AOL is finally offloading ICQ, to a newly familiar name in the tech investing space, Digital Sky Technologies. It’s actually a good regional fit as ICQ is the leading instant messaging service in Russia, where DST is based. DST has agreed to pay $187.5 million, which in the grand scheme of things is not too shabby — back in another era, AOL bought ICQ for $407 million in 1998. However, in December it had been reported that DST would buy ICQ for $200-$250 million.
ICQ has been on the block for a while. Though using ICQ may be a long-lost memory U.S. Internet users, the IM service has 32 million uniques per month, with significant presence in Eastern Europe. That dates back to ICQ’s roots in Israel, where it was created in 1996 by Mirabilis.
AOL, which is still looking to offload its social networking acquisition Bebo, reported a 58 percent decline in first-quarter profits today.
The startup Formspring.me was just four months old when it closed a $2.5 million angel round of funding last month from 10 name-brand investors, among them angel funds, individual entrepreneurs — even a venture capital firm. Formspring’s premise is a kind of blogging in reverse; users set up a profile and invite anyone to ask them questions. And it’s seen rapid adoption, to the tune of 50 million uniques a month and more than 300 million questions answered to date.
But premise and adoption numbers aside, such a long list of investors putting money into a jumbo-seed round so early on is not uncommon these days. Don’t blame it on too few investments driving up demand, however; on the contrary, there are many young companies taking lots of money from lots of investors. We find ourselves reporting on another early-stage funding round for an Internet or mobile startup every day. Whereas a year ago…nada.
CB Insights shows growth of 33 percent from Q1 '09 to Q1 '10. It uses an index instead of raw deal count numbers because angel investing is so opaque.
There isn’t much in the way of comprehensive statistics on angel investing, but the numbers that are available back this trend. U.S. angel investment deal flow was up 33 percent year-over-year in the first quarter of 2010, according to CB Insights. And angel investors themselves cite a return to frothiness. I interviewed a passel of them about when it started, why — and what it means for the future of today’s crop of companies.
‘Trigger-happy, But Not Irrational’
“I haven’t seen this level of startup activity (and angel investing) in SV since ’98,” PayPal and Slide founder Max Levchin tweeted back in March, an observation he reiterated during a recent discussion. “I’ve probably made more investments in the last month than in the previous year,” he told me. “I’m suddenly trigger-happy. And I am not irrational.”
Early-stage investors agree that things started picking up in the fourth quarter of 2009, and were going full steam ahead by the first quarter of 2010. Levchin’s PayPal and Slide compatriot Keith Rabois reports having invested in five companies this January, compared to none in the fourth quarter of ’09. The first Google employee to go angel, Ayden Senkut, told me he’s made double the amount of investments this quarter as he did during the previous three-month period. And there are no signs of a slowdown.
Slide CEO Max Levchin thinks today's startups are poised to disrupt incumbents due to fundamental shifts in the technology environment.
All of which has had an impact on valuations. From a price perspective, “There are no longer deals to be had,” said Jeremy Liew, managing director at Lightspeed Venture Partners and an investor in companies such as Flixster and RockYou. Indeed, multiple angels said that entrepreneurs now open angel rounds at $750,000, whereas 18 months ago it was unusual to see anything above $500,000.
Investor Posse(s)
The larger rounds are often provided by a larger number of investors. And there do seem to be more total investors in the angel market. Jessica Livingston of Y Combinator, the pioneering three-month intensive startup program, said that investor attendance at its latest Demo Day in March was up 50 percent from the previous session, held in August 2009.
Jessica Livingston of Y Combinator said 50 percent more investors showed up to the program's latest Demo Day.
The startups presenting at Demo Day were swarmed — but in fact there was so much advance interest that a quarter of them already had money in the bank before the day even kicked off, according to Livingston. Whether it be former Googlers, former PayPal peeps, or just folks with some money who’d like to be tapped into what’s hot, there are a lot of people these days willing to cut checks for tens of thousands of dollars.
“When I first started doing this I was the only ex-Google angel, and today there are anywhere between 20 and 40, and that’s just Google,” said Senkut, whose Felicis Ventures has about 50 active investments. There’s even one angel team, Mixin Capital, that was started by the Y Combinator alums who sold Zenter to Google and invests almost exclusively in Y Combinator startups.
So many investors on the hunt lead to what Rabois called a “dogs and cats round, with everyone piling on.” Formspring’s round of 10 named investors is just one example. Though Rabois, who serves as EVP of strategy for Slide, said he was “dubious” as to whether that was a good thing. “When there’s lots of people involved, nobody’s accountable,” he noted, never mind how many patrons an entrepreneur then has to please.
There’s also increasing collaboration between angels, through organizations like AngelList and the Angel Forum as well as Y Combinator and the many startup camp copycats it’s inspired. (Increased knowledge sharing might also be partly to blame for the mini-swarms of me-too companies we see these days. There’s a reason they call it groupthink.)
And new incubators and seed funds are popping up all over the place. For instance, the video embedded above is from a tour I took of Kicklabs, a soon-to-open space in San Francisco’s SOMA neighborhood set up by Transmedia Capital in partnership with the building owner. They’re planning to give startups free rent and access to advisers and resources (and a pretty sweet in-office slide) in exchange for the equivalent of a $25,000 share of each company.
Shortest. Recession. Ever.
So why now? Why are there so many companies deemed worthy of receiving money and so many investors willing to give it to them? The simplest reason is that the overall economy, after cratering in the fall of ’08, is showing signs of recovery. Even if the market isn’t righted again, investors’ public company stocks are moving in the right direction.
Call it the shortest recession ever, as I discuss in the video embedded below with SoftTech VC‘s Jeff Clavier, who himself has made 75 consumer Internet investments in the last six years, 48 of them in the last two and a half. He had four exits in 2009: Mint to Intuit, Mixer Labs to Twitter, Ohloh to SourceForge and DanceJam to Grind Networks.
Clavier came by our office studio to talk about the state of angel investing. “There was a handful of us six years ago and now there’s a legion,” he said. One of the factors that prompted Clavier to start investing was how much cheaper it had become to start companies, given web infrastructure and monetization tools. And that’s only more true today.
Another factor is that starting a company has a cool factor — especially these days. “You see people from Wharton coming out to Silicon Valley now” is how Rabois put it, whereas a few years ago, “a lot of those people would have been at investment banks.”
The Race to Get in Early
To be fair, the economy is not out of trouble yet, and neither are later-stage Internet companies. VC funding numbers are still depressed, with first-quarter stats for Internet-specific U.S. investments showing a 14 percent quarter-on-quarter decrease in dollars and a 19 percent decrease in the number of deals, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers and the NVCA.
Keith Rabois, EVP of strategy for Slide, invested in five companies in January, compared to zero in the fourth quarter of '09.
Still, there are some notable larger and highly sought-after venture funding rounds — like the yet-to-be-closed but widely reported bidding war for Foursquare, and competitive deals closed by former Facebook employees’ companies Asana and Quora.
Asana and Quora are both pre-launch — aka, the kind of companies that would normally be getting angel funding. “Because of the excitement around microcap and seed investing, venture capital firms are being more active in the space as well,” said Senkut. “The valuations are going up too fast. They feel like they may need to have a better grasp on the seed stage.”
And after a long IPO drought, there appear to be some viable exits approaching IPO-style valuations available to startup shareholders. Google, after not buying a single company for nearly a year, has acquired nearly 15 since last August. And there’s an active secondary market for employee and early investor shares, led by Russia’s Digital Sky Technologies, which has made deals to buy common stock in Facebook, Zynga and Groupon. Those companies are part of a small pack that see active secondary market trading, both privately and facilitated by sites like SecondMarket and SharesPost.
Nature or Nurture?
Are today’s web and mobile startups any different or better than those of the past? Investors contend that they are, for a few reasons. First of all, there’s a working theory that companies borne out of the hardship of a bust cycle are better grounded, if only because they’re not swept up in the hype of a boom. Secondly, many of today’s early startups actually have revenue before they seek funding, whether from commerce, subscriptions or coupons. Or, like Formspring, they have incredibly viral and mainstream adoption that seems to promise long-term value.
Aydin Senkut of Felicis Ventures has 50 active angel investments.
And thirdly, as Max Levchin put it, “Every decade or so you see enough of a buildup in technology capabilities to enable things that change the world in fundamental enough ways that incumbents can’t take advantage of and startups can.” That’s why he invested in the social payments startup WePay, which he hopes will take on PayPal. The behaviors the company is trying to address are fundamentally different than those of 10 years ago because broadband Internet has become a much more significant part of our life since then.
But there are downsides to so much money being spread around. More funding buys an entrepreneur a bigger runway, but also increased oversight and higher expectations. The result will be that many similar companies will have trouble co-existing, and the most crowded segments will see consolidation. There’s no way all these companies will succeed.
Lastly, increased excitement around early-stage companies is also responsible for an imbalance in the tech job market. “I do not have a single company that is not hiring, and I do not have a single company that is not finding it difficult,” said Senkut. “Anyone worth being hired as an employee is starting their own company.”
For some, this kind of frenzied, frothy atmosphere will be all-too-reminiscent of the dot-com bubble 10 years ago. At this accelerated pace, it’s possible that the shortest recession ever could be followed by the shortest boom.
Here’s a company you should be paying attention to, if you’re not already: Zong, the mobile payments startup, said today it’s raised $15 million in a round led by Matrix Partners and is now fully spun off from Switzerland-based Echovox. Palo Alto, Calif.-based Zong enables mobile payments through both cell phone bills (it has hundreds of direct relationships with carriers) and direct charges to credit or debit cards (to avoid carrier feeds).
Most notably, Zong is Facebook’s mobile payment provider of choice, an enviable position given the popularity of virtual goods on that massive platform. Along with the funding, Matrix General Partner Dana Stalder, a former PayPal exec who led PayPal Mobile as well as the company’s developer platform, will join Zong’s board.
Competitor Boku raised $25 million in Series C funding from DAG Ventures, Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures and Khosla Ventures in January. And of course, there’s a certain eBay-owned company that scoffs at the notion of “PayPal killers.”
Aardvark, by some measures — accumulating many active users or making lots of money, for example — did not succeed. But hey, it did get acquired by Google for a cool $50 million, so it’s worth hearing a little more about how the social search startup succeeded on that front. The real secret, according to Aardvark co-founders Max Ventilla and Damon Horowitz, who were speaking at the Startup Lessons Learned conference in San Francisco on Friday, was acute awareness of how close they were to failure.
Aardvark co-founders Max Ventilla and Damon Horowitz
“I’m probably going to fail, so how can I increase my chances of success but — more importantly — use that failure and make it less painful and minimize the risk of the catastrophic fail, when you’ve run out of money and you actually have to change jobs,” was how Ventilla described their thought process.
“Once you’ve sold your startup, it feels very much fated. I don’t think we felt that,” Ventilla said. That’s despite the fact that he had formerly worked at Google and Horowitz had founded multiple acquired startups. But the truth is that the Aardvark founders had no idea what their product would be or if they’d be able to build it.
Aardvark's abandoned product ideas
In order to find out, they got users to test-drive their ideas. For the first six months Aardvark prototyped ideas, gave them to 100-200 people, and if they saw they weren’t taking off, abandoned them (a slide of five abandoned ideas is pictured on the left). Once they figured out that social Q&A was the ticket, they didn’t pull back on user testing, bringing in 6-12 users a week over the 30-month span of the startup.
But Aardvark didn’t actually build products right away. The service connects people with questions to those in their broader social network with corresponding answers, but for nine months, a human being was involved in every single interaction — a kind of “Wizard of Oz” that classified the query and otherwise managed the conversation from behind the scenes.
In the meantime, Aardvark recruited its core team and raised $7.5 million. In fact, Ventilla said was easier to convince investors and prospective employees that Aardvark could figure out how to automate something that people were already using than to get people to use something new.
Aardvark's long path to product automation
Once Aardvark felt it was on the right track, its next goal was to improve its ability to learn and engineer faster, said Ventilla. The entire company — 30 people at the time of acquisition — reviewed user testing, feedback and metrics, and split testing for new features on a weekly basis. “As long as you don’t run out of money, if your second derivative is good you’ll leave everyone else in the dust,” he argued. Aardvark also made sure that users and advisers alike knew their opinions were being heard and implemented. “Part of your job as an entrepreneur is to be barraged by opposing viewpoints,” said Horowitz. “If you’re not prepared to be grateful, than you shouldn’t do a startup.”
“This is a sinking ship from day one, and that’s why we’re going to do lots of things and be totally uncompromising about when we abandon one ship and try to get on another leaky boat,” said Ventilla of the startup experience. Or as Horowitz put it, “Assume you are wrong, and then at least you’ll be correct in that assumption, if nothing else.”
Facebook has been inaccessible to many, if not all, users for the last 30 minutes or so. This is incredibly bad timing for the company, which is trying to pitch itself this week as a central part of the web’s infrastructure. Not only is the Facebook.com site down, but error messages are popping up on partner sites using the new social plugins launched this week.
Meanwhile, jokes are running rampant on Twitter about how long till people tweeting about Facebook take down Twitter. Downrightnow.com is reporting a service disruption of 28 minutes and counting, though just before we hit publish, we were able to load Facebook.com again. We’ve reached out to Facebook about the outage, which says it’s looking into it.
Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my bio.
The Facebook-powered social plugin on CNN's homepage draws a blank (bottom right).
UPDATED Users who sign up for Blippy, the service that encourages sharing personal transactions online, do so with the expectation of becoming more open about their purchase data. But they don’t expect their credit card numbers to be posted online, which is what seems to have happened. If you search Google using the terms “site:blippy.com + ‘from card,’” you’ll see what appear to be a set of transactions at Starbucks, Exxon Mobile, Kroger’s and other stores. Many of them are in Michigan and many of them appear to be from a single credit card.
To be clear, there are only 196 results for that search query. But Blippy has yet to speak up for itself, more than three hours after VentureBeat’s Owen Thomas tweeted about it, and in the meantime “Blippy Users’ Credit” has become a trending topic on Twitter. Blippy’s privacy page promises to tell users of security breaches “in the most expedient time possible and without unreasonable delay.”
Update: Blippy founder Philip Kaplan has now posted on the company blog and spoken to at least one reporter about the breach. He said the credit card numbers shared belonged to a total of four users who had been early beta testers. Blippy had since cleaned up its data but Google was still caching it.
Kaplan wrote:
We take security seriously and want to assure Blippy users that this was an isolated incident from many months ago in our beta test, and doesn’t affect current users.
While it looks super-scary and certainly sucks for those few people who were affected, and is embarrassing to us, it’s a lot less bad than it looks.
Mr. Kaplan said that early on, Blippy started disguising the raw transaction data behind the scenes, but it did not know about the breach until today. He added, “This still looks pretty bad.”
Blippy is a brand-new startup that just raised $11.2 million in new funding at a valuation of $46.2 million — and yesterday was the recipient of a New York Times writeup about the new age of personal information sharing online. What the company doesn’t need is the perception that it’s cavalier with user data. A little breach goes a long way against user trust — and the service is on the hook for a lot of growth to live up to that new funding.
Yesterday at Facebook’s f8 conference, the company launched tools for any web site to add a social layer by bringing over Facebook friend connections. These social plugins are available to any web developer and use a simple piece of code to add a Facebook frame onto a page and instantly make that page social. So, for example, if you visit CNN.com, you could see what news stories your friends liked and shared there.
CNN doesn’t actually see that happening — to them it’s just a box they leave open on their site for Facebook to populate — but it’s presumably happy because users get a more personal experience and stick around longer. And users don’t get identified for simply visiting a site; they have to login to Facebook through a dialog box for their presence and activities to be shared with their Facebook friends.
Ta-da! It’s personal
Facebook also introduced a way for certain sites to push this further than everyone else. Three carefully chosen launch partners — Microsoft’s Docs.com, Yelp and Pandora — have access to what Facebook is calling “instant personalization.” This is a powerful, inventive and creepy tool that the company hopes to extend to other partners but is testing the waters with these three first.
Instant personalization means that if you show up to the Internet radio site Pandora for the first time, it will now be able to look directly at your Facebook profile and use public information — name, profile picture, gender and connections, plus anything else you’ve made public — to give you a personalized experience. So if I have already publicly stated through my Facebook interests page that I like a musical artist — say, The Talking Heads — the first song I hear when I go to Pandora will be a Talking Heads song or something that Pandora thinks is similar.
The idea is that Pandora is a somewhat hard concept to explain to new users — before it existed, people didn’t have their own personalized radio stations based on similarities between artists and song. Now, new users will derive value from Pandora before they even sign up. The first time they load the page it will be to their favorite music.
This new sign-up customization has the biggest privacy implications of everything Facebook did yesterday. Until now, when you browsed the web, it was safe to assume you were anonymous until you actively logged into a site. But in recent years, behavioral advertisers have started following us around as we browse, using cookies about where we’ve been to customize ad on new pages we visit. (So if I’ve been shopping on Kayak for an upcoming trip, I might get ads about similar flights and travel destinations showing up on a page I visit later that day.) In the post-f8 world, when you show up to Yelp having never been there before, the page will now show a feed of restaurants and stores that your Facebook friends have liked and reviewed using Yelp before you go there.
I spoke with Facebook platform engineering lead Mike Vernal at f8 yesterday about instant personalization after having trouble grokking the concept when CEO Mark Zuckerberg threw it in as a “one last thing” during his f8 keynote. Vernal described the goal as to create a “magical” experience for users. However, he said Facebook is well-aware that these privileges could be abused. “We’ve very cognizant of balancing building great user experiences and respecting privacy,” was how Vernal put it.
Vernal said Facebook has not finalized any plans for allowing additional sites into the instant personalization program. Users are also able to opt out entirely with a new option at the bottom of the list on their privacy settings page. And further, if they want to prevent their friends from sharing their information with an instant personalization partner, users must block that specific application individually. Multiple Facebook employees told me the company was unsure about how to label the sensitive product and which partners were launching on it until the last minute.
I made this just for you
The problem is, users aren’t accustomed to instantly personal services, and we have no idea where that personal information is coming from. Going back to the relatively benign social plugins from the beginning of this story, it probably won’t be obvious to the casual visitor to CNN.com that CNN doesn’t know anything about the story recommendations Facebook is providing. To most of us, it will look like CNN knows who we are. And further, arriving on a brand-new web site that instantly knows who you are might be ultimately useful, but the first time it happens you’re going to freak out.
Facebook’s way of addressing that is by placing an icon in every social plugin that leads back to an explanation on Facebook, and layering a big blue bar on top of the three sites — again, Microsoft’s Docs.com, Pandora and Yelp — that are getting the special treatment. So when I go to Yelp today I’m greeted right up front with: “Hi Liz. Yelp is using Facebook to personalize your experience. Learn More – No Thanks.” That’s fine, but the fact is, this tool is designed to help users become acquainted with sites they’ve never been to before. So the experience is necessarily going to be foreign.
I recently signed up for a new web photo service giving an email address and password. When I went to fill out my profile, there was already a picture of me staring back. Whoa. That’s useful, I guess — I didn’t have to find a headshot to upload yet again — but it weirded me out. It turned out the site was probably using Automattic’s Gravatar, to match my email with my profile pic. Clearly, Facebook’s not the only platform that wants to enable shortcuts to make my new web experiences better — expect this instant personalization to catch on, if users and privacy advocates don’t revolt and drive the company to drop the feature. We saw that happen with a cousin of this product, Facebook Beacon, three years ago.
But if my Facebook stream is any indication, some users have already caught onto this latest privacy tweak. Here’s one message making the rounds:
“Do NOT forget to OPT OUT of the new FB Instant Personalization sillyness. Under your Privacy Settings so 3rd parties cannot collect your personal data. Account–>Privacy Settings–>Applications & Websites–>@bottom is the Instant Personalization thing–>Uncheck Allow.”
But then, lots of people just hate change; every Facebook redesign, ever, has been protested. And so, like Facebook, we’ll have to wait to see how much instant personalization freaks people out.
Facebook, with its open graph announcements at the f8 conference today, is digging itself deep into the infrastructure of the web. Outside developers and existing sites will now be able to hook into Facebook users’ data and activities directly and persistently, keeping logs well beyond the previous limit of 24 hours.
Organizing the world’s information by powering it is clearly a direct affront to Google. Where Google observes links and relationships between web sites from a distance, Facebook aims to be the glue that connects the web itself. The implications are thrilling, but also scary — what if Facebook goes down?
The benefits of using a Facebook authentication system were already strong. Bret Taylor, Facebook’s director of product, at today’s keynote explained just how strong when speaking of his own struggle to grow FriendFeed, the real-time social company Facebook eventually acquired. Users who signed up for FriendFeed with Facebook Connect were four times more likely to become active than any other form of sign-up, said Taylor.
But now, beyond fostering better participation by inviting users to connect their real identities and their real relationships, web services will be able to use Facebook to explode user engagement and relationships. They can use Facebook’s social plugins to expose personalized friend activity and recommendations. And Facebook will establish persistent, dynamic links to users’ participation on connected sites around the web through its “like” buttons.
Users now have the ability to express their interests not only by saying what they like — say, a local restaurant — but by saying what web site represents it — say, a Yelp review page, instead of the official restaurant site. Web services would be silly not to participate.
As a user, having your social self represent you around the web will at first be creepy but ultimately be useful. As one Facebook engineer put it to me today, “Imagine if you had one login for the whole web. That would be so sweet.”
In preparation for f8, a few Facebook employees hacked together examples of what outside developers could do given the new open graph tools. For instance, Facebook.me would allow users to use Facebook as a CMS. Say you’re one of those crazy MySpace devotees who wants blinking disco lights on your profile. Great. Make a web page, host it at whatever URL you want, uglify it to your heart’s content, and port in data that dynamically connects to Facebook. You can imagine brands and small businesses might want to use this in lieu of a traditional web page.
Another demo, KlugePress, gives the ability to use a nice template and port in Facebook event information. Only users who are invited to the event on Facebook would be able to load a KlugePress invite (this is tricky, and wasn’t really figured out yet for the demo). If users are logged in to Facebook and have permitted access, they can RSVP, comment and see details as they would on the bland Facebook event page. The data itself is sent right back to Facebook. (Pictured above is a KlugePress skin on an older event from my own profile.)
By inviting developers to integrate with it so tightly, Facebook is enabling new opportunities — but also asking for an awful lot of trust.
Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my bio.
Facebook, asexpected, launched its master plan to make the rest of the web social at its f8 conference in San Francisco today. CEO Mark Zuckerberg and director of product Bret Taylor laid out three major initiatives to that effect.
The f8 launches expand on the concept of authenticating on sites using Facebook Connect — which reached 100 million users in its first 15 months — and sending back updates to the Facebook news feed. Most interestingly, Facebook will move from the idea of a transitory stream of actions to give outside sites persistent access to its users.
First, social plugins are little widgets that bring Facebook to the rest of the web. They offer “instant personalization,” said Taylor with the goal of increasing user engagement, using an iFrame and a cookie remembering the Facebook user. So when you visit a website, even if it’s new to you, you’ll which friends have also logged in there, what their activity is, and a set of recommendations based on their actions.
One action in particular will be closely tied back to Facebook: the like button. If you indicate you like an article, a band, a restaurant, really anything, a site using Facebook’s open graph protocol can create a persistent relationship with you around that content. Sites give Facebook semantic information around the thing you liked — for instance, the title, type, genre and city for a band you like on Pandora. Then that band goes straight to the favorite music section of your profile. Same thing happens if you like a movie on IMDB, another launch partner.
The objects that you like are first-order citizens on Facebook, said Taylor. So if another user hovers over that movie you liked, they see information brought from IMDB. A click goes back to the source. If a user searches for restaurants on Facebook, the top things that show up in Facebook’s own search could be restaurants your friends liked on Yelp. And the sites can communicate back directly to that specific subset of users who have liked something. So when Stanford football star Toby Gerhart gets drafted tomorrow, Bret Taylor could automatically see that information in his feed.
One application developed with this in mind is the new Docs.com from Microsoft, a web-based document editor available later today that will enable users to can see, edit and share with their Facebook friends. (This is an obvious team-up against Google Docs.)
Lastly, Facebook’s Graph API aims to make developing on its platform much simpler for the long haul. Every object on Facebook has now been given a easy to formulate unique ID. The API will allow sites to search user updates and get real-time updates every time a user adds a connection or posts on a wall. Developers, with permission, will be able to hold onto user data for more than 24 hours. And Facebook will be adopting the open authentication protocol OAuth.
Though these launches will clearly bring even more data under Facebook’s control, Zuckerberg said they signaled “for the first time a truly open graph.”
“The open graph puts people at the center of the web,” he said. “It means the web can become a series of personally and semantically meaningful connections.”
Zynga CEO Mark Pincus invited social game developers to band together to create an “app economy” at the Inside Social Apps conference on Tuesday in San Francisco. Maintaining the structure of applications built on top of platforms will be key to Zynga and its competitors’ success, he said:
You wouldn’t even think of going to Expedia.com to check your flight on an iPhone. It’s too many clicks and too much typing, so Expedia isn’t going to have a relationship with you unless you have that app. It’s not that way on the web but it could be that way.
Pincus said he thinks a proper application economy will require tools that create a consistent social gaming experience as users move between applications on the web. First, an “app bar,” would follow users around, enticing them to navigate back to their games — like the one from Meebo (which is tying up with other social web services through XAuth), the “social games bar” launched today by Heyzap, or the one expected to be launched by Facebook soon. Pincus said such efforts have the added benefit of increased engagement and revenues for publishers and networks who use the bar.
Second, apps need properly tuned user communication channels, Pincus said. These should be open enough to allow apps to grow through reaching out to their users, but closed enough to prevent obtrusive and annoying communication.
Third, an app economy would require universal social feeds that follow users around the web. This would allow users to connect feeds between destinations and activities, for instance sending activity in one game to a narrowcasted group of their friends on a certain network. When Zynga tested narrowcasting, or enabling users to share updates with a certain group of their friends, sharing increased 400 percent, Pincus said.
Because people find more value in games when their friends are playing them, Zynga finds that revenues are a leading indicator of engagement, not trailing. Social games have the capacity to be the most successful long-term gaming franchises in history, he argued, because console and PC games go out of style with their hardware, and traditional MMOs only retain a small portion of users over their life.
Pincus, whose hit game FarmVille has something like 30 million daily active users and has hosted 19 billion virtual gift transfers to date, offered advice for his fellow game developers. In order for a social game to be a hit, he said, there are three requirements: Users have to play with friends, they have to make an investment in the game, and the game should be a form of expression.
Pincus encouraged developers to take what he called “bold beats” — in other words, “giving yourself permission to take an enormous risk with your franchise.” For instance, Mafia Wars started adding new cities, and FarmVille added functional buildings. Both moves were internally thought of as challenges to the core games but were well-received by users. “We don’t want to be on a treadmill where we’re killing ourself to put out new content,” said Pincus. The ides is to test changes that are bold enough, so if they work they make a lasting difference.
So how can social game developers work together in the fiercely competitive space, full of ripoffs, copycats and borderline behavior? “Many of us have tried and failed at ways to share traffic and users,” Pincus said, pointing to past efforts of tool bars and APIs. “I think that where this ought to go is to be the open Xbox Live for the web.”
Pincus left the door open for an outside company to build the connecting tools he proposed. The obvious choice might be Facebook, which didn’t have a speaking role at the conference (they’re busy prepping for f8) but was of course ever-present in conversations about social apps. Pincus said of Facebook, which his company has a very lucrative symbiotic relationship with, “They’re going to have to decide between being the plumbing and the portal. I’m hopeful for all of us that they find the better business model around the plumbing.”
Facebook is not only launching products this week but also killing them. The company said this morning that it will no longer support Facebook Lite, a stripped-down version of its site meant to load faster and be more accessible in places without broadband. As of today, lite.facebook.com redirects to Facebook.
Lite was a short-lived product, having only gone live last September. The most probable explanation for the shutdown is that Facebook has since incorporated technology from Lite into its main product. It also requires continued effort to maintain two web versions — not to mention multiple mobile versions — as the larger product evolves. The company said in a wall post that it “learned a lot from the test of a slimmed-down site.” We’ve asked the folks at Facebook for additional comment and will update if they provide it. Lite had something like 70,000 fans on Facebook (or people who “like” it, in the new parlance).
One reason not to like Lite? It showed limited advertising and was disconnected from features like Facebook pages and applications. Ad Age called it “a black hole for brands.” Not a good idea to irritate the people who pay the bills.
Facebook today is rolling out the first set of launches around its f8 developer conference this week, making user profiles more dynamic by transforming static interests (like cooking or hiking, or a certain band) into “community pages.” And it’s taking the opportunity to realign its privacy controls yet again, into two categories: information that a user owns — “personal information and posts” and information that’s jointly owned — “friends, tags and connections.” These are features and alignments that makes sense, but they add yet more complexity to topics — like privacy — that many users are confused by or not interested in.
The good news for privacy worrywarts is that they’ll now be able to control who sees their friend list, current city and pages — information that had previously defaulted to public. Hiding friend lists was Facebook’s most-requested privacy feature, said product marketing manager Ana Yang on a call about the new features. Half of Facebook’s users have customized their privacy settings to date, about 20 percent before December and 30 percent since the big controversial revision at that time.
As for making profiles more dynamic, Facebook will also be revising its understanding of user interests. All users will today be asked about displaying the interests and institutions they’re already affiliated with more prominently in their profiles. And instead of becoming fans of pages, they’ll now indicate their affiliation by “liking” them.
The company noted that three times more people have connected to an official brand page than filled out the text on their profiles about what they were interested in, so the new “community pages” are meant to fill that gap. They can be started by anyone, and they use Wikipedia text licensed by Facebook to provide information about a topic as well as user contributions. “Our goal with pages is to create the best collection of shared knowledge on a topic, but obviously we’re not there yet,” Yang said. She said she expects there to be some redundant community pages, and that Facebook will evaluate them later in the beta rollout.
Facebook has also built new features that enable users to drag and drop their most current interests in their profile and for visitors to see hovercards when they mouse over interests to learn more about them. Pages are public by default.
Please see the disclosure in my bio about Facebook.
Web publishers want to do anything they can to encourage users to share their content, so they often end up throwing up way too many tiny icons to connect to other social sites — Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Delicious, Google Buzz. See the pictured screenshot from ClearSpring’s AddThis, which can also include options for the long tail of sharing sites including Arto, Aero and Blurpalicious. Some people call this logo overload the NASCAR problem of the social web.
But do we really need the option of sharing on so many random services? What if those sharing widgets had a bit of intelligence about what a certain user already prefers, and just showed her the options she’s likely to use? That’s the aim of a new open platform called XAuth that is being released on Monday by Meebo, with the support of Google, Microsoft, MySpace, Yahoo, JanRain, Disqus and Gigya.
XAuth detects whether or not a user is logged into a service, or has recently done so, by looking at his browser history. Then a publisher can prominently display those preferred social networks and communication sites, in the hope that seeing their favorite logos will make users more likely to connect and share.
The tool will clearly be useful for Meebo, which offers a service to encourage sharing called the Meebo Bar that runs alongside the bottom of hundreds of sites, reaching an estimated 120 million users per month. But XAuth could be all the more useful if many web services choose to use the same code, which Meebo plans to open source and place under the care of the Open Identity Exchange or the OpenID Foundation. It’s promising that so many large web services have already signed on, if only for the inaugural press release.
However, Clearspring is absent from that list of partners, as is Facebook, which would prefer that everyone used its Facebook Connect. Facebook is expected to launch its own sharing toolbar that would compete with Meebo’s as early as this week at its f8 developer conference in San Francisco.
I think visiting a web site that knows I’m logged in elsewhere could get a little creepy. Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg said that XAuth won’t know anything about a user’s email address or login, and that it’s a way to pass data around with privacy restrictions and white-listing intact. Further, he said, XAuth could be extended in ways that make it more worthwhile for users. For instance, if you were reading an article on a newspaper’s site, it might be nice to see a feed of your social gaming activity pop up, alerting you to head back to another site to resume playing.
Meebo 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.
Groupon is the latest U.S. consumer web company to be anointed with an investment from the Russian firm Digital Sky Technologies, which gave gave Facebook and Zynga huge chunks of money last year to help them avoid having to go public by buying up employees’ shares. The collective buying site has now officially taken $135 million from DST and Battery Ventures, valuing it at more than $1 billion, Kara Swisher reports tonight with an early copy of the press release. TechCrunch had the first report on the deal last week.
Chicago-based Groupon said it will spend the money on its global expansion (it’s currently only in the U.S., though it wants to be in 100 cities by the end of 2010) as well as cashing out employees and early investors. It has now raised more than $170 million, and has previously projected revenue of $100 million for 2010. More than 4 million Groupons have been bought so far, amounting to savings of more than $150 million (provided people actually used the coupons they paid for, that is).
DST had previously given Zynga $180 million and Facebook $200 million (or possibly $300 million, according to a report that it re-upped to buy more employee shares).
Tweetarena was not one of the most popular Twitter clients — it had around 50,000 users — but developer Andrew Weekes clearly hadn’t lost interest in it. Just this month, he built a new version of Tweetarena for release the same day as the iPad launch, and it already has more than 1,500 purchases. The eBay auction, which has a starting price of $15,000 and no bids so far, includes the brand and source code for iPhone, Android, iPad and other additions, including the unreleased next version of the Tweetarena iPhone/iPod touch app.
Weekes didn’t directly explain the timing of his offloading the project, but he did say that:
Up until now Tweeterena has been a bit of a hobby, I have been putting every bit of spare time into the project. Believe it or not, I do have a day job and due to this and various other new commitments in my life I feel it is time to move this ongoing project into the hands of somebody else who will be able to put the time in to developing it further.
Interested parties have less than 24 hours left to place their bids — but at this point it’s not clear that anyone other than Twitter is buying up Twitter clients.
Could a broad set of patents around collective buying be the ammo Tippr needs to chase Groupon? That’s what CEO Martin Tobias is betting, having bought up the intellectual property generated by bubble-era Mercata from its investor Paul Allen.
Groupon — which is in the process of raising $130 million on a $1.35 billion valuation for offering online deals redeemed at local businesses, according to TechCrunch — is a runaway hit. And a hundred or so other companies in the collective buying space are duking it out to grab a share of that market. But Tippr, which just launched in February, has a special weapon up its sleeve: intellectual property.
Tippr comes out of Kashless, a local classifieds system founded by Tobias, the former CEO of biodiesel company Imperium Renewables. Around the same time last year that Kashless was finding that classifieds weren’t the best way to drive customers to local businesses, Tobias saw the rise of Groupon. He happened to know that Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who’d invested something like $90 million in the failed Groupon of the late ’90s, Mercata, still owned that company’s patents.
Mercata didn’t work for a number of reasons: Online social networking didn’t exist back then, customers were much less likely to spend money online and the company missed the IPO window before the market crash. But it did accumulate 12 patents, with two more pending, that Allen recently sold to Tobias, receiving an equity stake in Kashless/Tippr for his firm Vulcan Capital. (Kashless raised $5 million from RRE Ventures a year and a half ago.)
Tobias wouldn’t name what law firm he’s working with, but did say he plans to enforce the patents to protect Tippr. And he maintains that he’s not a patent troll — Tippr will soon expand to cities beyond Seattle, where he said it is already the third-biggest offering behind Groupon and LivingSocial.
“My personal belief is that patents are primarily a defensive weapon, not offensive,” Tobias told us. “The only reason I spent a lot of money to get the patents is to make a viable business. If all you’re doing is trying to extort people that’s not a viable business.” The other way Tobias plans to compete is by building Tippr as more of a white-label technology company and less of a brand. Tippr deals are already running as a dynamic ad unit for Seattle Magazine and the Seattle P-I, he said (pictured below).
Twitter’s Chirp conference this week was ultimately an overdue kickoff of the company’s developer community. With more than 100,000 applications created on its platform to date, it’s frankly amazing that Twitter hadn’t formalized its road map and addressed competition with developers before. Here are the excuses: Twitter is small and young. Twitter has had trouble enough scaling to meet demand and stay online. Twitter never anticipated the ways people would use and extend it. All fair. Though with $160 million in the bank you’d think the company could have been a little quicker and savvier.
Twitter CEO Evan Williams speaks at the company's Chirp conference
But I think another factor is that Twitter has been a center of attention for most of its life, with everyone from celebrities to governments to social mediaites to developers demanding its time. “They have to be diplomatic so they defaulted to silence in their diplomacy instead of listening,” said Laura Fitton, who in running the Twitter tool directory Oneforty has become a de facto spokesperson and liaison for the Twitter developer community.
That Twitter has been out of touch was obvious on the first day of Chirp, which was billed as a developer conference but content-wise was all about business and media. Fitton called the Twitter executive keynotes “spinmeistery.” “Where was the code?” asked Orian Marx, developer of Fusebox, an app he called “a TweetDeck killer.” “Those morning speeches were a little too long for me,” said Danielle Morrill, the director of marketing for Twilio, who’s working on a “Tweet-to-call” application herself. Worse, the event itself was held in a theater, with the audience in darkness — not exactly a collaborative atmosphere.
Twitter investor Chris Sacca did an admirable job in the last session of the day (video embedded below), asking tough questions of a gaggle of Twitter executives onstage and voicing developer concerns about competition and support. Though the Twitter execs may have been a bit too punchy and silly, they did finally get to the point. “The thing I learn time after time is that if people don’t have visibility the natural reaction is to think it’s nefarious,” said CEO Evan Williams. “While there is some natural tension [between a platform and its developers], I think we can communicate a lot better.”
Five days before Chirp, Twitter announced it had acquired the maker of Tweetie, an iPhone client that will bring it into direct competition with other client developers. That made people who build businesses on the Twitter platform nervous, unsettled and angry. “Having the Tweetie acquisition then may have not been the greatest headline-producing strategy,” said Twitter VP of Product Jason Goldman. “But from a communication transparency perspective it was awesome — we can talk to you much more directly.” So in a sense, Twitter was forced into honest and upfront communication by its own actions.
The company promises that it will do better in the future; for instance, platform head Ryan Sarver promised quarterly platform updates, to be available on video. Sarver, by the way, was the breakout hit of the conference, offering frank and practical information about the things developers were there to hear about. (Fittingly, he was Foursquare’s “mayor” of the Chirp Hack Day when I checked in this morning.) And already, the second, hands-on day of the conference was held in a much friendlier open space at Fort Mason. Even if the awful acoustics made attending sessions difficult, the beanbag chairs were a much better setting for actual conversations. Plus, there was a tweeting taco truck!
In the future, expect Twitter’s blanket justification for its actions to be that it’s trying to build a bigger pie for everyone. “The best thing we can do for you guys in our minds is to grow the user base. That’s going to create an order of magnitude more opportunities than exist today,” Williams said in his keynote. Sure, it’s an excuse, but it’s not just talk; the company will be giving developers half of its revenue when they participate in its grand new ad product, Sponsored Tweets.
So now that it’s all said and done, here are my practical lessons from Chirp.
Where Twitter will compete with developers:
The company will release its own Android client (Williams said he tried to have the announcement ready for the conference but couldn’t talk more about it, which sounds a lot like they’re trying to close an acquisition).
Twitter will release a full link shortener soon. “It’s absolutely stupid that a user can’t put a URL in our box,” said Williams. Users of Twitter’s own web and other apps won’t be offered a choice of which link shortener to use.
Hosting images is not in the company’s “immediate plans,” Williams said, but defined the time period as “this quarter.” So it may be coming fairly soon. Twitter does plan to make it easier for developers to manage media.
Sarver said developer tools will include places, annotations and actions from user streams. The company has also made its developer resources much better and opened up some of the technologies it’s used to scale. Sarver said Twitter won’t try to treat some developers preferentially, but it will necessarily try to learn which ones it can trust and give better indications of where it’s going to everyone. Expect to see a more structured agenda for communicating Twitter’s road map coming soon.
Will investors continue to put money into Twitter ecosystem startups?
Twitter invited super angel investor Ron Conway to open its second day, and he rallied those present with the promise that he’s still bullish on companies in the Twitter space. “In five years there will be a billion [Twitter] users, and five public companies in this sector, and one of you here will be CEO of one of them,” he said. Of course that optimistic attitude isn’t going to extend to every investor. “I’ll be honest with you: I’m not buying all the feel-good, make-love-not-war stuff,” said Mike Hirshland of Polaris Ventures, an investor in companies like Thing Labs and Automattic, on Chirp’s VC panel.
What Twitter-based opportunities remain?
Some of the ideas thrown out by Twitter executives and potential investors at Chirp include:
Building on top of Twitter’s cheap international SMS deals (Williams)
Helping publishers integrate with the @Anywhere platform (Twitter COO Dick Costolo)
Giving users good reasons to share their locations (Sarver)
Analyzing all the data thrown off by Twitter’s users, encouraging users to share more personal information like on Blippy and Swipely (David Pakman of Venrock)
High-touch business applications, agency businesses, analytics and something like Groupon for Twitter (Peter Fenton of Benchmark)
My big takeaway: Before this week, Twitter was its ecosystem’s keeper; now, it’s really a company. While it may not be a great time to be a well-funded Twitter client maker like Seesmic, the companies that are getting off the ground post-Chirp have the promise of surer footing and better guidance. Smaller startups and development shops have reason to hope that Twitter will buy them as it staffs up in a hurry in order to tackle the market, as it’s doing now. The company has made four acquisitions to date and it’s clear more are coming soon.
But to some extent, this will all just be talk until a startup that’s not named Twitter creates a big Twitter-based business.
Twitter will soon give developers access to streams of user activity on its system, and allow them to create their own annotations to send along with tweets, Twitter’s director of platform Ryan Sarver said at the company’s Chirp conference in San Francisco today.
“It’s important that we do keep agile, but as much as I can, we want to be explicit about where we’re going with these things,” Sarver said, nothing that Twitter has fostered more than 100,000 registered applications, up from 50,000 in December.
Twitter’s new location feature, Places, will give developers a structured and curated database of places from around the world. That will allow tweets to be associated with the actual location they originated from, in a way that’s more decipherable and interesting than lat-long coordinates. It’s not necessarily a direct competitor to Foursquare or Gowalla, but it serves much of the same purpose for noting your location and broadcasting your comments about it in context.
Next, a new User Stream API will give developers access to a feed of user actions on a more granular level than just tweets. The user stream includes mentions, friending and favoriting (the kind of stuff you’re used to seeing in Facebook’s news feed). The API will be available to developers to play with at Twitter’s Chirp Hack Day (which actually starts tonight).
On the concept of metadata, Sarver previewed an Annotations feature that will be launching “next quarter” that gives developers much more flexibility around the context of a tweet. The feature will allow developers to “add any arbitrary metadata to any tweet in the system.” So, just like a tweet can today be transmitted along with information about which other tweet it was in reply to, or what location it came from, or what application it was created on, now Twitter will allow developers to make up new stuff. Twitter is looking to see how developers use Annotations before it creates any sort of taxonomy for them, Sarver said.
Lastly, Twitter is launching a central developer resource site at dev.twitter.com later today. It includes such features as documentation that’s generated from code, rather than hand written (this won applause from the Chirp audience), a way to securely build and reference API calls, an official WatchMouse monitor for the Twitter service, and search across all the repositories of Twitter developer information.
Twitter is holding its first developer conference, Chirp, today in San Francisco. Co-founder Biz Stone opened with now familiar stories of how Twitter has been used for the betterment of humanity. He also (to his own chagrin, since he’s not a numbers guy) dropped a few stats about the service: 105,779,710 registered Twitter users; 300,000 signups per day; 180 million uniques/month. And 75 percent of traffic comes from outside twitter.com.
Next up, Twitter CEO Evan Williams addressed the company’s relationship with developers:
“Twitter has always been about developers,” Williams said. “Twitter is the ecosystem more than any other web services that has ever existed. You’ve helped define it, poured in your time and energy all the while putting up with our growing pains. And for that we thank you. there’s been a lot of changes lately, we’ve been getting into areas people never thought we would — making money for instance — but we’ve also been releasing more products.”
There’s a fundamental philosophy that’s not changing with Twitter. We’ve always believed in openness. we believe in an open system and the power of ideas. And that is not changing. Twitter is truly a collaboration and that is not changing.
Williams said Twitter released an API just a few months after launch, in September 2006, because he thought that was a thing you do for web apps and services, having created one at Blogger to solicit outside contributions when it was just he working on the product. But some of the company’s investors and advisors “said ‘Hell no, are you crazy?’” Williams described how the first Twitter desktop app, Twitterific, and a map visualizer, Twittervision, helped the company understand what it was. First, people’s preference for Twitterific over the web showed “Twitter is ultimately a different experience for different people,” he said. And then Twittervision was a way to show how people used Twitter to those who didn’t understand what it was.
“Ever since then there’s a been an explosion of clients, visualizers, business apps, stat apps, discovery tools. We can’t keep up, the numbers are just staggering,” Williams said. “Twitter now gets 3 billion API requests per day and is seeing 1,500 percent growth per year.” The company also handles 600 million search requests a day, he said. Twitter has grown by 1,500 percent a year for three years, he told the conference, and “to deal with that level of growth has been difficult.”
A year ago this week “there was some wacky stuff happening” at Twitter, Williams said. Ashton Kutcher was racing CNN to a million followers. Oprah did a show about Twitter and had Williams on. Those rogues from 4chan attacked, and meanwhile traffic was up 90 percent after SXSW. The company had just 30-35 employees. “It was surreal… not a normal startup experience.” Now, things have “evolved,” said Williams, and so the company — which now has a team of 175 employees — can provide developers much better guidance. “While we’ve largely been dealing with uncharted territory, we’re going to start painting out the map.”
Twitter’s fundamental tenet, Williams said, is that “The open exchange of information has a positive impact on the world. Our goal as a company is to maximize this impact, that’s what we’re about and it’s what drives everything we do.” That’s why Twitter made those deals with Google, Bing and Yahoo, though investors worried that the licensing deals would be “giving away the farm.” Williams said his team was swayed by the idea that putting the Twitter firehose in front of those engineering teams and their millions of users would “maximize value for end users.”
Next, Williams laid out the company’s four core strategic priorities: infrastructure, friction-free, relevance, revenue. He provided a progress report on infrastructure: Twitter has reduced error rates by two thirds, released tweet delivery failures by two orders of magnitude and killed bugs. It has written a tool based on BitTorrent to transfer lots of files. It took the average time from 40 minutes down to 12 seconds, Williams said.
When it comes to the goal of being friction-free, Twitter is still too hard, Williams said, noting that if you type “I don’t get” into Google, the number two thing people don’t get is Twitter. The company has a new “onboarding” team to try and help get people used to the service, and a recent new sign-up revamp increased retention by 20 percent. Improvements are based around the fact that “Twitter is different things for different people. you can build specialized experiences that make twitter relevant for different people.”
But mobile, said Williams, is “clearly where most people will use Twitter,” and it’s the best way to “take twitter to the weakest signals around the globe.” After canceling international SMS on Twitter due to rising costs a while back, carriers are now seeking out Twitter and signing deals for cheap SMS — 65 of them now. “This is something I’d encourage people to think about,” Williams told the developers. “You can use Twitter’s SMS reach, which normally takes a lot of money and it’s hard to get these deals.”
Next, Williams turned to its hot-button moves to create an “official” BlackBerry Twitter app and buy Tweetie. He said that Twitter not having these apps is a big problem. “Or else we’re just failing users, we’re failing the ecosystem because we’re not getting people engaged.” Williams’ rationale for the deal: “The best thing we can do for you guys in our minds is to grow the user base. That’s going to create an order of magnitude more opportunities than exist today.”
Today there are about 55 million new Tweets per day, and vast majority are open to the public. “We want to start building relevance into search,” Williams said, using factors like understanding the value of a link and location or “points of interest,” a new feature the company is launching today. “Our goal is to make twitter a tool for finding what people care about, not just more information,” he said. Lastly, the Twitter CEO had just a couple of words on revenue: he said it will be organic to Twitter, it will be “user beneficial” and it will be “ecosystem friendly.”
Williams ended with three takeaways, and he offered them in less than 140 characters: “Keynote takeaways: 1. Twitter is evolving. 2. the goal is to serve users. 3. There is much left to invent.”
Google CEO Eric Schmidt sat for a Q&A at the company’s Atmosphere event yesterday pitching its Apps platform to the enterprise. A couple of his remarks stuck with me today and I wanted to share them as well as a video of the session that Google has now made available to the public.
Schmidt made two specific comments about resource allocation, saying that the hardest and most pressing engineering issues facing Google today are around sharing and mobile. He was talking to the enterprise execs present but his statements were so absolute I think it’s fair to apply them more broadly.
“Companies are about sharing,” Schmidt said. “One of the new things in the last five years about the web is that it enables sharing-sensitive apps.” He continued,
I think of calendars as incredibly boring, but I’m wrong, calendars are incredibly interesting because they’re incredibly shared. So from a computer science perspective, all of a sudden we have our top engineers who want to build calendars. I’m going, what’s wrong with you guys? But in fact it’s a very interesting example. Spreadsheets are similar, the most interesting spreadsheets are highly, highly interlinked, something I didn’t know, and was not possible with the previous technology — Microsoft technology made it very difficult because they were not built in that model.
Schmidt also recommended to the executives present that “You should always put your best team on your mobile app that enables your service. The answer should always be mobile first.”
As the mobile Internet becomes central for both consumer and corporate users, the core product questions are interoperability, security and safety, Schmidt said. “What’s important is to get the mobile experience right, because mobility will ultimately be the way you provision most of your services,” he added, saying that Google considers phones, tablets and netbooks mobile experiences.
Lastly, to make good mobile, web and diskless computer (aka Chrome OS) apps, Schmidt had a platform recommendation as well: “From our perspective the single most important development has been the arrival of the HTML 5 standard.”
AOL is finally offloading ICQ, to a newly familiar name in the tech investing space, Digital Sky Technologies. It’s actually a good regional fit as ICQ is the leading instant messaging service in Russia, where DST is based. DST has agreed to pay $187.5 million, which in the grand scheme of things is not too shabby — back in another era, AOL bought ICQ for $407 million in 1998. However, in December it had been reported that DST would buy ICQ for $200-$250 million.
