April 28th, 2013

Google Will Sunset The Meebo Bar On June 6 To Focus On Google+ Sign-In and Plug-Ins

Google-logo1

Google has announced that it is bidding adieu to the Meebo Bar publishing tool in order to focus on projects like Google+ Sign-In and plug-ins. The Meebo Bar will be retired effective June 6. → Read More

July 25th, 2012

Stealthy Online Shopping Startup Commerce Sciences Launches A Meebo Bar For E-Commerce

Commerce Sciences - Logo

Commerce Sciences, the stealthy Israeli and Palo Alto-based e-commerce startup, is launching into open beta today, and is finally revealing what it has built. It’s a Meebo Bar for e-commerce! The company made waves earlier this month when it announced $1.8 million in seed funding from Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, Israeli VC firm Genesis PartnersT5 Capital, and a number of angel… → Read More

June 9th, 2012

Meebo Gets The Classic Google Acq-hire Treatment: Most Products To Shut Down Soon

meebo-logo

Looks like a talent acquisition. Smells like a talent acquisition.

Meebo, the chat and publishers tools company that Google acquired for roughly $100 million, is going to see most of its products shut down next month. That includes Meebo Messenger, the sharing widgets and mobile apps.

The one major product that will keep running is that Meebo Bar. (Yes, that one.) Haters aside, Meebo Bar… → Read More

September 10th, 2011

The Job Of A CEO At A 200 Person Company

seth-sternberg

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… → Read More

May 12th, 2011

(Founder Stories) Meebo’s Seth Sternberg On Hiring, Growth And Flying High.

Like many start-ups, Meebo has been on a recent hiring spree. In this episode of Founder Stories, CEO Seth Sternberg tells Chris Dixon, “for 12 weeks we had to hire a salesperson a week and if we didn’t we would have missed our revenue numbers later this year.”

But it’s not just new salespeople populating Meebo’s workstations. “We started this year at about 130 employees.  I think we… → Read More

May 10th, 2011

(Founder Stories) Meebo CEO: "What If We Could Completely Change The Game?"

Should founders innovate based upon customer feedback or is it better to develop from within and let consumer adapt. In this episode of Founder Stories with host Chris Dixon, Meebo’s Seth Sternberg discusses his philosophy: “Users tend to be very good at giving you incremental product suggestions.”  But they are not product visionaries. “They may be asking for something that would be… → Read More

May 7th, 2011

(Founder Stories) Seth Sternberg On The Early Days Of Meebo: "We Did Not Get It."

Meebo, which connects users with their friends across social platforms, emerged from the ashes of an idea Seth Sternberg and his team had for “file sharing between friends that had IM in it.” Those early days of development saw more misses than hits—“kind of depressing” says Sternberg in this episode of Founder Stories.

After more than a year of tinkering, Meebo finally found its magic… → Read More

April 23rd, 2011

TC Cribs: Meebo’s Headbanging, Rocket-Flinging Office (With Magical Passageways)

meebooffice

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… → Read More

March 10th, 2011

Meebo Packs Up Your Favorite Websites And Takes Check-Ins Mobile

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… → Read More

February 8th, 2011

Meebo Acquires Mindset Media, Prepares To Venture Into Direct Response Advertising

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… → Read More

December 26th, 2010

The Unwelcome Return of Platform Dependencies

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… → Read More

December 5th, 2010

Social Networking: The Future

Social Networks_ Future

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… → Read More

December 2nd, 2010

Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg On Why He's Pushing For Website Check-Ins (TCTV)

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 (→ Read More

November 18th, 2010

Meebo's Sternberg: The "Widget Economy" Was a Big, Fat Lie (TCTV)

“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… → Read More

November 17th, 2010

$25 Million for Web-based IM? Not Exactly. Meebo's CEO Explains. (TCTV)

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… → Read More

November 14th, 2010

Raid The MiniBar: Meebo Gets Into The Site Check-In Game. But Don't Call It A Game.

With the rise of Foursquare, the “check-in” has become fairly commonplace. With the launch of Places, Facebook will only make it more so. It shouldn’t be surprising that we’re seeing dozens of other startups spring up to do check-ins for FILL-IN-THE-BLANK. Media check-ins were a pretty obvious extension. But now we’re seeing a number of companies pop up that are doing check-ins for websites. A… → Read More

November 9th, 2010

Bebo Adds Meebo In Belated Effort To Win Over Chat-starved Users

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→ Read More

July 28th, 2010

Toolbar Developer Wibiya Takes On Meebo As Traffic Soars

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… → Read More

July 21st, 2010

As Facebook Looms, Meebo's Bar Gets A Big Speed Boost, Shares Strong Growth Figures

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… → Read More

April 18th, 2010

Spearheaded By Meebo, XAuth Looks To Make Social Sites Smarter

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… → Read More

February 15th, 2010

Meebo's Multi-Chat iPhone App Hits iTunes

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

February 11th, 2010

Preview: Meebo's Simple, Quick, And Slick iPhone App

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… → Read More

February 9th, 2010

Meebo Eyes A New Market For Its Chat Bar: Online Retailers

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… → Read More

February 1st, 2010

Looking To Boost Engagement, Meebo Makes It A Lot Easier To Start Using Its Chat Bar

2009 was a good year for Meebo, which saw its Meebo Bar spread to over 130 partner sites. The chat bar, which also makes it easy to share content, now reaches 110 million unique visitors according to Quantcast (74 million according to comScore), and is growing at a clip pace. But not everything has gone exactly according to plan — on certain sites, the chat bar isn’t being used as much as… → Read More

December 21st, 2009

Meebo Launches Self-Serve Meebo Bar, Takes A Look Back At Its Big Year

For a long time, Meebo has been a widely liked company with lots of funding but a fairly small amount of revenue. This year, that started to change. The company’s Meebo Bar (AKA Community IM) has now been deployed to over a hundred major sites and has helped Meebo reach nearly 100 million unique visitors monthly. And today, it’s launching a feature that will see that number take a huge jump: a… → Read More

December 2nd, 2009

Meebo Gives Publishers More Control Over Meebo Bar With New API

We’ve been tracking the progress of Meebo‘s Community IM bar for a long time now: it was announced back in July 2008, started rolling out in October 2008, and is now exposed to nearly 100 million people worldwide on dozens of partner sites. Clearly it’s making good progress, but since launch the options available to publishers for customizing the bar have been quite limited — you basically… → Read More

November 18th, 2009

Qlipso Brings Avatars, Video Chat, and Facebook Connect To Virtual Rooms

Media on the Web is going from a solo affair to a shared experience. We are seeing this in everything from CNN live news videos enabled with Facebook chat to Meebo Rooms and Tiny Chat. Today, a new startup from Los Angeles called Qlipso is launching its own virtual rooms where friends can share videos and play Flash games with each other.

The service is in private beta and requires a… → Read More

October 11th, 2009

Finding Your Co-Founders

The number one question you all asked after reading my last blog post about starting a business from scratch was “how do I find my co-founders?”

Great question – let’s start with a bit of self reflection:

Close your eyes and visualize your group of closest friends.

Now, think specifically about how tall (or short) they all are.

Great, now ask yourself “are all of them roughly the same height?”… → Read More

October 6th, 2009

Meebo's Reach Spikes To Over 90 Million Users With Community IM Growth

Ever since Meebo launched its Community IM feature — which lets any site integrate a chat feature that’s similar to Facebook Chat — the service has seen strong growth. But the bump the site has seen with each successive partnership over the last year pales in comparison to the growth it’s been seeing in the last few months: between August and October, Meebo has jumped from around 50 million… → Read More

September 20th, 2009

From Nothing To Something. How To Get There.

This guest post was written by Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg. It is the first in a series of posts he’s writing about the decisions a young entrepreneur needs to make when she/he is first starting a business. The timing is perfect, there is more than a little overlap with Vivek Wadhwa’s guest post on venture capital earlier today. We’ll update this post with links to his further installments.

I was… → Read More