Eric Eldon is a writer at TechCrunch.
He was previously the cofounder and editor of Inside Network, where he managed publications including Inside Facebook, Inside Social Games and Inside Mobile Apps.
Before that, he spent a couple years covering technology and finance at VentureBeat, a leading Silicon Valley publication where he was the first employee.
While Inside Network sold to WebMediaBrands for $14 million in May of 2011, Eric also had a failed startup a few years ago. Called WriteWith, it offered online writing collaboration software.
Before getting into the tech world, Eric attended Stanford University and graduated with a degree in international relations in 2005. There, he reported and edited news for The Stanford Daily student newspaper, and ran its business for a year.
Following San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee’s presentation of the city’s new government tech innovation plans last night at the TechFellow Awards, I caught up with him briefly to get a few more details on the plans. I asked questions like what his true feelings were towards the awful local taxi companies (negative) and how he felt about taking on the more recalcitrant portions of the city bureaucracy. Check out the video for his answers. → Read More
There have been a few walkie-talkie mobile apps that have come out on iOS and Android over the last year or two, but it wasn’t until last fall that one of them had a breakout moment. Voxer suddenly hit it big with the young black community in Cleveland and a few other big cities last November. Since then, it has spread to the rest of the world, topping the app store and gaining a wide range of users – including venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road here in Silicon Valley.
By which I mean, lots of VCs are both using it, and looking at investing in it. Voxer has spent the last couple months working on closing an angel round that it had left open, according to industry sources, while also working on its first venture funding. It’s raising $15-20 million at a pre-money valuation of $150 million, says one person. Another counters, saying that the valuation is going to be at least double that. → Read More
San Francisco may not have intended to be become the startup mecca that it is today, but now the city government is working hard to make itself as friendly as possible to tech entrepreneurs. Makes sense, considering that there are 1,539 tech companies and 30,000 tech jobs in the city now — a number that’s been growing fast as older industries like high finance continue to suffer through the recession.
What that means is this. Mayor Ed Lee, who came to power last year with heavy support from the local tech scene, is announcing a new initiative today at the TechFellows awards ceremony, that has some intriguing ideas for making the city itself more relevant to the booming industry within it. → Read More
Research firm eMarketer has put together a few interesting data points that show Google doing better in display ads than you might have realized. That is, by growing this business across properties that it at some point acquired – YouTube, DoubleClick, and mobile (AdMob) – it’s set to pass Facebook’s own display business.
The social network had the highest online ad sales of any company in the US last year, at $1.73 billion. But that was a mere $200 million or so above Google. This year, eMarketer expects a similar story, with Facebook bringing in $2.58 billion versus Google’s $2.54 billion. Things change in 2013 and 2014, further off from what the data can tell us accurately. → Read More
…. Whether or not Facebook’s in-house analytics product, Insights, is working. Due to product changes in recent weeks, the tool has been particularly slow to update with the latest metrics, as the site’s creator, PageLever, has discovered. The startup uses Facebook’s API to provide an advanced custom interface for page owners who are trying to track impressions and a variety of other key numbers. Because of the problem, it has been getting all sorts of questions from clients lately asking a slightly different question: “Why isn’t PageLever working?”
Yes, WhyIsFacebookInsightsNotworking.com doesn’t actually try to answer what its name would seem to indicate. Only Facebook engineers working on the tool know exactly why Insights is not functioning at any given time, after all, and they are probably busy working to fix it instead of dealing with questions. → Read More
If you’re a big website, you have a range of good options for staying protected from malicious hacks: hardware from enterprise-oriented companies like Cisco or McAfee, your own in-house support, or hosted professional blog services like WordPress VIP (which is what TechCrunch uses). If you’re a smaller site out on the open web, you have weaker options — at least if you want to get auto-updated responses to a wide range of security problems.
Israeli startup 6Scan is out to change that, launching a WordPress plugin today that automatically scans and updates to protect against the latest issues coming up across the web. By “automatically,” I mean that the company’s security team monitors the web and does its own research to find problems, then pushes an update to all of its users. These go out about every hour, according to co-founder and chief executive Nitzan Miron, as they’re discovered and added to the company’s system. → Read More
I’ve been using Facebook since its early years. So today it has the most complete and accurate set of connections to people I’ve known throughout my life. Exactly because of its success in assembling this group, I’ve avoided turning on its five month-old Subscribe feature — until now.
For the many others of you who both want attention but don’t want to spam your friends about your work, here’s my reasoning for taking my Facebook profile public. → Read More
In case it wasn’t already clear to you that later-stage social, mobile and deal-oriented companies led venture fundraising last year, here’s some analysis of CrunchBase data that drives the point home, courtesy of Alexey Tolkachiov at BuzzSparks.org. → Read More
Search engines like Google scour the web to figure out how to rank content. Measurement firms like comScore sample users to estimate traffic to web sites. But what if you want to know which of some 2000 technologies a web site is using? And, what if you want to know what the tech trends are across the 130 million largest sites on the web today?
You could just dig through the source code for each site you’re interested in to answer these questions piecemeal, or you could repurpose other web site profilers designed for search engine optimization or other jobs.
Or, you could use BuiltWith. → Read More
Having built a socially-driven market research business on Facebook and across the web, Peanut Labs is launching a new iteration of its crowd-sampling tool today called CrowdVi.be. The goal is to let a brand or anyone else quickly ask questions and get meaningful answers back from random internet users.
Sure, you can use other social media tools, like Twitter and Facebook, to instantly get feedback online. But the difference is that Peanut Labs has some 50 million users on 200 social networks around the world, who take its surveys in order to earn Facebook Credits or other forms of virtual currency in games and apps. In other words, it has a huge, fairly random pool of consumers who are easily to access and hear back from. During its private beta, Crowdvi.be has already been used by companies testing various versions of logos, video trailers, site redesigns, and other tests of words and images.
→ Read More
After a week of confused coverage around which mobile app developers access user address books and how they do it, we are finally getting a product-level resolution. Apple says today (in time to beat back some inquiring congressmen) that it will start requiring developers to ask for explicit user permission in order to access these contacts.
The new interface, slated for its next iOS operating system release, will provide a permissions notification to users after they install an app, similar to how it currently requires users to approve location sharing or push notifications. This change will add some arguably unnecessary friction to users of apps that pull address books — and a lot of developers will be affected, as 11% of free iOS apps were accessing address books as of the start of last year, according to one study.
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The problem that former Sun Microsystems chief executive Jonathan Schwartz is trying to fix with his new startup is clear enough.
More and more people are having to care for older relatives or children with health issues as the US population ages. But, the current online methods for sharing such sensitive information aren’t always appropriate. Emailing caregiver information can lead to tastelessly targeted ads. Online project management software may be too bloated or insecure for sharing medical histories between just a few people. Offline documents — the most common form of communication in this area — are simply hard to share between all the people who need access. → Read More
Zynga’s first earnings release today makes the social game developer’s business look notably stronger than it did when the company went public in December. Traffic, its paying user base, and its projected bookings are all headed into positive territory, whereas these numbers had been flat or falling towards the end of last year. → Read More
Three months after going public, Zynga is having its first quarterly earnings call this afternoon, and expectations are high.
Public investors had given the social gaming developer a cool reception the first couple months it was on the market, with shares staying below its relatively conservative $10 opening price. That has changed in the last several weeks. It started gaining ground around the time that online gambling began to look like a new revenue stream for the company. → Read More
Having rolled out Timeline at the end of last year, Facebook followed up in mid January by letting third-party apps integrate with the reverse-chronological scrapbooking feature. Apps like Pinterest, Yahoo News and Fab began letting you post stories that stay as permanent reminders of news stories, designs, photos or anything else that you experience via a web or mobile app.
What difference is this making for developers? The early results are in, and according to Facebook data, Timeline is creating some new growth, particularly for non-gaming apps. → Read More
Padma Rao’s analytical marketing skills have made a big impact at more than one company in the Bay Area, and now she’s bringing a decade of experiences to her new role as an entrepreneur in residence at Foundation Capital.
Her most recent efforts helped turn a gaming startup into a booming public company.
Few people realized it at the time, but in late 2008 and early 2009 social game developer Zynga had figured out how to get a great return on investment from Facebook advertising. The social network had developed its ad system over the previous few years to the point that it was able to deliver ads closely targeted to users’ interests — but most people hadn’t realized that yet, so prices were cheap. → Read More
On the surface, the StartX Demo Day last night could have looked like any other accelerator pushing its latest class of startups. Nine groups got on stage and fired off presentations about how they were working on something cool, and why they deserved funding.
But it wasn’t the rash of lightweight consumer applications you often see at other demo days. These were Stanford students, particularly technical graduate students, who have been nerding out on solving real problems for years in their labs and dorm rooms, and who are now in the middle of commercializing their hard work. Big-name investors from around Silicon Valley unsurprisingly showed up to check them out. → Read More
Mobile app developer Rovio has famously turned its Angry Birds game into a popular toy franchise, but most other new-fangled gaming companies haven’t spent much energy going this route. But now social gaming leader Zynga is, per a big licensing deal with Hasbro. → Read More
Some of us can’t be bothered to check in, but still want to find interesting people nearby. The challenge for developers is how to do this in a way that is both useful and not creepy. Glancee, available for both iOS and Android, gets closer to solving these problems than most I’ve seen.
The app lets you sign in with Facebook, then it shows you people within 100 yards, or one, two, or ten miles who have things in common. In some ways this sounds similar another app I recently covered, Highlight — but there are key differences, that will make each app appeal to different sets of users. → Read More
Japanese mobile gaming giant DeNA bought mobile app developer Ngmoco last year for $400 million. Since then, the company has acquired a range of other outfits and worked to tie the San Francisco startup in with everything else it does.
In general, things seem to be going well. The conglomerate just posted a strong third quarter, with net sales up 16%, which in turn boosted the stock price by more than 8% for a valuation of $4.8 billion. However, net income declined versus the same period the previous year, from $106 million to $79.2 million. → Read More
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