TECH CRUNCH - Sep 29 - Vevo, like a Hulu for music launched in December
2009, is now the third largest source for video on the web. Vevo, whose
core philosophy is that the Internet is about choice, now receives 49M
unique video viewers a month, with 500M views in the US and 1.4 billion
around the world. A partnership between Universal Music Group, Sony
Music Entertainment and the Abu Dhabi Media company, Vevo allows users
to create personal music video playlists from over 30,000 videos and
8,00 artists through a syndication deal with YouTube. Vevo is currently
seeing tens of million in revenue, through sponsorships and advertising,
with more than 50% of that revenue going back to the labels and
artists. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH
« August 2010 | Main | October 2010 »
Skype And Facebook To Announce Partnership
MASHABLE - Sep 29 - Facebook and Skype are working on a deal that would
integrate Facebook Connect with Skype accounts. Once you connect Skype
with Facebook, you’ll be able to SMS, chat with or call your Facebook
friends directly from Skype. You should also be able to log in to Skype
with your Facebook credentials. FULL ARTICLE @ MASHABLE
Five Months In, 2 Million Websites Using Facebook’s New Social Plugins
TECH CRUNCH - Sep 29 - Facebook CTO Bret Taylor announced that 2M
websites have added the “Like” button and Facebook’s other new social
plug-ins, which were launched five months ago. Aside from the Like
Button, Facebook’s other social plugins include an activity feed that
displays your friends’ activity, a widget with recommended articles, and
the Facepile, which shows you photos of your friends who also use the
site you’re browsing. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH
LinkedIn Now Worth More Than $2 Billion
MASHABLE - Sep 29 - A new report suggests that LinkedIn’s value has
surpassed the $2 billion mark, based on recent investments from outside
investors. Tiger Global Management spent $20M to acquire~1% stake. The
hedge fund specifically paid $21.50 per share. That’s where the math
comes in. According to SharesPost, an online marketplace for privately
held companies, LinkedIn has 105M shares outstanding. Multiply that by
the $21.50 Tiger Global Management spent, and you arrive at a valuation
of $2.26 billion. FULL ARTICLE @ MASHABLE
Marc Gingras, CEO Of Tungle - An Easier Meeting Maker
SNW INTERVIEW - Sep 30 - I’ve been very impressed with the Tungle
service. It’s helped me save a lot of time chasing people down for
meetings. I can’t recommend it enough. Marc Gingras is the Founder
and CEO. - Mark Brooks
Marc, tell us a bit more about how you started Tungle.
I started Tungle four years ago, with the purpose of solving a problem
for business people to meet. Specifically, to avoid all the back and
forth emails that people have to go through to find the time to meet.
I first encountered Tungle several months ago, and it was
just after I had one of my administrators start to look after my
meetings. It was the one and only task that she’s ever torn her hair out
trying to execute. So we started using Tungle. So, as a testimonial,
we’ve been really happy with it at Courtland Brooks.
And I’m sure you’ve had countless other companies talk similarly. So
what kind of companies are you targeting with this service?
It’s not a specific size or industry that we’re targeting. Our most
avid users are the people that are externally facing. People that have a
lot of meetings with people outside of their business. The majority of
our users are sales people, people in biz dev, executives that don’t
have executive assistants, consulting firms, and so on.
Why don’t you charge for it?
We’re not avert to
making money. However, we are going to offer a premium service in a
couple of months. We think that there’s an opportunity right now to
become the primary scheduling service across all companies and
platforms. There’s over 500 million people that use electronic
calendars today and none of them, except for those using Tungle, have a
solution that works for them to help them schedule meetings. So our
goal is to spread quickly, and to capture as many of those 500 million
people that are using electronic calendars as possible.
We haven’t spent anything in terms of marketing. Our users are our sales people. When you become a Tungle user, you use it with other people. They do not need to sign up to Tungle, but often time they like the experience so much that they end up converting and becoming Tungle users. So the service has a pyramid effect. This keeps our cost of user acquisition very, very low.
How many users do you have?
We are going to
announce that shortly. But what I can tell you today is that we’ve been
growing at the pace of 20 to 30% every month. So it’s growing quite
rapidly.
Who is your main competition?
We don’t see other
companies as our competition. Our primary competition is email and
phone calls. We need to be faster and simpler than picking up the phone
or sending an email.
The ideal way for people to use Tungle is to allow Tungle to
hook into the calendar directly. I’ve hooked it up with Gmail – in my
case. What other services do you work with, currently?
We
work with Google Calendar, Outlook, IBM Notes, Domino Servers, Yahoo
Calendar, Blackberry Calendar, Windows Live Calendar, your TripIt
calendar, you name it.
The investment community is definitely paying attention to
Tungle, along with some pretty impressive advisors that you just brought
onto the team. Can you tell us more about that?
When we
launched our service in May of 2009, we were VC-backed. We’ve got some
great investors behind the company. But we also had some really
high-profile users using Tungle, that we didn’t even know about, and
they reached back out to us to say, “Hey, we’re fans of you guys, how
can we help you?”
So we put together an advisory board of these people including Robert Scoble, Scobleizer, Ellen Levy, the VP of corporate strategy at LinkedIn, Don Dodge from Google, Dave McClure, who has closed his 500 Hats Fund recently, and also Scott Stratten, who is an expert in viral marketing.
What are your goals for 2010 through 2011? Where would you like to be with Tungle for the end of 2011?
If you look at calendars today, they’re very boring and they all look
the same. Because we work with all these leading calendar applications,
there’s so much that can be done. Your calendar has the potential to be
something very intelligent. Your calendar is probably the first to
know that you’re going to San Francisco, for example. Now as soon as
you put that information into your calendar, you’ll probably need a
flight, hotel and a car. Also you would probably have some free time in
between, and there’s certain people that you may want to meet that you
weren’t even thinking of meeting. So ideally your calendar can start
doing some work for you. So you’re gonna see some development in that
aspect.
This interview also appears on OnlinePersonalsWatch.
Why We Sold TechCrunch To AOL, And Where We Go From Here
See all posts on AOL
AOL Acquires TechCrunch
MASHABLE - Sep 29 - AOL is acquiring popular technology news publication
TechCrunch and its associated properties. The acquisition was formally
announced at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, where
AOL CEO Tim Armstrong and TechCrunch Founder and Co-editor Michael
Arrington took the stage to announce and sign the agreement. Armstrong
and Arrington did not disclose terms, though CNBC’s Julia Boorstin
reports that the price is “~$40 million.” Arrington, who founded the
site in 2005 and still breaks many of its biggest stories, will remain a
part of TechCrunch for at least three years as part of the deal. FULL ARTICLE @ MASHABLE
Twitter Passes MySpace To Become Third Most Trafficked Social Network
READ WRITE WEB - Sep 28 - Twitter has surpassed former social networking
giant MySpace in unique visitors according to ComsCore. Twitter.com had
~96M unique visitors last month, up 76% from the same period last year.
MySpace dropped 17% to 95M unique visitors, while Facebook easily sat in
the lead with 598M unique visitors, up 54% from last year. The number
two spot is occupied by Microsoft's Windows Live Profile, with 140M
unique visitors. FULL ARTICLE @ READ WRITE WEB
See all posts on Twitter
See all posts on MySpace
See all posts on Facebook
AOL Acquires Thing Labs And Brizzly
MASHABLE - Sep 28 - Back in the summer of 2009, Shellen and fellow
Googler Chris Wetherell, who were instrumental in creating Google
Reader, founded Thing Labs, a social app shop. Their freshman product
was Brizzly, a web-based social reader and third-party Twitter and
Facebook client. Brizzly was never in a position to compete with
hard-hitting apps such as Seesmic and Tweetdeck, but this fact alone
would have made Thing Labs a more palatable acquisition target for AOL. FULL ARTICLE @ MASHABLE
Reid Hoffman Says One Social Network Is Not Enough
FORBES - Sep 28 - Reid Hoffman, one of
Facebook's earliest investors, says the people need more than one social
network, during an on-stage interview at the TechCrunch Disrupt
conference in San Francisco on Monday. Hoffman points to Facebook’s
inability to properly implement and convince people to use friend lists
to separate friends into different categories (for instance, work,
family, acquaintances). Hoffman also announced a new $20M fund from
venture capital firm Greylock Partners to focus on seed investments in
startups. FULL ARTICLE @ FORBES
Mark Brooks: Naturally, Reid would say this. He wants people to use his LinkedIn service. He's biased. But he's also completely correct. Facebook is fun, and for friends, and oh yeah, it's very handy for business as well. Linkedin is for pros. Its the defacto standard. Viadeo and Xing compete with it in Europe, Ushi.cn, in China. Here's my Linkedin page, btw.
See all posts on LinkedInApple Has Already Approved The Official Google Voice App For iPhone
TECH CRUNCH - Sep 28 - The official Google Voice app is on its way to
the iPhone in the next few week. Google just needs to revamp the app to
work with the iPhone 4 and iOS’s multitasking capabilities. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH
2010 Acquisitions--Microsoft: 0 Google: 23
Mark Brooks: The press always write about acquisitions. There's a lot of PR value in being seen as super-active, on the acquisition warpath.
Foursquare Passes 3m Users
TELECOMS - Sep 27 - Foursquare, a mobile LB social networking app that
works on the iPhone, Blackberry, Palm, Android has now ~3M users. It is
estimated that Foursquare is adding ~15,000 users daily and is
experiencing over a million ‘check-ins’ every day. Successful companies
in this space such as Foursquare, Where, Loopt, WeReward, and
Gowalla are becoming very attractive acquisition targets for big players
such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook and Nokia. Few months ago,
there was speculation that Foursquare will be acquired by Yahoo for
$100M. Facebook and Microsoft were also interested in acquiring the
company. Yahoo has since then acquired Koprol; a social networking with
features similar to Foursquare and Twitter, and Facebook has snapped up
Nextstop; a user-generated travel recommendation site. FULL ARTICLE @ TELECOMS
Friendster Explains Monetization Plans
ZDNET ASIA - Sep 27 - As part of its efforts to better monetize its
services, Friendster's key areas of growth are social networks, social
games and location-based services (LBS). A Malaysia-based payments
company, MOL acquired Friendster last December. MOL is already involved
in e-payments and micro-transactions for online games. The company
processes~60M transactions a year with an annual payment volume of over
$200M. FULL ARTICLE @ ZDNET ASIA
Japanese Company DeNA Invests In Social Game Studio Astro Ape
TECH CRUNCH - Sep 26 - A week after announcing the acquisition of U.S. mobile social gaming studio, Gameview, Japanese gaming giant DeNA is making a strategic investment in another U.S. gaming company, social game studio Astro Ape. The investment amount was not disclosed by the companies. In fact, this is the fourth American social gaming investment by the company over the past year. The company purchased game studio IceBreaker and invested in gaming platform AuroraFeint last year. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH
Zynga Buys German Game Engine Developer Dextrose AG
TECH CRUNCH - Sep 24 - Zynga’s quest for world
domination continues today, as the social gaming giant acquires the
assets of German game engine developer Dextrose AG. Zynga has been
growing fast and on an acquisition tear this year, buying up XPD in
Beijing, Unoh Games in Tokyo, Conduit Labs in Boston, and Challenge
Games in Austin. Dextrose AG develops a commercial game engine for
pluginless browser games. Called “Aves Engine,” the game engine
technology allows developers to build any type of web based 2D or 2.5D
game using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH
Mark Brooks
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