Author: Eliza Kern

When Pinterest moved up to San Francisco last summer, the move, along with similar leaps from companies like AirBnb and Twitter, signaled both the high prices of Silicon Valley real estate and the growing community of startups in the city.

On Monday, the team at Pinterest finally moved into the company’s newly-renovated offices, and GigaOM got a tour of the new digs and sat down with CEO Ben Silbermann, who talked about where the company is headed now that it’s settled into the new location. Pinterest now has about 100 employees, and we’ve written before about how Pinterest has been able to maintain a culture of collaboration between designers and engineers in part due to its relatively small size.

Pinterest’s new digs in San Francisco.

“We are heads down on execution,” Silbermann said.

Pinterest announced back in November that it would be rolling out some options specifically for businesses, and it announced a web analytics product in March. But for a company that just raised $200 million, putting its valuation at $2.5 billion, it seems likely that we’ve only just starting see what the company has planned.

Recent Comscore numbers put the company’s traffic at about 48 million global users, and while the company has made no moves into e-commerce yet, the vast number of people “pinning” photos of items certainly presents a lot of money-making avenues for the company down the line. Silbermann said the company will be announcing an update to Pinterest in a few weeks:

“We’ve already indicated Pinterest for business and and Pinterest insights are some of the foundational things for the company,” he said. “Our focus has been to become a very valuable service.”

When Silbermann spoke at our Roadmap conference in November 2012, he talked about the challenges in keeping a user’s attention as the web and smartphones increasingly pull them in different directions. One thing that could keep users on Pinterest more often is the tablet, which Silbernmann called “the device of the future.” But even more than securing user eyeballs, he talked about his desire to translate actions on Pinterest into everyday life.

“We want to make pinning actionable,” he said.

Here are some more of Om’s photos of the company’s new offices:

Decor in the new Pinterest office in San Francisco.

The team at Pinterest talks things over in the new offices.

A view of the new Pinterest offices and eating options from above.

Work spaces at Pinterest.

The new Pinterest offices are fairly open and light by design.

Room to sit down and talk at Pinterest.

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Sales of Facebook’s HTC First phone have been disapointing so far, and not only has AT&T discounted the phone as we previously reported, the carrier has decided to discontinue the phone altogether, BGR reported Monday.

Facebook debuted both its Home on Android launcher and the HTC First about a month ago in early April, but by last week my colleauge Kevin Tofel reported that AT&T had dropped the price of the phone to 99 cents with a contract. Om’s full review of the HTC First can be found here.

While phone promotions are common, it didn’t seem like a vote of confidence for the HTC First sales, which have only totalled 15,000 so far, according to the report. Kevin wrote why it could be a challenge to get consumers to pick them up:

“It’s difficult enough for a high-end flagship phone to stand out from its peers, let alone a mid-range handset. Frankly, I can’t see how Facebook Home helps the HTC First differentiate itself enough; particularly when the software is already available for download on better phones and is expected to arrive on other handsets in the future. Sorry Facebook, I don’t think the market likes your attempt at a smartphone.”

Facebook declined to comment on the report and referred me to AT&T, which has not yet responded to requests for comment. BGR has uncorked some whoppers in the past, such as a 2012 report that Sprint would be getting the iPhone 5 exclusively, but this report makes sense given the lackluster interest in Facebook Home and this phone in particular.

Facebook’s Home on Android has also suffered from poor reviews, garnering only two stars in the Google Play store, although Facebook said last week that it was working on some improvements that would make the app more appealing for Android users.

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If you’ve ever seen a toddler interact with an iPad (the best being the toddler who didn’t understand why her paper magazine wouldn’t flip), you know that kids are in many ways uniquely suited to playing with tablet or mobile apps — sometimes before they can even read.

But developing apps that will appeal to kids is a real challenge. A variety of enterprenuers and developers who work with technology intended for kids and parents spoke at the 500 Startups Mamabear conference in Mountain View Friday, where they talked about the challenges but potential benefits of building for the younger set.

Complying with privacy guidelines

One of the biggest hurdles for app developers — which should comfort parents concerned about the privacy of their kids — is complying with COPPA, the regulations from the FTC that limit the data that developers can collect from kids like names or photos, and which require developers to attain permission from parents before they acquire any data.

Building a viral social app while complying with COPPA can be tricky, and most notably, COPPA got Path into trouble when an FTC investigation found underage users on the app, which led to a $800,000 fine for the company and 3,000 accounts getting purged from the system.

Shai Samet, a lawyer and privacy consultant who runs the startup kidSAFE Seal Program, talked about how developers can work with the COPPA guidelines to create apps for kids, reminding them that all sorts of information, from real names to photos to videos to geolocation, is all information you need parental consent to collect. You also can’t include social plug-ins for apps like Facebook, or include behavior tracking ads like Google ads, both of which are common monetization strategies, if they’re targeted at kids.

“There’s really three key strategies to avoid COPPA regulations in some scenarios and be able to scale user growth,” he said. Samet pointed to three different tactics, which include anonymizing data from kids (so you’re not collecting real names), limiting sign-ups to kids over age 13 (if acquiring younger users isn’t a requirement for success), and picking the easiest form of acquiring parental consent (avoiding credit card numbers or social security numbers if possible and opting for email instead.) Shamet’s full presentation can be found online here.

App-testing with more distracted users

Plenty of app developers will host focus groups for their target audience to see how people respond to products and how they interact with devices. But when it comes to app-testing with kids, (especially those who aren’t verbal yet), it can be a lot harder to get feedback.

Sandra Oh Lin, the founder and CEO of Kiwi Crate, talked about how to do focus groups and app testing with kids, and how it can depend on the age of the kid with whatever tactic you take.

“Adults have no problem telling you what they think,” she said. “They’ll walk you through and say, ‘Here’s why I’m tapping on this.’” But for kids, you have to do a lot more observation to see how they interact with a game, since they might not tell you why they don’t like something. Plus, they’re extremely prone to distractions, and keeping them focused on the task is tricky too.

But if your focus group works well? Remembering to contact all of those people when your product ships to tell them about it can give you an automatic user base to start with.

Figuring out the content that works

It sounds obvious, but the people designing the apps for kids aren’t kids themselves, so figuring out the content that appeals to them can be somewhat of a learning process.

Mark Schlichting, CEO of NoodleWorks Interactive, said that in creating content for kids, age matters. For instance, an app designed for a toddler who doesn’t yet associate letters with words will have a totally different impact when the game is played by an eight-year old. Some age groups might find some material terrifying that wouldn’t bother a slightly older age group — understanding your audience here is key.

Plus, kids often find new uses for an app that the developer didn’t even intend. Schlichting said they found that kids were tapping a particular part of the app in a way that caused it to crash. A developer asked him if they should fix the app and make it un-tappable, but instead he said it’s important to capitalize on how kids are using it.

“I realized, this is an inherent play pattern that we didn’t know was in here,” he said. What are the things kids like in an app? Everything in an app should be highly tappable, responsive, and interruptive, he said. ”Don’t trick ‘em.”

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Visual organizer and web content clipper service Clipboard announced Thursday that it’s been acquired by Salesforce and will be shutting down the current operation. AllThingsD is reporting that the company was acquired for somewhere between $10 and $20 million.

The company explained its decision in a blog post on the site:

“We have some bittersweet news. We are extremely happy to announce that salesforce.com has signed an agreement to acquire Clipboard, allowing us to pursue our mission of saving and sharing the Web on a much larger scale. But at the same time we’re also sad to see this stage of our adventure come to an end, especially since it means that our relationship with you, our users, will irreversibly change. As a result of this news, the Clipboard service at clipboard.com will be discontinued on June 30, 2013.”

I wrote about Clipboard back in September 2012 when it launched its iPhone app and new desktop design. At the time, I noted the similarities between the service and Pinterest, in that they both allow you to save items from across the web and organize that content into “boards.” The Clipboard service allowed you to save links in a way that made them private and fairly useful because of the amount of content that came embedded in clipped material.

“Anyone who’s used Pinterest before will feel immediately familiar with Clipboard — the design is almost identical to the Pinterest layout, with the option of grabbing material from across the web, saving that material to “boards,” and liking other people’s posts.

But Clipboard doesn’t seem like a site for wedding daydreams or fashion photos in the way Pinterest does. Clipboard posts, or “clips,” default to private, and unlike Pinterest’s static photos, Clipboard clips retain almost all of their original web functionality, making them seem more like helpful notes-to-self in the vein of Instapaper or Evernote.”

In the company’s closing post, it reported that the service only gathered 140,000 users who created about 3 million clips. By comparison, last August Evernote had 40 million users, up from 25 milion in May 2012.

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Facebook Home launched about a month ago, and while the company has already seen nearly 1 million downloads of the app and increased engagement on Facebook from the users who have it, the app still has only a two star review on the Google Play store and some users seem frustrated.

In a session with reporters at Facebook’s headquarters Thursday, Facebook engineers outlined some planned changes and additiions to the Home app for Android in an effort to address some of the low reviews, including a way for users to keep their apps from getting reorganized during the Home download, an easier way to start conversations with friends via Chat Heads, and clearer instructions on how to use the app. My colleague Kevin Tofel wrote a more extensive review of the Facebook Home app for Android earlier this month.

Facebook Home will be updated on Thursday, but those are mainly bug fixes and performance improvements. The company said the app organization and Chat Head improvements will likely come within a few months. It’s an interesting move for Facebook to preview coming changes that don’t have timetable yet, and might indicate that the comapny wants to quell concerns about Home from the users who’ve tried it.

Facebook declined to provide data on active users of Home, so while a million people have downloaded it, it’s still unclear how many of those people continued to use it. But Cory Ondrejka, VP of mobile engineering for Facebook, said that of people who have downloaded Home (and these numbers exclude owners of the HTC First phone), overall engagement with Facebook products has increased by 25 percent, and that Chat Heads has increased use of Facebook Chat by 7 percent and messages sent by 10 percent.

“We have just about a million downloads on home,” he said. “It’s very much in line with our expectations.”

Ondrejka responded to the average two star review in the Google Play store, saying that the reviews tended to split among five star reviews and one star reviews, with most of the one star complaints coming from people who were annoyed by the re-organization of their apps on their main screen, and people who wanted easier ways to start conversations with their friends in Chat Heads from the cover feed. The comapny is also looking to add a feature that internally is called “Blues Clues,” which shows people around the app and instructs them on using different features.

“The five star reviewiers are pretty outspoken, saying things like, ‘We love what cover feed is doing,’” he said. “But we’ve spent a lot of time diving through the one star ratings.”

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Out of all the companies in the ex-Twitter gang’s Obvious Corp’s umbrella of publishing startups — most notably, Medium — Branch is still perhaps the lowest-profile of the bunch. While it presents an interesting forum for conversation, eight months into its existence Branch is still figuring out how to get traction in a world that isn’t exactly lacking for conversation online.

Branch launched publicly about eight months ago with the idea of creating a public space for limited conversations among a few people. While it’s fostered some interesting discussions so far (“Is there a bubble?” “What have you learned about visiting Las Vegas?” “How much should a writer be paid, if anything?“), the company is clearly still figuring out how to get conversations going on the site.

I recently spoke with people from Branch and Hyatt, one of the first companies that’s been using Branch for marketing purposes, and it was clear from our conversation that Branch could have a real future in giving companies a place to talk to with consumers in a way that’s both fairly public and transparent but also limited in terms of the investment required by the companies. In other words, some of the aspects of Branch that make it unappealing to users could actually work in its favor when it comes to courting large businesses as customers — and potentially making money on the site.

Branch wasn’t created by one of the former Twitter founders like Medium was, but instead joined the Obvious Corp back in March of 2012. We wrote about the company in July and talked with CEO Josh Miller, who explained the idea behind the product and how he wanted to create the types of conversations people have with friends around a dinner table, but transport those conversations online to be shared and viewed publicly.

But as my colleague Mathew Ingram noted at the time, that closed nature of Branch conversations that are then posted online are reminiscent of blogs without comments — they seem odd to those of use who’ve become used to the spontaneous, collaborative qualities of traditional social media:

“The discussion also seems oddly sterile for anyone who has gotten used to the somewhat chaotic nature of a Twitter debate — or even in blog comments. And because it is less open, there is less of an opportunity for flames or irrelevant comments, but there is also less opportunity for a smart comment from a stranger.”

Yet the closed nature of the discussions and the greater assurance of quality control are obvious perks for a company like Hyatt that wants to hear what frequent travelers think of hotels, and wants to share that feedback publicly but doesn’t necessarily want to maintain a lengthy Facebook feed about the topic. Not to mention, users would probably get annoyed if Hyatt retweeted a lot of people tweeting about hotels, explained Dan Moriarty, the director of digital strategy for Hyatt.

But when I asked Moriarty why he doesn’t just send out a survey asking people what they think of hotels, he explained that the company has learned the value of sharing public feedback with users and the company gets more out of the experience in the long run by appearing more transparent.

“I think we’re over that worry,” he said about the possibility that users would post negative things publicly about Hyatt on a company Branch thread. “I think we’ve done a similar thing on Facebook or the website we started for the campaign, so we’ve worked through the pain of worrying about what people would say about us in social spaces.”

He noted that with a Branch conversation, Hyatt can pick influential travel or hotel bloggers and ask them about hotels, and then once the Branch is over, they can keep sharing the conversation and make sure other users see how the company took that feedback into account. So a conversation hosted with 20 people can get shared out to thousands of others. You could certainly argue that it’s a lot less transparent and truly open for a company to hand-pick people for a Branch conversation than respond to angry customers on Twitter, but you can see the appeal from the company’s perspective, and there’s no reason a company couldn’t do both.

“When you look at Branch… it’s just like-minded people opting into a conversation on things they care about,” he said. “So we definitely get a higher-quality of responses that are more thought through.”

Libby Brittain, the director of editorial development for Branch, said the company is still new, and they’re not sure what a money-making strategy with large corporate partners would look like, but it’s something they’ll evaluate.

“For publishers or brands, they’ve been told to be conversational for years,” she said. “But sometimes they really struggle to deliver on that promise with their customers or clients. I’ve been pleasantly surprised how this has worked.”

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Path plans to announce a partnership with Sprint on Wednesday that will allow Sprint customers to download the social networking app to their Android phones without having to search for it in the Google Play store.

Allowing Android users of certain phones, including the Samsung Galaxy S4, HTC One and Torque devices, to more easily find Path could help the app win more users and improve distribution, which has been a continuing hurdle for CEO Dave Morin’s self-described closed personal network.

The company explained the partnership with Sprint in a statement:

“Today, we’re excited to announce that we’re starting something new with Sprint to make finding Path easy. Sprint has brought together a group of some of the highest quality apps around for its Discover-it Widget on the new Samsung Galaxy S4, HTC One and Torque devices, and we’re delighted to be included. Now, millions of Sprint customers can download Path with just a quick tap, allowing them to easily connect and share with the ones they love.”

Path was dinged by users recently for reportedly spamming a user’s contacts telling people to sign up for Path. While Morin denied that Path had ever spammed its users, Facebook reportedly cut off access to the Facebook API that allowed users to invite their Facebook friends to join Path.

The Sprint partnership could give Path a needed boost in adding new members, as the pressure increases on the mobile social network. Sprint most recently counted 55.2 million customers, and while not all of them are using Android, it certainly provides Path with a large new group of possible users.

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Klout plans to announce a new feature on Wednesday that will prompt users who are supposedly influential about certain topics to answer related questions when they log into the site, building on the company’s idea that one’s knowledge about a particular topic can increase your credibility online.

The new product puts Klout in competition with several different products, from Quora to Yelp. CEO Joe Fernandez explained in an interview that the company wants to help users actually grow their visibilty on the internet and provide useful information to others, rather than just measure their internet visibility or connect those users with brands. However, the questions product, called “Klout Experts,” seems like an odd choice for the company, which has become something of a punchline in consumer tech and social media circles but might have more options courting businesses and marketing professionals.

The company used the questions of, “what’s the best veggie burrito in San Francisco” or “what’s the best digital SLR camera to buy” as examples of questions that users might answer, but it’s hard to imagine enough Klout users answering those questions more thoughtfully than the realm of other sites providing such information, or that people will go to Klout when they want burrito or camera advice. It’s true that no one has totally solved social recommendations, but there are companies with a good deal more payments data and location data giving it a shot, including public company heavyweights like Google and Yelp.

Fernandez touted the company’s integration with Bing as a key audience driver for the product (popular Klout answers will eventually show up in Bing search results), but with about 16.7 percent of market share in February, it’s not like Bing is a default search engine for many people.

However, when I asked Fernandez about the progress of Klout for business, he perked up (pun intended). Users have now redeemed more than 1 million Klout Perks since that product launched several years ago and said that they already have several hundred thousand businesses signed up for the program. Fernandez said the company is on track to do $10 million in revenue this year, and he sees his company becoming more like LinkedIn, where the majority of the revenue comes from products sold to businesses so it matters less how often consumers visit the site.

Fernandez said right now, businesses are eager to work with some of the people using Klout’s platform. For instance, McDonald’s might give a Klout Perk to fitness and health experts so those people can try out a new health-conscious menu item, in hopes that if the food is good, those people will tweet how much they love it. So the new question and answer product could become a way for both businesses to poll users about certain topics, or identify people who are particularly vocal online.

Here’s what users will see when the Klout Experts product comes to profiles:

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With the exploding popularity of Instagram, the social photo app that now counts more than 100 million monthly active users, it could be easy to forget that you ever shared your iPhone photos any other way. But remember Hipstamatic? The iPhone-exclusive app was one of the early ones that captured the attention of mobile photographers with square frames and filters, but ultimately, it missed the boat on social. And for many people, the rest is history.

Hipstamatic CEO Lucas Buick.

But it seems Hipstamatic isn’t dead quite yet. While the company laid off its engineering team last summer and has tried a few others social apps in the past that didn’t catch on, it plans to announce the debut of Oggl on Wednesday, a standalone app to serve as a social network for your Hipstamatic photos. It will also introduce the ability for users to subscribe to Hipstamatic for exclusive filters.

Even more broadly, it seems Hipstamatic is trying to position itself as the photography app for the true artist, not necessarily for anyone with an iPhone. At the company’s press event in San Francisco on Tuesday, CEO Lucas Buick quoted famous photographer Ansel Adams, showed the work of photojournalist Damon Winter, and referred to features with words like “filters,” “lenses,” and “new gear,” — the types of phrases you hear from serious photographers.

In other words, this is not the app for your selfies.

“We’re trying to build this little empire for photo nerds,” Buick told me. “We’re not trying to build something to be a new communication tool. It’s really an art tool.”

The traditional Hipstamatic app will stay the same for those who want to keep using it, but Oggl will provide the same photo-taking capabilities while also allowing users to share those photos into a feed — very much like Instagram. And most importantly, users can still share photos to other apps including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and Foursquare. The app adds a feature I’ve always wished Instagram would adopt, which is basically a photo retweet, or the ability to re-post someone else’s photo that you like. For now, you still have to take your photo in the Hipstamatic app, preventing people from uploading photos they took with a “real” camera and slapping on a filter.

The app will launch in Apple’s App Store this week, and will at first become available on an invite-only basis as it rolls out slowly to users. The app is free to download, with the option to subscribe for 99 cents per month, or $10 per year, for access to special filters and other features.

There’s no question that the addition of a Hipstamatic feed where I can check out my friend’s photos would make me far more likely to use the app. Previously, Hipstamatic wasn’t a destination — it was a camera tool. But that could change; the Hipstamatic filters and photo processing somehow feel more high-quality and expansive than the options on Instagram. Plus, the sharing features that allow me to take photos in Hipstamatic and send them elsewhere is great, especially as social apps are increasingly building silos around content.

There are aspects of Oggl that feel cluttered and confusing. The requirement that you take your photos in Hipstamatic rather than upload them from the camera roll is a real deal-killer. When I’m out on a hike or walking down a busy city street, I want to be able to quickly snap a photo to filter and share on Instagram later. If I have to open an app, there are a lot of photos I’d never take. And the navigation on Oggl between the camera, the multiple filters and lenses, the main feed, and the sharing options isn’t terribly clear.

But using Oggl, I’m reminded of why I initially fell in love with Instagram. As CEO Kevin Systrom has highlighted before, it’s all about the simplicity. Scroll, heart, snap, filter, share. That’s it.

The app’s confusing nature, and Buick’s discussion of Hipstamatic as a “lifestyle brand” in addition to being an app could reflect some of the turmoil and changes the company has faced since Instagram’s rise, which Fast Company examined in a three-part profile of the company’s struggles. Buick said that after Facebook bought Instagram, “everyone thinks they need to buy Hipstamtic,” but that he’s committed to remaining independent of both an external owner or venture funding.

“For us, the biggest challenge is to find ourselves and not forget what we’re doing,” he told me.

So it’s possible that Oggl is too little too late when it comes to social photo apps. But it’s also worth considering that if Instagram starts integrating even further with Facebook over the next few years, and if more sponsored content or advertising starts showing up in Instagram feeds (which isn’t a remote possibility), users could tire of Instagram and start looking for another solution.

And if Hipstamatic sticks around, it could be a good choice.

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One of the biggest challenges for social networks of any kind is the signup process: how do you show someone to use your app and create the experience your existing users love? At this point I can’t imagine life without Twitter, but when I went to teach my parents how to use it, I struggled to explain how they should find the right people to follow, what makes for a good tweet, and how to make their newsfeed look as vibrant as mine. Twitter has continually worked on this problem, Path has struggled with it, and now one of the latest new social shopping apps, called Wanelo, is tweaking its own formula in an attempt to limit the signup hurdles and quickly get more people using the app.

A few months ago I heard about Wanelo and downloaded the app to give it a spin. At its simplest, Wanelo is exactly like Pinterest — except you can click through to purchase anything posted to the site. But when I first installed the app, I was greeted with photos of cut-off shorts, backless dresses, cat pictures, sparkly nail polish, and the like. It was like a 13-year old girl’s heaven. But it wasn’t exactly my style. I couldn’t figure out how to make the main feed reflect my tastes, and I quickly lost interest.

On Tuesday, the company is altering its formula to help people get into Wanelo more quickly, changing the signup process to show people how to follow brands and people (which I struggled with on the old version), and then showing users their curated feeds as the default page of the app rather than what’s trending generally on Wanelo.

Wanelo was founded in 2010 by CEO Deena Varshavskaya but has exploded in popularity in recent months primarily among teenaged and early-20′s women. The company has grown from 1 million registered users in November to 8 million in May, which wouldn’t necessarily mean much, but the company reports that users spend an average of 50 minutes a day on Wanelo. Even among a small group of users, that’s a lot of time, when you consider people spend about 30 minutes a day on Facebook. And a Twitter search for the word “Wanelo” is essentially a feed of (primarily women) discussing their Wanelo addictions.

Varshavskaya said women in the primary age group for Wanelo were becoming obsessed with the app, and as soon as they opened it, they felt at home among the products shown on the trending page. But for anyone else who doesn’t dig sparkles, it was harder to show them the appeal of Wanelo.

“For them, the feed is an amazing, addictive experience,” Varshavskaya said. “For them it’s an awesome first experience. But the downside is that the trending feed cannot by definition work for everyone.”

It seems the re-design fixes the initial signup challenges, but the obvious question is still how Wanelo can distinguish itself from Pinterest, which has raised a lot of money at this point and is pretty much the default social network for saving images and products on the web right now.

Varshavskaya and Wanelo’s investors, which include prominent names like Ann Miura-Ko of Floodgate, Naval Ravikant of AngelList, Kirsten Green of Forerunner Ventures and Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital, are quick to explain their confidence in the company. Wanelo is fundamentally oriented toward commerce and transactions rather than aspirational photos like Pinterest or Tumblr, Varshavskaya said. And it’s true that if you’re looking to purchase an attractive item and want inspiration, Amazon might not be your best bet, and it’s frustrating when you click a link on Pinterest and discover that it’s broken.

So what’s the future for Wanelo? The company seems ripe for acquisition, either by Pinterest itself or another shopping site like Amazon looking to get into social shopping. Pinterest will surely add a commerce component soon, and while it will be a challenge for Pinterest to transition from a site full of photos to a site with shoppable links, it’s surely a challenge the company will try to solve.

And as much as I got into the new Wanelo app, I still found myself saving aspirational items like an $1,800 necklace. Which feels pretty much how people use Pinterest.

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At a time when it’s easy for tech entrepreneurs to find money, the top venture capital (VC) firms need more than cash to stand out. So in a quest to become a top-tier VC firm, Google Ventures not only needs to be an agressive investor; it needs to be as visible as possible.

Rich Miner, partner, Google Ventures (c) 2012 Pinar Ozger [email protected]

The rise of Google’s venture capital arm is an interesting one, because unlike a lot of emerging VC firms, Google Ventures isn’t lacking in capital. Instead, the firm has to prove that it’s not just an offshoot of Google, but rather a VC firm in its own right that can compete with other top-tier firms for access to the best — and potentially most profitable — founders.

“We are not your typical strategic corporate fund,” the firm’s enterprise partner Karim Faris told Forbes, in a mantra you hear often from the group.

One way Google Ventures is working to attract young founders is the addition of young, visible partners like former Digg founder Kevin Rose and blogger-turned-VC MG Siegler. While it boasts Android founder Rich Miner as a partner, Miner is based in Boston, and the addition of Rose and Siegler can help Google Ventures build up its local presence and visibility. So far, Google Ventures has invested in a large number of companies including Nest, DocuSign, HomeAway, and Nextdoor.

Digg founder Kevin Rose, now a Google Ventures partner.

One way Google Ventures is trying to distinguish itself from its Valley peers is by preaching a more hands-on approach to investing. Unlike the traditional model, where partners dispense advice to portfolio companies at board meetings or when the companies ask for it, Google Ventures has set up more of a lab-like atmosphere in Mountain View. It has designers, marketers, engineers and other staff on hand to assist and advise the portfolio companies however they need it.

This strategy has worked for firms like Andreessen Horowitz, which also launched around the same time as Google Ventures in 2009 and was originally derided for its flashy, PR-powered operation. But it has quickly become a top-tier firm in a short period of time, investing in companies like Facebook, Instagram, Github, Pinterest, and Twitter.

In November, Google Ventures announced that it now plans to invest $300 million a year, compared to more typical VC firms that invest about $200 million to $500 million over the course of several years. There’s no question that having the resources and support of Google behind the firm has an impact.

“We were lucky. Larry and I, we just wrote up the check,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin told GigaOM in an interview at the time.

When Google Ventures announced plans to increase the size of its fund, managing partner Bill Maris said Page had asked him what he would do with $1 billion. But with the firm already investing in about 80 companies a year and providing resources like engineering, design, and marketing guidance, he worried more about how to scale that kind of operation and provide enough partner attention for the companies that need it. So adding some new partners is a step in that direction.

Building a VC firm that can compete at the highest levels with the likes of Sequoia and Greylock only four years after launch isn’t an easy task, even if the firm had one of the hottest names in technology as partners. But if Google’s forays into driverless cars and Glass are any indication, the company has no problem setting its sights high.

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Two months after firing its CEO, Groupon is facing another setback: The executive in charge of Groupon Goods, the part of the company that has provided a bright spot in an otherwise struggling daily deals business, has resigned, sources close to the situation have told us.

Faisal Masud, the vice president of Groupon Goods, will be leaving the company later this month, the sources said. One of the sources said he has taken a top position at Staples.

Groupon Goods, which was started in 2011, is one of Groupon’s newer businesses and is its first push into more traditional e-commerce. It sells discounted goods from companies like Dell, and is separate from Groupon’s traditional local coupon business. Masud was hired away from eBay in 2012 to help build Goods, which Groupon announced in April had reached an annual run rate of $2 billion in global billings. Groupon as a whole had $5.38 billion in gross billings for 2012, the company reported in February.

“As we’ve discussed before, growth of Goods … has impacted our overall margins as it has grown materially over the last few quarters, reaching an impressive $2 billion annual billings run rate in Q4,” then-CEO Mason said in the company’s fourth quarter earnings call in February.

The company’s stock has been pounded since it went public in late 2011 — at one point it was trading in the 20s, but more recently has fallen into the mid single digits. Part of the issue for investors has been questions about the reliability of the company’s accounting — last March, for example, Groupon had to restate its earnings after a higher-than-expected number of customers demanded refunds.

But also driving the downward pressure on the stock price is investor skepticism about whether the company can become more than a simply a daily deals site. Many analysts think that model has limited potential, because users can easily tire of the daily email blasts, and for merchants, the deals don’t necessarily translate into a greater number of loyal customers.

Masud’s job has been to help the company become a much broader e-commerce company, a “searchable marketplace,” as Groupon executives referred to it on a recent earnings call. Our sources said Masud’s departure was prompted by tensions between the emerging e-commerce side of the company and Groupon’s local-coupon roots. Before joining Groupon, Masud was head of global shipping and fulfillment for eBay, and before that spent five years at Amazon.

Groupon told us it had no comment. We also reached out to Staples, and will update the story if we hear back from them.

Groupon has been in the spotlight most recently with the high-profile departure of CEO Andrew Mason. Cofounder Eric Lefkofsky and fellow board member Ted Leosis have been named interim co-CEOs while the company searches for his replacement. The company will report its first quarter earnings on Wednesday. The stock closed at $5.84 on Friday.

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Square is looking to build a recommendation engine in addition to its payments system that could challenge the likes of Foursquare and Yelp as the company moves into the local recommendation space, The Verge reported Friday.

“I think we can do something a lot better” than those other apps, Ajit Varma, Square’s director of discovery, said in the interview.

While Foursquare has recently confirmed its intentions to move away from check-ins and mayorships and toward local commerce, hoping to solve the problem of finding the best businesses near you — that you’ll actually like — hasn’t been completely solved. Not enough people are checking into places on Facebook yet to make the company’s service all that useful, and while Yelp is the established favorite, reading reviews there is a little like shopping on Amazon — you need to know what you’re looking for when you go in. Google’s search offerings and Google Now app have strong possibilities for local commerce, but haven’t yet captured the mobile market.

While Square is still a relatively young company, having launched in 2010, it’s already inked a deal with Starbucks and has millions of local merchants connected to its payments service, and as we wrote, the company had a particularly strong year in 2012. It makes sense that as the company expands further and more merchants allow customers to pay through Square, it will acquire a vast amount of data about your purchasing habits — data that both Foursquare and Yelp lack.

Square has your credit card on file, knows where you typically shop, how much you spend, and how much you tip, even, which could allow the company to make much smarter recommendations than its competitors. For instance, if I go to Starbucks every day to purchase a bagel, Square might know to recommend bagel shops to me instead of coffee shops. Or if I leave better tips at one restaurant over another, Square might be able to determine how much I really liked those two restaurants relative to each other.

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In case you missed it: LinkedIn remains a very profitable public social web company, it’s trying to become a major media platform and corporate recruiting is where the money’s coming from. There weren’t too many surprises from the company’s first quarter earnings released on Thursday, but another quarter of strong numbers and exceeded expectations reinforce the trends we’ve been seeing from LinkedIn over the past year.

LinkedIn posted its first quarter earnings on Thursday, reporting revenue of $324.7 million, which beat analyst expectations of $317.08 million. The company saw first-quarter earnings of $0.45 per share excluding one-time charges, compared to analyst expectations of $0.31 per share. The first quarter revenue of $324.7 million is up 72 percent over the $188.5 million in revenue from the same quarter of 2012.

As we’ve written before, the company’s corporate recruiting efforts, called the “Talent Solutions” portion of the business, has become the primary money-maker for LinkedIn, and that remained true for this quarter. The Talent Solutions section grew to become 57 percent of the company’s revenue this quarter with $184.3 million in revenue, up from 53 percent of the company’s revenue last quarter. It allows companies and professional recruiters to pay for access to the product that lets them track candidates, post job openings, and manage submissions.

The company reported $22.6 million in net income and non-GAAP net income of $52.4 million, which translated to earnings per share excluding one-time charges of $0.45.

The company noted earlier this year that a good deal of its new user acquisitions were coming from overseas, and in fact nearly 40 percent of the company’s revenue this quarter came from international markets. The company also noted Thursday that they’ve seen huge growth from students on LinkedIn as well. LinkedIn’s SVP of engineering, Kevin Scott, will be talking about the challenges in leading engineering for the growing business this summer at our Structure conference in San Francisco.

LinkedIn has emerged as one of the most profitable social web companies on the public market right now, consistently posting strong numbers and coming off particularly strong fourth quarter earnings. Since February, the company has launched a variety of products and new features, having recently re-designed its consumer-facing mobile app as well as its Recruiter page for corporate recruiters. The company also launched the brand-new LinkedIn Contacts product, which is a separate mobile app that serves as an integrated contacts app for super-networkers. LinkedIn also acquired the social news reader Pulse, and is clearly looking to make the main feed on the site more of a hub for business-related news and media.

CEO Jeff Weiner also noted that LinkedIn will be selling sponsored content in the main LinkedIn feed, which fits with the company’s goal to populate the feed with more business-related news, photos and videos. Once LinkedIn becomes a destination for people to find current news, it gives the company more chances to sell ads. But even as the number of users on LinkedIn appears to be growing, it’s all relative: LinkedIn is only at 225 million registered users, up from 200 million in January, and those are just registered, not active. So take that for whatever it’s worth.

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Instagram plans to announce Thursday that it’s adding a new “Photos of You” feature on the app where users can see Instagram photos that they’ve been tagged in. The new feature makes sense for the company as it thinks about how to make money on the app, since users can tag both people and brands, and the photos will then display Facebook-like tags on a user’s profile screen.

In a blog post, the company described the update, which will be available on Instagram for iOS and Android:

“There will now be a Photos of You section on your profile. When someone adds you to a photo, you’ll receive a notification and the photo will appear in your Photos of You. Want to make sure you like the photo first? No problem: you can easily adjust your settings so nothing appears on your profile until you approve it. Before your Photos of You section is visible to other people, you’ll have until May 16th to play around and get used to the feature.”

Tagging someone is different than just mentioning them in a comment, so photos you’ve previously been @-mentioned on will not appear on your profile page immediately.

The focus on people and tagging your friends and favorite coffee shop is quintessentially Facebook, a company that’s always talking about people, whether it’s the launch of Facebook Home and a phone organized by “people instead of apps,” or the re-launch of News Feed with the emphasis on large photos of people.

And by being able to tag businesses, like your favorite coffee shop, in addition to your friends, the update points a clear path to Instagram setting up for advertising, which Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hinted at on Wednesday’s earnings call.

“I’m really proud of how Instagram is going,” Zuckerberg said on the call Wednesday. “Kevin and his team made incredible progress since last april, and the Instagram community is growing even faster than the Facebook community did when it was this size.”

Zuckerberg said advertising on Instagram is “something we’re thinking about,” which wouldn’t be surprising as Instagram moves into its second year under Facebook’s ownership, a deal that was announced in April 2012, but hadn’t produced many changes to Instagram at first. However, tagging people and having a page aggregating photos of you are both very Facebook-like features, and being able to tag brands would set the company up to create brand-specific Instagram accounts and features like Facebook Pages.

For users, it’s important to note that the “Photos of You” will become visible to your followers on May 16, so you can play around with the feature until then and approve photos before they go live to others.

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Facebook has re-launched its existing password security feature witha  new system called Trusted Contacts, which allows you to designate actual, real-life friends (you have those, right?) to help you retrieve your password if you get locked out.

To use Trusted Contacts, you can log into Facebook and go to your security settings, where you pick three or more friends to serve as your Trusted Contacts. Facebook then notifies those people that you’ve picked them, and if you ever got locked out of your account, you can ask those people to request security codes for you. Once you have three codes, you’ll be able to get into your account. You won’t have to answer security questions to get your password.

Password security is a hot topic right now, as we’ve become even more susceptible to internet hacks that can destroy personal information and leave us digitally stranded. And as the recent hack of the AP’s Twitter account proved, these hacks can have real financial and security implications for companies as well.

Facebook’s move is similar to two-factor authentication that we wrote Twitter should adopt, and which the company reportedly is working to add, although Facebook’s method uses your friends rather than a smartphone to supply the codes. Companies like Apple and Microsoft have recently stepped up password security options for their users, and it’s becoming somewhat of a must-have.

Facebook previously introduced a Trusted Friends feature in 2011 that let you designate friends to help in case you were locked out of your account, and Trusted Contacts is something of an update to that product, notifying your friends in advance.

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If you’ve read anything about the social network Path over the last year or so, you’d know that it’s an attractive app with some interesting social and design features, but one that has been struggling for years now to get enough users to move it into the big leagues of social networks. Path needs more people using its app. And clearly, the company got the message.

Path announced this week that it hit 10 million users, hoping to reinforce that the company is on a growth track. But just as soon as Path announced that number, stories that hint at less-than-ideal user-acquisition strategies came out, highlighting yet again that attracting new users doesn’t mean much if those new users feel that they can’t trust you.

As many people have already written, the concept of “registered users” is essentially a meaningless metric. A registered user could be someone who downloads your app once and never opens it again — hardly a valuable customer to have. There are also a variety of shady ways companies can acquire new downloads.

On Tuesday, The Verge reported that several users had done just that — downloaded the app, tried it out, and then uninstalled when they found they didn’t like it or need it. However, those users then reported that Path had then sent a message to all of the contacts in their address book, urging them to check out photos that the user had shared on Path — even after the user had uninstalled the app — which in order to see the photos requires one to download the app and sign up. This is also an issue that commenters on Reddit have complained about before.

When I spoke to the company about those complaints Tuesday, a representative explained that when a user signs up to download Path, that user can choose whether to grant Path access to their contacts and Facebook friends. So presumably, if you unselect your friends and contacts from the suggested lists when you sign up, you’re set.

But in regards to today’s story of the user’s contacts getting messaged after he uninstalled the app, Path VP of Marketing Nate Johnson said the company is investigating how that happened, and the current guess is that there was a delay in sending messages to the person’s contacts after he signed up, that went out after he’d uninstalled the app.

“That’s something we’re investigating very closely,” Johnson said. “We’re not going to do anything without your knowledge, that’s not the Path way.”

Maybe contacting your Facebook friends is fair game on Path’s part if the user doesn’t realize he needs to uncheck some boxes, but if I uninstalled an app and then discovered it had spammed all my contacts after that app was gone from my phone? I would would be livid, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend the app to any of my friends.

It’s not an uncommon strategy in Silicon Valley for companies to take first and ask later when it comes to user privacy and sharing — Facebook, where Path founder Dave Morin played an integral role, practically pioneered the strategy.

But for Path, it’s a much more dangerous road to travel than it is for Facebook, and not just because Path doesn’t have the 1 billion strong user base to serve as a buffer. Path already had to settle with the FTC and pay an $800,000 fine for acquiring the numbers of minors, and back in its earlier days it made headlines when the company apologized for storing user address book data on its servers.

So yes, Path absolutely needs to acquire new users to remain relevant, and there are several ways the company could achieve this. That road to users and revenue could come with the company’s new messaging and stickers (which I was just using this weekend, and are stupidly, addictively entertaining.)

But if that growth comes from violating user trust and spamming their address books to effectively cold-call a user’s friends? That’s a surefire way to alienate both existing users and deter any future ones.

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Last May, Fab CEO’s Jason Goldberg gave entrepreneurs a piece of advice: don’t be afraid to break with a bad idea. And Goldberg would know, since he previously tried to launch a social network before focusing instead on building a design-centric e-commerce site. So when Goldberg says the company is pivoting again, you might imagine a totally new business model.

But in reality? With this pivot, Fab isn’t completely changing its product as much as it is changing what the Fab brand means. Instead of selling merchandise from other retailers on its site through flash sales (sales of limited quantities of items for limited time periods), Fab is expanding to include products designed by Fab, products designed by others, and ventures like custom furniture and a brick and mortar store in Europe. The company wants to be one of the “next great iconic shopping brands,” it wrote Tuesday, and that shopping experience will maintain the design focus that the company was founded on.

Goldberg explained the idea behind the re-launch, which he announced in a blog post Tuesday:

“People called it a “pivot.” We called it a complete restart. We threw out the old and started anew. And it took off fast. Really fast. We re-launched Fab on June 9, 2011 and before we knew it we were tracking to $100M in sales and working with tens of thousands of designers and connecting with millions of consumers. We were on to something big. We knew it. So, in January 2012 we did what came naturally to us: We planned to Pivot. Again.”

Focusing on the general concept of a design-based e-commerce brand will allow Fab to both produce its own products and work with others, expanding the items it sells on its site and expanding the concept of what it means to be a physical retailer, the company wrote:

“We believe that part of disrupting design is disrupting it across multiple channels. We’re working on Fab store concepts that reimagine and reinvent how people buy design products by merging offline & online experiences in entirely new ways. We’ve always said that Fab wants to be where its customers are — be it smartphone, tablets, web browsers, or even physical retail stores. And, with less than 5% of home products purchased online today, we think that physical retail has an important role to play in the customer’s decision process. But, we plan to reinvent retail and help guide home product purchased online to 10%, then 20%, then 30% online as part of our disrupting the industry.”

As part of the expansion, Fab is also acquiring MassivKonzept, a custom furniture company, which will give Fab a head-start on this business and the addition of a physical store, with plans to add more of these stores in the future.

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