Last month, Facebook drove 160 million visitors and 1.1 billion visits to third-party apps, an increase of 100 million visitors and 780 million visits from the month prior. And that’s just for third-party mobile apps. Thanks to the size of its user base, and the increasing power of its referral funnel, Facebook now has the ability to take sites from 0 to 60 in a matter of weeks. While this is true for content of all stripes, be they photos, games, or news readers, the most recent and most-buzzed-about evidence has been Open Graph video apps, like Socialcam and Viddy.
Unsurprisingly, app developers and websites are eager not to miss the train — the Open Graph/Timeline Lift — and these video apps are not alone in their Facebook integrations. Now, both the cult favorite community-directed Q&A site, Quora, and the fast-growing, increasingly popular non-profit educational video repository Khan Academy are on board. And, as a result, educational content is becoming social, gamified, and more discoverable. It’s friends helping friends get smart. → Read More
Q&A site Quora has raised $50 million at a $400 million pre-money valuation according to a report by the Wall Street Journal and confirmed to me by the founders themselves. We had reported that Quora was raising in this range back in April and it looks like Facebook board member Peter Thiel has beat out many other investors including a much-rumored KPCB to lead the round. Also investing is Matrix’s Josh Hannah and Northbridge’s Jonathan Heiliger.
According to our own sources, Quora co-founder Adam D’Angelo put $20 million of his own money into the Series B financing. Thiel is leading personally and not through Founders Fund, breaking up the remaining $30 million between Matrix and Northbridge. → Read More
Here’s a heart-warming tale of why you can’t second-guess yourself. Robert Cezar Matei had the chance to work for Instagram long-before it was acquired by Facebook for $1 billion, but followed his passion for knowledge and became the growth hacker for question & answer site Quora instead.
This is his answer on Quora (fittingly) for why he declined Instagram, and why he’s still smiling. “You make a gut call, then you walk into the future with serenity.”
Question – Did anyone decline an offer to work at Instagram?
Answer - Robert Cezar Matei: “Yeah, I had an offer to be the second engineering hire.
Kevin and Mike grew the team very slowly for most of their history: they’d hired only one engineer, Shayne, until just a few months prior to the acquisition, and they’d only made one other offer before me. They were picky, but they also weren’t taken that seriously as a business by many people. → Read More
It’s really beautiful outside. Like so beautiful that if San Francisco is like this more often it will become really expensive to live here. Also, Quora is raising money according to the multiple people in the past week who have told me that Quora is raising money.
From what I’ve heard, the startup wants to raise between $30 to $50 million in its Series B, at a $400 million valuation — while we couldn’t confirm whether the amount was pre or post, it strangely enough seems modest in light of the billion dollar rounds being thrown about willy nilly. → Read More
The drive for more information has long been fueling the growth of the Internet, but that rising tide is not automatically lifting all boats, as one company trying to ride the wave has seen.
Beepl, a Q&A startup co-founded last year and led by ex-TechCrunch writer Steve O’Hear, has now lost him as CEO over what TechCrunch understands to be a dispute around future strategy. O’Hear confirmed his departure to TechCrunch and says that he remains a minority shareholder and director — although given his departure as CEO he may be leaving that role soon, too.
It is not clear yet who is permanently replacing O’Hear as the CEO, but we have heard that the move comes at the same time that Beepl is pushing out a new release of its site and gearing up for a mobile app launch. → Read More
Quora has fiddled around with its Credits system and unveiled some new features today, making two very notable changes. The first one is the elimination of the original “Pay to show to Topics” feature of Credits, where users would have to pay credits to have their questions show up to people following specific topics. Instead, users will have to pay 50 Credits to ask a question, any question and all topic additions are “free.”
Users can earn credits by having their questions and answers upvoted, in addition to answering “Ask to Answer” questions or having users gift them credits. → Read More
Wisdio, a social QA site like Quora, has decided to up the social QA ante by adding something they’re calling WAR – Wisdio Authority Ratings. These ratings allow folks to recieve answers from authorities on their subject of choice, thereby reducing the number of incorrect answers and, one would hope, increasing the utility of the site.
Founded by Sebastian Zontek, Wisdio aims to help “find the right people to answer questions quickly and reliably,” not unlike many of its competitors. However, the WAR score offers a one-stop shop for folks trying to figure out who to trust and, one would assume, listen to. For example, I can say I’m an expert in Social Media (which I am. I have LOTS of followers on Orkut) but in order to increase my score I need to answer questions about social media. This prevents gadflies from answering questions willy nilly and reduces useless responses. → Read More
Quora has joined the “Button” wars today with the launch of the Quora “Follow” button, created by Quora engineers Shu-Uesugi and Edmond-Lau. In the same vein as the Twitter “Follow” button, the Quora Follow button can be embedded in any website by cutting and pasting a customized snippet of code from the Quora Resources page. Users can choose between a light button and a dark button to taste.
“The goal is to help people discover great Quora users from the outside of www.quora.com,” says co-founder Charlie Cheever, “Like blogs and personal websites. When someone clicks on your button, he/she will start following you immediately if he/she is logged on to Quora; otherwise he/she will be prompted to log in or sign up.”
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Beepl is a questions and answers service, which launches today. Co-founder/CEO and ex-TechCrunch blogger Steve O’Hear actually left TC to do this startup is convinced that Beepl can take on the the so-called Q&A field better than Quora. But how? → Read More
Beepl is a questions and answers service, which launches today. Co-founder/CEO and ex-TechCrunch blogger Steve O’Hear actually left TC to do this startup is convinced that Beepl can take on the the so-called Q&A field better than Quora. But how?
→ Read More
The nominations have been tabulated and the votes are in. Over 300,000 nominations were calculated across 20 categories. Along with our partners GigaOm and VentureBeat, we are very proud to announce the finalists for 2011′s best in technology. Voting begins now.
For 2011, we’ve added some new categories. Best Location App, Best Cloud Services and Biggest Social Impact join the Crunchies ranks this year. You’ll also find Best Social App (Google+ is up against Facebook Timeline, the New New Twitter, Instagram, and Path 2.0), the NYC-dominated category of Best Shopping App, Best New Startup and the year’s best VC’s and Angel Investors. Newcomers like Task Rabbit’s Leah Busque and Keith Rabois for his angel investments (Airbnb, LinkedIn, Yammer, Path, YouTube) made the list of finalists, as well as industry favorites such as Marc Andreessen, Jack Dorsey, Mark Pincus and Ron Conway.
In addition to today’s announcement of the Finalists, we are happy to release our next batch of tickets through Eventbrite. The release begins now, so act fast and get them while you can. → Read More
Quora is taking a step beyond Q&A this morning with its latest product launch, boards. Users can now set up their own personal-themed bookmarking boards, sort of like a Pinterest for text-based information.
Writes Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo in a blog post, “As Quora has grown, we’ve learned that people want to read the most interesting content regardless of whether it happens to be in question and answer format or not.” D’Angelo tells me that this shift fits in better with Quora’s new goal, “to connect you with everything you want to know about.” Its old goal was described as “a continuously improving collection of questions and answers.”
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It’s telling that Apple chose an app that debuted more than 14 months ago, Instagram, as its “iPhone App of the Year” for 2011. This should not imply that there was a shortage of quality and groundbreaking apps released this year. Far from it.
From social magazines to music discovery apps to console-quality games that players can hold in the palms of their hands, there are hundreds of new titles in the iTunes App Store that will inform, organize, and entertain virtually anyone who owns an iOS device. As more choices become available to different kinds of consumers, however, it’s difficult to identify the undisputed champions of the app world.
We picked 20 of the best iOS applications that came out or received significant updates in 2011. The list is a healthy mix of free and paid titles that can run on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. (We will follow up with a separate top 20 list just for games, which are not included in this list). → Read More
You know what I’m into? Quora‘s efforts at gamification. Because listen, Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever could have chosen to devote their youth to anything on earth and they have chosen to build a database of all content that people want to know. Valid.
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Very very quietly (there is almost no Google footprint), investment bank and securities firm Goldman Sachs held its “Private Internet Company Conference” this week in Las Vegas. During the two-day conference, which lasted from November 29-30th, a gaggle of companies presented their business models to an elite audience composed of bankers, investors and peers. → Read More
Good news people who are really curious about Quora growth! You might one day be reading an article like this about Quora …
Because Quora has hired a former Twitter and Facebook guy, Andy Johns, to focus on user growth and engagement. Johns, who tweets under the apropos username @ibringtraffic, spent a year and four months at Twitter, two years at Facebook and is now taking his speciality to the fancy Q&A startup.
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After five months of beta testing, Quora has made its Quora Credits and “Ask to Answer” User Suggestions live for everyone today.
All users can now earn credits for a variety of positive and user engagement-magnifying Quora behaviors like answering questions they’ve been asked to answer, getting votes on answers to questions they’ve solicited through “Ask to Answer” and getting votes on their answers to other questions. Users can also give each other credits, which is awesome and can be managed through the Credit interface here. → Read More
It’s hard when you’re new to a city and have no friends. When I visit a new city I tend to hide in trees and behind garbage bins and watch people from afar, seeing where they go to eat and socialize. Then I go to those places at night, when they’re closed, and sniff the air for their scent. However, Drumo offers an improved method for finding out specific things about a city using Quora-style discussion connected to geodata of major metropolitan areas. → Read More
Quora can be an addiction. You visit the site just to see what’s going on, 30 minutes later you’re still there. Today, the addiction goes mobile. Finally.
The service has just released their first iOS native app. Tailored for the iPhone and iPod touch, I can safely say that it’s awesome. I’ve been testing it out for the past few days, and my own personal usage of the service has already skyrocketed. Why? A few reasons. → Read More
Q&A site Quora has just unveiled a revamp of its commenting system, the most notable change being the implementation of a threaded commenting feature for the discussions under a question and its subsequent answers. The new threaded comments allow users to reply to specific comments in an answer thread, intuitively by entering text into the Reply box under each comment. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
