The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Hitwise: Facebook Accounts For 1 In 4 Page Views In The U.S.
- Accel Selling Big Chunks Of Facebook Stock
- Two Chinese Online Video Sites Going Public: Which Should Investors Buy? (TCTV)
- What’s New At Tumblr: Funding, Hires, Office, Board Member, And A Focus On Fashion
- Q&A Site Formspring Lands Another $10 Million
- The TechCrunch Guide to the Web 2.0 Summit
- In The Giving Mood, Amazon Also Unveils MP3 Gifting (That Can Magically Become Amazon Gift Cards)
- Anonymously Chat With Other College Students On HowRandom
- Resolute Marine Wins Startup Open, Converts Wave Energy To Clean Water And Power
- Peter Thiel: Facebook Co-Founder Eduardo Saverin Did A Poor Job, Got Rich Anyway
- Survey: Consumers Choose Cyber Monday Over Black Friday
- Video Review: The Microsoft Kinect for Xbox 360
- Web Video Hogs Up 37 Percent Of Internet Traffic During Peak TV Hours
- Groupon Sues Fellow Group Buying Site MobGob Over 9-Year-Old Patent
| Hitwise: Facebook Accounts For 1 In 4 Page Views In The U.S. Posted: 19 Nov 2010 02:03 PM PST
In March, Hitwise reported that Facebook overcame Google to become the largest website in the U.S. with 7.07% of all U.S. visits. Google was second at 7.03% at the time. As of September, comScore reported that Facebook was behind Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Hitwise also says that visits to Facebook have increased by 60% from the same week last year and represented 1 in 10 US Internet visits last week. And the market share of page views for Facebook was 24.27% last week, 3.8x the volume of the 2nd ranked website YouTube.com with 6.93%. Of course, it’s important to note that this doesn’t include visits from outside the U.S. and excludes mobile traffic.        
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| Accel Selling Big Chunks Of Facebook Stock Posted: 19 Nov 2010 01:37 PM PST
Prior to the sale they had somewhere around 10% of Facebook. They paid just $12.7 million for that stock, in 2005. Our understanding is they sold somewhere around 20% of that position, meaning they own 8% or so of Facebook now. So who bought it, and what was the price? One source said TCV purchased some $200 million of the stock. And another source says Andreessen Horowitz purchased $80 million in Facebook stock out of their massive new fund. We’ve heard these trades occurred at a $35 billion valuation from one source. Another said $40 billion, and yet a third said “way lower.” Whatever the price, it’s likely half a billion dollars or more that Accel is taking off the table. To be clear, we haven’t confirmed some of this. But it’s pretty clear Accel is selling a lot of Facebook stock right now, and that at least Andreessen Horowitz is one of the buyers – they confirmed to us that they have begun buying shares, but won’t comment on price or number. A year ago Elevation Partners bought $90 million in Facebook stock at a roughly $9 billion valuation. Then earlier this year they invested $120 million more at a $14 billion valuation.        
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| Two Chinese Online Video Sites Going Public: Which Should Investors Buy? (TCTV) Posted: 19 Nov 2010 01:29 PM PST
One of the most interesting corners of that goldrush is online video. Between dozens of competitors, soaring bandwidth costs, piracy issues and government crackdowns, this has been one of the harder areas for Chinese upstarts to succeed and more than a dozen have died. A lot of Silicon Valley money has died with them. But left standing are YouKu and Tudou and both have filed paperwork to go public. They are frequently called the “YouTubes of China,” but both are actually becoming the home of more premium and even original scripted content. These companies may have started with a user generated content bent but are more like a Hulu than a YouTube now, or even an HBO or AMC. It seems UGC is hard to monetize everywhere. With hundreds of millions of uniques per month– they are sucking up insane amounts of bandwidth. The two leading companies Tudou and YouKu have raised more than $300 million between them and only Tudou is close to profitable. Some IPO cash would help them dramatically, as would the marketing event that goes along with a successful IPO. But with two companies with roughly the same user base and roughly the same revenues both getting ready to file– which one should investors buy? Bishop helps us make sense of the market.        
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| What’s New At Tumblr: Funding, Hires, Office, Board Member, And A Focus On Fashion Posted: 19 Nov 2010 01:27 PM PST
But while the numbers are still a bit up in the air, we do know that as Fortune and Business Insider reported earlier, Sequoia Capital is leading this new round. And we’ve heard that previous investors Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures are on board once again. Further, like Business Insider, we’re hearing that Sequoia’s Roelof Botha will join Tumblr’s Board as a part of this investment, which will likely close in the next couple of weeks. We spoke with Tumblr founder David Karp earlier today, and while he declined to comment on any of the funding news, he did offer up some other details about the company, and where they’re heading. First of all, Tumblr just opened a new office in New York City. For the past several months they were working at capacity at their old office, with a team of 12. But with the new space that Karp says is roughly four times as big, they’ve already expanded to 16 people now. And they’ll be at 20 employees before the end of the year, Karp says. Given the growth Tumblr is seeing, it’s pretty incredible that they’ve been able to keep up with only a team of 12, but Karp admits that it has been a challenge. And they’re now putting the focus on ramping up hiring to make sure they can keep pace. He expects they’ll be at 30 employees by early next year, most of them engineers, essentially tripling the size of the company in just a few short months. If you’re wondering how they’re paying for this hiring spree, see: above. Karp notes that he worked really hard to keep the team small up until this point, to keep everyone focused, but says that they now have so many directions that they want to go in, that they need more people. One of those is a new Director of Product, Derek Gottfrid, who they nabbed from The New York Times, as we first reported last week. Another new hire is Rich Tong, a co-founder of Weardrobe, which sold to Like.com in late 2009. Tong is Tumblr’s first specialized community director, leading the fashion community. This is a key area of focus for Tumblr going forward as this community makes up a full 16 percent of Tumblr’s most popular sites, Karp says. He notes that in the next few months, a huge focus for Tumblr will be how to better cater to the creative communities they’ve attracted. Fashion, film, photography, these are all hugely important to the platform, he says. Karp believes that focusing on them will help separate them from that other social network, Facebook, which has not done a good job of handling these specialized communities so far. In fact, Karp considers Facebook to be “arguably hostile” towards them. Tumblr wants to be “the best place in the world for the best creative communities,” Karp says. He wouldn’t give any specifics about what they’re thinking about doing here, just that it’s a key area of focus. Karp declined to disclose any sort of revenue numbers, but does say that they’re making a good amount just from the theme community alone. Tumblr currently sells customized themes, created by the community, at a variety of prices. They split the revenues with the theme creators at an “App Store-like split”, but it is a tiered system. The more expensive the theme, the more generous the split is, he says. When the new money comes in, you can probably expect Tumblr to continue to focus on scaling and the product short term, rather than any big money-making schemes, is what I’m hearing. You know, the Twitter model. [photo: flickr/David Karp]        
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| Q&A Site Formspring Lands Another $10 Million Posted: 19 Nov 2010 12:48 PM PST
Formspring is yet another player in the Q&A space piquing investor interest. Since its launch in November, the service now boasts over 16 million registered members, 40 million monthly uniques and around one billion questions answered. Quora, another buzzed about Q&A site, is much much smaller at a modest 200,000 monthly uniques. Formspring plans to use the cash to focus on building out more social integration into its service. Its first financing round attracted such hot angel investors as SV Angel, Travis Kalnick, Kevin Rose and Dave Morin.
       
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| The TechCrunch Guide to the Web 2.0 Summit Posted: 19 Nov 2010 12:36 PM PST The seventh annual Web 2.0 Summit wrapped up yesterday after an exciting week of panels, interviews, and discussions at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. The star-spangled lineup for this year’s events included Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski, and big-ticket investors like John Doerr and Fred Wilson. For Web 2.0′s theme this year, conference co-organizers Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle chose “points of control,” explaining, “Fifteen years and two recessions into the commercial Internet, it’s clear that our industry has moved into a competitive phase—a ‘middlegame’ in the battle to dominate the Internet Economy. At this year’s Web 2.0 Summit, we’re focusing on these shifting points of control—strategic chokepoints on an increasingly crowded board.” According to the event’s symbolic map above, territorial rivalries have begun to manifest in the technology world — as have areas of conflict. A conversation between New York Magazine's John Heilemann and VC big wigs John Doerr (Kleiner Perkins) and Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures) exemplified this, as the group argued over meaty, contentious issues like whether the tech industry is in a bubble or boom cycle, innovation on the East Coast versus the West Coast, the state of investing and more. TechCrunch writer MG Siegler found it to be one of the highlights of this year’s event; check out his coverage here. Mark Zuckerberg spoke about Facebook’s new mail client, known as “Facebook Messages,” which the company hopes will reflect the transition to “Next Generation Messaging,” as younger generations move away from using email. He also spoke about Facebook’s recent conflicts with Google, its proposed role as an “enabler” of innovation among small start-ups hoping to disrupt traditional verticals, and, perhaps most interestingly, discussed why focusing on “points of control” overlooks the most critical territory in the industry’s landscape — its “uncharted” waters. Watch the video and read Alexia Tsotsis’s take here and Jason Kincaid’s in-depth review here. Other points of interest include Twitter Founder Evan Williams’ discussion of the company’s complicated relationship with Facebook and how Twitter has been secretly assigning each of its individual users a “reputation score.” Eric Schmidt also showed off a “Nexus S” and said that we might expect the arrival of Gingerbread in the “next few weeks.” Just in time for Christmas? Peep Devin Coldewey’s analysis here. For more in-depth TechCrunch coverage, check out our complete list of posts below:
       
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| In The Giving Mood, Amazon Also Unveils MP3 Gifting (That Can Magically Become Amazon Gift Cards) Posted: 19 Nov 2010 12:11 PM PST
To be honest, it’s a little surprising that Amazon didn’t have this feature before. But it comes with a nice little bonus that only someone like Amazon can offer: if you receive an MP3 as a gift and decide you don’t want it, you can instead opt for an Amazon credit for the same amount, which you can use towards any product they offer. Just as with the Kindle book gifting feature, you simply have to enter a recipients email address, add a message, and choose the MP3(s) you want them to receive. Then you pay for it, and you’re done. They’ll get a message that an MP3 gift is waiting for them and a link to download it. Amazon says the process takes less than 5 minutes. And because Amazon’s MP3s are DRM-free, they’ll work anywhere.        
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| Anonymously Chat With Other College Students On HowRandom Posted: 19 Nov 2010 11:23 AM PST HowRandom, a site for college students, launches today with one core feature — the ability to anonymously chat with people from other schools. There’s no photo uploading, file sharing or video capabilities, just a text entry line and a chat widget. The student on student communication happens on two levels, a test function where you casually enter in your school (warning, you have to type the full word “University”) and a verified function which allows you to type in your .edu address in order to get “Verified” as a bona fide college student. Explains founder Jon Cook, “It's a way for guys at Harvard to meet girls at Yale, etc. And it's not intrusive. HowRandom has a very solid viral loop. It has the Facebook-like .edu exclusivity. And it's extremely simple to use.” Cook and co-founder Jason Humphries think of HowRandom as more of a social experiment than a business. They hope it will mirror the randomness of life and “foster real-world meetings and interactions between two people that might otherwise never meet. " Like a text-based Chatroulette with no penis problem, there’s also a next feature in case you don’t like who you’re chatting with. Cook says he wants to keep evolving the app through user feedback, and is considering including limited profile option along with the “Verified” logo. Facebook initially restricted its users to college students with .edu addresses and that element was crucial to its success, this is also HowRandom’s hook. Colleges are hotbeds of virality in more ways than one, and starting off there is a good move for any social app.        
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| Resolute Marine Wins Startup Open, Converts Wave Energy To Clean Water And Power Posted: 19 Nov 2010 11:16 AM PST
As their prize, co-founders and core team members of Resolute Marine receive an all-expenses-paid, one-day trip to the island owned by Sir Richard Branson where they will embark on a Maverick Business Adventure. These events draw groups of entrepreneurs together to network while engaging in some crazy activities, like cage diving with Great White sharks, off-road racing or kite boarding. The Startup Open was run by the Kauffman Foundation, the Kansas City organization dedicated to the study and promotion of entrepreneurship, using iStart software (formerly StudentBusinesses.com) to receive, review and process applications. Unlike typical business competitions, there was no final pitch event, judges did not meet to review applications, and winners were selected based on compiled judges’ scores. Winners were picked from a pool of 50 finalists. The competition received 144 qualifying applications. The chief operating officer and co-founder of Resolute Marine, Olivier Ceberio, spoke with TechCrunch about his company and the win. The following is a condensed version of the conversation. Q: What does your company do? William Stady who is my co-founder and chief executive, and I really wanted to solve a serious global problem. Over one billion people today lack access to safe drinking water. Over thirty percent of people, meanwhile, are living within 100 kilometers of the ocean according to a study we read by the Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center. People who lack access to safe drinking water also usually lack access to the power grid or affordable power. Our small scale system converts energy from the waves into electrical power or into pressurized seawater, so we can provide both drinking water and clean, more affordable power. Q: How does your technology work? The wave energy converter is like a pedal. It is attached to the bottom of the sea, or the seabed. When a wave starts, the pedal moves back and forth. It extracts energy from the wave, and we use that to produce either electrical power or pressurized sea water. It can produce one or the other. We send those to the shore to drive a desalination system. The technology transports energy, or it can transport pressurized seawater, which is an input to the desalination processing systems on-shore. We have not created a desalination processing system ourselves. For that, we will partner with other companies. We have begun talking with some of the world's largest providers of small scale desalination systems. Q: Who are your customers? Are your systems out on the market yet? When we are ready to commecialize the system and install it, the wave energy converters will be in situ for 10 years or up to 20 years, and we will provide maintenance over that lifetime. We have to test our system out before the commercial pilot, probably in New England most likely in Maine. In the U.S. three states that are very active in wave energy research are Maine, Oregon and Hawaii. But worldwide, the core of the wave energy industry would be in Scotland, and Australia with some others in Europe where governments really want to find and use renewable energy. I feel that U.S. has been somewhat behind in this. Q: How will winning this competition effect your business? We competed at Ignite Clean Energy in 2009, which is now a part of the Cleantech Open, and at Masschallenge this year where we were among the finalists. We got in-kind services but no major cash prizes. We have also won several government grants. Surprisingly they are not near enough to pay for everything a cleatech startup needs. We will be raising private capital to finance all the aspects of our business from intellectual property protection, to rent and marketing. We will also continue along the competition circuit, and hope to compete and win prize money from some that are focused on water technology.        
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| Peter Thiel: Facebook Co-Founder Eduardo Saverin Did A Poor Job, Got Rich Anyway Posted: 19 Nov 2010 10:37 AM PST [UPDATE: We spoke to Peter Thiel today who felt his comments on Saverin were taken out of context and exaggerated. He clarified, "I don't have a strong opinion on his work performance, but I do think that he did very well during his very short time at Facebook. I didn't mean it to be a hit on him."] As far as I know, and my Web searching skills can take me, early Facebook investor Peter Thiel hasn’t yet publicly commented on the role of Eduardo Saverin, who co-founded and initially bankrolled ‘thefacebook’ back in the early days. Well, Thiel did exactly that, on The Big Think (video below). Asked who Saverin is, Thiel says he was “affiliated, quasi-employed at Facebook in 2004″. The fun doesn’t stop there. If you’re familiar with the origins of Facebook, whether or not you call yourself familiar with it because you’ve seen the movie The Social Network or not, you’ll know that Saverin was pushed out just when things got rolling for the fledgling company. This happened around the time PayPal co-founder turned investor Peter Thiel and Napster co-founder Sean Parker got involved. Saverin famously sued Facebook and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in April 2005, and prevailed. He still owns 5% of Facebook (which means he’s worth over $1 billion nowadays) Thiel chides Saverin for not being cut out for his role and that he wasn’t remotely doing his job at the time, which was supposed to be selling advertisements for Facebook. Ultimately, Thiel says, Saverin did well for not doing much. He also says The Social Network was “wrong on many levels”, and the Hollywood’s “caricature of capitalism”. The full transcript is copied below the video.
       
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| Survey: Consumers Choose Cyber Monday Over Black Friday Posted: 19 Nov 2010 10:21 AM PST
Black Friday, or the day after Thanksgiving, has always been known as one of the year’s biggest holiday shopping days. But in the past five years, Cyber Monday, the Monday following Thanksgiving, has become a a serious shopping day for online sales and promotions. Last year, Cyber Monday brought in $887 million in sales compared to $595 million in online spending on Black Friday. Today, Compete is releasing a survey that indicates that once again consumers could be choosing Cyber Monday for shopping as opposed to Black Friday. According to Compete’s data, 45% of respondents indicated they will do their holiday shopping on Cyber Monday, versus 37% who plan to shop on Black Friday. Interestingly, Black Friday shoppers are planning to spend more money than Cyber Monday shoppers, with Black Friday shoppers averaging an expected $353 and Cyber Monday shoppers averaging an expected $233. Compete says the increased spend is likely due to more people shopping for high-end items such as electronics, clothing, toys and games on Black Friday than on Cyber Monday. The report shows that 11%, 32% and 23% more people will shop for these items, respectively, on Black Friday than on Cyber Monday. Last year Hitwise reported that Amazon took the top spot on Cyber Monday and Black Friday. It’s not surprising that Cyber Monday is becoming more popular than Black Friday, especially if deals are equally as good on both days. Who wants to wait in long lines at 4 am the day after Thanksgiving if they can just click Buy It Now on their computer?
       
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| Video Review: The Microsoft Kinect for Xbox 360 Posted: 19 Nov 2010 09:47 AM PST http://player.ooyala.com/player.swf?embedCode=o4NTF1MTqTww-37TTvEiS1xM9jot2ndS&version=2 Oh, Microsoft. You just can’t seem to help but be the last one to every party you attend. You launched the Kin just as messenger phones began to die, then you launched Windows Phone 7 when the smartphone wars were so far underway that most folks had already declared an allegiance. And now you’ve got your motion gaming platform, the Kinect, hitting the shelves years after the Nintendo Wii and months after the Playstation Move. I’ve spent the last week living with a Kinect in my life. How does it fare? Find out after the jump. Read the rest at CrunchGear >>        
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| Web Video Hogs Up 37 Percent Of Internet Traffic During Peak TV Hours Posted: 19 Nov 2010 09:29 AM PST A few weeks ago, some data came out suggesting that Netflix alone accounts for 21 percent of Internet traffic during peak TV hours. But if you add in a couple other sources of streaming video from the Web, namely YouTube and other forms of Flash video, the traffic share of Web video jumps to 37 percent (with 10 percent from YouTube and 6 percent fro Flash video). BitTorrent is another 8 percent, with much of that being video as well. These startling numbers were put together in a slide by Morgan Stanley Internet analyst Mary Meeker during her presentation at the Web 2.0 Summit earlier this week. All HTTP web traffic is only 23 percent of the total. Does this mean that the No. 1 activity on the Web is watching videos? Not exactly. The traffic is measured in terms of bandwidth used and how many bits are transferred. Streaming a video file requires an order of magnitude more bits than loading a Web page. As a result, video is hogging up the bandwidth. And the longer the video, the more bandwidth it requires. Which perhaps explains why Netflix accounts for twice as much bandwidth usage as YouTube. People are streaming full-length two-hour movies from Netflix, not two-minute video clips. People are still watching a lot more videos and spending more time on YouTube. In October, viewers spent 23.4 billion minutes on YouTube compared to 750 million minutes on Netflix.com, according to comScore. And YouTube attracted 116 million unique visitors versus 20 million for Netflix. When you see these numbers, just remember that what they are measuring is the traffic load on the Internet in terms of bandwidth consumed, not time spent. Still, if video is eating up more than a third of Internet bandwidth during primetime hours, imagine what it will be if a decent TV experience ever comes to the Web.        
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| Groupon Sues Fellow Group Buying Site MobGob Over 9-Year-Old Patent Posted: 19 Nov 2010 09:28 AM PST Group buying site Groupon is suing one of the many small startups trying to emulate its successful social shopping model over a patent that was originally filed over a decade ago. The target of the lawsuit is MobGob, which enables people to use their existing social networks to gather their purchasing powers and collectively buy goods or services from sellers online. The complaint is embedded below. Groupon alleges that MobGob infringes one of its patents by operating a system for aggregating demand for the purchase of a product by a number of individual buyers. MobGob, as many group buying sites these days, allows sellers to provide a conditional sales offer for a product or service and set a price depending on the aggregate amount of acceptances of the conditional sales offer made in a specified and limited time. Groupon claims MobGob knowingly infringes one of its patents, no. 6,269,343, entitled “On-line marketing system and method”, causing them harm to their business, market, reputation and goodwill. Groupon is asking for the company to stop infringing on this patent and to hand over “all infringing products and systems in their possession”, including the MobGob website, for destruction. The description of the patent-in-suit reads:
What I found interesting about this lawsuit is that the patent was first filed back in 1999 and issued two years later, while Groupon is only three years old. The inventor listed is Matthew Pallakoff, currently in charge of mobile UI / UX for digital products at Barnes & Noble, and the company that the patent was assigned to is MobShop (not this one). MobShop was in fact an early group buying site that raised a ton of money from entrepreneur-turned-VC Marc Andreessen and Mayfield Fund at the hight of the early-century Internet boom and unceremoniously folded in 2001, almost as quickly as it had risen. I was curious to know whether Groupon somehow got hold of the patent through acquisition, which is particularly interesting given that they’re now filing lawsuits against smaller rivals based solely on the possession of the patent. Reached by email, Groupon founder and CEO Andrew Mason told me that it’s a “funny story” – I’m still waiting for him to get back to me and tell me what it is (will update if and when he does). Update: so basically, Mason told me that the reason they’re suing MobGob is because they actually tried to patent-troll-sue Groupon first, under another name and with a patent that was issued at a later time than the patent-in-suit. He added that Groupon has absolutely no intention of going after companies in the group buying space, but that they bought the early MobShop patent to protect themselves in “crazy lawsuits” that get filed against them now that they’re in the picture so much. In other words, he says they bought the patent for usage in lawsuits filed against them, not with the intention to sue other group buying services. (Thanks to patent news site Priorsmart for the heads up)        
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Sometime in the last week or so, we’ve heard from multiple sources, 
For the past several weeks, there’s been a lot of 
Q&A site 
Earlier today, we noted that Amazon unveiled a new way to 
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