogs. The console (see screenshot below) still spits out fairly raw data right now and is in the process of getting a cleaner UI, but essentially it shows what looks like a digital program guide with shows and ads being tracked on different channels. For each show or ad, the grey bars represent how much commentary was sparked across various social media, with an actual sampling of Tweets and Facebook comments, along with a tag cloud summarizing what people are saying about that show or ad. A brand introducing a new product could see how often the name of the product is mentioned by people talking about it versus the overall umbrella brand. Advertisers interested in actually measuring engagement could use this data to see how much buzz is created given the reach of a particular show. They could look at the response rate per airing and then rank order each TV network to see where their ad dollars are best spent. “For every mass media action there is some sort of audience response,” says Roy. “This has always been the case. Because of the low barrier to entry to social media there are feedback loops. Those roll up to a significant new force which shifts how audiences view the mass media.” Roy is a researcher at the MIT Media Lab and he founded the company in 2008 with one of his Ph.D students, Michael Fleischmann. ver the past 15 years, Roy’s research explored the nexus between video and language. He taught a robot named Toko the names of objects using video and language as complimentary feedback loops, and put his own family under video surveillance to capture how his son learned language over a period of 36 months. Now with Bluefin, he is taking that deep machine learning and semantic analysis and applying it to TV. Last year, Bluefin raised a $6 million series A financing led by Redpoint Ventures. Other investors in that and a previous seed round include Lerer Ventures, Acadia Woods Ventures, Brian Bedol and Jonathan Kraft. The company has raised a total of $8.35 million, including a $1.15 million grant from the National Science Foundation. The company is piloting its console with nine large advertisers, brands, and media agencies including Pepsi. But getting back to how social media can create effective links to TV. What is a link? It is a reference to something else on the Web. When you talk about a TV show or ad that is also a reference, but you usually don’t use links. Your comments, however, are increasingly being captured by social media. “You don't need to interact with a piece of online media to create a response,” says Roy, “all you need is somebody to talk to.” Bluefin is “treating social media like clickstreams: It determines when somebody is talking about a particular show or ad on TV using its language learning and semantic analysis engine, and then creates an implicit link to that content in its database. It is taking social media and mass media and mixing them together.
       
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