Greylock VC and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman talked about his Web 3.0 idea (Big Data quel surprise) here at Web 2.0 about the implementation layer on top of this data. When asked by moderator John Battelle what he thought about his own investment (and what some might consider a competitor) Facebook, Hoffman said, “Not everything has to be social,” he said “Facebook has a lot of huge things to do,” saying the interest lies in figuring out how to do that.
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Before I begin, two points:
1) I do not own any Apple stock. I have absolutely no interest in whether the stock goes up or down.
2) One can make an argument that there may be other reasons to sell Apple’s stock now (namely, uncertainty following the passing of Steve Jobs), I’m simply arguing that the stock’s collapse today due to yesterday’s earnings is laughable.
Watching the stock market following Apple’s Q4 earnings yesterday and into today, I’m reminded of a famous Steve Jobs quote. “If you see a stylus, they blew it.” Reworked, the quote today would be: “If you’re investing based on Apple analysts, you blew it.” → Read More
Facebook CTO Bret Taylor responded to the oft repeated maxim (“meme” is what he called it) that Facebook privacy settings are needlessly complex by asserting that “the majority of people on Facebook have modified their privacy settings” in a conversation with John Battelle at Web 2.0 Summit today.
“If you talk to college students they know what their parents can see, they know what their ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend can see.” (I heard a “Yeah right” emanate from the audience when he said this).
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Google founder Sergey Brin freely admits, “I am not a very social person myself.” Speaking onstage at the Web 2.0 Summit with Google+ exec Vic Gundotra, Brin says that he thought Google+ would be too complicated, with all of its Circles and different ways to share with different groups of people. But he has been pleasantly surprised. “I have been able to reconnect with friends, I was not able to do that with existing services because of the way their sharing models work. The Circles worked very well for me, I debated they were too complicated. Now I use them.”
But of course he does. What about regular people? As Sean Parker pointed out on Monday, all of your friends are already on Facebook and it will be hard to get all of them to move over to Google+. “Your mom and friends, guess what, they are already on Google,” responds Gundotra. Google will get them to use Google+ overtime. → Read More
We know PayPal has been investing in a comprehensive solution for in-store merchants to integrate the payments service into the point of sale payments experience. Today, on eBay’s earnings call, eBay CEO John Donahoe said that the launch of the new technology will take place in the fourth quarter. He said that the in-store PayPal technology will be tested on a ‘friends and family’ basis in a national retailer in two markets.
The exact details on how this will work is still unclear, but we do know that features of this new offering will include location-based offers, making payments accessible from any device and offering more payments flexibility to customers after they’ve checked out. Users will have the ability to access realtime store inventory, receive in-store offers, and real-time location-based advertising from stores. → Read More
“That’s a big number even by Google standards,” said Google social czar Vic Gundotra.
Updating. → Read More
eBay reported third quarter earnings today, which were in-line with Wall Street expectations. Revenue for the third quarter increased 32% to $3 billion, compared to the same period of 2010. This was actually a record quarter for revenue, says the company. Net income on a GAAP basis was $490.5 million, or $0.37 per diluted share, and non-GAAP net income came in at $628.2 million, or $0.48 per diluted share, up 18 percent from 2010. Analysts expected $0.48 cents per share, and revenue was expected to hit $2.9 billion.
The company’s PayPal business continued to help buoy the company’s earnings. PayPal ended the quarter with 103 million active registered accounts, a 14% increase year over year. PayPal revenue increased 32% year over year driven primarily by increased penetration on eBay as well as continued merchant and consumer adoption. PayPal’s net total payment volume grew 31% to $29.3 billion in the third quarter of 2011 compared to the same period of last year. PayPal had its first billion dollar quarter last quarter but exceeded this, bringing in $1.1 billion in revenue, which is up over 30 percent from 2010. And PayPal expects to generate more than $3.5 billion in mobile TPV in 2011, up from $750 million in 2010.
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The Lytro “focus later” camera has created a lot of interesting discussion on the web. With photography still in many ways the same as it was a century ago, this new way of capturing images has certainly struck a nerve. I’ve voiced my skepticism, but I wouldn’t want to pour cold water on this truly innovative device on its big debut.
At an event in San Francisco today, CEO and originator of the Lytro’s light-field technology Ren Ng showed off the device, which only resembles traditional cameras in that it has a lens and LCD screen. It’s really more like a kaleidoscope than anything else. → Read More
San Francisco-based Liftopia, an online retailer of lift tickets and mountain resort activities, is today announcing it has raised $1.3 million in a round led by First Round Capital. New investors in today’s round also include Dave Morin and Chris Sacca, who participated with existing investors Erik Blachford and Sam Shank.
Today’s investment brings Liftopia’s total raise to nearly $3 million. → Read More
Today at The Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Founder of Khan Academy, Salman Khan, took the stage to share a few quick stats on the growth of his online video education platform. For those unfamiliar, Khan Academy is, as John Batelle noted this afternoon, one of Bill Gates’ favorite educators.
It also happens to be one of mine, but I thought you’d probably resonate a bit more with Bill Gates. But Khan Academy is the institution of Salman Khan, who brought the idea of educating young people, self-starters, people who learn at their own pace — online. “Educational”-type YouTube videos have now been around for years, but Khan Academy’s repository is pretty ridiculous. The educational startup now counts over 2,600 videos in its library, with sessions or classes on everything from arithmetic to physics, including 211 practice exercises, to let students watch videos and learn at their own pace. → Read More
Kevin Rose took the stage today at the Web 2.0 Summit to give a demo of Oink, the first product from his his mobile lab, Milk. He’s talked a bit about it before, but went into more details today. “With Oink, we wanted to build a platform to rank things,” he explains.
Oink is a mobile app that lets you rank things in different places. So instead of ranking a restaurant or point of interest, you can rank specific things at those places. Rose showed an example of one of his favorite places, The Samovar Tea Lounge. On Oink, you can rank the different teas at the lounge, and see how they rank against the other teas there and teas you can get nearby. Everything is based on hashtags like #tea, and each type of #ea is ranked by place or within a geographic radius. You can chose to find the best #teas within 1 mile, 5 miles, 25 miles, etc. And they all show up on a map. → Read More
If there is a theme emerging among new social startups, it is layering an interest graph on top of people’s social connections (aka, the social graph). Bill Gross’s new product Chime.in is all about filtering your stream by interest. Sean Parker’s new still=stealthy startup Airtime will also, I suspect, be organized around interests. The first person I ran into at the Web 2.0 Summit, Dmitry Shapiro, is also working on a social network based around interests. Shapiro, who was the founder of Veoh and did a stint as CTO of MySpace Music, gave me a brief demo of his new social network, AnyBeat in the video above. → Read More
The increasing socialification (as opposed to socialization) of our everyday activities is food for thought. What is it that makes people want to share everything about every activity? Reading especially, to me, has always been more of an escape from the social sphere. Except for on the rare occasions on which I have had to read out loud, books are a way to completely disengage from the constantly and insistently connected online world. Yet I can’t deny that the urge to share and be shared with must be as compelling for some regarding books as it is for their lunches, activities, and so on.
So when Kobo shows off its e-book reader and touts it as the world’s first social e-reader, I am skeptical. Firstly because I’m pretty sure there are plenty of socially-enabled e-readers out there, and secondly because I’m not sure social is a basket into which that Kobo should be putting all their eggs. → Read More
Somehow on stage at Web 2.0 Summit, MC Hammer has just announced WireDoo, an attempt at a relational search engine that he is somehow involved in.
Why do another search engine? Hammer asked the confused Web 2.0 audience rhetorically. “Well, what if Sergei and Larry had not tried?” He has a point. His offering, WireDoo, which is ironically un-Googleable, apparently has the motto of ”Search once and see what’s related.”
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Enflick, the developer who created free text messaging app TextNow and IM application PingChat has raised over $1 million in seed funding led by Freestyle Capital, with the Menlo Ventures Talent Fund and Lady Gaga’s talent manager Troy Carter and Justin Bieber’s manager Scooter Braun participating in the round.
Enflick was co-founded by Derek Ting and Jon Lerner. Over 300 million text messages are sent each month using TextNow, which is a simple, free text messaging app. at absolutely no cost to the user. PingChat is a cross-platform instant messaging app that supports real-time conversations, group chat, and media sharing. TextNow and PingChat combined serve more than a billion impressions per month with 21.5 million users worldwide. → Read More
As the holiday shopping season approaches, more and more consumers are going to be using the smartphones to search for products, stores and more. Google is debuting a host of new mobile ad formats today, including one specifically designed for the search experience. Many apps feature search capabilities (i.e. Yelp) within the app, so with these new formats, app developers can place contextual ads within the app’s search.
Another ad unit allows businesses to use mobile search ads to direct someone right to a destination within a mobile app already installed on their phone. For example, if someone searches for an iPad on a mobile device, they might see an ad that takes them directly into a shopping app they’ve installed on their phone. → Read More
Sure, other sites might have footage of Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0.) They grabbed a Galaxy Nexus, fumbled with it for a second or two, and then shot 2-3 minutes of video with a device/interface they weren’t really familiar with. And that’s fine.
But I didn’t want to do that — I wanted us to do it right. Late last night, I caught up with Android’s Engineering Director Dave Burke for an in-depth, 15 minute video showing a massive array of Ice Cream Sandwich’s finest features. → Read More
The pedometer – those little things you wear to measure your steps – has always been a weight loss gimmick. Only recently, however, have pedometers gotten smart enough to do more than just vaguely shame us into walking a little further. Take Striiv, for example. This keychain-sized device measures steps walked and stairs climbed and includes a unique set of cute little games that should, in theory, get you off your bum.
Like the FitBit, Striiv senses strides and stair climbs from the comfort of your pocket. It has a small LCD screen and lasts one week on one charge, making it quite Tamagotchi-like in its size and interface. To use it you just slip it into your pocket and it gives you goofy little badges (“Good start” for your first 150 steps, “Average Day” for 4900 steps, the average number of steps an American takes each day) and you can track your daily stats.
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WeVideo, a newly launched cloud-based collaborative video editing platform, is today announcing integration with YouTube. Starting this afternoon, YouTube users will be able to access a basic version of WeVideo’s online service in order to edit their video clips by adding titles, effects, animation, music, narration and more.
The editing tool will be provided directly on YouTube itself at YouTube.com/create. → Read More
The days of scrounging in your pockets for bus fare are over, if Google and NJ Transit have anything to say about it. NJ Governor Chris Christie announced earlier today that the third largest transit system in the country has struck up a partnership to bring Google’s wireless Wallet payment system to bus routes and rail lines in the Northeast. → Read More
