It may now be obscured by all the hoopla surrounding Facebook’s going public, but back in November the popular user-generated review site, Yelp, filed to go public and planned to raise $100 million ahead of its IPO (at an expected $1 to $2 billion valuation). On Friday, Yelp filed an amended S-1 that shows that the company plans to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “YELP.” → Read More
Back in 2009, my colleague MG Siegler wrote a brilliant piece titled ‘Keep It Simple, Stupid,‘ which delved into how having a simple and easy to use product is a key formula for winning in the consumer tech space. A few days ago, Greylock Partner John Lilly echoed MG’s thoughts, explaining that simplicity is quite simply very hard to beat. While this doctrine has been applied tonconsumer technology products like Dropbox, Gmail, Twitter and most famously, Apple; reinforcing simplicity in the product thought process is becoming an ever-present part of enterprise technology as well. → Read More
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Facebook’s late-comer HTML5 mobile app platform lags way behind the Apple App Store and Android Marketplace. Yesterday I spotted Facebook’s latest effort to catch up — a test showing bookmarks for third-party applications at the top of the mobile news feed. Currently, Facebook buries HTML5 app bookmarks at the bottom of its mobile site’s pull-out navigation menu, and only shows them in the iOS or Android Facebook app’s search bar.
Placing them much more prominently atop the mobile home page could increase engagement — the first step in attracting developers to the platform and earning money on in-app purchases. → Read More
Apple’s all-in-one physical flat-screen iTV is coming, make no mistake. And, when it does, it will represent Apple’s attempt to reinvent the television experience in much the same way it did for music. But, while media execs were hopelessly naive in Apple’s presence back then, they feel they are ready this time. They are determined not to let Apple rule the premium online video world like they did (and still do) for online music. The question is, do they have the will? → Read More
Reading Leena Rao’s recent article on Techcrunch about the personalization revolution, you get the sense that the tech world is waiting for a bus that isn’t coming. Rao quotes well-known industry experts and luminaries describing what needs to happen for e-commerce to finally realize the promise of personalized shopping, a future where online retailers predict what you’ll want to buy before you know yourself.
Ironically, Rao and her pundits are missing the zooming racecar that’s speeding by them as they wait for the personalization bus to arrive. That racecar is Pinterest and the new breed of startups marking the beginning of what I call the “Curated Web.” → Read More
The Artist parades its conceit at every turn of its familiar romance. We’re doing this no sound thing for you because it’s good for you. Things will work out fine. The dog needs no dialogue. The music tells you what to feel. It’s already half over, and besides, it’s already better than the last five movies you’ve seen.
Google Search + parades its conceit at every turn. It’s free, so we can improve it any way we want. We’re already reading everything you write in Gmail, so now we’re blurring the metadata into one big data pool so we can better read your mind and sell the results back to marketers. It’s OK because Facebook already does this. We’d add all the other networks if they would just let us have their data too. And besides, we’re doing this. → Read More
This guest post was written by Richard Price, founder and CEO of Academia.edu — a site that serves as a platform for academics to share their research papers and to interact with each other.
Instant distribution
Many academics are excited about the future of instant distribution of research. Right now the time lag between finishing a paper, and the relevant worldwide research community seeing it, is between 6 months and 2 years. This is because during that time, the paper is being peer reviewed, and peer review takes an incredibly long time. 2 years is roughly how long it used to take to send a letter abroad 300 years ago.
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The future of easy home energy monitoring may be a little bit closer, thanks to a government initiative designed to allow consumers direct access to their energy consumption data.
The White House’s new Green Button gives utilities a way to simplify and standardize sharing usage statistics with their customers via a one-click download. Two California providers, Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric, already launched the feature, adding what is literally a green button to their websites. Utility companies in other regions are expected to implement it within the next year. Customers can click the button to download their personal usage information in one place. → Read More
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As an investor, I’ve seen hundreds of mobile application pitches. And as a consumer, I’ve downloaded hundreds more – some out of curiosity and others in the hope that I’ll find something so useful and exciting that I’ll make room for it on my iPhone’s home screen.
From both perspectives, I am rarely excited by download numbers. What gets my attention is engagement: how frequently an application is used and how engaged users are. This ultimately is the barometer for an application’s utility and/or strength of community. And if either of those two factors are strong: growth will certainly come. Just ask Instagram, Evernote, LogMeIn and others. → Read More
Now that Facebook is preparing the biggest tech IPO in history, it is possible to compare its financials and potential market value to Google’s when it went public. At first glance, all of Facebook’s numbers look bigger. Its pre-IPO revenues of $3.7 billion in 2011 are more than two and a half times larger than Google’s 2003 revenues of $1.5 billion (Google’s IPO was in 2004). Facebook’s $1 billion in profits is ten times larger than Google’s pre-IPO profits of $106 million. And its expected market cap of between $85 billion and $100 billion will dwarf Google’s IPO market cap of $23 billion.
Facebook, no doubt, will be emphasizing these differences. But in many ways it is a false comparison. Facebook is going public after 8 years as a private company. Google went public much earlier in its development, after 5 full years. So, yes, Facebook at Year 8 is much bigger than Google was at Year 5 of its trajectory. A better way to see how the two companies stack up is to compare their revenues and profits at the same points in their histories. → Read More
So it’s Saturday night and you’re out with friend. Are they the inconsiderate jerk who can’t stop checking their smartphone? Or is that you?
Either way, here’s one way to make dinner a little more interesting.
I’ve seen/heard this described as both “The Phone Stacking Game” and “Don’t Be a Dick During Meals”. It’s been mentioned on a couple of blogs, but a quick straw poll of my friends suggests that it hasn’t become widespread yet, at least on the West Coast. Which is a shame, because it’s perfect for folks in tech. → Read More
The New York Times released its latest earnings report earlier this week, spurring another round of discussion about the newspaper’s paywall, which was launched near the beginning of last year. The consensus: Early signs are positive, but it’s not doing well enough to offset plummeting print ad revenue. → Read More
For more than a decade now, the Internet has done a great job of making things in our day-to-day lives more efficient by easily connecting parties who can have a mutually beneficial personal or business relationship. This same idea is now on the verge of disrupting labor and changing the definition of employment as we know it. → Read More
Much ink has been spilled these past few days on the Facebook IPO filing. Much of it analyses the details revealed in the S1 initial document. Some of it has focused on revenue and growth; some of it on control and corporate governance, some on valuation and how reasonable or not it is likely to be, and a little on whether or not the IPO represents the end of Facebook’s growth cycle.
So, should you be a bull, and buy? Or should you run as fast as you can away from the bulls? → Read More
Change in the air. It’s palpable.
Those of us in the technology world are witnessing a transformation: a buyer-led revolution in how information technology is both produced and consumed. Smartphones and tablets are upsetting the PC order; social applications are impinging on traditional “workforce productivity” and communications applications. → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — trembled in the face of Facebook’s IPO and all-out war on the open Web, also known as Google. Me, I go back to Bill Gates during the DOJ deposition when he basically said we don’t need no steenkin’ breakup when Google will come along and be invented.
@kevinmarks makes a good college (fitting) try of defending the open schmopen set, while none of us seem to notice Social Spring just keeps on rolling over conventional wisdom. Me, I’m pretty jacked up waiting for what this means for Twitter. Go Giants! → Read More
Quick, what’s the second most traded commodity in the world, after oil? Sorry, no: it’s not coffee. In fact, while hard data is scant, it may well be — of all things — carbon. No, really. According to the World Bank (PDF) , the global carbon market was worth a whopping 1.42 Facebooks US$142 billion in 2010.
Mind you, it’s not like container ships weighed down to the gills with graphite are crossing and recrossing the Pacific every week. What we’re actually talking about here is the trade in carbon offsets, ie, the absence of carbon. Very Zen, no? Anyway, techies should be comfortable with this notion; I seem to recall spending less time studying electrons than I did “holes,” ie their absence, while acquiring my EE degree.
Anyway, where there’s a $twelve-figures market, there are startups fighting for a share. In particular, there’s a bit of a war on to see who will be the primary aggregator of carbon-market data. On one side, dominating the market, I give you the Goliaths Point Carbon, a tentacle of the Thomson Reuters kraken, providing “independent news, analysis and consulting services for European and global power, gas and carbon markets,” and Bloomberg New Energy Finance, doing much the same. On the other, I give you plucky little David eCO2Market, a Paris-based startup with an algorithmic sling. → Read More
Following in the tradition of “Shit Silicon Valley Says” and other Shit ______ Says memes, August Capital’s David Hornick has made “Shit VCs Say.”
There are some gems in here, including: → Read More
Leadership guru Warren Bennis asked whether leaders are born or made. When asked if Wall Street would accept a young Mark Zuckerberg in his early 20s as CEO, Facebook investor Peter Thiel said: “Well, we’ll wait until he’s over 25 to file”. Wise move, considering that Mark’s title on his business cards read “I’m CEO, bitch”.
This week Facebook filed its S-1 to go public. Mark is 27. How Mark managed to launch a social networking site after Friendster had crashed during MySpace’s zenith has been widely chronicled. What’s been less discussed is how Mark mastered the six requirements to succeed, namely Ambition, Vision, Determination, Execution, Luck and Timing. → Read More
Two days ago, I received an invite to Pinterest. (I know, I’m late.) After signing up, I pretty much ignored the welcome message, just as I do with most services. But last night I decided to get myself caught up after the Crunchies, and started reading through all my unread emails (even the ones from Nigerian royal’s relatives) and found myself actually reading through the Pinterest welcome email, too.
It’s wonderful, and the reason it’s wonderful comes down to just one bullet point:
Pin carefully! As one of the first members of Pinterest, your pins will help set the tone for the whole community. Use big images, write thoughtful descriptions, and pin things you really love. Also, no nudity
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