Saturday, June 27, 2009

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The Top 100 Networked Venture Capitalists

Posted: 27 Jun 2009 05:40 AM PDT

jurvetosn-friendship-wheel

Do venture investors with the biggest and best networks end up producing the best returns? An academic paper from a few years ago by Yael Hochberg, Alexander Ljungqvist, and Yang Lu titled “Whom You Know Matters: Venture Capital Networks and Investment Performance” (embedded at the bottom of this post) suggests that is the case. They looked at historic venture returns and found that “better-networked VC firms experience significantly better fund performance,” as measured by how many of the companies in their portfolios exited via an IPO or acquisition.

A venture firm’s network in the study was defined as being made up of all the other venture firms who co-invested with it in funding rounds. The more co-investors a venture firm has, the better its network. The better its network, the better its overall returns. The correlation between the size of a venture firm’s network and its returns may have something to do with better access to deal flow, talent, advisers, potential customers, and potential exits.

If this is true, then who are the most connected venture firms and angel investors today? Vijay Dondeti, a graduate student in bioinformatics, applied the analysis in the Hochberg paper to about 2,700 investors in CrunchBase who participated in over 3,300 startup funding rounds between 2006 and 2008. He scored each investor based on how well connected they are to other investors as well as how well-connected their co-investors are to other investors. “In summary,” says Dondeti, “to get a high score, you need to co-invest often with others that also co-invest often.”

So which venture investors have the best networks? Here are the top 10:

1. Draper Fisher Jurvetson
2. Sequoia Capital
3. Accel Partners
4. Intel Capital
5. First Round Capital
6. Dag Ventures
7. New Enterprise Associates
8. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
9. Benchmark Capital
10. Ron Conway

Draper Fisher Jurvetson takes the top spot. Will its returns beat everyone else’s, or is it just that its spray-and-pray investing strategy gives it an advantage in this type of ranking system? Top-tier firms such as Sequoia, Accel, Kleiner Perkins, and Benchmark also score highly, as does First Round Capital and angel investor Ron Conway.  Other individual investors a little further down the list include Reid Hoffman (No. 18) and Marc Andreessen (no. 31).

Below is a ranking of the Top 100, or you can review the entire data set for all 2,700 investors here.

(Image: Flickr/Steve Jurveston)

Rank VC Investor Raw Score Scaled Score

1 draper-fisher-jurvetson 6721 100.00

2 sequoia-capital 6608 98.33

3 accel-partners 6505 96.80

4 intel-capital 5849 87.03

5 first-round-capital 4881 72.62

6 dag-ventures 4857 72.28

7 new-enterprise-associates 4746 70.61

8 kleiner-perkins-caufield-byers 4695 69.8

.

9 benchmark-capital 4685 69.71

10 ron-conway 4484 66.71

11 charles-river-ventures 4124 61.37

12 goldman-sachs 3926 58.42

13 redpoint-ventures 3915 58.25

14 general-catalyst-partners 3814 56.75

15 bessemer-venture-partners 3622 53.89

16 index-ventures 3469 51.62

17 khosla-ventures 3258 48.47

18 reid-hoffman 3232 48.10

19 sigma-partners 3227 48.01

20 mayfield-fund 3186 47.40

21 oak-investment-partners 3150 46.87

22 norwest-venture-partners 2996 44.57

23 lehman-brothers 2983 44.38

24 greylock 2946 43.83

25 highland-capital-partners 2917 43.40

26 jafco-ventures 2912 43.33

27 omidyar-network 2856 42.50

28 fidelity-ventures 2841 42.27

29 sap-ventures 2831 42.12

30 venrock 2742 40.80

31 marc-andreessen 2462 36.64

32 lightspeed-venture-partners 2446 36.39

33 roger-ehrenberg 2412 35.89

34 foundation-capital 2404 35.76

35 shasta-ventures 2395 35.63

36 us-venture-partners 2378 35.3

.

37 union-square-ventures 2336 34.76

38 canaan-partners-3 2298 34.19

39 atlas-venture 2285 34.00

40 bay-partners 2277 33.88

41 menlo-ventures 2263 33.67

42 mohr-davidow-ventures 2230 33.18

43 interwest-partners 2224 33.10

44 globespan-capital-partners 2209 32.88

45 trident-capital 2203 32.78

46 steamboat-ventures 2183 32.48

47 focus-ventures 2166 32.22

48 atomico-investments 2096 31.18

49 spark-capital 2083 30.99

50 draper-richards 2076 30.89

51 amadeus-capital-partners 2041 30.36

52 greycroft-partners 2039 30.34

53 allen-and-company 1991 29.62

54 founders-fund 1979 29.45

55 meritech-capital-partners 1974 29.38

56 dcm 1974 29.37

57 labrador-ventures 1924 28.63

58 european-founders-fund 1856 27.61

.

59 esther-dyson 1844 27.44

60 jeff-clavier 1802 26.81

61 3i-group 1784 26.55

62 motorola-ventures 1764 26.25

63 jeff-stewart 1749 26.03

64 mission-ventures 1740 25.88

65 cisco 1734 25.81

66 time-warner-investments 1729 25.72

67 comcast-interactive-capital 1726 25.68

68 marc-benioff 1692 25.18

69 martin-varsavsky 1685 25.07

70 betaworks 1684 25.06

71 polaris-venture-partners 1682 25.02

72 trinity-ventures 1673 24.89

73 bezos-expeditions 1667 24.80

74 hummer-winblad-venture-partners 1624 24.17

75 hearstcorporation 1612 23.99

76 presidio-stx 1604 23.86

77 y-combinator 1596 23.75

78 sutter-hill-ventures 1567 23.32

.

79 baseline-ventures 1552 23.09

80 advanced-technology-ventures 1549 23.05

81 wellington-partners 1543 22.96

82 walden-international 1533 22.81

83 granite-ventures 1518 22.58

84 hercules-technology-growth 1504 22.38

85 morgenthaler-ventures 1497 22.28

86 northgate-capital 1491 22.19

87 battery-ventures 1486 22.11

88 scale-venture-partners 1486 22.11

89 crescendo-ventures 1456 21.66

90 emergence-capital-partners 1451 21.60

91 azure-capital-partners 1445 21.51

92 mike-maples 1433 21.32

93 glg-partners 1428 21.24

94 ariel-poler 1418 21.10

95 vantagepoint-venture-partners 1414 21.04

96 north-bridge-venture-partners 1407 20.94

97 matrix-partners 1405 20.90

98 bluerun-ventures 1405 20.90

.

99 waldenvc 1399 20.82

100 rustic-canyon-partners 1384 20.59

.


Whom You Know Matters: Venture Capital Networks and Investment Performance -

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Confirmed: Glam Media Shares (Some) Details On Twitter Ad Network Plans

Posted: 27 Jun 2009 04:55 AM PDT

Yesterday we posted about Glam Media contacting Twitter app developers concerning an upcoming ‘Twitter-powered ad network’, and requested more information from CEO Samir Arora as the e-mail we were forwarded by one of the developers was rather scarce on details.

He came through earlier this morning to confirm the accuracy of the scoop, and also provided a statement from his team in order to shed more light on the imminent initiative. As we suggested, the new solution is tied to GlamApps, the company’s application platform.

Arora tells us:

With the launch of Tinker.com to help monetize “real-time” trends and events, Advertisers have been asking Glam to reach real-time stream users across multiple applications.

Unlike Social Network apps that live “inside” MySpace and Facebook, Twitter is revolutionizing the apps business by pioneering an open model- Glam sees this as the first mid and long tail of Social Apps, much like iPhone has done for mobile apps with a pay for apps model. Given internet apps are free, except for a small “pro” apps upgrades, it is vital that we can figure out a monetization quickly. Given the audience and vertical targeting Glam has developed for content publishers and the trust with brand advertisers, Glam can bring the learning to the Twitterverse. Like Portals like Yahoo and AOL offered advertisers content along with social apps like AIM, Twitter Apps Network helps Glam Media offer distributed social apps to brands- taking the next step in building a true distributed media company.

Yep, that’s still vague. Hopefully we’ll have a better understanding of what Glam Media is trying to accomplish when they share more details about the project next month.

We didn’t really ask, but Arora also shared some statistics about the current reach of the Glam network. He claims Glam Media currently boasts over 1,000 publishers with 6,000 editors/journalists/bloggers reaching 56 million unique users a month in the United States. That’s one big vertical.

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Unique Auction Site Swoopo Expands To Canada, Testing ‘Buy It Now’

Posted: 26 Jun 2009 09:09 PM PDT

It’s been a while since we last took a look at Swoopo, the “entertainment shopping” site that’s one part auction-house, one part virtual casino. Since launching in late 2008, the site has closed a $10 million funding round led by August Capital, and has grown to over 2 million members. Now, the site has quietly expanded to launch a Canadian portal, and is also beginning to test a ‘buy it now’ function on its German site that allows users to apply the costs of their previous bids towards the purchase of an item.

For those that aren’t familiar with Swoopo, here’s how it works: the site uses a unique pricing model that invites you to purchase virtual “bids” for 75 cents, which can then be used to bid on goods ranging from video games to high-end televisions. Whenever you bid on an item, its price increases by fifteen cents and an extra 20 seconds are tacked on to the duration of the auction. Oftentimes items wind up selling substantially below their market value, but this lower price comes with some risk: if you bid on an item, you don’t get that 75 cent bid back when the auction concludes. Even if the item winds up selling below its normal market price, Swoopo can make money from these bids (the site does sometimes lose money on an auction, but relies on the proceeds of other auctions to cover them).

It’s definitely a departure from traditional auction sites like eBay, and after navigating through the flashy site it’s easy to see why it might be a bit more fun. Sure, there’s always a chance that you’ll throw away a few dollars on lost bids, which will be enough to put some people off, but you also have the potential to score a TV for a fraction of its typical retail price (of course, dozens or even hundreds of bidders might be competing against you). To help take some of the risk out of bidding, the site is experimenting with a ‘buy it now’ feature (apparently only on its German site for now), which allows you to apply the cost of your bids towards purchasing a product outright for its normal market value. You won’t be able to get the low auction price, but you’re not throwing away the cost of those bids, either, which should be enough to drive even more bidding.

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Say Hello To The First Someecards Video Cards. Ads That Are Hilarious.

Posted: 26 Jun 2009 04:19 PM PDT

picture-413As we wrote about a couple weeks ago, Someecards, makers of hilarious online greeting cards, are delving into doing video cards. The first batch are now online. And yes, they’re quite good.

The cards feature the same solid color backgrounds that are distinct on Someecards, but rather than black and white drawings, they have actors acting out short video skits. The first ones feature comedians Michael Ian Black and Michael Showalter, who are promoting their new Comedy Central show, Michael & Michael.

Yes, these are ads. But as we wrote previously, these are the best kind of ads cause they’re actually funny, and something I would watch.

Plus they have a lot of swearing.

Watch below. I really want to embed them all but they auto-play (I’ll embed the one with no swearing until the end but be warned, possibly NSFW). Watch the rest of them here.

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Chart: What It Looks Like When Everyone Searches Google For “Michael Jackson”

Posted: 26 Jun 2009 03:22 PM PDT

michael-jackson-searches

Just like every other major Website, Google was inundated with people looking for news about Michael Jackson yesterday. Above is a chart showing the volume of search queries for the deceased pop star. Searches peaked right around 3 PM PDT, as people all over the world were trying to find out information about his passing.

More details on the Google blog.

Update:
Here’s a graph that was posted by the Facebook Data Team showing off the number of Michael Jackson-related status updates during the same time frame:



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Video: Introducing Bing. The Better Way To Google.

Posted: 26 Jun 2009 03:04 PM PDT

A lot of us here at TechCrunch quite like Bing, Microsoft’s new search, sorry, discovery, no sorry, decision engine. For a number of queries it seems to provide better results than Google. But that doesn’t mean the public will start using it. And this video by College Humor I think lays out why.

“Bing helps you Google the best choice, faster. And shows related Googles right there on the results page. Bing knows what you like to Google.”

Gotta love the sub-caption too on the video page: “The easiest way to Google since Yahoo!”

[thanks Ian]

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MythBuster Adam Savage Leads Twitter Revolt Against AT&T

Posted: 26 Jun 2009 02:18 PM PDT

For the last few weeks it hasn’t been unusual to see AT&T among Twitter’s trending topics — following its disappointing performance at WWDC and the activation issues with the iPhone last week, the carrier hasn’t exactly been garnering positive reactions from its legions of Twitter-using members. Today, it’s reached the top spot on Twitter once again, and, once again, AT&T is the target of waves of contempt.

The source of the recent flurry of AT&T tweets is Adam Savage of MythBusters fame, who tweets that for “a few hours of web surfing in Canada” he was charged a whopping $11,000. AT&T is apparently claiming that Savage managed to download 9 gigabytes in Canada using his USB data connection (which he calls “frakking impossible“). What’s worse, the customer service rep Savage was dealing with was apparently a bit loose with their decimal points, telling Savage that “data is charged at .015 cents, or a penny and a half, per kb”. Read that again — there’s a couple orders of magnitude difference there.

Now Twitter is in revolt. With over 50,000 followers Savage has a pretty loud voice, and his outraged tweets certainly resonate with a broad audience. In the end, he’ll probably get a pass from AT&T — nobody wants to mess with a man who blows things up for a living. But it’s clear that AT&T needs to work on letting its customers know when they’re spending exorbitant amounts of money on data charges. An AT&T spokesman says that any phone taken abroad that begins racking up excessive charges will automatically receive an SMS alert, but apparently there are no such mechanisms in place for members using the increasingly popular USB wireless connections.

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StreamAPI Opens Live Video Funtionality To All On Facebook

Posted: 26 Jun 2009 02:10 PM PDT

A couple of days ago we wrote about Facebook’s new Live Stream Box funtionality. Ustream was the first to offer a live video solution for users with Facebook Pages. But the sign up for the free option is limited, and the white-label version carries a one-time fee of $15,000. Enter Stickam. It’s offering live video via its StreamAPI service to anyone. And there’s no set up fee and no monthly fee. But it will still cost you.

The StreamAPI solution is pay-as-you-go, with live video costing you 45 cents a gigabyte. That includes support for HD video, customizable solutions (with no Flash knowledge required) and analytics. It’s a similar approach that Stickam takes with its regular StreamAPI product.

On this sample Facebook page, you can see live video of traffic in LA.

Find out more here.

picture-126

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Is Execution More Important than Vision?

Posted: 26 Jun 2009 01:10 PM PDT

A few years ago, Max Levchin—of PayPal and Slide fame— told me there were two kinds of entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley: Those who work tirelessly and are great at execution, and those who are visionary and truly create new ideas—and sometimes new markets. Levchin put himself in the former category. Indeed, a lot of Slide's success has just been the result of doing a better job ripping off ideas from competitors like RockYou. He put Evan Williams of Blogger and Twitter in the latter. At the time, Twitter was only a techy phenomenon, but Max noted that unlike a lot of other Web 2.0 companies, Twitter was one of the only ones doing something untested and new.

With all the hyperbole about Twitter today, if I asked you whether the executor or the visionary would wind up being more successful, nearly everyone would say the visionary. But—as Levchin no doubt knew when he made this point—the visionary is usually the one that gets the shaft in Silicon Valley.

Napster changed the music world, but it was iTunes that profited off of it. Google was one of the last companies in the Internet bubble to try their hand at building a search engine—and was laughed out of some VCs' offices as a result. Palm pioneered the smart phone, not Blackberry. And Friendster was the social network pioneer before Mark Zuckerberg even entered college.

What about Apple? Well it was visionary when it came to the computer, but what turned the company around was the iPod and the iPhone—both just way better versions of MP3 player and smart phones. You can extrapolate it to enterprise software too: Is it i2, PeopleSoft or Siebel that ended up reaping top dog rewards for creating the software that now runs every single large company? Nope. It's SAP—a company great at applications but horrible at underlying technology—and Oracle—a company great at technology but horrible at applications.

Of course, you can't talk about this issue without bringing up TiVo: The company that revolutionized how we watch TV and dramatically altered the business model of nearly everyone in that medium, whether it's cable companies, networks, or advertisers. What was its reward? The company has mostly limped along losing money as competitors ripped off their idea and gave boxes away for free. Most people who use the verb "TiVo" have never even owned a TiVo.

Tom Rogers, TiVo's CEO, granted a rare interview to NBC's Press:Here, and he laid out his vision for why TiVo is getting stronger. First there are the financials: It finally turned a profit on net income last year, and a healthy one at about $100 million. Second, there's the stock: It's up from a November 16 low of $4.60 a share to nearly $11 a share. But the big question is where future growth will come from. Who doesn't have a TiVo who wants one at this point?

In essence, Rogers says the company's future lies in three main areas: Getting way more content than just broadcast and cable on their box; pioneering Internet-like market research on what people watch down to the second they start fast-forwarding through a commercial, and cooperating with TV stations to come up with ways to get their advertising message across that people will actually consume. The heavy lifting here won't be innovation as much as it'll be tough execution. Of course the company could always get bought. But given the stock bump, that's probably not in the offing any time soon.

It's not surprising that the focus is on programming and TV-partnerships since Rogers is a TV guy, not a techy. He was a long time NBC executive who co-founded CNBC and MSNBC. Notice in this clip how deftly he bats aside the question I asked about product innovation and why TiVo was so late to the HD game. The full episode can be viewed in the Bay Area on Sunday morning on NBC or here now.

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Adding Insult To Injury: MySpace Botches Layoffs

Posted: 26 Jun 2009 12:15 PM PDT

When you’ve just gotten laid off, the last thing you want to hear is that you can’t cash your last check because of one final payroll screwup. But that’s apparently exactly what’s going on over at MySpace, which laid off over 30% of its staff (or around 480 employees) earlier this month. The company has just asked many of its laid off employees to refrain from cashing their checks due to an error in calculating how much they should be receiving. Employees are getting voicemails from FIM notifying them that the company has issued a stop payment on their checks, and that they can expect an updated check next week.

This isn’t the company’s only blunder during this sensitive time. We’ve heard that that last day for the terminated MySpace employees was chaotic and poorly planned, and that the company hasn’t been very tactful regarding treatment of laid off employees. In the press release announcing the layoffs, CEO Owen Van Natta called the company “bloated”, displaying a surprising lack of respect towards the terminated workers. It gets worse: MySpace has been holding a number of meetings for staff who are still at the company, during which they’ve referred to the recently terminated employees as “fat”. Unfortunately, some of these “fatty” employees have been present at these very meetings — the company has kept a number of terminated employees onboard through the duration of their contract, creating a group of so-called “walking dead” who are being insulted to their faces. Classy.

Of course, MySpace isn’t the first company to botch their layoffs. Earlier this year Microsoft asked some of its laid off employees to send back part of their severance checks. Microsoft’s goof was perhaps more insulting because the company didn’t realize its mistake until after many employees had cashed their checks, so the company actually wanted employees to return money that was already in their bank accounts. MySpace at least caught their mistake early enough to just cancel the old checks and issue new ones, but the company’s lack of sensitivity leaves a lot to be desired.

Image via Biojobblog

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The Real Time Search Dilemma: Consciousness Versus Memory

Posted: 26 Jun 2009 12:05 PM PDT

One of the hottest areas of search right now is real time search, which attempts to find results based on what is happening right now. Twitter’s search engine fast becoming one of the key ways to navigate the service and discover what people are thinking about any subject at any given moment. Facebook is testing out ways to let you search your personal stream. Google is waking up to the challenge as well (Larry Page is particularly concerned with keeping up).

Every week, it seems, a new startup launches tackling real time search from a different angle. (Collecta, One Riot, Scoopler, Topsy, Almost.at, Tweetmeme, CrowdEye, Omgili, to name a few). They are trying to apply real time search to all the different streams of information flowing over the Internet right now: Twitter, Facebook feeds, Digg submissions, blog comments, RSS feeds, Flickr photos, YouTube uploads, shared links on bit.ly and elsewhere. The list keeps getting longer every day.

There is something about human nature which makes us want to prioritize information by how recent it is, and that is the fundamental appeal of real time search. The difference between real time search and regular search didn’t really crystallize for me until I had a conversation with Edo Segal, who sold his real time search company Relegence to AOL a few years ago and holds three patents on the subject. “Real time taps into consciousness,” says Segal, “search taps into memory. That is why it so potent. You experience the world in real time.”

This raises an interesting dilemma. If real time data streams are akin to the living consciousness of the Web, how do you search them? How do you search consciousness? It is not the same as searching memory, which is what Google does when it looks at its indexed archive of the Web and how those pieces of information build up authority over time. The real time search dilemma centers precisely around how to rank results, and how to resolve the tension between recency and relevancy.

The default, or at least the starting point, for most real time search engines is simply to put the most recent results up top and then keep pushing then down in a free-flowing river of information as new results which match the query come in. That is what Twitter search does, for instance. It is a chronological stream of the most recent Tweets containing a particular set of keywords. Real time search startup Collecta also takes this approach of simply presenting the stream as it comes in, and letting you filter by source. Ranking results any other way would automatically reorder them and automatically make them less real-time.

Yet not being able to filter that stream generates too much noise. Other approaches attempt to add in other factors. OneRiot, for instance, is developing what it calls PulseRank, which takes into account the freshness of the information, the link authority of the Webpage where it is coming from, the authority of the person who is sharing the link, and the velocity with which the information is being passed around the Web. This seems like a reasonable approach, but it may not catch something important as fast as simply watching the unadulterated stream.

There are other approaches as well. You can look at what people on the Web are actually doing in real time or look for variations in the stream of mentions for any given keyword to notice spikes of activity. When everyone is talking about Michael Jackson or Iran above and beyond the normal level of chatter for those topics, that is when you want to know that you need to pay attention. So maybe real time search is more like an alert system.

Can you search consciousness, or can you only watch it pass by? We’ll be debating this at one of the panels on real time search at our Real Time Stream CrunchUp in July. But it is clear that in order to make sense of the stream, it needs to be ranked by order of importance as well as by time.

(Photo credit: Flickr/Andrew Sea)

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Flicker (No, Not That One) Bares Its Stats In An Attempt To Get Rich

Posted: 26 Jun 2009 11:25 AM PDT

picture-316Flickr, Yahoo’s photo property, is one of the largest picture sharing services in the world. However, if you were to ask a group of random people how you spell its domain, a high percentage would likely tell you F-L-I-C-K-E-R. That’s not surprising, but it’s undoubtedly longstanding a headache for Yahoo. And now the people who own Flicker.com are looking to capitalize on it.

If you visit the site, you’ll see that it now exposes its traffic stats in the lower right-hand corner. It’s a blatant attempt to make money, at the very least from advertisers willing to throw links on the page. Or presumably to get someone to buy the domain.

Here are the stats they publish:

Flicker by the numbers:

Unique Visits:
3.6MM /yr

Source:
Direct Navigation (95.74%)

Outbound Clicks:
400K /yr

CPC Keyword Values:
(Photography equipment)
$2.50 -$3.00 /click

Daily Value to Advertisers:
$2700.00 - $3300.00

(Data is approximate, tracking by Google Analytics)

Below that is a link to contact them.

You’ll notice that over 95% of the traffic comes from direct navigation. That’s because if you Google “Flicker,” you’ll find flickr.com first, and flicker.com nowhere to be found on the first page of results. And that means that millions of people each year are typing in “flicker.com” likely expecting flickr.com. Certainly, that’s worth something, and Flicker knows it.

But the people who own flicker.com probably shouldn’t hold their breath for Yahoo to buy the domain anytime soon. After all, they’re busy selling off their own killer domain names on the cheap to make money.

And so the site is resorting to rather shady tactics. While its main page claims that it’s down for maintenance, there’s a Twitter button right next to that to tweet out that it’s down for maintenance. You might think that most sites wouldn’t want people to know that they’re site is down, but not Flicker. That’s because they clearly want people to advertise on their new “down” website.

And it’s working, look at how many people are actually tweeting this garbage out. You can be sure that a lot of them think Yahoo’s Flickr is down, and they’re just trying to let others know. Flicker has its own Twitter account that highlights all these tweets.

On the site below its maintenance message, you’ll find a bunch of links to camera equipment (the same group Flicker directly appeals to with its ‘CPC Keyword Value’ stats). And just to keep things even more shady, all of these links are bit.ly shortened links.

Update: As commenter Noah points out, some of those Bit.ly links aren’t exactly bathing in traffic. This one has only 500 clicks in the past two weeks.

picture-125

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Maybe that Guy Does Need to Get Laid After All

Posted: 26 Jun 2009 09:08 AM PDT

chemistryWe’ve all heard it before, whether you work in a Fortune500 company or waited tables at a restaurant.  There’s always an uptight guy or girl who’s defensive, paranoid, over-stressed and nitpicky. And someone– maybe you’re too polite– but someone says, “That guy (or girl) soooo needs to get laid.” (Note, I didn’t use the example “leading tech blog” above. I’d like to keep my job.)

A new study says there’s some truth to that. Seriously. According to Dr. Helen Fisher, biological anthropologist and chief scientific adviser to Chemistry.com, regular sex can make you a better worker bee. The dopamine rush from sex improves creativity making you a better problem solver. A boost of oxytocin and vasopressin generate feelings of trust, making you more likely to be a team player. And, a boost in testosterone can make you more confident and competitive.

Yep, sounds like a dude wrote the study. But, hey, if it’s true, maybe there’s a productivity justification for all that porn online.

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