Something dramatic is going on between Zynga CEO Mark Pincus and one of his old employees at Tribe.net, a company he cofounded in 2003. Pincus has obtained a temporary restraining order on Darren McKeeman, formerly the IT Director at Tribe. Cisco acquired the company in 2007.
Pinkus hasn’t returned a request for comment, but the TRO was filed in the Superior Court of California, County of San Francisco.
McKeeman is prohibited from contacting Pincus at all, and must stay at least 50 yards away from him. He is also explicitly prohibited from any of the following to Pincus: “harass, attack, strike, threaten, assault (sexually or otherwise), hit, follow, stalk, destroy personal property, keep under surveillance or block movements.” He is also restricted from purchasing guns or other firearms, and must sell or turn in any guns that he owns. → Read More
Last year was a turbulent one for Silicon Valley based Tribe.net. Founding CEO Mark Pincus was ousted, in April 2005 and then returned in August 2006. While Pincus was gone rumors swirled that the company had been acquired by NBC, but the deal was never consummated. But now the New York Times is reporting that the assets of the eight person company have been acquired by Cisco. This follows their acquisition of Five Across, a social networking infrastructure service, two weeks ago. The hope is to use the two company’s technology to help Cisco’s corporate clients build their own social networks, so it isn’t clear whether or not the Tribe service itself will live on. The price of the Tribe deal hasn’t been disclosed, but usually these things leak within a few days. The demand is clearly there, as seen by Reuters’ announcement today that they’re looking to build their own Myspace clone, for financial types. Everyone, it seems, wants their very own social network these days. Cisco is now a player in the social networking space. That certainly wasn’t in anyone’s predictions for 2007. And there are bound to be a few snickers around the valley as Cisco dips its toes in this new business. Marc Andreessen, the founder of Ning (which just upgraded its build-it-yourself social network platform), had a great sound bite on this topic in the NYT article. He said “The idea that Cisco is going to be a force in social networking is about as plausible as Ning being a force in optical switches.” → Read More
San Francisco based Piczo is having a media coming-out party today, with announcements on the current state of the service and key statistics. A few weeks ago CEO Jeremy Verba did the same thing in the UK – which we covered on TechCrunch UK. Piczo is adding 35,000 new member registrations per day, 75% of which are teenagers between 13 and 16 years old. Ten million unique visitors come to Piczo sites monthly, adding up to 2.5 billion page views. While this isn’t much compared to monster competitor MySpace (which serves over 1 billion pages per day), it shows what the power of the network effect can do when applied properly – Piczo hasn’t spent a dime on marketing. And unlike Myspace, Piczo is focused on safety first. It is virtually impossible to browse user pages on Piczo. There is no search or browse feature. Users must share their page URL with others for it to be found, and there are numerous ways for users, parents and others to report inappropriate behavior. Piczo has full time staff reviewing all complaints and takes swift action to protect its members. Piczo was founded in early 2004 as a paid service. Based on early user feedback it was relaunched as a free service, and founder Jim Conning sent out 100 emails to Canadian teenagers announcing the new site. That is where Piczo’s marketing efforts began and, until now, ended. The result of those 100 emails has been a massive viral spread of the product. Piczo brought in a high powered CEO late last year, Jeremy Verba. Verba was previously GM and Vice President of AOL’s Voice Services division, which he grew to over a million subscribers. In addition, he was co-founder and president of E!Online, a joint venture of CNET and E!Entertainment Television, now a part of Comcast. Piczo is well funded after pocketing a total of US$7 million over two rounds of financing from Sierra Ventures and Catamount in 2005 and 2006. The Social Networking Space I thought this was a good opportunity to look up Comscore numbers on the largest social networking players and see how things are evolving (these are U.S. numbers only). MySpace is still the king, with over a billion page views per day, 100 million registered users and 56 million unique visitors per month. If anything, their lead is growing over competitors. But that doesn’t mean there → Read More
Update: This is now confirmed. Mark Pincus is back at Tribe. This is just weird. Mark Pincus may be back at Tribe. Or someone may have just hijacked his Tribe account. Mark was ousted from his CEO spot back in April (first spotted by Marc Canter, and Matt Marshall has a good summary here). New CEO Jan Gullet took over, and Pincus commented at the time “I don’t really enjoy being a day to day manager of people and projects…and it’s not something I think I’m particularly good at. Is this a case of another founder being pushed out, kicking and screaming? That’s never the case with me.” But today Eran Globen found a listing on Mark Pincus’ Tribe page that says Mark is back, Jan is gone and other changes are on the way: This is also here, with a different title. The language and method of communicating this message is odd to say the least. But this is definitely Mark’s Tribe page. I emailed Mark the link and asked him if he has a comment. He replied “Yes in an hour” but I haven’t heard back from him after two hours and a couple of additional emails from me. So I have no idea what this is all about, but Mark has my attention. And, there is a very good chance that someone simply broke into Mark’s Tribe account and posted this. → Read More
Rumors are being spread (by Rafat Ali and Susan Mernit) that NBC is buying social networking site Tribe.net. Ali estimates the sale at $50 million or less and says that the media company will use Tribe to power the low-tech women’s networking site iVillage, which it acquired earlier this year for $600 million. Update: ClickZ story now un-confirms the above, reporting that the deal is in fact not complete and the likely price is far lower than Ali’s guess. See comments below for more. Tribe received funding from the Washington Post and Knight Ridder earlier this year. Critics allege that its user base has failed to grow substantially beyond its San Francisco core. It seems a bit of a strange move to me, but I suppose when you’re NBC it couldn’t hurt to throw some pocket change at an established technology and focus on integrating it rather than taking the time to build your own. Goodness knows a media company can’t be without a social networking site or two these days! Good for Tribe getting some money before this kind of technology hits absolute commodity status. Great scoop by Valleywag on this last week. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
