The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Mark Zuckerberg On Facebook’s Strategy For China (And His Wardrobe)
- Deals Aggregator DailyD Raises $5 Million
- Getting To The Bottom Of The Crazy Yahoo-Groupon Rumors
- So What If Google Does It?
- Startup School: Reid Hoffman On The Burden Of Competition
- Y Combinator Startup School Kicks Off With Founders Of Sun, Groupon, And YC
- TripTrace: A Place Book For Where You’ve Been And Where You’re Going
- The Father Of CSS Talks HTML5, CSS3 (A TCTV Interview)
| Mark Zuckerberg On Facebook’s Strategy For China (And His Wardrobe) Posted: 16 Oct 2010 06:38 PM PDT
Zuckerberg says that for years Facebook didn’t have a strategic plan for international growth — each month, the site would take off in a seemingly random country with no apparent pattern (obviously this approach paid off). But there are still a handful of countries that Facebook isn’t winning in, or isn’t on a path to win: China, Japan, South Korea, and Russia. “China is extremely complex,” Zuckerberg says, and the site is taking its time to make sure it approaches the world’s most populous country with the right strategy. The hope is that if Facebook can show that, as a Western company, it can succeed in a place where no other Western company has before (like Russia), that will help it get the momentum to figure out the right partnerships it needs to succeed in China. With respect to openness in China (or lack thereof), Zuckerberg says that different countries around the world have different values, which Facebook has historically respected. For example, in Germany it’s illegal to post content about Nazism, so Facebook blocks it in Germany (but not in other countries). It has a similar policy with regard to drawings of Muhammad in Pakistan, where it’s illegal to post that content. Zuckerberg says that he’s spent a lot of time personally examining Chinese culture (including daily Chinese language lessons) to help with this. Above all, it’s clear that Facebook would like to establish a strong presence in China down the road, explaining, “How can you connect the whole world if you leave out 1.6 billion people?” Oh, and about Zuckerberg’s wardrobe? He says that while The Social Network got a whole lot wrong, he actually owns every shirt and fleece that appears in the movie. Image by Robert Scoble        
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| Deals Aggregator DailyD Raises $5 Million Posted: 16 Oct 2010 05:22 PM PDT
DailyD is was started by LowerMyBills founder Matt Coffin and DailyStrength founder Doug Hirsch and currently aggregates deals in 53 cities while also offering exclusive family deals in Los Angeles. Jim Simons, a partner at Split Rock Partners who also backed LowerMyBills, is listed on the form. We have contacted DailyD for more information as to what extent Simons and other investors are involved and will update the post when we hear back.        
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| Getting To The Bottom Of The Crazy Yahoo-Groupon Rumors Posted: 16 Oct 2010 04:15 PM PDT
One source earlier this week said that a $1.7 billion acquisition was all but done, but Groupon’s management team balked and killed the deal. That’s certainly juicy and consistent with Yahoo’s failure to acquire Yelp and Foursquare. Another source close to Yahoo said much the same thing, but suggested the price was higher, well north of $2 billion. And yet another source said that Yahoo offered a price so high that Groupon had to take it seriously. But ultimately a deal never happened. If discussions were taking place, they were clearly at way above $2 billion, and probably above $3 billion. Groupon was valued at $1.35 billion earlier this year. A sale in the $2 billion range would mean that Groupon sees a major problem in their business model. Otherwise, they’d be in it for the long haul. On the other side, a source close to Groupon tells me that there haven’t been any serious acquisition discussions with Yahoo at all. But we actually think this is incorrect. Also, we’ve checked with some of the other usual suspects who’d likely be bidding against Yahoo in a Groupon acquisition. They’ve not heard a thing. We have confirmed that Groupon and Yahoo are working on a large distribution deal of some kind. A smaller deal is already in place, but something much bigger is coming in the next few weeks. Deals with eBay and Citysearch are probably also being signed. But for now, no acquisition. Either because discussions never happened (unlikely) or because Groupon management balked at being part of Yahoo (most likely), or because something else disrupted the discussions.        
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| Posted: 16 Oct 2010 02:51 PM PDT
Is no startup safe from Google’s finger in every pot? The folks at WhatIfGoogleDoesIt.com have decided to use crowdsourcing in order to at least give startup founders some verbal ammunition when the inevitable “What if Google does it?” question comes up during a VC pitch or demo. My favorite user-contributed answer so far, aside from the one above:
Zing!        
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| Startup School: Reid Hoffman On The Burden Of Competition Posted: 16 Oct 2010 02:24 PM PDT
Hoffman says that when he’s looking at startups, he often encounters entrepreneurs who think their product will be immensely useful once it gains traction. Unfortunately they oftentimes fail to put enough thinking into how they’re going to get from zero users to that critical mass that turns their product into something that people actually want to use. And that can be lethal, because getting traction is no given. Hoffman touched on a point that was raised earlier during today’s event: it’s cheaper than ever to start a company, because you can tap into cloud services like AWS instead of having to build out your own infrastructure with a significant capital investment. But that has the downside of meaning that there are many hundreds and thousands more sites being created than there used to be, which means there’s more noise than ever. Hoffman says that people go to around seven sites, give our take two, on a regular basis. In order for your site to succeed you need to break through the noise, and maybe even displace one of these mainstay sites. And therein lies the big problem: you don’t really have to worry about Google or Microsoft doing exactly what you’re doing (they probably won’t). Rather, you need to worry about rising above a whole “zone” of competitors. Even if your product is superior to the others, consumers are usually going to use the product they stumble across first. In other words, even if your competition is completely mediocre, they’re still making your progress that much slower because you’re vying for the same customers, investors, and press. He says that one of the things that helped make LinkedIn successful was that there simply wasn’t much competition when he founded the company back in 2003. Hoffman also talked about some of the pivots he’s been through during his time as an executive at PayPal and later at LinkedIn. He subscribes to the “fail fast” mantra — you need to ship your product as soon as you can, and if you’re not embarrassed by the first product you launch, you’ve waiting too long. He recalled one relevant anecdote to this theory: just before LinkedIn was due to launch, his team of engineers said that they had to wait until they could implement a “contact finder” that would help users hone in on the kind of people they wanted to connect with. Hoffman asked his team if it would be possible to wait and implement this after the launch. The answer was yes, so Hoffman said to launch as planned, and that they’d implement the Contact Finder as soon as possible if it was clear that users wanted it. Seven years later, LinkedIn has yet to launch the feature — it simply isn’t needed. Photo Credit: Alexa Lee        
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| Y Combinator Startup School Kicks Off With Founders Of Sun, Groupon, And YC Posted: 16 Oct 2010 01:26 PM PDT Today Y Combinator is holding its sixth Startup School, where a roster of Silicon Valley’s most experienced and successful founders and investors come together to lecture hundreds of eager entrepreneurs. The event is always extremely popular, and today is no exception — the lecture hall on Stanford’s campus is packed to the brim. Today’s event will feature eleven talks, including lectures from the likes of Paul Graham, Mark Zuckerberg, and Ron Conway. The first session — which featured Andy Bechtolsheim, Paul Graham, and Andrew Mason — just ended. You can find my notes from each talk below, and we’ll be posting more later today on each cluster of speakers. You can also watch a live stream of the event right here. Andy Bechtolsheim Sun founder Andy Bechtolsheim's talk revolved around innovation. He kicked off with a brief history of the incredible changes we've seen in the computer industry in a brief period of time, with the number of transistors on a chip increasing a million fold since 1970 and networking technology seeing similarly impressive gains. Bechtolsheim says that there are a few key lessons from what's gone on in terms of web innovation: first, the time from innovation to adoption can be remarkably short (see Google's rapid adoption, for example). And the key to success isn't to be first (after all, there were many search engines available before Google came out). Instead, it's important to be the first to solve the right problem. So why is there so much focus on web companies? Bechtolsheim says that it's primarily because starting one is so cheap, relatively speaking. You no longer need to have your own infrastructure — with AWS, you can get up and running for cheap. It's also cheaper than ever to raise awareness due to the proliferation of blogs, Twitter, etc. Paul Graham There's an increasing tension between so-called Super Angels and Venture Capitalists (which manifested itself in AngelGate). Unlike traditional angel investors, Super Angels are investing other people's money, which makes them similar to the VC camp. But, unlike VCs which have historically invested large sums of money (usually $1M+), Super Angels are happy to make many, much smaller investments. This gives entrepreneurs more control — they can raise exactly how much they want instead of having to take a giant Series A round. It's also led to larger VCs making small (~$100K) investments to compete more directly with the Super Angels. This has another consequence: because VCs are mostly price-insensitive at this point (they view these seed investments as options to invest larger sums down the road), they don't mind if the startup valuation grows higher than it would have. Which is great for the entrepreneur, but is bad for Super Angels who do care about the startup's valuation. This, Graham says, could lead to what looks like another bubble with skyrocketing valuations, but hopefully without the pop at the end. In the long term, this probably isn't sustainable — Graham says that VCs and Super Angels will increasingly become one and the same, as the top VCs who add value are weeded out from the rest. But he thinks that process will take time, since the VC industry moves at a "glacially slow" pace. Until then, we'll keep seeing those sky-high valuations for companies that appeal to both VCs (who think the company has a chance to IPO) and Super Angels (who think the company has a chance at an early, lucrative exit). For more on this topic, see our post on The $4 Million Line. Graham will also be publishing an essay covering his talk, which we'll post a link to as soon as it goes live. Andrew Mason Groupon founder Andrew Mason decided to take a different approach with his talk: he gave an old pitch for his original startup The Point, which eventually evolved into the wildly successful Groupon. The Point was a collective action platform that would let users take action together — for example, to raise money to build a dome around Chicago to block out the city's frigid winter weather (yes, this was an actual initiative on the site). But Mason’s (old) pitch wasn't a good one, and The Point never really gained traction. So what went wrong? Mason pointed out some of the original company's main flaws: it was about a vision more than making a tool that was actually useful. Mason was thinking of what the Point could become five, ten years down the road, without figuring out how to get people to actually use it. Another problem: you need to recognize and embrace your constraints, and figure out what's practical. You also need to realize that you'll probably fail. Many people who are thinking of launching startups are very smart — they've succeeded in the past and the notion of failure isn't really conceivable to them (Mason fell into this camp when he was working on The Point). Now, at Groupon, he constantly reminds himself of ways he could fail — the company has a bunch of magazine covers hanging on the wall near the entrance featuring companies that have gone downhill after massive success, like MySpace and AOL. Image by Robert Scoble/Scobleizer on Flickr        
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| TripTrace: A Place Book For Where You’ve Been And Where You’re Going Posted: 16 Oct 2010 11:31 AM PDT
PlaceBook is now known as TripTrace. Still in private beta, it’s a service that allows you to note places around the world you’ve been to. And places you’d like to go to in the future. All of this is done in two books (dare I call them “Place Books”?): your Atlas (places you’ve been), and your Travel (places you want to go). There’s a heavy emphasis on maps in these books, and all of your places are marked by pins (red for where you’ve been, blue for where you’re going). The key to TripTrace is that it makes the complicated notion of travel planning relatively simple. They do this both by making the process a more visual experience, and with a series of tools. One of those is a TripClipper bookmarklet. With it, you can easily take notes as you’re browsing around the web, to bookmark things you find that you might like to do on a trip. Maybe you’re reading an article on a good restaurant in Paris, for example. With the bookmarklet, you can highlight what you want to save and it will be stored in your TripTrace books. You can also email in things to add to your books. And eventually, of course, the plan is to add mobile applications to the arsenal as well so you can tag and note things on the go. When you go back to the site, you’ll see the data you’ve saved as well as a ton of other data that TripTrace pulls from around the web via APIs. You know the drill here: Flickr pictures, Foursquare places, all types of events — eventually, anything that is location tagged, Rubin says. All of this data provides a rich place experience within TripTrace itself and will hopefully help you make decisions on places you want to go next. In the Travel book, you can use any of the things you’ve clipped to help you get a costimate for a trip to that particular city. While this obviously isn’t exact, something like this is very helpful when determining if a trip is even feasible in the first place. TripTrace pulls information on things like flights and hotels based on your current location and dates you want to travel. It should be fairly obvious by now that the eventual business model for TripTrace will be lead generation. If the service can team up with the Kayaks of the world, they can probably make for a pretty nice customer experience, while getting paid. Partnerships in the travel space is what Rubin and his team will go after. And they have some other ideas for possible sources of revenue as well — perhaps actual place books? But that’s down the road. First, they need to nail the user experience. “The Holy Grail isn’t just getting stuff on a map, it’s mixing personal and private with public and common data,” Rubin says. “If you put that in one place, it’s enormously powerful,” he continues. But again, he notes that it need to be in a format and experience that’s useful. Rubin and his team have quite a bit knowledge about merging public data with more personalized data, as many of them are ex-Netflix guys. Rubin himself was a director of product management there and was instrumental in the development of the website. TripTrace currently has data for about 20,000 cities, and they’re pulling in more data each day. The service is officially an offshoot from PublicEarth, a free wiki database for locations, which has raised some money in the past. But Rubin notes this is a whole new team working on TripTrace, and they hope to be ready for a public launch sometime in the next few weeks. Provided they don’t change their name back to PlaceBook and get sued out of existence by Facebook first, of course.        
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| The Father Of CSS Talks HTML5, CSS3 (A TCTV Interview) Posted: 16 Oct 2010 08:55 AM PDT Lots of abbreviations in the title and URL, but with an audience like TechCrunch’s I’m not too worried about the point coming across or not. At this week’s Opera press event held in Oslo, Norway, I had a chance to spend a couple of minutes talking to Håkon Wium Lie, who is not only the software company’s chief technology officer but also broadly known as the “father of CSS”. In 1994 while at W3C, Wium Lie was the man who proposed the concept of Cascading Style Sheets, which describes how documents are presented on screens, in print, or perhaps how they are pronounced. A graduate of the MIT Media Lab, he also spent quite some time at CERN working on the World Wide Web project together with Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau (see our earlier interview with the latter here). We talked CSS3 (the next iteration of Cascading Style Sheets), HTML5 (the next iteration of the HTML language) and the role of Opera Software as a company in both. Enjoy:        
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Group buying aggregator 
I’ve had an interesting few days trying to track down exactly what 
Back in August, we got word that a startup called PlaceBook was 
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