Author: Eliza Kern

Self-serve advertising on Twitter will now be widely available to all users rather than invite-only, the company announced Tuesday.

The move, while not surprising, formally opens the doors for Twitter to make more money on its advertising platform and demonstrates that the company is now ready to sell ads on a larger scale. The success of the advertising network Twitter is creating will likely have a significant impact on its business model, and therefore the success of an IPO if the company goes public later this year or next, as many expect.

“Over the past year we’ve listened carefully to feedback from the thousands of businesses and individuals who’ve had access to the self-serve tool, and madeenhancements based on their suggestions, including more targeting and reporting in the UI. It’s because of this feedback that effective today, we’re ending our invite-only period and opening signups for our self-serve ad platform to all users in the U.S.”

Twitter first launched the self-serve ad product in March 2012 and started working with a limited group of partners, and over the past year the company has announced a variety of improvements to the product that have initially been available to those invite-only clients.

For instance, Twitter started allowing companies to advertise based on the words people use in their tweets (so if you tweet about wanting ice cream, you might see a Ben & Jerry’s ad), and based on the accounts you follow (so if you follow a lot of basketball-related accounts, you might see a March Madness promoted tweet.) The changes have been focused on refining the ads to make them more relevant and hopefully interesting to users, which could then benefit Twitter and the businesses if users are more likely to click.

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Accel Partners plans to announce Tuesday morning that former Groupon President and COO Rob Solomon will be joining the firm as a venture partner, adding a seasoned tech executive to the firm’s ranks and marking another interesting move for a former Groupon executive. In a statement, Accel wrote that Solomon would be evaluating early stage startups for the firm, which is known for its success in investing in web companies like Facebook.

The venture firm welcomed Solomon in a statement and explained what he would add:

“As Venture Partner, Rob will be evaluating early stage and growth equity opportunities with Accel. He will also play a major role in advising the firm’s portfolio companies on a wide range of strategic and operational issues like product management, scaling infrastructure, business operations, and mergers and acquisitions.”

Accel manages over $9.6 billion in funds and has had some strong successes investing in internet companies like Dropbox, Etsy, Facebook, Kayak, Prezi, Rovio, Trulia, and Vox Media.

Before his tenure at Groupon which ended in July 2012, Solomon worked at the venture firm Technology Crossover Ventures and was the president and CEO of a startup called Sidestep that was acquired by Kayak.

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I got a Fitbit (see disclosure) last November when it started to seem like all of my friends and co-workers were sporting tracking devices to measure their movement and exercise. I’ve grown to adore the little black device, taking a few more laps around the block on my way home to hit 10,000 steps per day, and running back inside the house if I forget to clip it to my pocket before leaving for work in the morning. I love checking the charts and graphs on the iPhone app that show my fitness progress over time. It’s fair to say I’d be bummed if I lost the device.

So what if you do lose your tracking device and don’t want to buy another one? Or maybe you’re unwilling to spend more than $100 on one in the first place, about the average price for a Fitbit or Jawbone Up? I’ve been trying out Moves, a free iPhone app released earlier this year, and have been impressed by how well the app tracks my movement throughout the day. So far, it would be a decent replacement for my Fitbit if I ever lost one, and with a pricetag of $0, it’s a pretty great deal if you’re not sure whether you want to track your steps or not.

The idea behind Moves is that most of us are carrying smartphones around during the day anyway, and the accelerometer inside the phone mimics a lot of the technology inside  popular tracking devices. So CEO Sampo Karjalainen set out to create a mobile app that would approximate the experience with devices many of us already own, but at a much more affordable price, hoping the app would appeal to more casual exercisers.

“The whole idea was just to make it really effortless,” he said, noting that for a lot of people, devices like the Fitbit just aren’t as appealing. “They have this active sports image which doesn’t really fit with a lot to people, who might not see themselves as active sports people.”

The app shows you steps you’ve moved every day, minutes spent active, as well as locations you’ve been to if you enable the tracking features. Karjalainen said the app, which got $1.6 million in venture backing from Lifeline Ventures and PROfounders Capital, has been downloaded 1.5 million times since the launch, although he wouldn’t say how many of those users are actively using Moves. The company is working on building an Android version and an API.

It took some time for me to adjust to the Moves app and the simplicity of the screen compared to Fitbit — you can’t enter your weight or food intake, and it doesn’t provide you with stats on calories burned or let you adjust for your height and weight. And apps dedicated to running like Nike+ or Runkeeper might still be better answers for serious runners. However, the steps and distance tracking on Moves provided nearly identical data to my Fitbit, so if you’re just looking to hit 10,000 steps every day and stay active, it’s a great solution. And it did track my runs pretty accurately as well.

The only caveat is that you have to carry your phone with you everywhere for it to work. But chances are, if you’re the kind of person who’s interested in GPS fitness tracking, carrying your phone around probably won’t be an issue for you.

Disclosure: Fitbit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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LivingSocial, the Washington D.C.-based daily deals company, has been suffered from a hack that could have affected the data of more than 50 million customers, AllThingsD first reported Friday based on an email obtained from CEO Tim O’Shaughnessy to employees. The email said that LivingSocial had experienced “cyber-attack on our computer systems that resulted in unauthorized access to some customer data.”

A LivingSocial representative confirmed the hack with us, and said that the company would be contacting the more than 50 million users who might have been affected, sending them emails explaining what happened and encouraging them to reset their passwords. The hack affected all of the company’s users except those in South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines, since data for those users is stored on different servers.

The hack comes as large consumer web companies are increasingly facing scrutiny regarding their security measures. In February Twitter reported that hackers may have accessed data on 250,000 user accounts, and LinkedIn was sued over a hacking incident last summer that exposed more than six million consumer passwords.

In a statement, O’Shaughnessy explains how the company was hacked and how that will affect customers:

“We recently experienced a cyber-attack on our computer systems that resulted in unauthorized access to some customer data from our servers. We are actively working with law enforcement to investigate this issue.

The information accessed includes names, email addresses, date of birth for some users, and encrypted passwords — technically ‘hashed’ and ‘salted’ passwords. We never store passwords in plain text.”

Currently, visitors to LivingSocial’s website will notice a large red bar telling them to reset their passwords:

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Facebook has acquired Parse, the company that provides tools for developers building mobile apps, the startup announced in a blog post Thursday. The company went through the Y Combinator incubator program and raised a $5.5 million Series A from Ignition Partners back in 2011.

Facebook said the addition of Parse is an acquisition, not a talent deal, and the company would not disclose financial terms.

From the Parse blog post:

“Parse has agreed to be acquired by Facebook. We expect the transaction to close shortly. Rest assured, Parse is not going away. It’s going to get better.

We’ve worked with Facebook for some time, and together we will continue offering our products and services. Check outFacebook’s blog post for more on this.

Combining forces with a partner like Facebook makes a lot of sense. In a short amount of time, we’ve built up a core technology and a great community of developers. Bringing that to Facebook allows us to work with their incredible talent and resources to build the ideal platform for developers.”

My colleague Barb Darrow wrote about Parse back in May 2012 when it added a new JavaScript SDK, explaining what the new technology would allow and why it would be an interesting addition to the market:

“Mobile app developers hate dealing with server-side programming, but most need to do some of it. Those server-squeamish developers are the target market for Parse’s new JavaScript SDK, downloadable as of Wednesday.

The promise of the new SDK is that these developers can now build a secure JavaScript application with a backend without having to provision or write code for servers, said James Yu, founder of San Francisco-based Parse.”

In a blog post of his own, Facebook’s Doug Purdy explained why the company wants Parse:

“By making Parse a part of Facebook Platform, we want to enable developers to rapidly build apps that span mobile platforms and devices. Parse makes this possible by allowing developers to work with native objects that provide backend services for data storage, notifications, user management, and more. This removes the need to manage servers and a complex infrastructure, so you can simply focus on building great user experiences.”

To be sure, one of Facebook’s vulnerabilities has been a perceived lack of mobile skills. Parse could help address that.

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It’s hard to imagine there’s a person out there who feels like they don’t have enough networking and contacting opportunities on LinkedIn. But the company aims to reach just those people on Thursday with the launch of its new product, a standalone mobile app that integrates (only some) of a user’s contacts across different social and web services into one app, called Contacts, that’s meant to help you keep in touch with more professional contacts outside of the existing LinkedIn app. And get you hooked on more of LinkedIn’s products while you’re at it.

The LinkedIn Contacts app, which will launch just on iOS for U.S. users on an invite-only basis at first, allows you to pull together your Google, Outlook, Yahoo, and phone contacts into one contact database hosted on the app. (It also supports integration with some apps like Tripit or Cardmunch.) Contacts then lets you sort and filter people based on how often you contact them and lets you add details about your relationship to serve as personal reminders.

For instance, I can mark when and where I first met one of my LinkedIn conections, see when I last emailed that person in Gmail, call them on the phone (if they list their number), and see when I last met with them according to my Outlook calendar (if I used one of those).

These seem like useful features that could help you sort and categorize professional contacts, and it’s cool to see how LinkedIn has used algorithims and data to put together individual relationship histories for each contact without much work required from the user. However, it’s unclear why LinkedIn felt that these features should exist in a standalone app.

Will people really download a second LinkedIn app if they already have one that works just fine? These features seem like they’d be more useful if they were integrated into the existing app rather than launched in a second one. The company did indicate that it will evaluate how the product does on mobile in deciding whether to add features into the existing app, and users who gain access to the new Contacts app will have this data integrated into their contacts section of LinkedIn.com, which is smart.

Sachin Rekhi, the former CEO of the address book company Connected, which LinkedIn acquired in 2011, is now heading up the Contacts app, and he explained that LinkedIn wanted to keep the contact info in a separate app to better target the specific audience that would find it useful. Namely, professionals who want networking info on mobile. But it’s unclear which of LinkedIn’s existing members wouldn’t fit that description.

“We’re taking a multi-app strategy across different use cases and target audiences,” Rekhi said.

The other major downside to the app is that it doesn’t integrate with Facebook or Twitter, so it’s fairly limited in the types of information it can actually import. The company would not indicate whether this was because Facebook and Twitter refused to provide access to those social graphs, or whether LinkedIn wasn’t interested in adding them. Rekhi said it’s because the Contacts app just focuses on professional contacts rather than more social features, so starting with apps like Gmail and Outlook made sense.

However, the increasing reality is that a lot of people do make professional contacts over Facebook and Twitter, and as Facebook improves its messaging and contacts products, it seems like a major downside that the LinkedIn app wouldn’t include those. Presumably, LinkedIn wants you connect with people over its own social network, wishing them happy birthday, calling them, and catching up with them on the Contacts app rather than through Facebook. But by not including Facebook’s social graph, it makes the app a lot less complete for younger users like myself.

So what’s the benefit for LinkedIn in producing this app? Of course, more eyeballs focused on LinkedIn and more screentime with the company’s products are always good for the company, and messaging and calling apps have become popular recently as companies try to hook users into communicating through their services. Importing all of your contacts and email information gives LinkedIn much more data to use as it turns your information into value for professional recruiters, who drive most of the company’s revenue.

Plus, as LinkedIn focuses its site on producing more news and media content, as evidenced by the Pulse acquisition, it’s possible it wants to make the main LinkedIn app more of a news reader and the Contacts app where you communicate with other individuals. But the company has a long way to go before it builds the equivalent of Facebook and Facebook Messenger.

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The importance of a strong visual component to social media and the profileration of shopping-oriented sites like Pinterest and Facebook have been great for retail brands, as consumers are spending a lot more time looking at potential purchases online. However, there are now a bunch of startups trying to fix an associated problem, which is that once a photo of a product gets tweeted out or shared on Pinterest, re-directing consumers back to the original site — and turning them into purchasers — can be a challenge.

I’ve written about photo-tagging startups in the past that attempt to add multimedia to points on images on the web, but Pict, a new company announcing funding on Thursday, has a particular focus on integrating catalog information into a retailer’s photos, and when viewed in Facebook’s timeline the photos will be totally interactive without the consumer having to leave Facebook.

The company went through Angelpad as a company called Dropt in 2012. Dropt let designers create digital lookbooks that could be shared more easily than the traditional paper or PDF versions, but the founders realized there was an even greater opportunity when it comes to digital fashion sales. Fashion designer Steven Alan became one of the company’s first outside investors when it prepared to relaunch as Pict.

As Pict is announcing $1.4 million in funding and opening up its registration more widely this week (although you still have to request an invite.) The company works to let companies from large retailers down to individual Etsy sellers can tag and share photos of their products across the web.

“It’s really similar to tagging photos on Facebook,” CEO Brent Locks explained. “You can snap a photo on your phone, type in the names of products in the phone, and we pull in all of the relevant metadata from your uploaded catalog.”

While there are a good number of startups that allow you to tag images to re-direct back to the seller, Pict is unique in that it just focuses on product details — not adding maps and videos and tweets on top of a photo — and it has a mobile app, which allows sellers to take photos from a smartphone and post to social media on the go.

“It doesn’t require any kind of learning curve,” Locks said. “That’s the key that really differentiates us.”

The company has brought in $1.4 million in funding so far, and while it’s not a huge amount of money in the realm of startups, the company does have notable investors like Kirsten Green’s Forerunner Ventures, a successful e-commerce investor who put money in companies like Birchbox, Hotel Tonight, Threadflip, Wanelo, Warby Parker and others. Other Pict investors include Lowercase Capital, Opus Capital, Angelpad, 500 Startups, Gary Vaynerchuk, Scott Belsky, Steven Alan, Seth Berman, and others.

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More Americans are posting about political causes and activities to social media outlets now than they were during the 2008 election, showing increased levels of comfort around using social media to advance civic causes, according to a new Pew Research Center report set to release late Wednesday.

The Pew report highlights changes in social media over the first four years of Barack Obama’s presidency, showing how people are more likely to post to sites like Twitter and Facebook. However, these dramatic increases aren’t all that surprising. Twitter was barely a mainstream source for news in 2008, and Facebook wasn’t much older at that point. Now both sites have become much more accepted as major advertising and communications platforms, so the increased participation there makes sense.

However, it’s worth noting how people use these platforms around civic engagement, because these types of participation could impact the business models of companies like Twitter and Facebook as they grow. It’s also worth considering how social participation corresponds with income and education levels, and how it translates into life offline.

Here were some of the most interesting stats from the report, titled “Civic Engagement in the Digital Age,” which will become available on Pew’s site later Wednesday:

• Increased activity: More Americans used social networks for political activity (39 percent of all adults) in the 2012 race than used social media at all in 2008 (only 26 percent were using social media at the time.)
• Offline engagement: Those 39 percent of people who are politically active on social networks aren’t just limiting their activity to Facebook — they’re also really engaged offline as well. Sixty-three percent of the people who post political activity online then do something like attending a meeting in person, compared to the national average of 48 percent of people who take offline political action. They’re also more likely to contact their representative online than the average public.
• What they’re posting: In 2012, 17 percent of adults posted political stories to social media (up from 3 percent in 2008), and 12 percent friended or followed a candidate in 2012 (up from 3 percent in 2008.) Since more candidates now have active social accounts, this makes sense.
• Sparking an interest: It’s encouraging to note that 43 percent of people using social media said they were inspired to go learn more about something they saw on these channels. What exactly they went on to learn and where they learned it is not noted, but it does show that a Facebook post could spark greater civic interest.
• Demographics: Wealthy, better-educated individuals are more likely to become politically engaged both online and offline, although the disparity of participation between low-income and high-income groups was less pronounced on social media than in other capacities. However, the researchers said it doesn’t look like social media will be the political equalizer people thought it might be.
• The remaining power of offline: Americans are still three times more likely to discuss politics offline (in person or over the phone) than they are online, reminding users that political discourse hasn’t moved entirely to Facebook. And the same is true for political donations, 60 percent of which took place offline.

The Pew report was conducted in July and August of 2012 and interviewed 2,253 adults over the age of 18. The interviews took place on both landline phones and cell phones and in English and Spanish. The study’s margin of error is plus or minus 2.4 percentage points.

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Twitter is partnering with the gum company Trident and the music television network Fuse to create Trending 10, an entertainment show about popular music that will air both on television and online, using Twitter’s data about music and social conversations about artists to power the content. The companies stated that it will be the first TV show “sourced and produced from real-time Twitter conversation spikes.”

The companies announced the collaboration on Wednesday, and it marks yet another example highlighting several trends we’ve seen from Twitter recently: a clear indication that the company is becoming a media entity, a strong interest in working with television companies, and a commitment to the strong interest in music that already exists on the platform.

“Through this partnership with Twitter, Fuse and Trident will enjoy elevated access to Twitter data surrounding the music conversation happening in real time,” Joel Lunenfeld, vice president of brand strategy at Twitter stated for the press release on the announcement.

Trending 10 will be a show that highlights the ten most popular music entertainment stories of the day, and it will air both live on television and in segments online that can be shared via social media.

Twitter has forged a number of television partnerships recently, including ones with the BBC, Comedy Central, and Turner Broadcast around March Madness. There were also reports that the company is looking to do deals with Viacom and NBC. As with this deal around the Trending 10 show, working with television networks could give advertisers the opportunity to cross-promote on both the live broadcast and corresponding social conversations.

And now that Twitter has rolled out its official #Music app, the Trending 10 show demonstrates how much money the company can make around music and entertainment. Twitter confirmed that the content on Trending 10 will come from the social conversations happening on the platform around music, which also power the content on the #Music app. Music artists are some of the most popular figures on Twitter, so building out advertising and promotion opportunities around those artists and Twitter makes sense.

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As it becomes clear that an errant tweet can move stock prices, perhaps it’s time for Twitter to improve security measures and add two-factor authentication for accounts.

The Associated Press’s Twitter account was hacked this morning, sending out updates saying that explosions hit hit the White House and President Barack Obama had been injured. The AP’s account was immediately suspended and the tweets removed, but not before the Dow dropped about 200 points. It has since recovered, but that type of velocity makes it possible for someone to have made a lot of money.

Twitter has had security issues before, most recently when it notified users that a number of passwords had been compromised in February, but now with new SEC rules allowing analysts and traders to check tweets for market-moving information, it’s more important than ever for the company to give influential users as many security tools as possible.

Apple just added two-factor authentication to Apple IDs in March, Microsoft rolled it out last week, and Google has had it for much longer. Two-factor authentication is just one way that users can protect passwords, preventing an individual from hacking an account by requiring them to also have in their possession a second form of identification. For instance, Gmail users can set up their smartphones to work with two-factor authentication, requiring a PIN sent to their phone when they try to log in online.

It’s quickly becoming common practice among large web companies, and as the stakes increase for Twitter, it’s time for the company to consider adding the feature. Ars Technica reported in February that Twitter had posted jobs listings seeking engineers with experience in security, including “multifactor authentication and fraudulent login detection.”

Twitter has not yet responded to our request for comment on its current plans.

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Not surprisingly, Foursquare plans to announce Monday that it has made tweaks and improvements to its desktop listings for local businesses, highlighting once again that the company has moved beyond convincing people to become mayor of something and is doubling down on local search.

“You don’t need to check in to use Foursquare. Over the past few months, we’ve seen Explore use double,” the company wrote in a press release. “With billions of data points, we can always help you find the best places to go.”

The updates coming to Foursquare.com on Tuesday primarily reorganize the information on the business listing pages, making them easier to digest and putting important information like photos and hours more centrally located. The pages will include which of your friends have checked into locations (if you’ve logged in), suggest other places to go in the area, and share locations you’ve found with friends.

With Foursquare still struggling to find its footing several years and funding cycles down the road, it’s clear from the most recent mobile update that its best path to making money will come by challenging Yelp in the realm of local search. And if you’re going to challenge Yelp, you need a solid desktop presence.

Many people might be unfamiliar with Foursquare’s desktop site at all, but it’s actually been around for a while now, and the company said it gets more than 50 million visitors per month. Most of the changes to the business listings this Tuesday are design improvements, but as a Foursquare representative noted, the company hasn’t re-designed the listings since November 2011, when it launched Foursquare.com; they’re due for an update.

Here’s an example of the new desktop listings on the left and the old version on the right (click to enlarge):

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We’ve expressed some skepticism about Path’s potential reach as a social media network, at least in proportion to the amount of hype and funding that Dave Morin’s startup has gathered over the years.

However, even if Path doesn’t make it as a long-lasting social network, it’s hard to ignore the influence the company has already had on mobile app design recently. Some of these concepts, like launching a full-featured messaging app, aren’t totally groundbreaking, but it’s remarkable how many features (like thematic search or large emojis), we’ve seen come to Path first and then show up on more mainstream apps like Facebook with features like Graph Search after the fact.

Want to see which design features came to Path before the others? Take a look at just a few:

Navigation

One of the most distinctive design features on Path is the launcher button that brings up the navigation bar from the bottom left of the screen, with a series of options coming out of the primary button in a semicircle.

Last month, Tumblr announced a new version for its mobile edition on Android, and the new navigation looks remarkably similar to the Path launcher:

Stickers

One major feature in Path’s most recent release revolved around the addition of stickers, or large chat emojis that let users communicate through pictures.

While there’s nothing new about emojis (they’ve already become huge in Asia before they gained adoption in the U.S.), the distinctive size of the Path stickers looked remarkably similar to the stickers Facebook just launched last week:

Chat heads

Before Facebook called them Chat Heads, Path already had bubble heads that popped up for individuals. Path launched a full-featured messaging component in the company’s last release, allowing you to drop your current location, insert audio clips, and share photos. Facebook’s new messaging updates look similar too:

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The Financial Times is reporting that Twitter has reached an advertising deal “worth hundreds of millions of dollars over a multiyear period” with Starcom MediaVest Group, a large ad-buying firm with clients including Procter & Gamble, Walmart, Microsoft and Coca-Cola.

Twitter’s deal means the company is officially moving into larger territory when it comes to advertising and turning the social media company into a serious platform for brands to spend their budgets. The report says the deal will give SMG’s clients access to special advertising slots and opportunities with Twitter.

The company has been improving its different ad products for businesses of all sizes, recently rolling out keyword advertising that allows companies to advertise around particular words that individuals tweet. A research firm recently estimated that Twitter will earn nearly $1 billion in advertising revenue in 2014, likely due to strong growth on mobile, making $528 million this year and $950 million in 2014.

Social media use around television and broadcast events has provided huge advertising opportunities for Twitter already, with the company forging media partnerships around TV and sports, like the NCAA March Madness tournament.

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We’re still not totally sure what former Twitter co-founder Biz Stone is up to with Jelly, his stealth startup announced earlier this month. But it is clear now that Stone is looking to his last major venture for help in revealing his co-founder: ex-Twitter engineer Ben Finkel.

“Ben Finkel is my co-founder here at Jelly. Ben and I have been friends and collaborators for many years. During one of our frequent walk-and-talks around San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Park, we accidentally came up with the idea for Jelly. It was one of those ideas that we couldn’t get out of our heads,” Stone wrote in a blog post on Monday.

Finkel will join Stone at Jelly as CTO of the company, but there is still no word on when Jelly will open its doors. The company is backed by the Obvious Corp., the parent company created by Twitter co-founders and early employees including Stone to incubate a couple of content-related startups like Medium, Branch, and now Jelly.

Finkel originally founded Fluther, a question and answer site that was seed funded by a group of angels including Ron Conway and Marc Andreessen. Stone served as an advisor to the company, and in December 2010, Twitter went ahead and acquired the startup, primarily for the engineering talent behind the company. Finkel then served as a senior software engineer and then engineering manager for Twitter, where he was in charge of user growth.

“Ben managed New User Experience on the Growth Team at Twitter, helping grow an active user base from fifty million to more than two hundred million people,” Stone wrote. That’s certainly no small job, and according to his LinkedIn page, Finkel just departed Twitter last month.

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I’ve talked with a lot of companies recently about the challenges in making traditional shopping and e-commerce more social, and there’s one name that everyone mentions as the de-facto success in social shopping: Modcloth.

What started as a hobby around vintage clothing turned into a business led by husband and wife team Susan Gregg Koger and Eric Koger in 2006, and it has now become a dominant online fashion retailer known for its distinct style and vintage appeal. But what makes Modcloth unique is the way it’s continually married technology with fashion to build a strong social community around the brand, experimenting with everything from crowdsourced fashion to video hangouts with stylists to build the kind of user passion you see with companies like Lululemon or Nastygal.

Modcloth just launched its first native iPhone app on Thursday, and I sat down with CEO Eric Koger to talk about the company’s strategy when it comes to building a mobile audience and using social platforms to build its notoriously passionate audience. The company had just finished recording a Google Hangout in the office with Lumineers singer Neyla Pekarek, who wears Modcloth onstage, and Koger sat at the conference table with the company pug Winston on his lap.

“We’re very experimental in basically all that we do,” he said. “We put our customer first in the merchandise we’re bringing from the very beginning of the site, placing small bets on a wide assortment of things, and then figuring out what she really loved, and wherever possible bringing those items back in production.”

And the experimental approach applies to how the company uses technology as well. Modcloth started out with a website that was optimized for mobile, and said that still makes a lot of sense since the site sees so much referral traffic from Facebook (its top referring site) and Pinterest (its second-highest referrer). When a user finds an item through Pinterest, re-directing them to a native app was tough. So the company started on HTML, and just launched an iPad app in February. Now, the company is finally going native on iPhone.

Koger said it’s always a challenge to figure out how to serve up high-quality images of the different products on mobile while taking into account a user’s connection speed. But figuring out mobile is obviously important: the company has seen a 129 percent increase in mobile traffic over last year, and 178 percent growth in mobile revenue.

And one of the tricks to keeping sales strong? Modcloth is famous for its “Be The Buyer” program, which takes a sample from a designer and puts the photos online, then allowing users to vote on whether the company should produce the item — sort of like the original Kickstarter, but for dresses. And despite concerns from the fashion industry about putting samples out for the world to see (and potentially be copied), Modcloth has turned the program into a success. The company said sales are twice as high on the crowdsourced items as the regular ones.

“It’s a variety of things,” Koger said. “The invested community that helps to get it produced becomes sort of an advocate for the product, having that logo on the dress serves as a form of social proof, and it’s usually just a really cute product.”

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If LinkedIn has become the quiet success of the major social web companies, LinkedIn’s Recruiter page is the quiet success — and cash machine – within the company. And a brand new feature shows how the company is turning your professional data into a gold mine for recruiters.

LinkedIn’s “talent solutions” service, which gives recruiters and hiring managers the ability to post job ads and hunt for candidates, is the fastest-growing and most profitable portion of LinkedIn’s business. The talent solutions homepage saw an update last week that involved several design changes, but it was the addition of the “People You Might Want to Hire” tool that’s sheds the most light on how LinkedIn makes money.

At this point, most professional people are at least aware of LinkedIn, and with the company boasting 200 million registered users, a good number of people now have profile pages listing their work experience and other relevant information on the social networking site. But the consumer-facing side of LinkedIn that you might see is not the portion of the company that brings in the most revenue — or, at least not directly.

The talent solutions portion of LinkedIn brought in 53 percent of the company’s revenue last quarter. The basic service allows corporate recruiters and human resources employeees can to post job ads for the company, search for relevant candidates, track responses, and monitor people they might like to hire (yes, a recruiter can put an alert on your profile and know when you make updates or switch jobs.) Companies pay for access to those recruiting features, and the more accurate the data LinkedIn can provide, the more value the companies will derive from the service.

The new feature on the Recruiter page is an intelligent recommendation engine that suggests to recruiters people they might want to hire. It sounds simple enough, and with similar features all over sites like Facebook and Twitter, maybe not so novel. But the feature is huge for LinkedIn on the consumer side already, where the company reports that 50 percent of job seeker engagement comes from the recommended jobs tool, with the other 50 percent coming from people typing into the search bar. Users who are actively looking for jobs might be willing to put in search terms. But people who aren’t actively looking to switch jobs — which LinkedIn estimates is about 80 percent of the current workforce —  are far less likely to search.

“Recommendations have fundamentally changed the trajectory of Linkedin.com,” said Parker Barrile, head of product for talent solutions, in an interview this week. “The recommendations technology that suggests things for members totally change the game. Because we’ve realized how important it is not to expect consumers to actively search for things.”

My colleague Derrick Harris recently wrote about the engineering shift at LinkedIn over the past five years that now allows the company to put significant resources behind engineering projects like recommendations, and Barrile said that refining and perfecting the suggestions has become critically important.

“We’ve invested a lot into the technology that works on those recommendations,” he said. “All of these recommendation technologies learn from the way users interact with them. And LinkedIn’s recommendation technologies have become especiallly responsive because they’re so important to the business.”

The “People You Might Want To Hire” tool takes into account past behavior on the part of the recruiter, as well as data signals from within the job ad, to put together a list of candidates who might be a fit based on a variety of signals. For instance, let’s say you’re an tech company looking to hire for a PR position. The tool won’t just surface people working in technology PR. Instead, it might surface people working in technology who list writing and editing as their skills, or have a number of endorsements for communication or working with a team. Or, let’s say you’re hiring for a venture capital position in San Francisco — the system might also suggest relevant candidates from New York, since it knows people in venture capital are likely to move between the two cities.

Potentially creepy if you start getting a lot of messages from recruiters asking you to move to New York? Maybe. But for people who end up with job offers out of the process, there’s a strong upside to that technology.

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For Twitter, crafting the perfect Discover tab that immediately surfaces relevant content for users has always been a struggle. And with the launch of the company’s new music app on Thursday, it has become more pressing than ever for the company to solve its discovery challenge.

If Twitter succeeds in building a smart music discovery tool with the #Music app — one that tells me what to listen to based on my past listening data and personal suggestions — it could define social music discovery for the mobile user in a way no one else really has. And that would open up a whole new source of revenue for the company.

But these are still really big if’s.

Twitter #Music is a social discovery filter laid on top of paid internet radio. You can log into Twitter Music on either iOS or through a desktop browser, and you’re immediately greeted with four tabs: Popular (Pitbull, David Guetta, and the like), Emerging Artists (random, lesser-known artists), Suggested (artists the app thinks you might like), and #NowPlaying (which displays what your Twitter graph is listening to, with corresponding Twitter avatars.) Under each tab is a grid of songs by different artists, and you can tap individual songs to play them. You have to log into Spotify or Rdio or purchase songs on iTunes to listen to the full tracks.

From a design perspective, the app is beautiful. It’s easy to scroll through music previews and tap to play them, and it doesn’t look like every other Facebook-esque feed app out there. You can see the artist’s image, and follow artists you’re interested in.

But there are several reasons why building this new app an effective music discovery tool will be an uphill battle.

It’s a discovery app, not a listening app

Twitter #Music dramatically and intentionally limits the music that you can listen to in full. The app requires either a paid Spotify or Rdio subscription, or telling a user to download songs via iTunes; it seems most users won’t be listening to full tracks on the app.

A Nielsen study of American listening habits in August 2012 found that 64 percent of teenagers listen to music through YouTube, which is free — but it’s not a listening option on Twitter #Music. And neither is Soundcloud, another free streaming option. Of American adults, only seven percent said they listen to music through Spotify. And of Spotify’s 24 million registered users, only 6 million pay for the service. In other words, we’re not talking about a significant number of Twitter’s 200 million monthly active users.

Twitter friends doesn’t mean music friends

While Twitter’s premise is that you can listen to music your friends are listening to and get music suggestions from people you follow, there’s absolutely no guarantee that my Twitter graph and my ideal social music graph would intersect. Right now, when I open the app and tap on the #NowPlaying tab to see what my Twitter friends are listening to, it’s obvious that while they might have witty 140 character insights, I wouldn’t necessarily attend concerts with them.

What I've learned from Twitter music: The internet has horrible taste in music.—
Josh Petri (@joshpetri) April 18, 2013

The Twitter social graph might be vaguely useful as a rough starting point for Twitter to build on, but it won’t suffice as a long-term solution for the app. Twitter will need time to collect data on the music I’m listening to and previewing through the app to determine which parts of my friends’ musical selections I do like, and the type of music I appear to hate. Then the company will need to serve up a new algorithm for me in the Suggested tab, essentially using cues from me to create the perfect suggestions. Until then, I’ll continue to get suggestions to listen to Hilary Duff, and I’ll have no reason to check out the app. Plus, competitors like Pandora have been working to perfect the perfect music suggestions for years, and remain strong alternatives if I want to stream music while I’m on my computer at work.

Why it could work

However, while I’m a pretty lazy person when it comes to music discovery, I like to know what songs are cool right now. So if Twitter improved the quality of suggestions on the app, and it could actually serve as an app that told me about popular songs, it could be better than anything else out there for average users who aren’t curating Spotify playlists.

Right now, 48 percent of Americans still discover music through the radio, and ten percent discover it through family and friends, according to Nielsen. And while only about 16 percent of internet users are on Twitter, this will undoubtedly grow.

And for Twitter itself? If the move works out, it could be genius from a business perspective.

As the company noted in its press release, music artists are some of the most popular users on Twitter right now, catering to their rabid fans who want information on the artist’s every move. The monetization opportuntiies are almost endless: concerts, tickets, music-specific advertising, deals with Spotify or Rdio, and more.

But the key to this success lies with discovery — the app has to surface good enough suggestions to keep me coming back. And back. And back.

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If it wasn’t already obvious from the company’s acquisition of social news reader Pulse and launch of Influencers, a professional blogging service, LinkedIn’s mobile app update on Thursday shows that the company is increasingly focused on news.

As my colleague Mathew Ingram wrote, LinkedIn’s media ambitions began back before the company went public in 2011, but the full scope of what the company had in mind is evident in this redesign launched Thursday for iPhone and Android.

The new feed looks a heck of a lot more like Facebook’s News Feed than a digital resume service. Gone are the weird folders a user used to see on logging in, which are now replaced with a stream of information that combines both professional updates (which of your friends have new LinkedIn connections or jobs), and news stories, as well as a top bar that shows “top stories for you,” and other customizable features. Users can like or comment on stories directly from the feed, which again, provides the service with more data on user interests.

While its stock price is doing well and it’s well on its way to becoming the digital resume of choice for a lot of professionals, LinkedIn still only has 200 million registered users, which isn’t all that significant when you consider that those aren’t active users — just people with accounts. (For a point of comparison, Twitter, which is a much newer company, has 200 million users — active ones.)

LinkedIn’s business model hinges on the “talent solutions,” or the corporate recruiting arm of the company, which brought in more than 50 percent of the revenue last quarter. But that business needs users to continue uploading information to LinkedIn. When users note when they get new jobs or list their skills, they’re providing more data for recruiters and companies to evaluate, making that section of the business more valuable. And if users never visit LinkedIn, that’s a problem, as we’ve written before.

Scrolling through this feed, it’s easy to see why adding news stories and content to the LinkedIn site makes it far more engaging for users. After all, people don’t change jobs and update their LinkedIn profiles often enough to populate a timely news feed, but if I checked the LinkedIn app to find an interesting mix of technology and media news, I might be more likely to come back for a visit — not just to accept a connection.

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One of Facebook’s steps toward becoming a mobile-first company has been courting third-party developers to build an ecosystem of apps around the service that gets users sharing more data and content on Facebook. On Thursday the company launched new features that let developers improve the way they sign up users through Facebook’s credentials and the type of data those users can share back to Facebook.

The updates involve Open Graph, which lets users share third-party data with friends; Facebook Login, which lets developers sign up users with Facebook’s credentials; and the company’s SDK. Facebook explained in a blog post announcing the changes that it hopes to see more apps in its system:

“We’re launching three important products that further our transition to a mobile-first platform. We’re making it easier to implement Open Graph on mobile, improving Facebook Login, and releasing a new Facebook SDK 3.5 for iOS. We’re also announcing a new partner program to help developers integrate Facebook on a variety of mobile platforms.

More than 81 percent of top 100 grossing iOS apps and 70 percent of top 100 grossing Android apps integrate with Facebook. With the new tools we’re unveiling today, we’re excited to see even more high quality mobile apps integrate with Facebook to engage with our 680+ million mobile users.”

Facebook faces a tricky balance, though, between courting quality developers to build apps that integrate with its site and increase sharing and simultaneously maintaining quality control over the system. It also must prevent potential competitors from challenging it through its own services.

While the company previously saw great success letting companies like Zynga grow on top of the site, the issues with frictionless sharing that apps like Spotify faced, as well as recent challenges to Facebook’s core products, make that developer relationship a little more challenging. Still, the more that different apps keeps users interacting with Facebook inside the Facebook ecosystem, the better is is for the company’s bottom line.

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