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Saturday, August 4, 2012

The Latest from TechCrunch

The Latest from TechCrunch

Link to TechCrunch

Dear Yahoo, I Redesigned Your Website (And Took Out 512,240 Pixels Of Banner Ads)

Posted: 04 Aug 2012 08:00 AM PDT

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Dear Yahoo!,

I've redesigned your website (five sites, actually) and I'd like to get your opinion.

Across five properties — Homepage, Screen, OMG, Flickr, Music — I've removed 4 square banner ads, 2 wide rectangles, 2 text ads, and an interruptive preroll. I've replaced those traditional ads with content-based ads that are entirely native to each site's user experience — promoted videos, promoted playlists, promoted trends, promoted images, and promoted articles.

The kicker? I'm confident you could pull this off without having an impact on long term advertising revenue.

Y! Homepage: See the redesign

Y! Screen: See the redesign

Y! OMG: See the redesign

Flickr: See the redesign

Y! Music: See the redesign

Here's what I removed (and no offense intended to the advertisers below):

* That's 512,240 pixels of traditional display advertising, if anyone's counting.

And here's what I added:

Your Silicon Valley counterparts have entirely changed the ad game, starting from the ground up with design decisions built around the user experience and the product, not beholden to traditional "boxes and banners" economy. From Facebook's Sponsored Stories, to Twitter's Promoted Tweets, to YouTube's Promoted Videos, the new platforms of record are changing the rules of the ad game, saying "no" to traditional ads – and are already driving $10B+ in "native ad" revenue.

In fact, Marissa Mayer was part of arguably the most successful native ad strategy of all time — Google's promoted search ads.

So here's my suggestion:

You have the opportunity at Yahoo to do for content-driven advertising what Google did for search-based advertising – make the ads native to the user experience.

Native search ads don't try to distract you from what you came to Google to do; they actually help you find things (when done well). What if, in the same spirit, Yahoo encouraged advertisers to create and promote quality content (marked as "sponsored" of course) – videos, photos, articles, trends, music – and then allowed this content to compete on fair terms for readers' attention?

Yahoo’s undeniable strength is content. From Sports to News to Entertainment, Yahoo has far exceeded any other Silicon Valley company's efforts to build loyal audiences through original content. There could not be a better time for Yahoo to go native with content-driven advertising. Brands are investing unprecedented budgets in their own original content and publishing efforts, and are in deep need of new mediums to promote this branded content in native ways.

Yahoo, as the largest content company on the web, I say take a page from your frenemies, who are driving billions of dollars in native ad revenue.

Google = native ads in SEARCH.

Facebook = native ads in SOCIAL newsfeeds.

Twitter = native ads in the stream of real-time COMMUNICATION.

Yahoo = native advertising for CONTENT.

Your friendly, neighborhood native ad evangelist,

Dan Greenberg
CEO & Founder, Sharethrough

* Inspiration from this post from the ever-awesome Dustin Curtis.

Editor's note: Dan Greenberg is the founder & CEO of Sharethrough, the native video advertising company. Dan has been honored as an AdAge "Media Maven" and was recently named to the Forbes "30 under 30″ list. You can find him on Twitter at @dgreenberg.

Facebooking While Rome Burns

Posted: 04 Aug 2012 06:00 AM PDT

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I’m an optimist, I really am, especially when it comes to technology and its ability to transform the world. But today I can’t shake the feeling that we as a species are really screwing up. Guess what? “There is no hope of saving the global coral reef ecosystem.” How’s that for depressing?

Meanwhile, even those few scientists who previously doubted that climate change was human-caused are increasingly conceding that global warming is a) very real b) our fault — and yet, “the American public has grown increasingly skeptical.”

What do coral extinction, global warming, and global finance have in common? All are screwed up beyond all recognition, and given our current geopolitical systems, all are beyond all hope of repair. To which the innovator’s response should be: disrupt the system! But of course there’s no money in that. The system is, pretty much by definition, built to distribute money to those who perpetuate it.

Still, despite that defense mechanism, there’s money to be made in changing the world. Elon Musk is doing it twice over with Tesla and SpaceX. I believe Google’s Glass and self-driving cars, among other products of the “Google X” lab reportedly headed up by Sergey Brin, will both become huge money-minting markets. But note that both Musk and Brin were already enormously successful. How many truly ambitious founders who haven’t already hit home runs ever get to step up to the plate?

Despite the billions and billions of venture capital dollars wafting around looking for investments, I can’t hardly think of any. People–including me–complain about how everybody’s launching meaningless sugar-water startups, but to be fair, I bet a lot of those founders would in fact rather be working on something more important and significant. They aren’t doing so because they believe they first need to build their Instagram and cash out à la Brin and Musk.

They may well be right. But only a tiny minority of a tiny minority will succeed. So much talent and so much effort spent–wasted, really–building meaningless gamified SoLoMo apps, while around us an entire global ecosystem is already effectively dead, and more are queueing up to follow.

Or, as William Gibson, technology’s poet laureate, recently put it:

To an extent I disagree. I don’t think fear or malevolence are the fundamental problem. I think the problem is that we’ve built a geopolitical system whose eddy currents have evolved into runaway feedback loops that the system is not equipped to handle. Worse yet, the few people who do want to disrupt the system, eg the Occupy movement, have very little in common with the innovators and visionaries who could maybe actually improve things.

I hate to be a downer on this sunny Saturday morning, but despite the enormous wealth, resources, and knowledge of our age, despite Moore’s Law and our ever-multiplying marvels of technology, it’s hard to see a happy ending for the world’s coral reefs, and hard to imagine that they’ll be the last of our world’s treasures to go down in flames on our watch.

Image credit: Patrick Hoesly, Flickr.

Twitter Alerts To Scrape The Olympics Site For New Tickets Are Proliferating

Posted: 04 Aug 2012 03:55 AM PDT

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An unofficial Olympic ticket alerts twitter feed which was accessing the official Olympics ticket site to spot when tickets for events were released has been blocked. But others are now appearing.

Adam Naisbitt created @2012ticketalert on Twitter and deep-linked into the Olympics ticket site to allow people to find out about tickets as they became available. It garnered over 11,000 followers this week. A London 2012 spokesman has said its ticket agent had now blocked the feed. Naisbitt is trying to re-start the service.

However, a new site has now appeared doing the same thing. Andrew Davey, founder of tech startup Squadify, set up @SqadTicketWatch in the last couple of days.

“We built it in 2 days,” he told us. “It’s quite simple really. it’s just a web scraper with some tweaks to stop duplication and to help reduce spamming twitter. We check for tickets every 5 minutes.”

He says he saw the 2012ticketalert service being blocked, but his service will be harder to block as “they’d have to find us through all the traffic. I think his problem could’ve been that Naisbitt was checking every X seconds/minutes on the dot. i.e. every 5 minutes and no variation. Things like that make it easy to spot when someone is scraping your site.”

Clearly there may be more attempts, as people clamour for tickets to the Olympics following the scandal of empty seats.

The Federated Web Should Be Easier Than It Sounds

Posted: 03 Aug 2012 11:00 PM PDT

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Twitter’s suspension of journalist Guy Adam’s account earlier this week should further discussions that have been bubbling over the past couple weeks about the need for a more open alternative to Twitter. Although Twitter reinstated Adams’ account, the company’s actions show why such an alternative is important. It’s not about giving developers more API tools to play with. It’s about building more resilient systems for free speech online.

As Dave Winer has pointed out, most of the pieces are there already. And as was pointed out during the indie web panel at OS Bridge, we’ve had them since the early days of blogging. If you had your own domain name and kept good backups you could move from host to host and even to entirely different blogging systems (though you might mess up your permalinks). E-mail can work the same way, if you use your own domain name instead of your host’s. These are what some people call “federated systems.”

I’m interested in plans to build federated versions of the internet, including “darknets” like Freenet, Crptosphere or wireless internet alternatives like Project Meshnet and the many many other project like it. But for those of us living in relatively free countries, just having an internet where everyone owns their own portable identity is good enough. Owning a domain name is a bit on the geeky side, but it’s not like asking people to learn to program or configure their own Linux servers. We can still rely on hosted services – as long as we can pack up and move out of them when the time comes.

What we need to build an open alternative to Twitter isn’t more standards. We already have Dave Winer’s microblog namespace for RSS, PubSubHubbub and Activity Streams. What we need is a self-hostable, single user Twitter clone that can publish these formats (and optionally push to Twitter and other social networks). That was the idea that Winer was seemingly getting at last week with his own post on a Twitter alternative, but he focused more on all the tools that are out there for building something like this, and didn’t come out and say what it is we actually need. And that’s something that power users can get up and running relatively quickly without having to write it themselves and with the least amount of server fiddling possible. A WordPress of microblogs.

Sure we have StatusNet and other clones already. But these are designed for groups who want a private Twitter. I’m talking about is giving every user control of their feed by attaching it to their own domain name. One such thing exists already: PageCookery, but the site is in Chinese. Another option is to just run StatusNet and be the sole user on your server. There are also some WordPress microblog themes, but that seems like a clunky solution. It might be nice to see something that isn’t in PHP, but hey – PHP gets the job done and it’s easy for non-developers to get PHP apps running on commodity web hosting.

If it’s individual, how do you make it social? By using the same standards blogs did. You can use pingbacks and trackbacks for notifications. As someone (I can’t remember who) said on the indie web panel, blogrolls were the original social networks. There’s even a microstandard for establishing social links in blogrolls.

But one of the most important tools for all of this will be a way to actually read all the activity streams generated by these tools. This part will be the Google Reader of microblog/activity stream feeds. There’s already Winer’s River2, but it would be great if this could actually be built into microblogging tools. I think one of the reasons that services like Live Journal, Twitter and Tumblr took off is that you have your social stream and your means of contributing to it all in one place. This will be one of the hardest things to get right.

If this took off we’d eventually see hosted versions, the equivalent of Blogspot or WordPress.com. Great – as long as you can pull in feeds hosted elsewhere, and use your own domain name for your identity.

Is it a pipe dream? Maybe. We’ve had open source, self-hostable tumblogs for years now but few have migrated to them from Tumblr or Posterous. And just being able to syndicate your personal microblog out to Twitter might not be enough – I like being able to post to Twitter from the same place that I read and reply to Twitter.

But I remember when the idea of everyone having their own web page seemed absurd. Now, as Ward Cunningham, inventor of the original wiki and a slick new federated wiki told me in an interview not too long ago, everyone on Facebook has their own web page. All I’m asking is that we take it a small step further. Before that we’ll need power user adoption. And developers committed to building the right tools.

Snug Nugget Launches A Pay-What-You-Want Book Bundle

Posted: 03 Aug 2012 06:13 PM PDT

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While I can’t quite imagine what a “snug nugget” really is without descending into the scatological, but what the company does is quite interesting. This new website offers bundles of books with a retail value of about $30. They expect users to pay about that and they donate 14.3% to charity.

The current crop of books looks promising if you’re into thrillers and fantasy and hopefully they’ll continue these bundles with bigger names to draw in some more donations. All of the books are DRM free and come in Kindle, ePub, and PDF format. You check out via Paypal and Google Checkout.

The site competes directly with the yet-unlaunched StoryBundle and looks a little seat-of-its-pants in terms of design and UI. However, it’s a noble goal and it’s pretty darn important that sites like these not only succeed but thrive. Best of all? Here’s their “trailer” for the books on offer. Very exciting stuff.

via The Digital Reader



AKQA Chairman Tom Bedecarre Says Advertisers Want More ‘Elbow Room’ On Facebook

Posted: 03 Aug 2012 06:01 PM PDT

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In the final discussion of our Facebook ecosystem CrunchUp today, AKQA Chairman Tom Bedecarre and Facebook VP Greg Badros took the stage to address Facebook’s advertising strategy. Bedecarré wasn’t as skeptical as his new boss Martin Sorrell (whose advertising conglomerate WPP just announced that it’s acquiring agency AKQA, and who has said that Facebook is “not necessarily an advertising medium“), but he made it sound like the company has a lot of work to do to win over advertisers.

The numbers tell part of the story. Bedecarre (who’s the middle figure in the photo) said that WPP is upping its spend on Facebook ads this year from $200 million to $400 million — that’s nice progress, but less than 1 percent of its total $65 billion in spending.

To a certain extent, Bedecarre said that’s because brands are “addicted to television advertising”. They’re used to TV ads, and even when they move online, it’s easier for them to advertise somewhere similar, like YouTube. In a way, he says the ad that users see when they log out of Facebook is a “hook” to bring advertisers into the world of Facebook advertising — the big display ad is something they can understand, then perhaps they can be convinced to try more experimental ad units like Facebook’s Sponsored Stories.

When asked about what Facebook could be doing better, Bedecarre said advertisers want more data, and more ways to act on that data. That includes more ways to spur “demand and activation”, and using Facebook data to target ads outside the Facebook site. He said that advertisers have a hard time dealing with how quickly Facebook’s ad platform changes. And while he said that Facebook Pages offer a lot of creative opportunities, on the other hand, he finds advertising in the right-hand column “very restrictive” creatively, so it’d be nice to have a little more “elbow room”.

For his part, Badros (who’s on the right side of the photo) wasn’t asked to address most of those criticism and suggestions directly, but he did offer some of the Facebook perspective on advertising, including the Sponsored Stories that users see in the newsfeed. TechCrunch’s Josh Constine asked if there’s a specific ratio of sponsored to unsponsored stories that Facebook has in mind, but Badros said it changes from user to user. He also repeated a common talking point about ads on both Facebook and Twitter — that one of the best things about the sponsored content those sites is the fact it originates as “organic content”.

And even though much of the discussion about Facebook’s business model centers on advertising, Badros said it doesn’t make sense to “only have one horse in your stable,” so the company is also “exploring lots of different ways to help drive value in the world and help drive our business.”

Users Claim Twoo Is Spamming Their Friends, Social Network Says It’s “Just Not Clear Enough”

Posted: 03 Aug 2012 05:25 PM PDT

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Users are complaining that Twoo, a social networking service, is sending unwanted messages to their contacts. Co-founder and CEO Lorenz Bogaert counters that this is a misunderstanding and the company is working to fix it.

Users, both those who have emailed me and who have posted public reviews in the app store, say that the mobile app is intentionally designed to be tricky and cause the user to invite their entire address book.

The app auto-selects all of the user’s friends with no unselect all button, meaning the user must manually unselect every friend. While the “connect” button fairly obviously pings all of the user’s contacts, the “next” button will also send messages to all of the user’s friends. Additionally, the orange outlines around contacts’ images signifies that they are selected; however, this is not obvious as the app auto-selects all contacts and the orange outline appears to be part of the design.

On the browser version, users have told us me the site shows just seven contacts and an “other” profile, which has the rest of the users contacts. Rather than a scrollbar down to all of the user’s friends (like on Facebook and others), it appears as though only seven or eight friends have been highlighted, while all of the users’ contacts have again been selected.

“We do not send any messages without the prior consent of the user,” Bogaert tells me.

But multiple users in the Apple App Store have complained recently:

As have users in the Google Play app store:

Boegart notes that these are just a handful of users of millions of Twoo users; however, he adds that they have noticed the complaints and “had already decided to add an additional confirmation step to avoid any unintended actions.”

He says the additional step should be live in the next 24 hours.

While I’d like to believe that this was a simple miscommunication between developer and user (Boegart describes it as “just not clear enough for some users”), it would be very easy for a social network to grow this way until users complain and then change it. After all, it’s often easier to ask forgiveness than permission.

At the very best, the site is unnecessarily confusing. At the worst, it is purposefully complex in order to message unsuspecting users’ contacts to increase its membership.

Neither one is a very positive descriptor.

With Condiment, StyleDiary Founder Patricia Handschiegel Combines Lifestyle Content And Commerce

Posted: 03 Aug 2012 05:05 PM PDT

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Patricia Handschiegel, who founded fashion media company StyleDiary (and eventually sold it to StyleHive) is back with a new startup bringing together lifestyle content and commerce.

Handschiegel says she’s been interested in that combination since her time at StyleDiary, but thanks to the acquisition, she didn’t really pursue it. Nowadays you hear a lot more about bringing content and commerce together, but Handschiegel says that for the most part, it an area being tackled by e-commerce companies who start posting articles or other kinds of content featuring their products. With her new site Condiment, she’s taking the opposite approach, focusing on content first and then building the store.

Condiment had a quiet launch in January. Handschiegel says she’s trying to create a digital magazine focused on “life’s little extras” (hence the name, which she credits to Laurie Percival). For example, this week’s issue includes a spread of fashion, furniture, and accessories for the fall, and another on art and home decor picks.

Today, Handschiegel also launched the other big piece of the business, the market. She says she’s curating a small collection of products from “startups” in industries like food, fashion, and home. There’s a separate market page on the Condiment website, but naturally, if one of the products for sale is featured in a Condiment article, there’s a “buy this in the market!” link too.

“These product companies are squarely focused on the offline retail channel, which is their key target market,” Handshciegel tells me via email. “While there are plenty of inexpensive means to sell online, they are often too small in size to invest the human/financial capital to create, manage and grow that presence. Condiment does the work for them.”

Since the market just launched, you can expect the product lineup to grow over time. Handschiegel is hoping to expand the editorial side too — she says she wanted to get some of the experimenting out of the way before investing heavily on the tech side, but now she’s hoping to get on-board with one of the digital magazine publishing platforms. That would also allow her to publish more frequently — although she still wants to take a slower-paced, magazine-style approach. Handschiegel already writes a blog, and she says the her aims with Condiment are very different.

“With a digital magazine, when it’s about making pudding and buying laptop bags, it’s a little less time sensitive,” she says.

Condiment is self-funded.

Man Builds A Real, Working Wall-E That’s Still Eternally Hunting For Eve

Posted: 03 Aug 2012 05:00 PM PDT

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Mike Senna, a California-based roboticist, has built a real, working Wall-E that can move around, wave, and call out his own cute name in a rattly, digitized voice. Mike is the guy who built a real, working R2-D2 and his latest project is a real masterpiece of animatronics and robotic motion.

He spent 25 hours a week building the robot and he play with his toy at various events including charity activities where Wall-E helps cheer up sick kids.

Sadly, Senna might have some trouble building his own Eve simply because it’s hard to make something fly at high speeds and shoot lasers powerful enough to blow holes in rocks and heavy, steel oil tankers.

You can check out his blog here and enjoy some of his videos (including this one of Wall-E dancing) here.

Facebook’s Big Challenge: Building A Stable Platform For Developers While Maintaining User Experience

Posted: 03 Aug 2012 04:00 PM PDT

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Today at The TC CrunchUp at the Fox Theater in Redwood City, a group of founders and entrepreneurs took the stage to talk about the future of Facebook’s platform, where it’s been and where it’s going as a result. Although the company’s stock has been limping of late, Facebook continues to be impossible to ignore — by the end of June, for example, the platform was seeing 955 million monthly active users, with 81 percent of those coming from outside the U.S., and more than 230 million people playing games on Facebook.com every month.

Although it may seem like Facebook has plenty on their plate in terms of stock downturns, ad monetization strategies and more, Facebook Director of Product Management Doug Purdy said that a big challenge facing Facebook today is building a solid and stable platform for third-party developers via its APIs.

Purdy had earlier made it clear that the company has launched over 7,000 timeline apps, which has grown since 3,000 in March — clearly developers are keen to get it on the social bump, the alley-oop coming from the Social Deathstar. Facebook has become an important channel to drive users to new apps they discover in their news feed. In the past 30 days, for example, Facebook has driven people to the App Store and Google Play nearly 150 million times.

The Head of Facebook Product Management said that Facebook recognizes they can’t build all the social experiments, but they’re “all about extending that virality” to different verticals.” There are many businesses we’re not getting into, and we want third-parties to do that for us.

The difficulty, Purdy said, is in balancing priorities, specifically between developers and users (with some advertisers in there as well), because at the end of the day, if they don’t have either, they don’t have a business.

Founder and CEO of BranchOut, Rick Marini, Airbnb Product Lead Joe Zadeh, and FreshPlanet co-founder (publisher of SongPop) Mathieu Nouzareth also joined in on the conversation, which was especially relevant as each company they represent has seen big benefit from building on the Facebook platform. Airbnb recently announced that 10 million nights have been booked, while Facebook-connected guests in particular make 85 percent more bookings on average.

Songpop, meanwhile, has grown from zero to 12 million-plus monthly active users in the last three months, while 65 percent of its mobile users log in with Facebook, and Facebook users are spending 35 percent more time and money than those who don’t login with Facebook.

Marini himself said that BranchOut made a commitment to analytics in December, using a mixture of Mixpanel and Optimizely to make the experience better, trying to harness some of the power of its 400K-to-12M user growth. User acquisition shot way ahead of retention, and BranchOut has since turned its focus to harnessing that. Facebook, he said, helped give the company access to a new demographic, specifically to international users in Indian and Brazil — reach that they wouldn’t have been able to find otherwise.

In the meantime, Nouzareth said that the Open Graph had been instrumental in helping SongPop grow, with users sharing five or 6 times in a minute, although it was a constant worry campaign over whether or not Facebook’s algorithm would be putting those posts from the app into users’ news feeds.

At that point, Josh (who moderated the panel) coaxed Purdy into saying that, in fact, Facebook was not referring to its algorithm as EdgeRank (although the rest of the industry does), and nodded his head as Nouzareth said that they can’t worry about controlling that, they really have to just focus on making a good game and great user experience.

That’s where Purdy again chimed in to encourage developers to just focus on building a great gaming or app experience, and to use Facebook as the amplification tool to give them that extra boost. Purdy said that the better the apps are that end up in the news feed, and the more relevant the notifications and posts, it helps drive success for Facebook itself, and make their ads far more relevant — good for the bottom line.

“Build an awesome app, plug in Facebook and success will happen,” Purdy quipped.

Josh also asked about Facebook’s Face.com acquisition, and whether we might be able to expect a Facial recognition API anytime soon. “We have no plans for that at present,” Purdy said, although he did hint that if they saw enough interest from developers, it’s something that they would consider.

Updating…

Peter Deng On How Facebook Develops Mobile Apps

Posted: 03 Aug 2012 03:55 PM PDT

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Peter Deng of Facebook said on stage at the TechCrunch CrunchUp today that the company’s mission is now focused on mobile.

There is no single team that is focused on mobile, said Deng, Facebook’s director of product management. Instead, each group, be it the messaging or location teams, are thinking about mobile development.

It’s the right team that makes for great development, Deng said. By breaking the groups into small teams, Deng said developers can move quickly on the company’s design and social philosophies and better understand nuances of the experience they are seeking to convey in Facebook apps. It goes as far as Deng spending time thinking about seating arrangements so interactions between team members can be as efficient as possible.

Desktop app development is now moving toward twice daily pushes.  Mobile development will also move toward a time based approach, operating on six-week schedules. The first four weeks are for development, test and iteration. The remaining two weeks are for quality checks and bug fixes. The hope is to get into a cadence for rapid new app and feature development.

Facebook’s Camera app was built by a team of four people. The first Messenger app was built by seven engineers with simultaneous development for the iOS and Android platforms.

Deng said apps are designed with three themes in mind:

Start with people: Technology should serve people, not the other way around. Facebook’s friendship model is built on the concept of two-way  trust. It’s the basis for the Facebook friend request. Facebook is now seeking new ways to connect friends in serendipitous ways.  It’s those unexpected connections that people make which Deng said provides real joy to Facebook teams. We are often connected in ways we do not know. Surfacing those connections provides a context that is core to the Facebook mission. Deng said capabilities such as GPS make it possible to connect people in the way that they want.

Design for stories: Facebook is inherently telling a story, Deng said. Stories are about remembering the past, helping us understand the present and building an identity of who we are. This is why Facebook exists. It is inherently a storytelling platform. He says with mobile, Facebook can provide the ultimate storytelling experience. The Camera app, for example, allows you to take photos wherever you may be. But that is not its value. Its value is in technically designing an app that provides a sharing experience. The Camera app embodies these concepts. For example, it allows you to see these huge photos that can be swept left or right on the device. That forms a connection with someone’s trusted community. It also allows for multiple photos to be uploaded to Facebook in a single post. Sharing those photos becomes a way of telling a story about an experience.

Connect authentically: Face to face communications carries a range of emotions. Facebook is seeking to bring more of those experiences into the mobile app experience. A text message conversation can pose a problem when people are arranging a time to meet. If a person is running late, their text may not be read by the recipient.  In the Messenger app, Facebook is designing in features that are intended to do a better job of coordinating. If you are meeting someone, the Messenger app will tell you how far away the person is so you may adjust accordingly.

Deng says Facebook is on a new journey. But it feels like they are just realizing the importance of mobile and now are racing to catch up to a population that depends on their phones for the way they live and work.

Lover.ly Gets To Know Users, Vendors Better With New Features: My Style And My Portfolios

Posted: 03 Aug 2012 03:32 PM PDT

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In the newly crowded wedding space, Lover.ly has found a way to not only make money but also connect brides and grooms with the best possible vendors for their wedding. If you have yet to dabble on the platform, it’s much like a Pinterest for brides, offering a curated imagery-based interface to market wedding bloggers and vendors while helping brides plan for the big day.

But founder Kellee Khalil had a broader vision for the startup: to become a bride’s one-stop recommendation platform. And that’s just what Lover.ly has done.

The platform just got a brand new feature called My Style, which takes into account all of the user’s “loved” and “bundled” items to recommend more excellent products, ideas, venues, etc.

But any entrepreneur knows that pleasing the vendor/merchant side of your business is just as important as delighting consumers, and so Lover.ly has added a new My Portfolios tab. This allows vendors (photographers, bakers, florists, etc.) to create a centralized Lover.ly page showing off all their wares.

Users can then bundle vendors, or love them, if they find a specific cake maker that calls out to them. Just like with Lover.ly’s other brand partners, users can book vendors through their portfolio page.

Lover.ly has also added a handful of new brand partners, so if you’re getting married (or wish you were), head on over to the website and check it out.

Click to view slideshow.


230 Million People Played Games On Facebook.com In The Last 30 Days

Posted: 03 Aug 2012 02:57 PM PDT

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Doug Purdy, Facebook’s Director of Developer Products, just announced that 230 million people played games on Facebook.com in the past 30 days and that 8 of the 10 top grossing iPhone apps are integrated with Facebook. This is an interesting bit of news when thinking about actual user interaction with the service and what third party developers could expect to see when building for the platform.

Facebook offers games directly on Facebook.com as well as an SDK to push data from standalone apps on Android and iPhone to Facebook. Both of these traffic sources are obviously quite sticky and quite valuable.

Considering, according to Chris Dixon, that 10 million users is the new 1 million users, it’s clear Facebook is still a “growth engine” in the online space in terms of traffic, engagement, and monetization.

Purdy also noted that Facebook drove people to the App Store and Google Play 150 million times in the past 30 days, bolstering its value as an advertising platform.

Zynga VP Sean Kelly: Zynga Will Make Back The Money It Spent Acquiring OMGPOP

Posted: 03 Aug 2012 02:54 PM PDT

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Peter Deng was joined on our Facebook Ecosystem CrunchUp stage by Zynga product development VP Sean Kelly, Bump CEO David Lieb, and Xyologic co-founder Matthaus Krzykowski to tackle the prospect of creating and nurturing “modern” mobile applications.

One of the juicier tidbits that came to light during the panel came courtesy of Zynga’s Kelly, who noted he believed that the company would make its money back on its multi-million dollar OMGPOP acquisition.

“It’s been a good contributor to our numbers,” Kelly said to moderator Kim-Mai Cutler.

Fine, it may not be the most shocking revelation considering how vehemently the social gaming company has defended its purchase of the Draw Something creator since it all went down back in late March, but Kelly did note that the company learned quite a bit from the process. He notes that towards the beginning, popularity was so high that users would spend whole afternoons crafting doodles and shooting them to friends — a process that could potentially sour an otherwise fun gameplay mechanic. In hindsight, he says it would have been better if Zynga had implemented some sort of limit to prevent the game from becoming too much of a chore as users sought to keep their streaks going.

That said, there’s no question that Draw Something’s subsequent traffic dips have been a real bummer for Zynga.

“We acquired Draw Something pretty close to the peak of their traffic,” he said. “It’s disappointing to see the traffic dip, and I think it was a testament to how viral word of mouth can be.”

Kelly wasn’t kidding — shortly after the acquisition was announced, Draw Something still played host to over 14 million daily users. Now, according to figures from AppData, the social guessing game is down to a mere (relatively speaking) 3 million active users per day, or roughly 9% of the company’s overall daily mobile userbase. It may seem as though interest in the game is drying up at an alarming rate, but the current state of affairs is still nothing to sneeze at. Rumblings of a Draw Something television show continue unabated for one, and Zynga recently revealed it had partnered up with Hasbro to create (what else?) a Draw Something board game.

“We still feel like it’s a really valuable thing for us,” Kelly noted. “Both from the standpoint of acquiring the team and acquiring a brand we think is going to live a long lifespan.”

Another Round Of Google Shutdowns: Google Apps For Teams, Google Listen & Google Video For Business

Posted: 03 Aug 2012 02:52 PM PDT

GoogleAxe

Google just announced yet another batch of services it plans to discontinue in the near future. Most of these are relatively obscure products that probably didn’t have a large amount of traction. In this round, Google is shutting down three products, as well as a number of company blogs that had become redundant or just weren’t updated very frequently. The products include Google Apps for Teams, Google Listen and Google Video For Business. This round of shutdowns comes just a few weeks after Google also closed relatively popular services like iGoogle and Google Video.

So Much For Google Apps For Teams, Listen And Video For Business

Google launched Google Apps for teams in 2008 and the tool allowed businesses and schools to use non-email services like Google Docs without having to sign up for a Google email address. This service, Google said today, was not as useful for people as [it] originally anticipated” and starting September 4, Google Apps for Teams accounts will be turned into personal Google Accounts.

Google Listen started as a Google Labs project and was a way for people to find and listen to podcasts. Google Play now offers so many podcast listening apps that the company has decided to shut Listen down on November 1. Current users will be able to listen to their existing podcast subscriptions in Google Reader. Google last updated this service earlier this year, but even then, it was already clear that this service was mostly an afterthought for the company.

As for Google Video for Business, which allowed Google Apps for Business and Google Apps for Education users to host videos for internal use in their organizations, Google has decided to migrate all of these videos to Google Drive where they will be stored free and won’t count against a user’s Google Drive storage quota.

Since last year, Google either donated, merged or shut down 50 products in this “spring cleaning campaign” that started after Larry Page took over as the company’s CEO from Eric Schmidt. The idea here, says Google, is to “focus on the high-impact products that millions of people use, multiple times a day” and not to waste resource on underutilized products so the company can build a “better Google.”

Here is our running list of products that Google closed over the last few months:

Google Bookmarks Lists, Google Friend Connect, iGoogle, Google Video, Google Symbian Search App, Google Talk Chatback, Google Mini, Google Gears, Google Search Timeline, Google Wave, Knol, Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal (RE<C), Aardvark, Desktop, Fast Flip, Google Maps API for Flash, Google Pack, Google Web Security, Image Labeler, Notebook, Sidewiki, Subscribed Links, Google Flu Vaccine Finder, Google Related, Google Sync for BlackBerry, mobile web app for Google Talk, One Pass, Patent Search, Picasa for Linux, Picasa Web Albums Uploader for Mac and Picasa Web Albums Plugin for iPhoto, and all Slide products.

Google Ventures-Backed MediaSpike Brings Product Sponsorships Into Social Games

Posted: 03 Aug 2012 02:22 PM PDT

mediaspike logo

Blake Commagere, who’s probably best known for building early, popular Facebook apps like Zombies and Vampires (hey, remember those?), has started a new company called MediaSpike to tackle one of the big problems he faced as a developer: Integrating sponsored product placements into the games.

Commagere says those placements were one of the most effective and popular ways to monetize — in fact, when some of those campaigns ended and the sponsored content disappeared, “Users would actually complain.” On the other hand, he says that managing the process was “incredibly difficult.” Without any tools to help with the process, everything took a lot of time, whether it was determining where the sponsorship would appear, creating the media assets (i.e., the art for the sponsored product), and then providing all the data that the advertisers wanted. Then, when the next campaign came around, he’d have to start from scratch and do it all again.

“It got to the point where it felt like I had to choose between spending so much time on this sales cycle and focusing on building games,” Commagere says.

With MediaSpike, Commagere is trying to eliminate many of the inefficiencies with a marketplace that standardizes the process. Developers can identify specific areas of the game where they’re willing to feature sponsored content — Commagere showed me a demo game set in a bar where the poster on the wall, the drinks for sale at the bar, and other items were up for sponsorship. Developers create a marketplace listing for each of those items, including statistics about the game’s audience, a sample of the assets needed, and the sponsorship price.

So an advertiser can now identify the demographics of the audience that they’re trying to reach, and MediaSpike will give them a list of games that meet their needs. Then they can pick the item that they want to sponsor, create the art, and even open up a test version of the game showing how the sponsored product will appear in the game. Once the campaign has started, they can view up-to-date statistics on how it’s going.

For a developer, meanwhile, once they’ve integrated with MediaSpike and created the listings, they have to do very little to launch new campaigns. They get an email alerting them when an advertiser is proposing a campaign, and all they have to do is approve it or not.

MediaSpike has raised a seed round of funding from Raptor Ventures, Venture51, Team Downey (Robert Downey Jr.’s production company), Google Ventures, 500 Startups, CMEA, EchoVC, and HNK Ventures. It’s currently testing out an early version of the product with a small group of developers.

Looking ahead, Commagere says he definitely wants to open the platform to more developers, including the “long tail” of smaller games (which might not have a large audience, but might still appeal to advertisers because it reaches a desirable demographic). He also wants to expand beyond Facebook games to mobile — it made sense to start with social games (because they have a fast, iterative design process, making it easy to introduce and remove sponsorships), but Commagere says MediaSpike could conceivably work on any gaming platform. And he wants to incorporate smarter pricing in the marketplace, dynamically adjusting the price based on supply and demand.

Besides making more money for developers, Commagere suggests that if sponsored content really takes off, it could also change the type of games that are made. As a gamer of a certain age (which is to say — my age), Commagere has fond memories of classic adventure games like Day of the Tentacle. You don’t see games like that on Facebook, in part because of the business model. If most of your money comes from virtual goods, then you can’t create a game with a finite, branching storyline, because people aren’t going to buy goods if they lose them every time they replay the game from the beginning. So Commagere is hoping that if different business models flourish, different types of games might appear too.

To get priority in the MediaSpike invite process, TechCrunch readers can sign up for it here.

Facebook Doubles Release Speed, Will Roll New Code Twice A Day

Posted: 03 Aug 2012 02:04 PM PDT

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Facebook announced in a blog post today that they are doubling the site’s release speed, rolling Facebook onto new code twice per day.

“Last week, in conjunction with the opening of our engineering office in London, we decided to double the release speed of facebook.com and indeed “ship often,” release engineering manager Chuck Rossi writes.

First, there will be a push driven by Facebook’s New York office, followed by the social network’s regular daily push from the California team. Rossi says the developers are producing six times the amount of code per week as Facebook was in 2008, when he joined.

“It’s exciting and I think it crushes what anyone else of our size and impact is doing. Ship early and ship twice as often,” Rossi writes to close the post, firing a shot at Facebook’s competitors.

VP Mike Schroepfer: 7,000 Different Types Of Mobile Devices Access Facebook Every Day

Posted: 03 Aug 2012 01:18 PM PDT

facebook-5

Why is mobile such a challenge for Facebook? Well, for starters, 7,000 different device types are used to access Facebook each day. At today’s Facebook Ecosystem Conference, VP of engineering Mike Schroepfer said that part of the difficulty Facebook faces in reaching mobile users is just that there are so many different SKUs. As a result, Facebook can’t re-build mobile apps and iterate on the experience in the same way it does for the web.

Now that Facebook is on so many platforms, most of its focus is on refining the apps and making them better. Facebook generally pushes updates to its platform on the web every day or even twice a day, but that’s not something that the company can do for mobile. So the company is working on a new release schedule specifically for its mobile apps. Android apps are shipped every four to six weeks. Facebook for iOS isn’t quite on that type of schedule, yet.

That said, Facebook is seeing huge mobile adoption. Over the past 30 days, Facebook has driven people to the App Store and Google Play nearly 150 million times. And it’s integrated with a huge number of other apps in the ecosystem: Today, eight of the top 10 grossing iPhone apps are integrated with Facebook.

With so many different apps accessing its mobile ecosystem in existing app stores, Facebook remains mum on whether or not it will release its own phone. While not commenting on whether or not it’s building its own platform, Schroepfer said, “We want to be as well-integrated in these platforms as possible.”

Gillmor Gang Live 08.03.12 (TCTV)

Posted: 03 Aug 2012 01:03 PM PDT

Gillmor Gang test pattern

Gillmor Gang - Doc Searls, John Borthwick, Kevin Marks, Danny Sullivan, and Steve Gilllmor. Recording has concluded.

HTML5-Centric Artillery Raises $2.5M To Make the Browser The Console

Posted: 03 Aug 2012 12:57 PM PDT

Screen Shot 2012-08-03 at 11.22.05 AM

A challenging area that has seemed perpetually ahead of its time, HTML5 gaming has seen many startups come and go as Flash or native iOS and Android development have held their own. Yet the lure of having true cross-platform play keeps entrepreneurs coming.

Now some former early Facebook and early Google engineers are attacking the problem with a new startup called Artillery. They've raised funding from a stellar cast of investors including First Round Capital, Playdom co-founder Rick Thompson's Signia Ventures, Chris Sacca's Lowercase Capital, General Catalyst, Andreessen Horowitz, longtime former Googler Ben Ling, Greylock's Ali Rosenthal, Bubba Murarka, Tim Ferriss, Crunchfund and Kevin Colleran, who was one of Facebook's first 10 employees.

"We set out to solve the problem that real games don't exist in the web browser," says CEO Ankur Pansari, who was an early Facebook engineer.

Pansari says now that smart TVs increasingly come with browsers, there is a growing base of devices including smartphones, tablets, PCs to larger-format screens that should really support HTML5 gaming.

"The $40 billion console business — we feel like it should move to the web," he said.

They're starting with building real-time, synchronous games, but ultimately plan to work with third-party developers. With three people on the team, they're looking for more. They outlined "Six Impossible Problems" they're setting out to solve including making "high-fidelity, resource-hungry games run perfectly in JavaScript."

Pansari says the issue with other HTML5-centric gaming companies like Moblyng, which shut down earlier this year, is partially timing. But it's also that many companies tend to focus on the mobile element of HTML5-gaming, when making HTML5 titles work on desktop or laptop-browsers is more feasible now. Another Artillery competitor is Game Closure, which has raised $12 million from Highland Capital Partners, Greylock Partners, Benchmark Capital and General Catalyst Partners.
Posted by Ateev at 9:46 PM

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