The job of CEO at a 200 person company is pretty different from the life I had 6 years ago—just before Meebo launched. It’s a lot less about what I do and a lot more about how I enable others. In today’s world, if you zoom out to a very macro-level view, there are three things I do. 1. Strategy. 2. People. 3. Resource allocation.
Strategy
You always hear that part of a CEO’s job is to come up with the “strategy”. But what does that really mean? In my world it’s listen, synthesize and communicate. → Read More
We’re back with another episode of TC Cribs, taking you inside the offices of some of the tech world’s hottest companies. This episode features Meebo, which rose to popularity as a multi-protocol web-based chat client, and has since gotten tons of traction with their Meebo Bar (not to be confused with the numerous drinking holes located in the office, as you’ll see in the episode)).
Tune in to learn about Meebo’s traditions, their giant cookies, their hidden staircase to the happiest place on Earth, and the wooden board they call a ‘rock wall’ that is much, much harder than it looks. Seriously, it’s really hard. You’ll see. And do be sure to watch til the end. → Read More
Last November, Meebo took a step into a new territory for them: check-ins. But instead of checking into physical locations in the real world, they decided they were going to allow users to check-in to the sites on the web they were browsing. It’s a concept that a few other startups are trying as well, but Meebo has one big advantage: scale.
But as big as Meebo’s reach is, they recognize that people aren’t always going to be sitting at their desks checking in to website. So they’re taking the experience mobile. → Read More
Meebo, the online IM service that has increasingly become known for its social toolbar that adorns thousands of websites, has acquired Mindset Media. Mindset Media targets ads based on psychographics — it uses criteria commonly seen in ad targeting systems, like gender and age, in addition to other variables that it says establish user preferences and personality, which can in turn be used by advertisers. Terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed, though Meebo does say it will be incorporating the twelve members of Mindset’s team into its own workforce.
The acquisition sets the stage for Meebo to move into the direct response ad market. Meebo says that it’s now on over 8,000 sites, reaching some 76.6 million people in the United States (of course, these users are visiting sites with the Meebo Bar installed, but aren’t necessarily using it). With this growing distribution Meebo believes it has an opportunity to help advertisers directly reach customers. → Read More
Editor’s Note: The following guest post is written by a Silicon Valley CEO. Frank Dupree is a pen name
In the late 1990s, the rise of the browser was supposed to usher in an era of unprecedented opportunity for startups. A great part of that increased opportunity came as a result of the significant reduction in platform dependencies. No longer did the users’ operating system dictate their access to services or information. Even a behemoth like Microsoft was fighting hand-to-hand combat with small startups for the first time in decades. Fast forward ten years, and it’s 1985 all over again.
But even as the risks of dependencies become better understood by startups and investors, the ascent of Facebook and Twitter seem to point to an ever increasing number of startups with significant business dependencies. Recent changes to both Facebook and Twitter show that neither startups nor their investors can assume much when it comes to support for a given API in the future. Today, even the OS seems subject to dramatic shifts in record time. One only need look to Apple’s iOS to see how dramatic and unpredictable developments can change the landscape for startups, customers and investors.
Today, most startups build with significant external platform dependencies, whether it is Facebook, iOS, Google Apps or Twitter. There are a few types of dependencies. A simple distinction might be to call a dependency on a platform symbiotic or parasitic. Symbiotic dependencies are those for which both sides agree to terms of the dependency and for which both sides seem to derive a benefit. Developers on Facebook’s platform, for example. The most successful here being Zynga, which grew completely and—probably for the team and its investors—nervously within the Facebook ecosystem. → Read More
Editor’s note: This is the third of a three-part guest post by venture capitalist Mark Suster of GRP Partners on “Social Networking: The Past, Present, And Future.” Read Part I and Part II first.
In my first post I talked about the history of social networking from 1985-2002 dominated by CompuServe, AOL & Yahoo! In the second post I explored the current era which covers Web 2.0 (blogs, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook), Realtime (Twitter), and mobile (FourSquare). Is the game over? Have Facebook & Twitter won or is their another act? No prizes for guessing … there’s always a second (and third, and fourth, and fifth) act in technology. So where is social networking headed next? I make eight predictions below.
1. The Social Graph Will Become Portable
Right now our social graph (whom we are connected to and their key information like email addresses) is mostly held captive by Facebook. There is growing pressure on Facebook to make this portable and they have made some progress on this front. Ultimately I don’t believe users or society as a whole will accept a single company “locking in” our vital information.
Facebook will succumb to pressure and over time make this available to us to allow us more choice in being part of several social networks without having to spam all of our friends again. I know in 2010 this doesn’t seem obvious to everybody but it’s my judgment. Either they make our social graph portable or we’ll find other networks to join. I predict this will come before the end of 2012. → Read More
Now that people are just starting to get comfortable with the concept of the check-in for geo-location, it is starting to spread to other areas like product check-ins, TV show check-ins, and website check-ins. Just a couple weeks ago, Meebo introduced website check-ins as a new feature for its Meebo Bar. And before that, at our last Disrupt conference in San Francisco, two of the startups (Badgeville and OneTrueFan) launched entire companies around the concept of the website check-in.
So why would you ever want to check into a website? I ran into Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg today at SAI’s Ignition conference in New York City, who explains in the video after the jump. → Read More
“Meebo did widgets super early. Guess what we learned? Don’t build stuff that sits in a box.”
Better than a box? A bar. No, not one with hotties and booze– a toolbar.
In part two of our interview with Meebo’s co-founder and CEO Seth Sternberg, we talk about the value of reach online– given the gargantuan reach companies can get on platforms like Facebook in no time. Like a diamond, if everyone can get it, it’s no longer as valuable. Sternberg pokes a big hole into one of the hottest storylines of the early Web 2.0 days– that you could build a big business off of widgets. → Read More
Pivot. It is the new buzzword seemingly taking on a life of its own ala “SUPER ANGEL” after this iconic, viral talk by Mike Maples. Ngmoco did it and cashed in big time. Instagram did it and became an app sensation. Twitter did it, and became, well, Twitter. And now Meebo has done it and raised another $25 million from Khosla Ventures to continue building its business.
Seth Sternberg, Meebo co-founder and CEO, stopped by our studio after Web 2.0 to tell us about how the site became so much more than Web-based IM and how he says the company is nailing the discovery problem in a new, more powerful way than Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious and everyone that came before.
They reach 180 million uniques world-wide every month. How’d they get there? Moving from a product the founders wanted to build to a product other sites and users wanted them to build, and an emphasis on “building a product for normal people, not Silicon Valley.”
Sternberg explains what he means in the video below. Tomorrow, we’ll be posting part two of our interview with Sternberg where we talk about the value (declining value) of “reach” in an age of huge platforms with instant distribution. I also pry a few revenue details out of Sternberg. You won’t want to miss it. → Read More
Bebo just launched Meebo’s web-based instant messaging client across the social network and the company says a million messages have been sent already
This is Bebo’s first step towards a much more real-time, interactive platform since they sold to AOL for $850 million in 2008. Right after that AOL let the platform languish, eventually shutting it down for tax purposes and selling it for about $10m to Criterion Capital Partners. True story.
The new team of 20 or so employees has – surprise surprise – made the site profitable and it’s now coming back in user numbers. Mike Arrington’s recent interview with CTO Akash Garg suggested they’d be going for “Self expression, mobile and video will be strong components.” Clearly IM and Meebo is part of that. → Read More
Watch out Meebo, there’s a new kid on the block. Israeli startup Wibiya, which publicly launched its web-based, customizable toolbar to publishers in January of this year, is seeing impressive traffic for a year-old company.
According to Quantcast, Wibiya is seeing 151 million monthly visitors to its toolbars. In contrast, Quantcast also reports that Meebo is currently seeing 143 million monthly visitors. Currently, Wibiya has more than 70,000 active websites using its toolbar, including TheStreet, TheOnion, Playboy, Philly.com, JellyBelly.com and more. Wibiya says that nearly 1000 new websites are adding the toolbar per day. → Read More
To most people, online chat service Meebo is best known for its multiprotocol webchat, but for over a year now its primary focus has been the Meebo Bar — a persistent toolbar that third party websites can embed on their pages to facilitate sharing through services like Facebook, Twitter, and email. That bar now reaches nearly 150 million people per month through dozens of large third party integrations. Last week CEO Seth Sternberg swung by TechCrunch headquarters to discuss the current status of the Bar, and how it’s turning a single ad unit into some serious revenue.
We last did a deep dive on the progress of the Meebo Bar in December, when Quantcast figures showed it reaching nearly 100 million unique visitors across Meebo partner sites. That number on Quantcast is now up to nearly 150 million, and since August, comScore says that Meebo’s uniques are up nearly 300%. In terms of functionality the Meebo Bar hasn’t changed much since I last spoke to Sternberg, but the amount of money it pulls in certainly has: Sternberg says that the Bar is doing 4x revenue growth year over year, and that revenue is 4x right now what it was in January. In other words, things are picking up quickly (though it’s worth pointing out that Meebo declined to share any concrete revenue figures). → Read More
If you’ve ever tried using one of the many sharing widgets available on the web, you know that there are a lot of web services out there that support sharing. That presents a challenge for publishers, who often wind up showing widgets for the big players like Facebook and Twitter, while neglecting the smaller services their users may be members of. Now Meebo, in tandem with a roster of partners including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, MySpace, JanRain, Disqus and Gigya, has developed a new open standard called XAuth designed to put an end to this problem. And it has the potential to do much more.
Here’s how the official site, XAuth.org is describing the platform:
XAuth is an open platform for extending authenticated user services across the web.
Participating services generate a browser token for each of their users. Publishers can then recognize when site visitors are logged in to those online services and present them with meaningful, relevant options. → Read More
If you are one of the millions of people who use Meebo to bring together all of your buddies from different chat services across the Web, you can now do that on your iPhone as well. Meebo’s iPhone app is now available on iTunes The iPhone app lets you chat via AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Google Talk, MySpace IM, ICQ, Jabber, Facebook, and other chat services, delivering new messages vis push notifications. → Read More
Though they’re not planning to unveil it until next week, Meebo has given us a sneak peek at their iPhone app. My immediate reaction? This will be my go-to messaging app on the iPhone.
While there are no shortage of apps that now allow you to connect to a wide range of messaging networks, Meebo’s is great because it’s very, very fast. It might not have all the bells and whistles that some others contain, but its brilliance is its simplicity. The app itself contains only three main areas: Buddies, Chats, and Accounts. Buddies obviously shows you a list of all your contacts. Chats keeps track of who you are actively chatting with. And Accounts allows you to set status messages, and toggle settings such as being visible. From here you can also add accounts, which is the key to Meebo. → Read More
We’ve been covering the growth of Meebo’s chat bar extensively since its launch: after a fairly slow ramp up in 2008, it’s since been deployed to 130 partner sites and now has a reach of 100 million unique visitors. Now that the company has landed partnerships with a number of large publisher sites and social networks, it’s settings its sights on a new target: shopping. The company has been approached by various online retailers to see how they could help make shopping sites more social, and now they’re making an effort to expand into the market.
From a functionality standpoint, Meebo isn’t changing much about the bar to suit retailers — you’ll still drag and drop items to share them with friends, and you can chat with buddies using integrated services like Google Talk, Facebook Chat, and AIM. The big differences will lie in the monetization strategy and the level of analytics retailers will be able to take advantage of. → Read More
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