The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- For Eventbrite, Each Facebook Share Is Worth $2.52
- GE Acquires Smart Grid, Specialty Software Designers, Opal Software
- Fracture Glass Printing Makes Photos “Snazzy”
- Opera 11 To Come With Extensions: Calls For An Interview And A Demo (TCTV)
- eBay Adds QR Codes To Barcode Scanning App RedLaser
- Fyesta Launches As A European Plancast, Aims To Tap The Intention Web
- Verizon Stores, Not To Be Outdone, Will Sell The iPad On October 28
- Skype 5.0 For Windows Debuts With Facebook Integration, Call Recovery And More
- 2010 Global Cleantech 100 List Dominated By American And Energy Efficiency Businesses
- Opera In Numbers (It’s Pretty Huge)
- Involver Closes $8 Million Series C For Its Social Media Marketing Platform
- Add Game Mechanics To Your Site In Five Minutes With BigDoor
- Intuit’s New Version Of Quicken Gets Mintified With Financial Data Insights And More
- The Slow Race To A Translating Telephone
- Coming Soon: Opera Mobile For Android, Desktop Browser Extensions
- The Gas Has Been Passed From iPhone To Windows Phone 7: Fart App Tops The Charts
- When All Else Fails, Put Up The AOL-Yahoo Trial Balloon
- Gravity Regroups For Round Two: The Personalization War
- Web 2.0 Acquisitions, The Game
- Kiva President On The Next 5 Years And Why Zynga Is Their Biggest Rival (TCTV)
- Text Answers Service ChaCha Nabs $20 Million In Series F
- Style Factory Is A Crowdsourced Designer Furniture Shop
- Going Meg-ative: The Anti-Whitman Ads are Sad, Bad and Dangerous for Democracy
- HasWifi Shows You Which Flights Have Wifi
- Chilean Miner Rescue Becomes Most-Watched Ustream Event Ever
| For Eventbrite, Each Facebook Share Is Worth $2.52 Posted: 14 Oct 2010 07:53 AM PDT How much is a shared link on Facebook worth? For online ticketing service Eventbrite, each time someone shares a link to a paid event with their Facebook friends it results in $2.52 worth of ticket sales. In contrast, a Twitter share is only worth $0.43, and a LinkedIn share is worth $0.90. Sharing an event through Eventbrite’s email sharing tool is worth $2.34, almost as much as Facebook. On average, across all social channels, each share is worth an average of $1.78 for Eventbrite. Events are inherently social, and if you know your friends are going to go to an event you are more likely to go as well. Facebook and email most closely match your real friends, so it makes sense that those shares are worth more in this context. But Facebook has an edge because it broadcasts to all your friends. On average, each shared link on Facebook results in 11 new visits to Eventbrite, compared to 7 visits per share across all channels. As CEO Kevin Hartz told me a couple weeks ago when he raised $20 million, Facebook now sends more traffic to Eventbrite than any other source, including Google. It is no wonder that Eventbrite is making a big push into social discovery, adding more Facebook hooks into its service. The more it can get people to share events, the more tickets it sells. The big question is whether this phenomenon is particular to Eventbrite, or whether all commerce sites can benefit from social sharing. Companies should start tracking revenue per social share and see where the money is coming from. My gut instinct is that Facebook will be more valuable for products which get a bigger boost when your real friends are using them, and Twitter will compare better for other more general types of products where people are just looking for a trusted recommendation based on topic knowledge. Twitter might also result in better clickthrough rates for pure media sharing (i.e., advertising versus commerce). What’s your revenue per share? Send me an email or share in comments.        
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| GE Acquires Smart Grid, Specialty Software Designers, Opal Software Posted: 14 Oct 2010 07:49 AM PDT
Opal’s specialty is in data migration and SCADA simulation. The company’s data migration capabilities can switch quickly between multiple platforms, and integrate GE software into non-GE systems to provide greater flexibility and more options for the juggernaut’s utility customers. In a press statement, Bill Tarlinton, chief executive of Opal Software said: "[The acquisition] formalizes an already strong relationship. We are proud to be a part of GE Energy." The Australia-based Opal Software team is expected to improve GE's Digital Energy business in the Asia-Pacific region by providing increased local workforce and technology. "Opal Software's products and project management services are integral to the delivery of GE Energy projects," said Matt McKenzie, general manager, Asia region for GE's Digital Energy business, “[They] will help secure GE as a smart grid technology leader and meet the needs of the fast-growing Asia-Pacific region."        
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| Fracture Glass Printing Makes Photos “Snazzy” Posted: 14 Oct 2010 07:47 AM PDT I have a lot of photos. Most of them were taken for the restraining order hearing, but the rest are of my children, wife, and various permutations thereof. There are a number of these photos that I’d like to print out and save forever and there are a few I’d love to hang on my wall for posterity. That’s where Fracture comes in. Fracture is one of the most interesting and novel ways of creating a beautiful and lasting piece of photographic art I’ve seen in a long while. Fracture, a two-year-old start-up founded by two friends, offers a fairly simple service – you send them a photo and you get back that photo printed on a pane of shatter-proof glass. It comes with everything you need to hang or display the photo and it looks pretty great.        
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| Opera 11 To Come With Extensions: Calls For An Interview And A Demo (TCTV) Posted: 14 Oct 2010 07:21 AM PDT So browser extensions are finally making their way to Opera’s desktop browser product. The next release thereof, Opera 11, will boast the welcome new feature, although there’s no telling when even the alpha version of the browser will hit the Web exactly (the word is “very soon”). I caught up with Arnstein Teigene, who is product manager for desktop browser add-ons at Opera, to ask him about the forthcoming feature and what it means for the company and the Web as a whole. One of the things I asked was why it took Opera so damn long to gain said extensions feature, which I believe has been a fundamental part of modern Web browsers for years now. As you can tell from the interview, the company’s also considering shipping extensions support in its mobile browser products in the future, as it is apparently and oft-requested feature, but it doesn’t sound like that’s coming anytime soon. I also got a brief demo of Opera 11 alpha in action, showing functional third-party extensions from reddit, StumbleUpon and Wikipedia. Check it out:        
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| eBay Adds QR Codes To Barcode Scanning App RedLaser Posted: 14 Oct 2010 06:50 AM PDT
The app, which has has seen over five million downloads from the App Store (that’s 3 additional million downloads since June), looks up price comparisons in its product database by scanning the barcode of an product. QR Codes, which is short for Quick Response (because they can be read quickly by a mobile phone through its camera), are used to take a piece of information from a transitory media and put it in to your cell phone – this can be links, videos, text, photos and more. With RedLaser’s QR Code integration, consumers can receive information such as links to videos, product reviews or websites to get more product information, contact information for customer support, or calendar appointments for upcoming sporting events and concerts The new app will also populate product results with eBay Marketplaces and Half.com listings. While QR codes are popular amongst the geek set, the technology hasn’t yet become a mainstream way to identify products in U.S. stores (barcodes dominate this arena). In fact, I can’t remember that the last time I saw a QR code on a product at a store. But eBay claims that QR codes are popular in Asia and other parts of the world and are gaining traction in the U.S.        
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| Fyesta Launches As A European Plancast, Aims To Tap The Intention Web Posted: 14 Oct 2010 06:14 AM PDT  Starting with the simple question "What are you doing next?", the newly launched Fyesta.com, developed by Germany's Blue Oceans Labs, lets users share their upcoming travel and event plans with select friends or to make them even more public so that they can be discovered further afield. The service hopes to tap into a sentiment its founders are calling the "intention web", which is based on future-looking and predictive data. Now clearly, in terms of events, Facebook also covers this space, as does sites like Plancast, which is probably Fyesta's closest competitor. 
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| Verizon Stores, Not To Be Outdone, Will Sell The iPad On October 28 Posted: 14 Oct 2010 06:07 AM PDT
Here are the pertinent details:
       
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| Skype 5.0 For Windows Debuts With Facebook Integration, Call Recovery And More Posted: 14 Oct 2010 06:01 AM PDT
After logging in via Facebook Connect, you’ll be able to see your Facebook News Feed with the Skype interface, post status updates that can be synced with your Skype mood message and comment and like friends' updates and wall posts. In terms of actual integration with the VoIP end of things, you can now call and SMS your Facebook friends on their mobile phones and landlines from Skype. You can also make a make a free Skype-to-Skype call if your Facebook friend is also a Skype contact. Video calling is on the rise (video calling on Skype accounted for approximately 40% of all Skype-to-Skype minutes in the first half of this year), so Skype is giving users a free trial of group video calling. The new version of Skype also features automatic call recovery, which helps you immediately reconnect calls that are interrupted due to Internet connection problems. Lastly, Skype will include an improved UI and a new home dashboard which features a feed of mood messages from your contacts, and tutorials on Skype features and more. Clearly the big news here is the Facebook integration, which is a big win for Skype when it comes to adding a social component to its product. It could help Skype, which is filing for an IPO, expand its userbase (Skype currently has 560 million registered users), and it make the VoIP product more relevant in Facebook users day-to-day interactions. It should be interesting to see where the two companies take this partnership and if the integration extends to Skype’s mobile apps. Of course, Facebook could just buy Skype.
       
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| 2010 Global Cleantech 100 List Dominated By American And Energy Efficiency Businesses Posted: 14 Oct 2010 04:26 AM PDT The Cleantech Group LLC in conjunction with the UK’s Guardian News and Media, released their second annual Global Cleantech 100 list on Wednesday. The rankings recognize private, for-profit, independent cleantech companies that are most likely to make a significant, global market impact over the next five to ten years. The top ranked, North American cleantech business on the list was Amyris Biotechnologies, which makes chemicals and biofuels from renewable sources. Amyris was initially backed by Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, Khosla Ventures and TPG Biotech. The company went public in late September; its stock is now trading on NASDAQ under the symbol AMRS for around $18.00. This year, 3,138 qualifying companies were nominated for the Cleantech Group’s list. A panel of 60 judges appointed by the San Francisco, Calif. and London-based researchers made the final determinations. Fifty-five percent of the companies who made the list were headquartered in the United States. Energy efficiency represented the list’s dominant industry subcategory with 15 entries, though solar and biofuel companies followed closely behind, each with 14 entries on the list. Backers of the Cleantech Global 100 companies this year hailed from 20 countries. Of the 226 funding organizations that invested in these cleantech leaders, VantagePoint Venture Partners funded more than any other. Their 13 portfolio businesses to grace the list were: Adura Technologies, AlertMe, Better Place, BrightSource Energy, Bridgelux, Chemrec, MiaSole, Ostara Nutrient Recovery Technologies, Serious Materials, Solarcentury, Solazyme, Tendril and Trilliant. Kleiner Perkins backed twelve Global Cleantech 100 companies that made this year’s list. Last year, American businesses also dominated the list. Only 43 of the companies that ranked last year appeared again in 2010. Some, like Tesla Motors and A123, went public. Others were acquired. One went out of business. Government funding agencies, and corporations that fund, acquire or partner with cleantech startups are having a bigger influence on cleantech businesses this year than last, the list researchers noted. Access to government funding can make or break a cleantech company, they cautioned. One example from the 2009 Global Cleantech 100 list negatively impacted by this reality was Imara, a Silicon Valley lithium-ion battery developer that closed shop before 2010. The U.S. Department of Energy passed Imara over for grants and stimulus money, at which point its private investors decided not to add to their earlier rounds. Imara faced tremendous capital requirements and an exit for its investors looked further and further away. The company would have had to pay for manufacturing overhead for months before generating revenue, and stood in competition against massive battery makers like Panasonic-Sanyo, Johnson Controls-Saft and a host of Asian battery manufacturing concerns that offer price competitiveness not yet seen by U.S. domestic players. Cleantech businesses on the list that were bolstered by U.S. government grants, contracts and guaranteed loans or other financing included: BrightSource and Sustain X in solar, Amyris, Enerkem and Zeachem in biofuels, the electric vehicle makers Fisker Automotive, and sustainable plastics and materials startup Novomer. The Cleantech Group LLC makes their global 100 report available for free, as a PDF download with registration.        
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| Opera In Numbers (It’s Pretty Huge) Posted: 14 Oct 2010 04:10 AM PDT Evidently most of the coverage on Opera Software today revolves around what products and features are coming from the Norwegian company next (Opera Mobile for Android and desktop browser extension capabilities in Opera 11, to name but a few). But the company also took the time to tout its size this morning at the press event in Oslo, and I have to admit some of the numbers blew me away. Let’s see: - 71 million people use Opera Mini today This brings the total of Opera products users to a staggering 140 million users (September 2010), although obviously there’s some overlap here. Opera says they welcome two new users every second, on average. Furthermore, thanks to its extensive network of handset makers and telecom operators from around the globe, Opera can potentially reach a far larger user base than that, which leads them to say they’re just getting started (they mentioned a combined subscriber base of 1.2 billion people as far as its partner network goes). Couple of examples as to what agreements Opera tends to strike with those partners: the Samsung Galaxy S phone will come preloaded with Opera Mini in multiple regions soon, and one of the largest manufacturers of mobile phones in the world, Mediatek, plans to equip all its future phones with Opera software. Some Opera Mini-specific stats: - handling 36.9 billion page views per month (76% growth since December 09) Downright massive, and still so much potential for growth. Opera notes that emerging markets are the fastest-growing for them (with India leading) and that they foresee this trend to continue for the next decade. Another bold statement: the company sees mobile Web usage outgrow desktop browser usage by 2015. Opera’s positioned pretty well in that regard, and the company still manages to fly largely under the radar these days. Let’s see if the newly announced products will be able to change all that. Edit: I’ve just visited Opera’s HQ in Oslo – there are about 350 people working here, which is half the number of employees the company has worldwide. For some fun pictures from their main office, go here. Bonus: behold the Opera Mini Globe:        
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| Involver Closes $8 Million Series C For Its Social Media Marketing Platform Posted: 14 Oct 2010 04:00 AM PDT
Involver was founded in 2007 and has 100,000 clients, including big names like The White House, Alicia Keys, and Facebook itself. Its core products include Facebook apps which a brand can use to customize and enhance their Facebook Page (audio players, signup forms, and many more). Involver also recently launched its ‘AMP’ Dashboard, which helps brands manage their presences on Twitter, Facebook, and other sites, tracking inbound tweets, Facebook comments, and allowing the brand to also respond to users directly from the same dashboard.        
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| Add Game Mechanics To Your Site In Five Minutes With BigDoor Posted: 14 Oct 2010 03:25 AM PDT
With this new service, the BigDoor platform will custom generate the code site owners need to to create virtual economies including defining site currency, defining transactions, defining virtual goods and well as building badges and providing analytics. In the same modularized gaming space as Badgeville and OneTrueFan, BigDoor’s customized widget implementation allows you to “add game mechanics to your site in less than five minutes,” according CEO Keith Smith. No hard core developing skills needed, you can just embed the BigDoor widget code on to your own source code if you’re looking for a way to tie real life user actions into social rewards in any of their multitude forms including badges, levels and leaderboards, etc, an ideal system for content sites that want to take advantage into the huge social gaming thrust currently popular. While the toolbar-like “MiniBar” is not as aesthetically appealing as Badgeville badges, BigDoor is committed to continuing its movement towards the accessibility trend, announcing alongside this new product a 70% service price reduction and simplified cost structure for new clients. Seattle-based BigDoor has $5.47 million in funding from the Foundry Group and is also announcing an additional $250k in financing from Seattle’s Founder Co-Op to coincide with today’s product launch, intending to use the financing to continue to turn real life action into monetizeable online social rewards.
       
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| Intuit’s New Version Of Quicken Gets Mintified With Financial Data Insights And More Posted: 14 Oct 2010 02:58 AM PDT
One of the reasons Aaron Patzer founded personal finance site Mint.com was because of his frustrations with Intuit’s financial management software Quicken. Quicken, says Patzer wasn’t user-friendly, and in Patzer’s own words “felt like a product from 1996.” Flash forward two years, and Patzer’s Mint.com (which was also a TechCrunch50 winner) was bought by Intuit for $170 million in the Fall of 2009. Clearly, Intuit perhaps agreed with Patzer, who is now vice president and general manager of Intuit's personal finance group, that its own financial products needed a a makeover. Today, Quicken 2011 is debuting its software for Windows that includes more features from Mint.com. This is the first version of Quicken to reflect the collaboration of the Quicken Desktop and Mint.com product and engineering teams since last fall. The new version for Windows users includes 360-degree financial view that brings together all accounts, including bank, credit card, investment and retirement. Intuit has also added support for 7,000 more banks and now lists 12,000 banks and credit union in the U.S. Quicken’s new automated engine categorizes transactions (i.e. business, clothes, groceries, etc.) Credit card payments are automatically matched to transfers from checking or savings, to ensure they're not double-counted. You can also create budgets within the software based on an individual's historical spending and the software will include expense alerts and a graph to project cash flow help users avoid late fees and penalties. Pricing for Quicken 2011 ranges from $29.99 to $89.99. Patzer says of the new version: “It combines the best of Quicken with what we built into Mint.com to help ease the burden on people trying to manage their money…The product is customizable and intuitive, two things that people have come to expect from modern software." One feature that is clearly lacking between Quicken and Mint is the ability to sync your Quicken desktop software with your Mint.com web account, and integrate the data (Quicken Online users are being merged to Mint.com). But Patzer says that this will soon be added to the suite of products. His goal is for Quicken and Mint to work seamlessly across all platforms, including mobile. On another note, the Intuit acquisition doesn’t seem to have stunted Mint.com’s growth. Patzer says that the platform has grown from 1.7 million users in September of 2009 to 4.2 million users currently.
       
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| The Slow Race To A Translating Telephone Posted: 14 Oct 2010 02:32 AM PDT
It turns out that isn’t correct. Google PR told me today that “it is a ways off” from being launched. But Google has been talking about the product, which translates voice into another language and then speaks the translation to the listener, quite a bit lately. CEO Eric Schmidt mentioned it during his talk at TechCrunch Disrupt late last month. And Product Management Director Hugo Barra (recently in the TCTV studio) actually demo’d the product in Berlin in early September. Watch that demo here. But this isn’t a one horse race. Microsoft has their own version of the product, too. I saw Microsoft’s translating telephone live, and video’d the demo (also, oddly enough, between an English and German speaker). Microsoft didn’t seem to be in any rush to productize their translation service, either. But I hope one of them does, and soon. The market for this is huge, even if the services don’t work all that well at first. Being able to pick up the phone and talk to someone without a common language would help make the world a smaller place. Business relationships and friendships could be forged that would otherwise be ignored. And the device would also be very useful for communicating with alien races, as shown on Star Trek. In that wonderful television series, however, the universal translator wasn’t invented until late in our 22nd century. I don’t have that kind of time, guys. First one to market gets one heck of a TechCrunch Review, and free AOL tshirts for the whole team. Even though the translations will be hilarious. Let’s do this! Then, while sitting in my self driving car with nothing much to do, I can call people in Finland and have interesting conversations about the history of Nokia.        
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| Coming Soon: Opera Mobile For Android, Desktop Browser Extensions Posted: 14 Oct 2010 01:59 AM PDT I’m here in Oslo, Norway, attending Opera Software‘s global press day, and the company’s just made a number of announcements on stage – unfortunately while I wasn’t able to enjoy a second of internet connectivity. Now that things have cleared up on that front, here are some of the most important things Opera’s executive team announced: Opera Mobile for Android While the company’s other mobile browser product, Opera Mini, has been available for Android handsets since July, the platform will soon be getting its full-fledged browser, Opera Mobile. The product will be free of charge and available in beta sometime next month. Opera 11 with add-ons Finally, Opera’s desktop browser will get the ability to be customized by users via extensions. No word on availability but you should be able to download it before the end of the year. Hardware acceleration and pinch-to-zoom for Opera’s mobile browsers Both Opera Mini and Opera Mobile users will soon be able to download a more polished version that – finally – includes pinch-to-zoom functionality, which makes for a much smoother browsing experience any way you look at it. Also on the roadmap: hardware acceleration for smooth panning and zooming (which will be useful for a number of user interface experiences, as well as more robust gameplay etc.) Update: in a later Q&A session, Opera’s chief development officer said that the latter capabilities will be available for the Android-compatible versions. He did mention that all phones that support multi-touch (including the iPhone) will at some point gain pinch-to-zoom functionalities.        
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| The Gas Has Been Passed From iPhone To Windows Phone 7: Fart App Tops The Charts Posted: 13 Oct 2010 10:54 PM PDT Do you smell that? It’s the sweet smell of success. Or — well, something. Windows Phone 7 devices aren’t even available to the public yet, but it’s looking like Microsoft may replicate Apple’s iPhone success in at least one important area: fart apps. Even though the phones aren’t going to launch for a few more weeks, the app store is up and running within Microsoft’s Zune software. And those reviewers and/or employees with devices are downloading and using the first batch of must-have apps. The top-selling app? Farting Dino. Yep. I don’t know what’s better: the fact that an app named Farting Dino is the first hit for Windows Phone 7, or that it’s a paid app, and people are actually paying for it. iPhone users have long been in love with fart apps, but almost all of them have been free. Perhaps Windows Phone 7 really is going to change the space. It’s interesting that even though Apple has since decided that fart apps are no longer kosher, Microsoft has said they’ll be fine with them. That commitment is clearly going to be put to the test early. [image: flickr/artificialignorance] [via twitter/ai]        
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| When All Else Fails, Put Up The AOL-Yahoo Trial Balloon Posted: 13 Oct 2010 10:30 PM PDT On the face of it, this whole idea of AOL somehow buying Yahoo seems absurd. AOL’s market cap ($2.6 billion) is about one eighth the size of Yahoo’s ($20 billion). But as the Wall Street Journal reports, private equity firms Silver Lake Partners and Blackstone Group are penciling out ways to combine AOL with Yahoo in some sort of reverse merger, with Tim Armstrong becoming CEO. The thinking is that Yahoo could sell it’s 40 percent stake of Alibaba (which could be worth as much as $10 billion) back to Alibaba, and shed some other assets as well to shrink the company to a more manageable size. AOL would do a reverse merger into Yahoo, and the private equity firms would finance the whole thing with debt, possibly taking the newly merged company private. It sounds like a pretty tortuous transaction. (Disclaimer: Although I am now an AOL employee and TechCrunch is a recent acquiree, I have no direct knowledge of these talks one way or another). Even the WSJ notes that nobody’s bothered to ask Yahoo what they think about this idea yet. That’s because it’s a trial balloon. If the stock goes up on the rumor, the idea could gain currency among shareholders and Yahoo’s board might have to actually consider it. By leaking the details of the proposed deal to the WSJ, the people who want to make the deal happen are presenting the idea directly to shareholders rather than privately discussing it with Yahoo first. That fact alone makes it a long shot. Great deals that make sense financially usually get worked out first in private between the two companies merging. Public trial balloons like this one go up when shareholders are so frustrated with a company, as they are today with Yahoo, that they grasp at any chance at a new direction. But let’s look at how such a deal could work. Combining the two companies is not a completely crazy idea. It’s not the first time an AOL-Yahoo combo has been considered either. Two years ago, an AOL-Yahoo merger was thrown out there as an alternative to a Microsoft buyout. Heck, Steve Case once tried to buy Yahoo for $2 million back when it was just Jerry Yang and David Filo. Things are different this time around. AOL is once again a newly public company trying to reinvent itself as a 21st Century digital media company. It one of the Web’s largest publishers and advertisers, with particular strength in online display ads, much like Yahoo. The online advertising business benefits from scale. Henry Blodget has detailed many of the reasons why an AOL-Yahoo merger makes sense: they both operate online media properties which attract advertisers by their sheer size and reach; they can cut costs by eliminating duplication (mail, homepage, IM, sports, finance, ad network, etc.); they would gain more leverage with search and media partners. All of that is true. Buying scale makes sense to some extent. And Yahoo buying AOL, rather than the other way around, would make even more sense and be a lot cleaner. (Armstrong can still become CEO, and Bartz can become chairman). But there are downsides as well. While Yahoo and AOL are distracted with firing people and integrating business units and backend technologies for at least two years, the Internet will continue to move ahead without them. Big mergers rarely work out well. While it might look convincing enough on paper, what Armstrong and Bartz (two aging portal players proposing to prop each other up) really have to ask themselves is this: Do they want to merge with the past, or invent the future? Merging doesn’t help them with social. It doesn’t help them with search. It doesn’t help them with mobile, and it barely helps them with local. It only helps them with one thing: scale. And that may no longer be enough. Photo credit: Flickr/Marcus Vegas.        
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| Gravity Regroups For Round Two: The Personalization War Posted: 13 Oct 2010 09:00 PM PDT
“At a high level Gravity is an evolution on forums,” I wrote when they launched. But the core of what makes Gravity special was the technology to track the Interest Graph: “Gravity has created a new way of thinking about and exploiting conversational data. They call the way they track and predict the relationships between people and things the Interest Graph (a play on Social Graph, a popular way of describing online relationships between people).” Even though that was less than a year ago, the world has changed dramatically. Twitter opened its data stream to all comers, and Facebook has launched products that focus like a laser on building out their own Interest Graph. As a destination site and service, Gravity had a real problem – getting people to use them at all. By March they’d seen where the world was heading, CEO Amit Kapur told me earlier today, and the company started retooling to start thinking about the Interest Graph across the open Web. And today, just minutes ago, they relaunched their website to begin to show what they’re working on. The old service has been moved to convo.io. Gravity itself will focus on helping users and third party services personalize content. The company isn’t really saying yet what that means, although I saw a few of the upcoming applications and services today that they’ll roll out over the next several weeks. At a high level they will look at social stream data for individuals – Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and other services – to create an incredibly accurate Interest Graph for a person. That interest graph data can then be used, with the user’s permission, by third parties for content and ad personalization. I saw my own Interest Graph based only on my Facebook and Twitter streams over the last several months and it’s scary-accurate. And one thing is clear – the conversational data from my Twitter stream shows much more accurate interest data. Facebook’s data is still more of “what I want the world to see.” Will the company succeed? They still have most of their $10 million venture round in the bank, says Kapur, and a very low burn rate with just 19 employees. And the best companies are always willing to quickly adapt as the world changes. We’ll wait to pass judgment until the new applications and services begin to launch, but I will say this. We’d certainly pay for the ability to use the personalization technology I saw today at TechCrunch to help target content to users.        
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| Web 2.0 Acquisitions, The Game Posted: 13 Oct 2010 08:39 PM PDT Who isn’t a sucker for maps, and especially maps about the Internet, and especially interactive maps about the Internet that also function as a “Who should acquire whom?” acquisition guessing game where people can add their suggestions about what companies should buy what other companies just like you guys do in our comments sections? Thus I present to you the Web 2.0 Summit “Points Of Control” map in “Acquisition mode,” which apparently charts where something called “The Battle for the Network Economy” is waged. Warning: Like some of these companies and their business models, I’m having trouble getting parts of the map to actually work. Click map for interactive version. Via/ John Battelle        
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| Kiva President On The Next 5 Years And Why Zynga Is Their Biggest Rival (TCTV) Posted: 13 Oct 2010 06:58 PM PDT Who is Kiva’s biggest competitor? If you rattled off a list of non-profit-centric startups, the micro-lending site’s President Premal Shah would tell you that you’re dead wrong. Try Zynga, the gaming behemoth that has given rise to Farmville and Mafia Wars and other disturbingly ubiquitous internet classics. What does virtual fertilizer have to do with micro-finance? Shah says a lot: It’s a never-ending fight for eyeballs and discretionary income.
That perception will dramatically shape Kiva’s trajectory. According to Shah, over the next few years, the non-profit will focus on the integration of game mechanics, social tools, mobile and new philanthropic verticals like green and water loans. In terms of numbers, Shah predicts Kiva will raise $1 billion in microloans by 2015. Those are mighty goals when you consider that this startup only raised $500,000 in microloans in 2005, its first year of operation, and then $2 million in 2006.From those early months to today, it’s been a dramatic race up the hill for Kiva, which officially celebrates its 5th anniversary in San Francisco this evening. Since it’s launch, Kiva has grown to 60 employees, operating in San Francisco, New York and a smattering of far flung locales, the organization has also added student loans and (somewhat controversially) loans to US citizens. Kiva’s very far away from the $1 billion mark, but Kiva has raised $170 million in microloans and assisted roughly 400,000 entrepreneurs. Kiva is currently raising $1 million every six days. Kiva has proven itself to be beyond a fad and the robust growth trend seems to imply that Shah and co-founder Matthew Flannery do not have to worry about stagnation in the near term. However, during our on an off camera interview, Shah was definitely anxious (as I believe a good president should be) about the changing nature of the web and whether Kiva was tardy in its efforts to innovate. Shah is cooking up an ambitious plan, which he will deploy over the next few years, to overhaul the site from design to structure— remaining true to its principles and its core mission, but adding layers that will make it more social, interactive and simply fun. Not quite a Foursquare (although there will be badges) or Zynga of philanthropy, but rather a more engaging nonprofit that borrows the most successful elements of these internet sensations.
On the mobile front, the company is already experimenting in Kenya, where they are working with a local partner to manage an SMS platform to facilitate conversation between Kiva and the people receiving loans (and eventually between lender and recipient). Depending on this pilot program, Kiva will ultimately roll out this feature to other locations. Shah is on the right path here. Unlocking mobile, social and gaming (which the site has not really leveraged) could easily propel Kiva to the $1 billion mark by 2015, or well before. However, there is one major obstacle — one that Shah acknowledges is legitimate, if not issue number one. Regardless of the roadmap, Kiva needs high quality engineers to come on board. Right now the team has 10, Shah would like to at least double that. He says the hope is to hire 15 people for Kiva’s staff this year, with the majority of that being engineers. It’s challenging for any startup to recruit Silicon Valley’s top engineers, but for a nonprofit (which generally pays somewhere below the top salary bracket) it’s an especially frustrating task. When I asked Shah why he thought Kiva was not more effective in recruitment, he said part of the problem was a lack of awareness and the cultural attitudes towards the nonprofit sector: “Part of it is people when they think of nonprofits it’s something that they do once a year, maybe around the holidays, a lot of us in the back of our minds wanted to do something all our lives, but only after something happens, like once I retire type of thing. I actually think there’s a growing consciouness…of a lot of people who are talented developers or product managers who want to do something like Kiva just didn’t know that the opportunity exists.” Bonus footage: Kiva’s Shah expands on his next 5-year plan:
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| Text Answers Service ChaCha Nabs $20 Million In Series F Posted: 13 Oct 2010 05:46 PM PDT
ChaCha, founded by Scott Jones, has been around almost five years and has answered nearly one billion questions. This latest financing round follows a $7 million Series E in December of 2009, which means that ChaCha now boasts a whopping $72 million in funding to expand its free text messaging product. You can ask a question on ChaCha via text and via voice, with 98% of users texting. With 15 million uniques a month, ChaCha was most recently in the news for standing up to the T-Mobile tax on text messages as the company sends over 2 million text messages a day. With companies like Formspring and Quora reviving the burgeoning Q & A space, it’ll be interesting to watch what ChaCha does with the money in order to expand its current reach.        
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| Style Factory Is A Crowdsourced Designer Furniture Shop Posted: 13 Oct 2010 05:31 PM PDT
StyleFactory is a relatively new online store that hopes to alleviate at least part of this problem. They feature items by “the hottest talent in the world,” and you, sir or madam, get to vote on whether a particular item should be manufactured at all. Saves cost, leverages social input, and it has big shiny Facebook and Twitter share buttons. What’s not to like?        
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| Going Meg-ative: The Anti-Whitman Ads are Sad, Bad and Dangerous for Democracy Posted: 13 Oct 2010 05:27 PM PDT
I mean, I admit it's catchy. "I'm not voting for Meeeeegggg, Meeeeegggg, Meeeeegggg…" The California Correctional Peace Officers Association's attack ad aimed at undermining Meg Whitman's campaign for state Governor… "It's not all about Meeeeggg, Meeeeeggg, Meeegggg…" …which depicts the former eBay CEO as a Jib-Jab-esque bobble head doll. "Shady lady, job deporter, bobbling her bobble head.” In fact, since hearing it for the first time last week, I haven't been able to get the tune out of my head. And isn’t that the cornerstone of a decent ad? A catchy tune? Particularly, as in this case, a catchy tune which takes a bucket full of raw "facts" and transforms them, through song, into a message which prompts even the most dunderheaded punter into outrage that a) Meg Whitman is very wealthy, b) during her time at eBay, the company outsourced two out of five jobs overseas c) something about using eminent domain to buy her neighbour's house d) she really is very, very wealthy. In that regard, "Meg For Meg" is a triumph, in the same way that Tom Lehrer's proposed theme song for a movie based on the story of Oedipus Rex is a triumph. “There once was a man named Oedipus Rex The difference is that Lehrer was kidding, and his audience was in on the gag, elitists that they were. In the case of the CCPOA's Whitman ad, neither is true. And that's the first of the spot's three problems: putting aside the question of whether negative ads work at all, by attacking Whitman so personally, the CCPOA achieves the opposite of what they set out to do. They present themselves as a bunch of bullies, making the audience feel sorry for Meg Whiman. Which is no mean feat considering the CCPOA is a union representing 30,000 hard-working correctional peace officers and she's a Republican billionaire. The second problem with the spot is a purely artistic one: the catchy memorable part of the song – the chorus – is not the core message of the attack. Instead, the core message is hidden in the verse… "Well Meg’s got a house in pretty Telluride, The catchy memorable part is a cutesy bobble head doll (which makes Whitman look more like Marissa Mayer) and the refrain "Meg, Meg, Meg." I don't have a vote in this race, but if I did, thanks to that song I'd be entering the voting booth with cutesy feelings towards Whitman and her name stuck in my head. “Meg, Meg, Meg,” I’d hum as I put my cross next to the candidate nearest the front of my mind. #AttackAdFail, as the kids would have it said. But the third thing wrong with the ad is the one that, depressingly, is the one least likely to matter to voters: its whole message is breathtakingly disingenuous. Take this verse… "Since she moved in she’s been the head of eBay, This, along with the fact that Meg Whitman is (lest we forget) very wealthy, is why – we’re told – she is unsuitable for public office. Whitman sent American jobs overseas as head of eBay, so what's to stop her doing the same to state employees? To underscore the point, the video flashes up the words "Teachers?" "Cops?" (Presumably “correctional peace officers?” wouldn’t fit in the little animated stars.) Why yes, CCPOA, as CEO of a public company that employs thousands of programmers and customer service employees, Whitman chose to locate many of those jobs in countries where labour costs are lower. And so of course when citizens of Whitman's California call 911 it's likely that the call will be routed to a call center worker in Bangalore who will immediately dispatch a plane full of Mumbai's finest constables on the 25 hour flight to San Francisco. And heaven help the school bus drivers who will have to make the opposite journey every day to ferry Californian kids to their new classrooms in downtown Delhi. The fact is, whether you agree with her politics or not, Meg Whitman's decisions as the head of eBay have little to no bearing on how she would behave in public office. Or if they do, then many of the signs seem to be positive. eBay is a public company and as such Whitman's move to cut staffing costs and maximise shareholder value wasn't so much a decision, as a duty. As Scott Devitt, an analyst at Stifel Nicolaus & Co told CNET, “Meg Whitman was a phenomenal success running eBay for a decade… she has overseen an 88-times increase in revenue and a more than 1300 percent return in stock since the IPO." She also, it’s always worth mentioning, became very wealthy. As a public servant, Whitman's duties won't be to shareholders, but to the public so it’s at least possible that she’ll sho the same dedication to duty there as she did in private office. Not only is the CCPOA's attack ad using an apples to oranges comparison, but worse still it's setting a dangerous precedent for other business leaders considering public office. On the face of it, business leaders have many of the qualities that we need in government: communication skills, an obsession with managing costs, and (to mix a metaphor or three) an ability to wrangle countless conflicting interests into a single, well-oiled machine. But if the CCPOA has its way, and voters start seeing those traits as worthy of attack, then the voters of California – and America – might very quickly find themselves with no qualified candidate to vote for. “California Governor: only impoverished candidates with no successful management experience may apply.” Failing that, there's always outsourcing. Information provided by CrunchBase        
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| HasWifi Shows You Which Flights Have Wifi Posted: 13 Oct 2010 05:13 PM PDT
My point? HasWifi can nip this problem in the bud, by allowing you to check on whether your flights will have sweet, sweet Wifi before you buy them. Says founder Anthony Petito on his motivation behind building it:
Petito decided to build something that solved his problem fast and he came up with HasWifi. And while there is a social voting feature and you can also search for Wifi flights through Tripit, HasWifi’s search features are currently limited. Currently only serving six, Petito plans on expanding to offer more carriers both in the US and abroad. The company is also building an API to allow ticketing sites like Expedia to use HasWifi data, which would eliminate the need to visit the HasWifi.com site while purchasing flights. As far as eliminating the need to visit HasWifi all together, well that’s up to the airline carriers. Thanks: Rich Tweet via fivethirtyeight        
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| Chilean Miner Rescue Becomes Most-Watched Ustream Event Ever Posted: 13 Oct 2010 05:06 PM PDT By now you’ve doubtless heard about the ongoing rescue of 33 Chilean miners, who have been tragically trapped 2,000 feet underground since August 5. After months of waiting, the miners are being rescued one by one (as of this writing three are still below ground), and media organizations are broadcasting the footage of the recue effort live to a reported 1 billion people. That massive worldwide audience has led to some new records for live-streaming service Ustream, which has been broadcasting feeds from media organizations around the world. Ustream says that it has served 5.3 million streams over the course of the rescue, tallying figures between 4AM October 11 until 4AM this morning (given the fact that the rescue is still going on, the final count will be significantly higher). In contrast, the two previous record holders — Michael Jackson’s memorial and President Obama’s inauguration — drew 4.6 million and 3.8 million total streams, respectively, which makes this Ustream’s most-watched event ever. To be fair though, the mining rescue operation has spanned a longer period of time than those events, so this isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison. Other sites are seeing similarly high traffic: CNN reports that it saw 1.2 million live video streams on Tuesday and over 2 million live video streams on Wednesday, though that isn’t a new record for the site — it had a whopping 26.9 million streams during the Obama inauguration.
       
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eBay is 
Now this is an odd – if telling – move. All Wi-Fi-only 
Skype is about to become much more social with the 
White label game mechanics startup 
Google’s translating telephone, 
We’ve just heard that mobile Q & A service 
"Meeeegggg for Meg"
We’ve all been there and I was just there, by there I mean making the grave mistake of booking a flight without Wifi. As a person who works primarily online, I pretty much feel entitled to doing my job from anywhere now that 
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