Mereja

Author: Eliza Kern

  • How a bad fantasy baseball team turned Nate Silver into America’s top data nerd

    Nate Silver, writer for the New York Times and America’s favorite nerd, took the stage in Austin at SXSW on Sunday to talk about his favorite topic: data. Needless to say, Silver’s had a few wins this year in that department.

    He recently published a book called The Signal and the Noise that looks at the role data plays in our daily lives and the way we can use it to better understand the world around us. But speaking at a breakneck speed in front of a large audience in Austin on Sunday, Silver addressed some fairly random topics and questions:

    1. Why the competition matters

    “I’ve tried to work in fields like politics and baseball where the competition is not very good.” Silver said the lesson is important for startups, too: if you’re doing the same service that 98 percent of your competitors provide, there’s less room for growth.

    2. On moving

    “There were too many cool people moving to Brooklyn, so I had to move back to Manhattan.”

    3. Who would play Nate Silver if they make a FiveThirtyEight movie

    “I really hope they don’t make a movie about me. But I would think Brad Pitt. In terms of appearances.”

    4. How he got his start

    “Initially when I was a ten-year old I really wanted to build my fantasy baseball league. And I kept drafting … really crappy players and I didn’t understand why I couldn’t win. So with me it’s often been about competition, about wanting to win my NCAA tournament pool or my fantasy league.”

    5. On fame

    “Ironically I think I’m getting way too much credit now,” Silver says. “We’re very results-oriented as a society.” Silver said he’ll become uncomfortable if FiveThirtyEight ever discourages people from voting as the predictions improve, something he’s discussed before.

    6. On the best way to pick a March Madness bracket:

    “Travel distance matters a lot to performance.” Silver said that FiveThirtyEight does March Madness bracket predictions, but noted that people filling out their own should remember the correlation between travel distance and performance.

    7. On one of the hardest things to predict:

    “We had a formula that tries to predict the numbers and it’s only about 70 percent right,” Silver said of the Oscars. “That’s a field where you don’t have very good data available.”

    8. Why he’s misunderstood by critics

    “I think sometimes people mistake what I do as someone who’s saying everything we do is predicable…. Whereas really I’m more of a skeptic of prediction,” he said. “What I’m actually doing is taking polls and averaging them and the fact that it’s so surprising says a lot about where we have to go in terms of science and math.”

    9. The strangest model he’s ever been pitched on

    “I got pitched one time by a guy who works for a cricket team in India and thinks there can be like a Moneyball revolution in Indian cricket. I wasn’t too psyched about that.”

    10. One piece of data he uses to make decisions in everyday life

    “Don’t fly out of JFK in New York in the evening in the summer. If you fly out in the morning, and I’m not a morning person, but you probably have a much better chance of not having delays cascade across the system.”

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  • 5 things I’ve learned in 24 hours as a SXSW newbie

    Because I’m a journalist and somewhat of a nerd, which means I do things like read Romenesko and Poynter for fun every day, I’ve wanted to come to SXSW in Austin for years. I don’t remember when I first started feeling the pangs of missing-out-on-coolness-emanating-from-Texas in March, but I definitely muted the Twitter hashtag for at least the past two years and was deeply jealous of anyone I knew who went. When my journalism professors complained about having to go and moderate a panel last year, I thought they were the height of annoying. How could you possibly complain about hanging out with super hip people in a super hip city with tacos?

    One of the most in-demand services in Austin? Phone charging.

    One of the most in-demand services in Austin? Phone charging.

    But now, less than 24 hours into my first SXSW experience, I’m sitting on the floor of the Austin Hilton charging all my dead iDevices, telling someone that, no, they can’t take my picture for a Tumblr of people charging things and wondering if naps on the plush carpeting are acceptable. My hair is looking sort of frizzy from the humidity and I’ve been offered more free drinks in place of food than I thought possible. (Please let me know if you see vegetables anywhere. To the lady who told me that “Bloody Marys are the same as breakfast,” no, that’s just not true.)

    I’m texting people and complaining about various aspects of SXSW. And thank goodness, they’re reminding me to shut up.

    Despite the warnings that SXSW isn’t what it used to be, and despite the frizzy hair and excess drinks, I’ve still had a blast in the 24 hours I’ve been here. I’ve found plenty of geeks, heard live music three different times, seen people I’ve only read about speak in person, and have bookmarked the idols I still want to meet.

    So if someone tries to tell you it’s not as cool as it used to be or that it’s just over-hyped marketing next year, you should ignore them. And do SXSW your own way. (Even if part of the conference is moving to Las Vegas next year.)

    Here’s what I’ve learned in my 24 hours here so far:

    1. Planes from San Francisco to Austin on the Friday before the conference should be re-labeled SXSW shuttles. They should be properly labeled as such, at least for other passengers who don’t enjoy the sight of startup sweatshirts, discussions of the Soundcloud party, or questions like, “Hey bro, is that a Pebble watch?”
    2. When someone asks if your name is “on the list,” you should always say yes. Similarly, if they ask if you’re with “event PR,” you should say yes, because it’s possible they said “NPR” and you just misheard them and it will be an awesome party. Similarly, when you hear “Facebook jazz party” it could actually be “basement jazz party.” These are all good calls.
    3. Pedi-cabs are apparently normal in Austin, and the drivers wear absurd costumes to stand out. I don’t know who thinks it’s a good idea to ride one. But people do. And they look like fools.
    4. Introduce yourself to everyone. Say hello. People are fascinating. I took a Sidecar ride (which was free) and my driver told me about his job tutoring inmates in an Austin prison. I took an Uber car (also free) and my driver had worked at a mortician’s office. A completely random person and I bonded over trying to sneak into a line for free sandwiches before getting kicked out of said line. Seriously, this is like extrovert central; embrace it.
    5. You’ll feel like you’re always missing out on something cooler happening somewhere else. I think that’s an inherent part of the experience. But I’ve decided I’m just going to roll with it, and enjoy whatever I’m doing whenever I’m doing it. My best time so far was sitting in the basement (not Facebook) jazz bar drinking gin and tonics with basically complete strangers. And there wasn’t a tacky Interactive badge in sight.

    Think I’m an idiot for missing out on some crucial Austin tip or experience? I’m here till March 12 — tweet at me at @elizakern and let me know.

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  • Dalton Caldwell on our software choices: You are what you eat

    Dalton Caldwell knows that a lot of people are doubting his future with App.net. But Caldwell? He’s not stressing over picking the harder path.

    Dalton Caldwell talks about his App.net project on March 9 in Austin at SXSW.

    Dalton Caldwell talks about his App.net project on March 9 in Austin at SXSW.

    “It’s important to question assumptions about why things are the way they are,” the entrepreneur said Saturday in Austin at SXSW to the crowd in his typically passionate style.

    And Caldwell knows the road less traveled. After previous ventures in both an ad-supported music startup and a photo-sharing site, he launched App.net, a paid developer platform (that was commonly but mistakenly referred to as the “paid Twitter”) last summer to much fanfare.

    Caldwell has been working since then to make something out of his pledge to grow a network where people pay for — and own — their data. “I think that you are what you eat,” he said.

    But just a few weeks ago, Caldwell surprised some people when he announced a free tier to App.net, which seemed at first antithetical to the idea behind the service. But Caldwell pointed to business models for Github or Dropbox and said a freemium tier can be highly profitable when done right.

    “I don’t think people will use software because they think it’s good for them, or that it’s better,” he said. “But my approach is that we will make better software that people will want to use.”

    Caldwell said immediately before launching the free tier App.net had 32,000 paid members, and now just a few weeks later, they’re at 51,000 total users, both paid and free, which he thinks has big implications for convincing developers to build for the platform.

    While it was initially called a “paid Twitter” by a good number of people, Caldwell has repeatedly emphasized that App.net is actually a paid developer network that can serve as a platform for a lot of different apps (think Amazon web services or the plumbing and infrastructure people build their houses on.) Some developers have questioned whether they’d ever use those services if the average user membership to App.net itself is so low (just imagine the contrast with Twitter’s 200 million active users). But if a freemium tier can attract some more people, it could grow the audience and thus give credence to Caldwell’s idea that social networks should find a way to support developers and do right by the user.

    “Like, if Vine users can’t find friends with Facebook, that sucks. It’s stupid. It’s only to protect business model interests,” he said, of Twitter’s decision to protect its social graph. But then again, Caldwell knows that the path for Twitter, which is ad-supported, is not easy.

    Someone asked how Caldwell would have negotiated Twitter’s relationship with third-party developers this summer if he himself were a Twitter employee. Would he have done things differently?

    “I’m not sure I could do anything different if I were in his shoes,” he said.

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  • Anne-Marie Slaughter on female workplace equality: it’s about men, too

    If we want to change the equation for women in the workplace, then we need to include men too. That’s the message Anne-Marie Slaughter had for the mostly-female crowd at SXSW on Saturday in Austin: Gender equality is up to men, too.

    Slaughter made serious waves last summer — a “tsunami,” she actually called it — when she wrote for The Atlantic that “women still can’t have it all.” The article has generated 2 million pageviews so far, and made Slaughter, a Princeton professor and former director of policy under Hillary Clinton at the State Department, somewhat of a touchpoint in the discussion about women’s equality right now.

    “The future of work and family, and male/female equality, it depends on you,” she told the few guys under age 30 in the audience.

    Slaughter wasn’t saying that women should have to ask men for equal rights, but rather that we should view gender equality in terms of equal partnerships. Slaughter focused on the idea of the dual caregiver and breadwinner roles, and the understanding that men and women will need to juggle and balance those two roles between them to have an equal relationship, at times shifting who takes on more of each. And if men aren’t willing to engage in that juggle, Slaughter says, the balance won’t work.

    “If guys are willing to get together with women and insist on the ability to be breadwinners and caregivers together, then I think we can really get there,” she said. The argument is far less controversial than her Atlantic headline, but probably one that’s more likely to resonate with people (especially for those with aging parents instead of small children, she points out.) Slaughter came across as funny, self-deprecating, and deeply passionate about women’s relationships with their families and careers while being interviewed by Jezebel editor Jessica Coen on Saturday.

    Slaughter’s argument is familiar to the technology community right now, with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s book “Lean In” set to release next week (a book Slaughter already weighed in on), and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer drawing attention (fairly or not) to her every move after becoming the first pregnant Fortune 500 CEO. A number of us here at GigaOM are reading Sandberg’s book, and will be talking about our impressions of the already controversial take next week.

    In “Lean In,” Sandberg talks about the way our society is still uncomfortable with the idea of women out-earning their husbands, and said people would come up to her and ask if Dave Goldberg, her husband and SurveyMonkey CEO, was okay with her success. Sandberg said everyone needs to be more understanding of non-traditional gender roles and stay at home dads, a situation that Slaughter, who worked in D.C. while her husband was the primary caregiver, knew all too well. And Slaughter calls for that to change:

    “I’ve also heard women say, ‘I want a guy who’s equal,’ but then they also say they want a guy who’s a dominant breadwinner. And that’s not going to work. We have to find a way to really value the guy who’s the equal partner, and say, ‘Sometimes we’re going to out-earn him.’”

    Slaughter repeatedly came back to the need for workplace flexibility and careers that support women who also care about their kids and families. So naturally, the question of Mayer’s decision to end remote work at Yahoo came up. Slaughter said she’s torn: on one hand, she said the PR tactics of the announcement were terrible, and the dichotomy of Mayer’s personal nursery and ending home work for employees was a disaster. But she also sees why Mayer did it.

    “That is her first job, right? She’s a CEO and has to turn that company around,” Slaughter said. “But I don’t think there’s any question that she believes in flexible work. I don’t think there’s anyone in Silicon Valley who doesn’t believe in flexible work. The optics were terrible, and the blunt force way she did it was terrible, but I’m going to reserve judgment.”

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  • Ex-Wired editor Evan Hansen lands at Obvious Corp., joins editorial for Medium

    Former Wired.com editor-in-chief Evan Hansen has joined the Obvious Corporation to work on editorial content, providing interesting insight into the direction of Evan Williams and Biz Stone’s company.

    Williams and Stone re-launched Obvious Corp. in June 2012 after they both left Twitter, the company they co-founded with Jack Dorsey. Expectations for both Obvious Corp. and Medium, a collaborative publishing tool and the first product it launched in August, have been high, although the product appears to be growing slowly.

    Hansen wrote in his email to friends and family (reported by Mike Isaac of AllThingsD, formerly of Wired) that he would be working specifically on editorial content at Medium, which hired noted literary agent Kate Lee to direct content back in November.

    At the moment, Medium is publishing blog posts from a wide variety of writers, technologists, and artists, clearly focusing on quality over quantity and slowly rolling out the ability to contribute. Published stories are divided into “collections” around certain themes, and aims to re-think how writers to publish to the web.

    Last year at our Roadmap conference, Williams told attendees “I’d rather be HBO than whoever creates ‘Desperate Housewives,’” perhaps hinting at the type of content strategy that Medium intends to pursue.

    This post and its headline were corrected at 4:28pm to after Hansen clarified on Twitter that he wasn’t leading all of editorial at Medium, just science and technology.

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    • Facebook gets simpler with bet that we just want the news that fits

      Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg paused before unveiling a fresh design for its News Feed on Thursday at company headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. Before moving to the slide everyone was waiting for, he took us back in time for a few seconds, first showing how Facebook’s homepage used to look.

      It was a good reminder. Back in 2007, the News Feed was a lot boxier. It had a lot fewer photos. There was more text, and everything seemed smaller.

      In those early days, Facebook pioneered a different look that distinguished it from competitors like MySpace, offering a cleaner design and fewer options and customization for users. It was a new approach, and it worked. But the amount of content shared to the site has grown by an astounding amount since those days, as you’d expect from a site with now over a billion active users, and the News Feed hadn’t exactly kept pace. It had started to look cluttered and dated, and navigation (not to mention surfacing interesting content) was a challenge.

      Mark Zuckerberg takes questions after announcing the updated News Feed in the company's Menlo Park headquarters on March 7.

      Mark Zuckerberg takes questions after announcing the updated News Feed in the company’s Menlo Park headquarters on March 7.

      So from a visual perspective, Thursday’s update clears out most of the clutter from the homepage, taking Facebook back to its original design proposition of simplicity and filtering. And it emphasizes the idea of Facebook as the “local newspaper,” bringing you a small slice of the most interesting and informative posts on the homepage — and giving you sections where can dive deeper into the material where you want. It’s unclear how advertising will play into the changes, since the company gave virtually no attention to ads on Thursday, but if ads change to look anything like the enhanced photos, this could be a boon for advertisers as well.

      I wrote on Wednesday about the three advantages Facebook still has that I didn’t think it should break with the new design: content discovery (showing you interesting things you hadn’t previously discovered), visual media (photos and videos still look the best on Facebook’s page), and the content directory (taking advantage of all your friends and their information on the site.) In many ways, the re-design announced Thursday played perfectly into these three strengths, primarily the first two.

      “We believe that the best personalized newspaper should have a wide variety of content,” Zuckerberg explained during the hour-long presentation.

      With content discovery, the new News Feed — structured after the metaphorical newspaper — is all about giving you more content to read and discover (in fact, it seems more like a consumption page now than one for sharing — interesting to consider that users are probably sharing more from mobile devices than desktops now). The re-design introduces tabs on the top right of the page that let you toggle your view: “All Friends” (who you haven’t hidden from the newsfeed), “Close Friends” (an older feature where you can designate certain people), “Following” (pages and people you subscribe to), “Groups,” “Photos,” “Games,” “Music,” and “Other.”

      In each of these categories, users will be able to select specific set of content to dive into. “All Friends” gives users a chronological series of updates from friends, providing a feature that Facebook employees said was highly requested from users (especially considering the criticism the News Feed algorithms and perceived lack of transparency have faced in the past.)

      Screenshot Facebook newsfeedThe “Following” page serves as almost like a page for news, assuming you like any celebrities, journalists, news outlets, or organizations on the site who post updates. The New York Times’ Nick Bilton recently criticized the company for not sharing his posts with subscribers as much as he would expect, and while the company refuted his claims, the Following page certainly addresses this need for asynchronous relationships and sharing.

      And the company emphasized music — the music page will show songs your friends are listening to through apps like Spotify that use the company’s Open Graph. Each of these tabs give you a new set of information to dig into and greater control over the information you see.

      From a design perspective, the emphasis on photos is a huge part of what’s new. Photos are far more dominant in the main news feed, appearing larger in previews and playing on two obvious influences: the Instagram experience of a continuous photo scroll, and design for mobile that inherently incorporates a simpler, stripped-down look. Michael Reckhow, a product manager for mobile newsfeed, said they had worked so hard to build a cleaner mobile feed, that in looking at the desktop, they realized they’d already devised many of the solutions they needed:

      “Mobile is inherently simpler,” he said. So it’s fair to say that in some ways, you’ve already seen the new Facebook — on your phone.

      For Facebook, the question is how users will respond to the updated look — and if adoption of the new features goes the opposite way of print newspaper subscriptions.

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    • Live blog: Facebook’s News Feed redesign event

      There’s not much debate about what’s going to take place Thursday morning at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif.: the company has already said that it’s going to unveil an update to its service’s News Feed, the most vital part of the Facebook experience and one that hasn’t seen an update in quite a while.

      But we’re still not sure exactly how Facebook might change the design and/or features of this service. Until the event starts at 10am PT, check out my thoughts on the things Facebook really shouldn’t break in this update.

      Facebook News Feed redesign invite

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    • At Path, a quest for design excellence drove its 3.0 strategy

      Path launched its third version on Wednesday, and this time, it’s all about the messages.

      In the new version, Path messages take advantage of the fact that as our phones have become capable of much more than transmitting voice and text, traditional SMS has become fairly outmoded. People are looking for ways to communicate with richer features than just the letters of the alphabet. So the company is introducing a much more full-featured messaging option along with the third version of its social network, and pretty much everything you’d want is there.

      For a company that’s known for its design, some of the features will look different from what users are used to. But in meetings in San Francisco last week ahead of Wednesday’s launch, Path designers said they view the addition of large emojis they’re calling “stickers” as a new kind of digital art — a kind that hopefully, users will pay for.

      There’s text, of course, but it’s the other features that kick it over the top: the large emojis called stickers, the ability to quickly insert a pin on a map to show where you are or want to go, voice recording features, the ability to import or snap photos, music, movies, and a few others. It’s all the features you might screenshot or explain with words, but available at the tap of a button.

      “I think it’s a typical Path swiss army knife,” said Nate Johnson, Path’s VP of marketing. “You can do a lot of different things with it. And it helps that we have the list of your closest friends sitting right there.”

      Path to success?

      The question for Path is whether a robust messaging feature add to the network’s appeal and either draw in new users or bring back those who have lapsed?

      The company recently hit 6 million registered users, and Johnson said that for most people, once they get past the initial hurdle of understanding how to use the app, adoption is quick.

      For Path, the addition of stickers is interesting, because not only does it infuse the app with a new set of aesthetics and graphic artists who might not necessarily work for the company, it gives a hint at where the company’s monetization strategy is headed.

      Users will receive two “packs” of stickers for free. Each pack includes somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 to 18 images, depending on the pack, and the free sets take the classic Path smiley face (named Jack, apparently), and gives him a whole set of new updates. There’s party Jack, with a beer mug, developer Jack, with a 5 o’clock shadow and Red Bull, sleepy Jack with a robe and coffee mug, and more than 30 other images.

      Path is betting that within messages, the popularity of emoji-like images are the kinds of things that consumers will want to pay for under a freemium model.

      “The philosophy here is to build things that people want to pay for,” Johnson said. “It’s not to put in advertising. The spirit of this is that we think there’s a better way to make money. And that’s what we’re tyring to do.”

      Design uber alles

      Path is known for its design – the company has worked hard to create a strong feeling in the app through attention to detail and careful consideration of all elements. From the shading on the buttons to the way certain features fade out when you look at a photo, it’s small things coming together that make it an attractive app to use. But with the addition of large emojis, or stickers, the company is detouring a little from its established look, and banking on consumer delight to promote a new kind of design.

      “I feel like in this day and age, anyone can be self-taught and design something that looks good. But there’s so much thinking behind our product,” said Jenny Ji, design director at Path.

      The company is now rolling out “stickers” which are basically huge emojis for use in messaging. Emojis on steroids, maybe. At first glance they don’t really fit with Path’s carefully orchestrated red and yellow aestictic. The stickers come in a variety of styles, and most are goofy in nature and garish in color.

      But key designers at Path said that they’re persuaded the new stickers will not only provide some revenue for the company, but will provide greater joy to the consumers and change how we consider digital art.

      The company worked with external artists to create each of the sticker sets or “packs,” and when users tap on a sticker pack to purchase, they’ll see the designers name and bio, making it seem like youer’ purchasing a gallery of hand-crafted pieces of art, rather than smiling dog images.

      “Each of these packs, there’s a theme around it,” said Dustin Mierau, co-founder and head of design. “So we’re really asking is, ‘What do you want the pack to allow you to communicate? Like this one is about friendship and love, so my wife and I send these back and forth quite a bit.”

      “We don’t want people to have to type,” Mierau said. ”Typing is probably the worst part of messaging today. Usually it’s typing to coordinate or do things, so we want to bring in the tools that make it easier. With one tap, I’m saying something more meaningful. It’s a whole phrase. That’s how we see stickers, it’s entire phrases wrapped up in one tap. It’s like the map of saying where I am. It’s this whole giant interaction wrapped up in one path moment.”

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    • Three things Facebook can’t break with the newsfeed re-design

      Over Christmas, a friend and I were discussing the multitude of social media options we face on a daily basis. We asked each other a question: Which social network would you be willing to delete today and would never miss?

      Facebook might seem like the obvious target for anyone threatening to quit a social service, and the site’s irritating qualities are more than well-documented. Ads for Budweiser are obnoxious, Spotify notifications are spammy, and figuring out the privacy settings can sometimes require a PhD. The company hides your updates in favor of ads (maybe?). People over-share.

      But despite the naysayers, I do still keep a Facebook tab open on my browser throughout the day, and I’ve found that without my noticing, it provides a significant portion of my daily media diet. For me, it’s still far behind Twitter in terms of usefulness. But even with the service’s many flaws, it enjoys some advantages.

      The company is set to announce a re-design of the newsfeed on Thursday, and while it would be easy to list all the things it should add or improve, instead, here are the three things the company should emphasize.

      In other words: Zuck, don’t break these:

      • Content discovery: Facebook is still one of the best places to find the articles people are talking about and sharing that I might have missed at the time they were published. So many other news services and social products like Twitter are chronological, and in the speed of today’s digital world, it’s easy to miss things when they happen. I still look to Facebook to see the Buzzfeed story that’s trending (I think that’s how I learned what Harlem Shake was) or discover the local news item that’s outraging people. People criticize the black box of Facebook’s algorithm, and it surely has its flaws, but I’ve found that it’s still better than any news reader out there for surfacing things people are talking about.
      • Visual media: Despite Twitter’s efforts to integrate Vine, photo filters, and expanded tweets into its stream, Facebook remains the better platform for sharing anything with a visual component. As the Instagram purchase showed, Facebook’s sweet spot still lies with photos, and naturally stalking a friend’s photos remains a key element to the experience for most people. But even beyond that, the newsfeed is well-positioned to highlight content with photos, graphs, charts, or videos, and hopefully the re-design will take advantage of this element.
      • Contact directory: I’m not sure this is something Facebook could necessarily make or break with the newsfeed re-design, but in an informal survey of friends on what they like most about the service, they said Facebook is still the largest directory that most people have for their digital acquaintances. Allowing users to maintain this directory without cluttering the newsfeed with useless updates through functions like “hide from newsfeed” are a good start — the site should remain interesting, even if your Facebook friends aren’t.

      I’ll be live-blogging Facebook’s announcement tomorrow from its headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. starting at 10am PT.

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    • Quora keeps searching for growth, this time with user-generated product reviews

      In searching for a way to connect with users, some companies gear up for infrequent but splashy updates, hoping that dramatic shifts will catch people’s attention. With Quora, the company is clearly trying a different tactic: roll out new features or products every month, and see what sticks.

      This month, the company is announcing a feature that will allow users to leave structured reviews (with a one star to five star rating), adding structure to the traditional feedback people leave on the Q&A site for products like books, TV shows, cars, or tech hardware.

      In the past eight months we’ve seen the company launch embeddable threads, an Android app, designated power user status, an “online now” feature, a blogging platform, and a rich text editor for mobile, to name a few. The company took an significant $50 million in venture funding last May, and is clearly under a good deal of pressure to prove traction and adoption (landing it in hot water last month as a result). So embracing a product-driven approach to growth is understandable.

      As with all of the company’s updates, the new review features attempts to highlight the quality the company is known for generating in its question and answer pages. Reviews would certainly make the site more even more SEO-friendly by surfacing reviews for popular shows like House of Cards when someone is Googling for information about the show. So it’s a natural progression for the company, although a review feature certainly isn’t unique to Quora.

      “I think the biggest benefit is that it provides structure and categorization to this type of knowledge,” said Quora’s Marc Bodnick, who handles marketing for the company. He emphasized that Quora is not as interested in encouraging reviews of local businesses or restaurants, as sites like Yelp have a strong hold on that type of content. “The big reason why we’re excited to launch his product is to signal to readers and writers that there’s one place to write this type of question. So we’re hoping that if users think to themselves that if they want to write something about House of Cards, there will be a place to do that.”

      House of Cards Quora reviews

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    • Matter, a media startup accelerator, picks first class of six media tech companies

      Which are the companies tackling the future of media with new technology? A good place to start might be the six companies chosen by Matter, one of San Francisco’s newest startup accelerators.

      The companies have been chosen for the accelerator program that’s looking to build the future of public media and information. From the start, CEO Corey Ford said he was committed to finding companies to do the things that matter, and these six are the accelerator’s first bet.

      “We have a similar mission to public media and good journalism outlets, but this isn’t just about saving public media or saving journalism. It’s about building a place for entrepreneurs to build something that makes people more informed and empowered,” Ford said in an interview when Matter launched in December.

      (The accelerator is not linked to former GigaOM writer Bobbie Johnson’s science and tech publication also called Matter.)

      The six companies play at the intersection of content and tech, providing services like analytics for video, publishing platforms, or outlets for digital expression. But Ford emphasized that while the companies all have basic plans in mind, the final products could change significantly before the accelerator’s demo day on June 13.

      These are the six companies that will debut in June:

      • ChannelMeter – A video analytics platform aimed that lets publishers measure online engagement with videos on sites such as YouTube.
      • InkFold – A mobile product that allows consumers to read and interact with the news.
      • OpenWatch – An investigative network and citizen media project that aims to let users document abuses of power.
      • SpokenLayer – A company that transforms text on the web into audio.
      • Station Creator – A television platform allowing users to distribute their own broadcasts online from the cloud.
      • Zeega – A company that’s re-thinking publishing and storytelling by allowing users to mix content from across the web.

      “It’s really about execution. When you launch something like this, you’re wondering who is out there, and who will be part of this. And the awesome thing is that I can now answer, emphatically, there are talented invidudals out there,” Ford said. “We’re going from an abstract vision of who we’re serving to now we have our actual customers.”

      A recent bootcamp for Matter accelerator companies.

      A recent bootcamp for Matter accelerator companies.

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    • Exitround looks to facilitate tech and team acquisitions as market grows crowded

      Nearly every day in technology we hear about another startup team that’s been acquired. Now Exitround is looking to get in on the action by facilitating the search process for founders who might want to put their companies on the block, and helping corporate buyers investigate talent or tech up for sale — all while anonymizing the data to keep discussions discreet.

      While an internal marketplace for acquisitions might sound a little wonky or industry-specific, the success of investment marketplaces like AngelList prove that democratizing an industry often dependent on who you know has real potential for success.

      The company explained the rationale behind the site:

      “Startup founders who are having difficulty raising a Series A round face a series of options: raise additional Seed capital, cut the burn and bootstrap, shut the doors, or occasionally consider a strategic acquisition by a complementary partner. This type of conversation with strategic acquirers is common for larger venture-backed companies, however, not as common or accessible for the large number of seed-funded companies out there. Exitround is the way for founders to more easily explore the strategic acquisition option.”

      CEO and founder Jacob Mullins, who is also a senior associate at Shasta Ventures, was very clear that Exitround is not a public database where people can scan companies looking to sell. The site will prioritize privacy for all parties who are interested in participating, and potential buyers and sellers will have to fill out applications to be admitted to the site.

      Mullins said the company is mainly looking to make sure the companies filling out profiles have some sort of seed funding, top incubator experience, or strong technology backgrounds that make them a good fit for the marketplace. But he said Exitround is generally open to a variety of companies joining the site.

      Founders will fill out information on their companies, employees, technology experience, and funding, and then Exitround will collect the data into one big profile and anonymize it for potential buyer perusal. If the buyer is interested, Exitround will introduce the company and the buyer. Initially, Exitround is focused on small companies with some seed funding, but not necessarily those that have done a Series A yet, for example.

      “There should be a place where people who are at least interested in selling their company should be able to discreetly raise their hand and connect with people who are potentially interested in buying that company,” Mullins said.

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    • Tweets = public opinion? New data suggests we should think twice on this

      Are the number of tweets per television show the new Nielsen ratings? Or are tweets on election day the same as exit polls? Twitter might be moving in that direction, but new data from the Pew Center should have you think twice before trusting Twitter as a barometer of public opinion.

      It’s not all that surprising that tweets aren’t a perfect indicator of public opinion, considering that only 13 percent of Americans are currently using the service. But the discrepancy is worth noting as Twitter continues its push for journalists and the public to consider its data a legitimate source of news and an accurate indicator of the national discussion.

      Pew explained why evaluating tweets can be useful, but not necessarily definitive:

      “Overall, the reaction to political events on Twitter reflects a combination of the unique profile of active Twitter users and the extent to which events engage different communities and draw the comments of active users. While this provides an interesting look into how communities of interest respond to different circumstances, it does not reliably correlate with the overall reaction of adults nationwide.”

      The Pew data, released Monday, found that during the 2012 presidential election (when Twitter was quick to note the 31 million tweets on the big night), Twitter user reactions to President Obama and Mitt Romney weren’t exactly representative of American opinion at large. Twitter users were much more critical of Romney in the first debate and more positive about Obama’s electoral victory than the public as a whole. And while both candidates faced high levels of criticism on the site, Romney faced more than Obama did through the fall campaign.

      However, Twitter doesn’t just lean left. Reaction to Obama’s inaugural and State of the Union addresses on Twitter were more critical than overal reactions.

      As my colleague Derrick Harris has written before, there’s huge value in using tweets as part of a larger set of data to evaluate situations, but there are plenty of statistical reasons why measuring tweets is challenging. While Twitter is already having a significant impact on how we consume news and information and is relatively mainstream at this point, it’s important to remember that people who voice their opinion on the service are still just a tiny percentage, and who might have different reasons for wanting to share.

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    • Twitter kills Tweetdeck apps for iPhone and Android in favor of web apps

      Twitter announced Monday afternoon that it would be shutting down older Tweetdeck apps for iPhone and Android, as well as Tweetdeck AIR and discontinuing Facebook support, in an effort to get people using Tweetdeck apps for web.

      The shift for Tweetdeck users comes as Twitter continues to focus on monetization and has shut down third-party app experiences that haven’t fit with the company’s goals. However, after the company acquired Tweetdeck it continued to improve the Twitter web app experience, having just announced updates in February, which gave some users hope that it wasn’t going to shut down Tweetdeck entirely.

      The company explained the update that will shift users to web apps over the older mobile apps in a blog post:

      “TweetDeck is the most powerful Twitter tool for tracking real-time conversations. Its flexibility and customizable layout let you keep up with what’s happening on Twitter, across multiple topics and accounts, in real time. To continue to offer a great product that addresses your unique needs, we’re going to focus our development efforts on our modern, web-based versions of TweetDeck. To that end, we are discontinuing support for our older apps: TweetDeck AIR, TweetDeck for Android and TweetDeck for iPhone. They will be removed from their respective app stores in early May and will stop functioning shortly thereafter. We’ll also discontinue support for our Facebook integration.

      Over the past 18 months, we’ve been focused on building a fast and feature-richweb application for modern browsers, and a Chrome app, which offers some unique features like notifications. We’ve recently introduced many enhancements to these apps –– a new look and feel, tools like search term autocomplete and search filtersto help you find what you’re looking for more quickly, and automatically-updating Tweet streams so you immediately see the most recent Tweets. Our weekly web releases have been possible because we’ve nearly doubled the size of the TweetDeck team over the past six months (and we’re still hiring).”

       

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    • Facebook responds to criticisms of newsfeed, says it’s algorithms are designed to keep users happy

      Are you more likely to see posts surfacing in your newsfeed if the author pays to promote them? NYTimes writer Nick Bilton wrote this weekend that he’s seen engagement on his posts drop recently, but Facebook has come back to refute some of his arguments.

      Bilton’s column pointed to a drop in likes and shares from his subscribers (an option for public figures to allow non-friends to follow their updates), and the immediate jump he saw once he paid $7 to promote the post. Bilton questioned how Facebook surfaces items in the newsfeed, asking if advertising and promoted posts will push out posts that users share but don’t pay to promote.

      But Facebook came back Monday with a blog post titled “Fact Check” that warns users not to take one person’s anecdotes too seriously, and explain how the algorithims come to be, saying the tweaks the company administers to the newsfeed formula are meant to give users a better experience on Facebook:

      “There have been recent claims suggesting that our News Feed algorithm suppresses organic distribution of posts in favor of paid posts in order to increase our revenue. This is not true. We want to clear up any misconceptions by explaining how the News Feed algorithm works.

      First, in aggregate, engagement – likes, comments, shares – has gone up for most people who have turned the Follow feature on. In fact, overall engagement on posts from people with followers has gone up 34% year over year.

      Second, a few data points should not be taken as representative of what actually is happening overall. There are numerous factors that may affect distribution, including quality and number of posts.

      News Feed shows the most relevant stories from your friends, people you follow and Pages you are connected to. In fact, the News Feed algorithm is separate from the advertising algorithm in that we don’t replace the most engaging posts in News Feed with sponsored ones.”

      The post goes on to explain that the company has tweaked how much of public figures’ content is shared out to their subscribers, and arguing that you can’t compare interaction with posts from one year to the next, calling it an “apples to oranges” comparison.

      It’s a little unclear why user interaction on a post from year to year would be an unfair comparison, but Facebook has explained the algorithms behind its newsfeed before, noting that it does change the formula quite frequently and relies on negative feedback to figure out what users don’t like. The question is, how does the company’s desire to promote paid posts work its way into the algorithms.

      The company explained in November that the three most important factors that determine whether you’ll see a post in your feed are how you’ve reacted to the publisher in the past, how other people have reacted to the publisher’s story, and how you’ve reacted to similar stories before. So it’s reasonable to assume that if users stopped engaging with Bilton or other public figures posts, they might start popping up less frequently in the newsfeed.

      “We make changes to the algorithim all the time, at least weekly,” Cathcart said in November. “We work all the time to say, ‘Can we better predict what people are looking at? Can we better predict what people won’t want to see or are less likely to interact with?’”

      Facebook promoted post payment newsfeed

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    • Alt12 is tackling digital health, pregnancy and parenthood one comment at a time

      What can a smartphone owner expect when she’s expecting? We’re starting to see more and more apps that could change how we consider digital health and social interaction on mobile.

      When Jennifer Wong was five months pregnant in 2009, she went searching for a mobile app that would give her more information on her pregnancy. Wong didn’t find what she was looking for — instead, she found a business idea. Along with her husband Casey Sackett, Wong founded Alt12, a company that aims to provide women with information and a social community built around the iPhone for three topics: fertility, pregnancy, and motherhood.

      “I realized that mobile was a platform for where things were going, and there was a lot of focus on mobile,” Wong said in an interview recently in San Francisco. “But there were a lot of male developers out there, and we thought women’s health and women’s lifestyle was a really great place to go.”

      With initial seed funding, Wong started out with the company’s first mobile app called Baby Bump, hiring writers to research and produce educational information about the different stages of pregnancy, developers to build the network to support a strong social community, and eventually adding e-commerce features to sell some of the kid-related products the editors were recommending. With this three-pronged approach to content, social and commerce, Baby Bump just hit 8 million downloads recently, with 1.5 million of those users spending at least an hour a day on the app. The company just released an iPad edition of Baby Bump, which is among the top pregnancy apps for the iPhone in Apple’s App Store this week.

      “We look at this as sort of a new approach for women on mobile,” Wong said.

      The trio of apps highlight some of the recent trends in digital health, where people are looking for mobile-friendly specific information and support around conditions like pregnancy, and online communities have cropped up as a result.

      After the release of Baby Bump, the company expanded to produce Pink Pad (they found a good number of users on Baby Bump weren’t even pregnant yet, just searching for information on fertility), and Kidfolio, which provides parenting advice for the users who graduate from Baby Bump. The company raised a $1.26 million seed round in 2012 led by Felicis Ventures with participation from InterWest Partners, Social+Capital Partnership and a few angel investors.

      While Wong initially set out to answer questions about pregnancy and give mothers a way to connect via mobile, she was somewhat unprepared for the strong response from users within the social groups section. She thinks that because the apps started on mobile, they encouraged constant commenting, and comment moderation became a huge part of the business.

      “In a sense, I was very open-minded about it,” she said. “I had used online groups before, so I had some idea of what we were getting into. But what we had done was something slightly diferent because it was mobile, which people just use differently. We were treading in new territory.”

      Wong said that comment moderators will check particular threads where there are concerns of threats like domestic violence or self-harm, and will make sure that moderators in following shifts continue to monitor those discussions, sometimes suggesting a user seek medical advice if necessary. They have worked to carefully dissuade comments that promote self-harm, such as teenagers on the Pink Pad app talking about “pro-ana,” the controversial pro-anorexia trend that’s cropped up online recently.

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    • CEO Andrew Mason is out at Groupon

      After a disastrous earnings call on Wednesday for its fourth quarter numbers that sent the stock plunging, Groupon announced Thursday that its CEO Andrew Mason will be departing as CEO. The company is searching for a new executive, it reported.

      The company wrote in a press release about the changes taking place:

      “Groupon, the global leader in local commerce, today announced a leadership change in which Executive Chairman Eric Lefkofsky and Vice Chairman Ted Leonsis have been appointed to the newly created Office of the Chief Executive, effective immediately, replacing Andrew Mason. Lefkofsky and Leonsis will serve in this role on an interim basis. The Board has commenced a search for a new Chief Executive.”

      Mason wrote in a blog post why he will be exiting the company:

      “After four and a half intense and wonderful years as CEO of Groupon, I’ve decided that I’d like to spend more time with my family. Just kidding – I was fired today. If you’re wondering why… you haven’t been paying attention. From controversial metrics in our S1 to our material weakness to two quarters of missing our own expectations and a stock price that’s hovering around one quarter of our listing price, the events of the last year and a half speak for themselves. As CEO, I am accountable.”

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    • Facebook purchases Microsoft’s Atlas Solutions for reported $100 million

      Facebook has announced Thursday afternoon the purchase of Microsoft’s Atlas Solutions, giving the social network better tools to boost its advertising network as it continues to grow and to give businesses greater feedback on customer interaction with ads once those customers leave the site. Although the terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, CNBC’s Julia Boorstin reported the deal went for about $100 million.

      Facebook explained in a press release how the purchase will help the company understand the impact of its ads across the network:

      “Today’s marketing environment is much more complex than it was just a few short years ago. Marketers and agencies struggle to understand how their efforts across different channels complement and strengthen each other. Consequently, they are forced to adopt siloed marketing strategies for each channel, leading to poor and inconsistent end-user experiences.”

      A deal between Facebook and Microsoft had been speculated about before, with Kara Swisher at AllThingsD reporting that Facebook was debating a build-versus-buy approach, but was leaning toward buy. She reported that acquiring Atlas would give the company a head start on ad impressions despite technological challenges that would come with the acquisition.

      Facebook is working to grow its ad network, and Altas could help Facebook track users once they leave the site to see how effective the company’s ads really are. Microsoft acquired Atlas as part of its purchase of aQuantive for $6 billion in 2007. Dave O’Hara, CFO of Online Services Division at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post about the benefits for both companies in the deal:

      “Earlier today, Facebook and Microsoft announced a definitive agreement in which Facebook has agreed to acquire the Atlas Advertiser suite. This agreement will strengthen our existing partnership and also includes a long-term strategic commercial relationship. Having been deeply involved in this deal since day one, I can say with confidence that we are quite pleased with this outcome and are excited to continue building a deeper partnership between our two companies.”

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    • Albumatic and Cluster try a fresh take on an old problem: group photo-sharing

      Pitches for group photo-sharing apps are sort of like pitches for “the Instagram for video” products: they are usually treated with caution. Lots of people have tried to crack the nut, but we haven’t seen any clear winners yet. Color was one of the most high-profile attempts at letting friends easily share their photos with people around them, but that didn’t come close to being a hit despite the hype when it launched.

      Two different products for iOS have come onto the scene recently — Albumatic debuted last week, and Cluster plans to launch Wednesday morning. Both take a modern approach to sharing photos with friends, and they look different from most everything we’ve seen before. The apps themselves are simpler (they involve minimal instructions or tagging), and they make it easy to save photos shared by friends that you want to keep to your camera roll and invite people to albums. Within a few seconds of opening both apps, I clearly understood how they worked and I was able to get something out of them pretty quickly.

      The problems with group photo-sharing are clear. I spent Thanksgiving this year with six friends here in San Francisco, and we were all snapping photos on our iPhones throughout the day. By the end of the night, we all wanted each other’s photos for Instagram or Facebook, for sharing with absent friends and parents. But there wasn’t an obvious way to dump all our photos into one big album. We investigated Dropbox and Flock, but neither seemed like a fit, and we ended up using Apple’s photo stream, although it was a clunky solution.

      So what could we have used instead? As of this week, we’d have two new options:

      Albumatic

      Albumatic screenshotWith Albumatic, which launched last week, a user can create an album at the beginning of an ongoing event and add friends who are located nearby to contribute photos as the event happens. Users can like or comment on photos, and if your friends are creating events in distant locations, you can follow along and get notifications when they add the the album (although you can’t contribute if you’re not physically there).

      It seems like it might contribute to some serious FOMO, but could also be a fun way to keep up with far-flung families, groups of friends in other cities, or destination weddings you can’t attend. And for the event participants who are present and adding photos, it could be a good way to create a record of the event that you can easily share. Albumatic is clearly meant for in-the-moment sharing.

      Cluster

      Cluster screenshotCluster takes a slightly different approach to photo-sharing that I found immediately easier to use, compared to other options, after opening the app. Instead of trying to collect photos from party attendees as the party is happening, Cluster wants you to create an album when you get home that night and let everyone add photos after the fact. It’s a different approach that could work for different people.

      Once you create an event and pick your photos, you tell the app which friends were there, and it notifies them to add their photos (using the time and geolocation to suggest photos they might want to add). In testing, the app was quite accurate in picking up which photos I should contribute to events I attended, even in months past.

      Cluster seems like it has more post-event potential than Albumatic, but it will be interesting to see how both play out at SXSW in Austin next week and whether one is more conducive to sharing than the other.

      This story was corrected at 10:37am to note that you can upload photos in Albumatic from the camera roll as well as take them in the app.

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    • Max Levchin launches mobile payment startup Affirm out of new lab venture

      Max Levchin has launched a new payments startup called Affirm that will attempt to convert mobile browsers into mobile customers by instituting one-click checkouts, AllThingsD reported Tuesday. The longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur sat down with Om in January to talk about his new R&D lab called HVF (Hard Valuable Fun), and Affirm is the first startup out of that project.

      Affirm screenshot Max LevchinLevchin co-founded PayPal and then sold his second company, Slide, to Google for hundreds of millions. Slide came out of MRL Ventures, a similar type of R&D lab, that also produced Yelp as one of its companies. The Ukraine-born founder first pitched his idea for the new lab in Munich in January of this year, and explained the idea behind it to Om:

      “As we become more connected, we can make things a lot more efficient around us,” he said at the time. “There is a lot of change that is going to happen.” Levchin explained that the companies coming out of HVF would revolve around the importance of data and how we use it. He said at the time that he was almost ready to launch two different ventures from the self-funded lab.

      Affirm will allow merchants to convert mobile browsers to buyers by making purchases easier for people who don’t want to pull out their credit cards. The company’s website explains the concept behind it:

      “The mobile shopping experience attracts a certain type of shopper – impulsive, time-constrained, exploratory. Retailers must evaluate how their purchase flow aligns with these motivations. Affirm greases the skids between intent and purchase for these shoppers.”

      The concept sounds very much like PayPal or Square or any number of other payments startups on the market right now, but Affirm is looking to distinguish itself by acting as a digital charge card where users can add items to their tab and then pay later, according to the report. At launch, the company is just launching with one partner, 1-800-Flowers, but is allowing more interested merchants to sign up.

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