AllThingsD » Social

Time Machine! Tumblr's David Karp in 2007, Age 21.

Peter Kafka — Fri, 17 May 2013 22:03:55 +0000

Thanks to Quartz’s Zach Seward for jogging my memory about this oldie and goodie: Tumblr’s David Karp in a video interview taped in 2007, when he was 21, had 75,000 users and was talking about stuff like Digg, Flickr … and Twitter.

Karp’s interviewer is Howard Lindzon, who’s now known as the guy behind StockTwits. Assuming that the interview was taped close to the time it was published, it would have meant that the two men were talking as Karp was raising his first funding round of $750,000, led by Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital.

No need to say anything else:

Syrian Electronic Army Leaves Its Mark on the Financial Times

Arik Hesseldahl — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:52:19 +0000

You can now add the Financial Times to the steadily growing list of media organizations that have been attacked by the band of digital pranksters known as the Syrian Electronic Army.

The London-based financial newspaper (and competitor to The Wall Street Journal, which, like this website, is owned by News Corp.) saw both its main website and several Twitter accounts attacked, according to a report by another British newspaper, the Telegraph.

As of 10:30 am ET, Twitter accounts belonging to the FT’s Lex column, its tech news section and a few others were all suspended.

But this attack was a little different from the more recent moves by the pro-Assad group. Lately, they’ve stuck to attacking the Twitter accounts of Western media organizations including CBS, the BBC, the Guardian and the Onion. This time, they actually attacked the main website, as well, and left headlines announcing that they had visited.

Zach Seward of Quartz.com nabbed a screenshot, which he shared on Twitter:

Syrian Electronic Army appears to have hacked the Financial Times tech blog http://t.co/M2RAVhgDP3 @fttechnews http://t.co/A3r2JVuZWm

May 17, 2013 5:03 am via webReply RetweetFavorite

@zseward

Zach Seward

How to Sell a Yahoo-Tumblr Deal: Point to Facebook-Instagram

Peter Kafka — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:10:07 +0000

It’s easy to argue against a Yahoo-Tumblr deal. Internet history is full of misguided M&A, and Yahoo has its own, very expensive chapter.

But if you want to make the “pro” case for the deal, here’s how to do it: Pretend that Yahoo is Facebook, and Tumblr is Instagram.

The Facebook/Instagram deal is just over a year old, which means it’s still pretty early to gauge it. But so far it seems to have worked perfectly.

Facebook promised that Instagram would operate autonomously after the acquisition, and from the outside it appears to have kept that promise. People who read sites like this know that the two companies are linked, but lots of other people don’t, which is a huge plus for Instagram. (See: Parents who won’t let their kids use Facebook, but are okay with Instagram. For giggles, tell them the two are owned by the same company, and watch their faces turn ashen.)

And we’ve yet to see Instagram clutter up with lots of ads — or any ads at all. Result: The app is still growing like a weed, which helps mollify critics who worry about Facebook’s inevitable slowdown.

So that sounds like a pretty good model, right? Can Yahoo do the same thing with Tumblr?

Maybe. Tumblr is a much more mature company than Instagram, with a much bigger infrastucture. Kevin Systrom had about a dozen employees when he sold his company. After keeping his staff super lean for many years, David Karp has been on a hiring spree, and Tumblr’s head count is on track to hit something like 200 this year, with its own sales staff. So it will be harder to just tuck that away in the Yahoo org chart.

The crucial difference between the two scenarios, though, has less to do with the seller than the buyer.

Facebook bought Instagram because Mark Zuckerberg wanted to remove an obstacle. If Marissa Mayer buys Tumblr, it’s because she’ll be looking for a boost.

That makes it much less likely that she’ll be able to resist leaving Tumblr alone, and letting it figure out how to sell ads. Zuckerberg can drop a billion (or so) on Instagram, leave it unmonetized for a year, and Wall Street shrugs. Hard to imagine investors reacting the same way to this one.

QOTD: And the Buyer's Remorse Lingers On

Voices — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:10:05 +0000

– Rupert Murdoch, still steamed about that whole MySpace thing, tweets a warning to Facebook

Social Media Pose New Riddle for CIA

Anton Troianovski and Siobhan Gorman — Fri, 17 May 2013 12:00:35 +0000

Effective spycraft has long called for cover — a job, family or routine that would keep a government agent from drawing undue attention. Now, that calculation extends to spies’ use of social media.

Only in the past few years has the Central Intelligence Agency issued standardized guidelines on how to use social media, according to one former intelligence official. The line these guidelines draw appears to be thin: Revealing too much on Facebook and Twitter risks tipping too much to the other side. But given that social media use is becoming ubiquitous, revealing too little could also arouse suspicion.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Kids These Days

Voices — Fri, 17 May 2013 07:01:22 +0000

– Andrew Mason, in a personal blog post about what he’s been up to

Will Yahoo Try to Get Its "Cool Again" by Doing a Deal for Tumblr?

Peter Kafka and Kara Swisher — Thu, 16 May 2013 23:35:32 +0000

Earlier this week, Yahoo CFO Ken Goldman spoke at JP Morgan’s Global Technology conference and underscored the need for the aging Silicon Valley Internet giant to attract more users from the coveted 18-to-24-years-old age bracket. Along with more marketing, he explicitly said Yahoo needed to be “cool again.”

“One of our challenges is we have had an aging demographic,” said Goldman at the Boston event. “Part of it is going to be just visibility again in making ourselves cool, which we got away from for a couple of years.”

According to sources close to the situation, that could mean a strategic alliance and investment in or outright buy of perhaps the coolest Internet company of late: Tumblr.

Sources said the talks were serious, but any kind of deal — of course — could come to naught.

But it’s not the first time Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has been interested in the New York-based hipster blogging service. As an executive at Google, she had closely watched its fast growth, along with that of Foursquare. Since she took over at Yahoo, several sources said that she has met with its top execs, including founder and CEO David Karp.

But sources said that interest has gotten stronger more recently, coming at the same time as Tumblr has been stepping up its efforts to raise a large funding round that could value the New York company at $1 billion. In a series of fundings since 2007, Tumblr has raised $125 million so far, at a reported valuation of $800 million.

In the latest round, one source close to the situation said Tumblr was considering “strategic” investments, which would presumably be of the kind that Yahoo had tried and failed to do recently with France’s Dailymotion video service. Since then, Mayer and her team have looked at the ongoing deal to purchase Hulu that has many possible other bidders.

Tumblr is different from Dailymotion or Hulu, of course, in that it focuses heavily on user-generated content, largely text and photos, although there is an increasing use of video on the site.

But this puts it directly in Yahoo’s main wheelhouse, especially recent efforts to undergird its strong set of existing media offerings to appeal to a different audience and also get into the social space via consumer-based software solutions that are both elegant and easy to use.

“If you could pick a company that fits in with what Marissa Mayer has demonstrated in her career — aesthetics software technology and fast-growing — you could not land on a better choice,” said another source.

That said, Yahoo has been sticking to smaller acquisitions under Mayer’s regime, spending very little on a clutch of small mobile startups to up its game in the important sector. And at the same investment conference, Goldman also said additional M&A would continue to be smaller for Yahoo.

Still, any kind of deal with Tumblr could certainly bring Yahoo a big, young audience. Its worldwide traffic was at 117 million visitors in April, according to comScore. On its home page, Tumblr claims it has 107.8 million blogs and 50.6 billion posts. U.S. desktop traffic to Tumblr was 37 million in April, close to LinkedIn and Twitter, although Twitter obviously has much more via mobile.

But figuring out how to make money from that audience is a task that the company has only recently started to tackle.

Like other recent Web startups that have seen rocket ship growth — see: Twitter, Facebook — Tumblr resisted advertising for its formative years, and its user base seems particularly unwilling to accept standard banner ads. In addition, many industry observers think that Tumblr’s pages are packed with porn and/or other questionable content that would scare off advertisers.

But within the last year or so, Tumblr has started selling modestly sized “native ads” promoting brands’ Tumblr pages, on users’ “dashboards.” That’s the equivalent of running ads in a Facebook user’s News Feed or a Twitter user’s main feed.

Initial signs are promising. Tumblr told Forbes that it generated $13 million in revenue last year, and suggested it could do as much as $100 million this year; people close to the company say its momentum has continued this year.

In addition to figuring out its top-line business, Tumblr and its backers have also been spending a long time trying to figure out a managment structure. Even Karp’s strongest backers say that the 26-year-old needs help running the company, and for months they have been looking for a “Sheryl Sandberg”-style COO candidate.

“David is very charming, and clearly very very bright, and understands the product,” said an executive who talked to Tumblr about the role. But, “he’s incredibly confrontation averse, and there’s almost a ‘Game of Thrones’ palace feeling to the management team.”

Possibility of death by wildfire aside, sources said that the search has yielded two or three candidates that Tumblr is considering. It is a key hire since the company needs to build out an extensive infrastructure quickly, given its sharp consumer growth, including fielding a more robust advertising team. Tumblr hired an experienced exec, Lee Brown, from Groupon last fall, who has been busy hiring more sales execs. Interesting aside: Brown was a longtime Yahoo ad exec.

But building out the needed structure at the company is a long slog, and Tumblr might be seeking more help one way or another.

Yahoo declined comment and Tumblr has not gotten back to us as yet.

The Facebook IPO, One Year Later

Evelyn M. Rusli — Thu, 16 May 2013 23:30:58 +0000

Two weeks ago, new posters began appearing at the headquarters of Facebook Inc. The posters proclaimed: “Advertisers are users too*.” At the bottom of the page, in smaller font, was the phrase “*no srsly,” Internet shorthand for “no seriously.”

On the eve of Facebook’s IPO anniversary Saturday, how the Menlo Park, Calif., company tackles revenue is one of the biggest challenges in its short life as a public company. After eight years of focusing on user growth, Facebook has pushed revenue up its priority list and restructured its business so that many of its best minds are now thinking about driving sales.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Jelly, Biz Stone's Startup, Raises a Round (With a Little Help From Friends)

Mike Isaac — Thu, 16 May 2013 18:39:19 +0000

Jelly, the stealthy startup founded by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, announced Thursday that the company just closed its Series A round of venture capital. The round was led by Spark Capital; Bijan Sabet — an early Twitter investor — will join Jelly’s board. Other noteworthy investors include Jack Dorsey, U2’s Bono, Reid Hoffman, Steven Johnson, Evan Williams and Jason Goldman, Roya Mahboob, Greg Yaitanes and former vice president Al Gore.

Support for Facebook, Twitter and Video Streaming Coming to Google Glass, With New Tools on the Way

Ina Fried — Thu, 16 May 2013 17:24:29 +0000

Facebook and Twitter are among a new array of partners that announced on Thursday that they have built or are building apps for Glass, Google’s high-tech eyewear.

Facebook is building an app that allows photos taken on the glasses to be shared directly to the social network. Twitter is doing the same, as well as allowing access to send and receive tweets.

“In addition to sharing photos, you can also keep up with the people you follow on Twitter through notifications — for mentions, DMs and Tweets from users for whom you’ve turned on notifications,” Twitter said in a blog post. “As always, you can reply to, retweet or favorite these Tweets.”

Other partners include Evernote, CNN and Tumblr.

Google also said on Thursday that it is preparing a broader set of tools for developers to write software for Glass.

So far, Google has released a relatively limited programming interface, known as the Mirror API. During a technical session on Thursday, though, Google said it is working on a broader Glass Development Kit.

“We’re actively building it,” said developer advocate Timothy Jordan, speaking to a crowd of developers that filled the main room and an overflow room, and even spilled into beanbag chairs in an impromptu viewing area in the Moscone West lobby.

The developer kit is essentially similar to developing for Android, Jordan said, with some specifics tailored to the Glass hardware.

As for whether there is going to be an app store for Glass, Jordan noted that things are still in the early developer preview phase, but said, “We’re definitely going to have something.”

Google also announced Thursday that it will start supporting video streaming to Glass. Previously, Google had only talked about support for short video clips to be shown on the eyewear.

With New Twitter Partnership, Yahoo Folds Tweets Into Its News Stream

Mike Isaac — Thu, 16 May 2013 17:16:03 +0000

Yahoo announced on Thursday a new partnership between the companies that will bring select tweets from Twitter directly into the Yahoo News stream.

For now, it seems a fairly basic integration of Twitter accounts and actual tweets into Yahoo’s flowing news-content stream; think of it as seeing some select Twitter items placed in between the curated Yahoo News stories.

“Tweets have become an important information source for many of our users,” Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said in a company blog post. “From music to sports, news to entertainment, we’re committed to delivering our users the very best of the web, and our continued partnership with Twitter is an exciting leap forward in our endeavors.”

That makes sense, considering how Twitter has been treated in recent times by the news media itself. Think of recent major media events like the Boston Marathon bombings and subsequent manhunt: News actually broke on Twitter before news organizations were able to get to the scene and cover what was going on, and many outlets — including CNN and other live broadcast networks — were directing users to tweets to tell them what was going on.

Of course, this gets into an entire debate on the accuracy and role of social media in ongoing news coverage, but we’ll sidestep that one for now.

It’s also a win for Twitter, which basically gets a bunch of free distribution of its tweets on Yahoo’s main news page. Yahoo News still has a massive audience. If folks who aren’t already using Twitter return to Yahoo’s news stream daily and continue to see tweets and Twitter accounts, that’s easy potential for converting new users over to the social platform.

As far as Yahoo’s benefit, you might want to note how many times Marissa Mayer said that tweets will be “personalized” in that particular blog post. “Personalization” has been Yahoo’s huge pitch to court users into making Yahoo their destination site for the Web, including signing them up for Yahoo profiles. The more Yahoo can tout a personalized experience tailored to what the user wants, the better that pitch becomes over time.

It’s not clear right now if having a signed-in Yahoo profile connected to your Twitter account will affect what tweets will appear in that news feed, but I’d imagine if Mayer wants to claim true personalization, that would be a good way to do it.

It’s also not clear if Yahoo News editors are curating the tweets themselves, or if they’ll have their news algorithms do the work (we’ve asked Yahoo for clarification). Update 1:21 p.m. PST: Here we go — a Yahoo spokesperson provides me with clarification on this: “The initial list of content sources was editorially curated for relevance and quality, but the Tweets shown on the homepage have been algorithmically selected. The pool of eligible Tweets is further filtered to minimize spam and undesirable content.”

A question: Does this partnership mean we could see tweets appear inside of Yahoo’s search results someday?

No telling exactly, but Yahoo certainly leaves the door open: “We do not currently display Tweets in our search results, but we deeply value our partnership with Twitter and are always looking into ways we can integrate Twitter into our products,” a Yahoo spokesperson told AllThingsD.

Expect to see the tweets roll out in the Yahoo News feed on the desktop and mobile Web in the coming days.

As Google+ Pushes Hard Into Photos, the Race Is On to Own Your Memories

Mike Isaac — Thu, 16 May 2013 16:49:19 +0000

Our memories are important. We take millions of photos every single day. We post to our Facebook Timeline, pin to Pinterest boards. Clearly, we care about the past. And our friends in Silicon Valley would love to take care of all of it for us.

Thanks to app tweaks and software updates, it’s easier than ever for you to hand your photographic history over to the company of your choice.

Consider this: Take a photo using your iPhone, and Apple can instantly upload your snapshot to your iCloud account, where it’s accessible via any of your connected Apple devices. Google can do that, too, with Android phones and your Google+ account. There’s Microsoft and SkyDrive integration, Facebook and album image uploading. Not to mention others like Amazon Cloud Drive and Dropbox.

Google doesn’t want to be left behind, as evidenced by the company’s latest robust photo offering. The Google+ team dropped a massive update to its photo-editing capabilities at its I/O developer conference on Wednesday, bringing a series of professional-grade photo-editing tools to anyone who uses Google+.

The advantage here, Google would say, is that while everyone may offer free online photo storage in some capacity, Google is the one with the consumer editing suite. But you don’t have to be an expert-level Photoshop user to work with Google’s new tools. Auto-enhance, auto-highlight and even “auto-awesome” leverage the power of Google’s algorithms to choose the best pictures out of the many you’ve uploaded, and automatically make them look better than they did before.

The point is simple: The more you’ve invested yourself in a service — be it by filling out and continuously updating your profile, or through uploading photo after photo to its cloud-based storage — the less likely you are to fall away from using it. If all of your memories are stuck inside of, say, Facebook, you’ve got an online repository, an album to point others to in the future or to re-download as you see necessary. And, perhaps because of the emotional nature of the material, you’re less likely to even want to move it in the first place.

It’s also the type of media where platforms see some of their highest engagement from users. Facebook, I’ve been told, sees far and away more activity and engagement from users focused on photos in the stream than they do from text-based status updates. Google+, too, sees high engagement from in-stream pictures.

Users aside, big data companies like Google and Facebook gain reams of information from the photos you’ve sent in. Each file is another piece of location metadata to be registered, another image to identify and tag using facial-recognition tech, another way of recognizing the people and places you interact with most in your daily life.

So now, when all companies are offering similar uploading options and essentially unlimited free online storage, it’s up to competitors to differentiate to try and stand out.

That’s easier said than done. Facebook obviously has its billion-strong network (not to mention the rapidly growing Instagram), where many of your friends already likely have a presence. Apple touts accessibility and safety via only a certain set of devices. And Google+, while its usage and engagement stats are constantly a point of contention, will at least offer a simple, powerful photo tool set that gives any amateur photographer the ability to make their vacation pictures look a whole lot better.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter what winds up luring you to one service over another. What matters is how they keep you coming back to upload more of your photos, more of your memories. Perhaps Google’s new editing-feature suite will give it the edge it needs to stay in the game.

Fueled by Facebook Exchange, Triggit Raises Another $6 Million, This Time Via Debt

Peter Kafka — Thu, 16 May 2013 14:16:54 +0000

Ad tech startup Triggit, which raised $7.4 million last fall after Facebook helped its business skyrocket, has raised another $6 million, this time via a debt deal with North Atlantic Capital. Triggit, which has now raised $20 million over the past few years, is concentrating on connecting clients with Facebook’s Exchange, and on working with international ad buyers in particular.

King Touts Latest Gaming Numbers: 70 Million Daily Players, 21 Billion Games Played Per Month

Eric Johnson — Thu, 16 May 2013 13:30:18 +0000

On the back of its hit Facebook/mobile game Candy Crush Saga, casual game studio King said in a press release that it has crossed the 70 million mark in daily active players across all platforms. That puts it within striking distance of Zynga’s all-time quarterly peak of 72 million daily active users (achieved in Q2 2012), and well beyond that competitor’s latest quarterly total of 52 million DAU, as reported last month. The company also said that its cross-platform games are now being played more than 21 billion times per month.

With Revamped Hangouts, Google Aims to Unify Messaging

Mike Isaac — Wed, 15 May 2013 17:41:25 +0000

Not one to be left behind in the messaging space, Google on Wednesday unveiled its revamped take on Hangouts, cobbling together a number of the company’s communication tools into one unified system.

Pretty straightforward stuff: You’re able to chat with friends through five different types of Google properties — Gmail, Google+, iOS and Android devices, and the Chrome browser.

Much like Facebook, WhatsApp, Path and the many, many other messaging services available today, you’re able to send cutesy emoji smiley-face icons and photos, save your entire chat history between devices based on one (or more) people, and make video calls.

It’s a logical progression for Google — whose Gmail and Chrome properties have massive reach around the world — and, frankly, it should have happened some time ago. Since Facebook revamped Messages three years ago, the social giant has threaded email, chat and texting into one unified history, and has recently added emojis, as well.

It would have been interesting to see how WhatsApp could have been integrated if Google had bought the massive messaging service, which Google tried to do months ago. Alas, Google thinks it has reach enough across its browser and email marketshare, competing messaging app or not.

Expect the new Hangouts system to roll out soon.

Google+ Gets a Bit More Pinteresting

Mike Isaac — Wed, 15 May 2013 17:40:01 +0000

Google introduced yet another design revamp for its Google+ social product at its I/O developer conference on Wednesday, the second visual overhaul for the service in about two years.

And guess what? Like many other startup visual layouts today, it’s beginning to look a lot like Pinterest.

Three-column design spreads the content — photos, video, etc. — across the whole screen instead of relegating it to the single column Google+ uses today. Something cool: Photos and video are dynamic, sometimes spreading out over the entire column view.

Like Instagram and Twitter, of course, Google+ wants to co-opt hashtags into its service more deeply — but with a slightly different take on them. Google can scan one of your entries — text or photo — and impressively add a few hashtags it thinks relevant to your post (delete-able, obviously). Click the hashtag, and you can go down the rabbit hole of conversation based on that given hashtag.

So it’s pretty! Now to see how many people actually want to use it.

Talking Mobile With Two of Facebook's Key Chat Heads (Full Dive Video)

Ina Fried — Wed, 15 May 2013 14:00:27 +0000

Facebook Home has come under attack both for not doing enough and for taking over too much of an Android phone.

But the folks behind Facebook’s mobile project say that, like many engineering efforts at the company, the goal was to get out a product that did a set of features, and then tweak things from there.

Speaking at the recent D: Dive Into Mobile conference, Facebook’s Mike Schroepfer and Cory Ondrejka talked about how Home came to be, and also hinted that the software could soon span areas beyond the home screen and messaging, with photos and dialing among the areas of interest.

Facebook also used the appearance to announce the arrival of the Chat Heads feature for the iPhone.

In the wake of the challenges that Facebook Home has faced, it’s worth taking another look at where Facebook’s top executives say they plan to take the product from here.

[ See post to watch video ]

Google Doubles Down on Music Subscriptions, Which Means Google Isn't Serious About Music Subscriptions

Peter Kafka — Wed, 15 May 2013 03:55:20 +0000

Yes, Google plans to launch a subscription music service this week, via its Google Play store.

And, yes, Google still plans to launch a separate subscription music service later this year, via its YouTube site.

Make sense? Of course not.

It makes lots of sense for both YouTube and Play, which was built for Google’s Android devices, to sell music subscriptions.

YouTube is the world’s biggest free music service, which could make it a fantastic funnel for a Spotify-like paid offering, which can also help solve some problems with the music labels.

And if you’re going to have the world’s dominant mobile platform, then you ought to be the one selling music subscriptions that work on it, because that could help your customers stick to that platform. No sense in handing that feature over to Spotify, which works fine on iPhones and Kindles, too.

And something that knitted Android and YouTube together — combining a mix of free, paid, mobile, audio and video — could be great.

But that’s not what we’re going to see this week.

Music folks I talked to today expect the Google Play version to be paid-only — no free teaser tier, like Spotify has — and without any features that will set it apart from rivals.

And when YouTube launches its service — as best as I can tell, talks with the Big Three labels are all but completed — that service will likely run parallel to, but not connected with, the Play version. Which means none of the free music that people can get on YouTube will help sell Play subscriptions.

This set-up supposedly stems from former Android boss Andy Rubin’s insistence on controlling his own fiefdom (“Andy and [YouTube head] Salar Kamangar couldn’t be in the same room together,” said a music executive who has worked with both of them). But now we’re in the Sundar Pichai era, and he said he’s all about peace and love.

I’ve heard people in and outside of Google suggest that at some point down the line the two services could be knitted together. After all, just because something gets announced at Google I/O doesn’t mean it will show up. And getting something out there before it’s fully baked is standard operating procedure for Google.

But music subscriptions are an old idea that still really haven’t caught on in a big way. Spotify has six million paying customers worldwide, but its backers concede that it’s still a long way from mainstream. And none of its competitors are even close to those numbers.

If Google really wanted to make subscriptions work, instead of simply offering them as a feature most people won’t use — like the music store it opened up in 2011 — it ought to take the time to get this one right the first time.

Netflix Still Eats a Third of the Web Every Night; Amazon, HBO and Hulu Trail Behind

Peter Kafka — Tue, 14 May 2013 11:00:00 +0000

For the last three years, Netflix has accounted for a third of the Internet traffic zipping into North American homes every night.

But Web video competitors like Amazon, HBO and Hulu all say they’re seeing significant growth. So is anyone cutting into Netflix’s lead?

Not really, said Sandvine, the broadband service company that tracks Internet usage.

A Sandvine report out this morning pegs Netflix’s share of prime-time “downstream” traffic delivered over “fixed networks” — that is, wires and pipes — at 32.3 percent. That’s just a hair down from the 33 percent estimate it provided last November.

Meanwhile, Sandvine said Amazon and HBO have seen their share of traffic hold steady, as well. Sandvine said Amazon dropped from 1.75 percent to 1.31 percent, and that HBO dropped from 0.5 percent to 0.34 percent. But that’s not a lot of movement either way.

The one service that did leap a bit is Hulu, which is up from 1.1 percent to 2.41 percent.*

Bear in mind that these numbers do include data transmitted from a home network, via Wi-Fi, to iPads, iPhones, Android tablets, etc. And that Sandvine said this kind of “home roaming” accounts for a whopping 20 percent of traffic now, up from 9 percent a year ago.

But Sandvine also tracks streaming traffic to mobile devices over wireless networks. And here it said that Netflix has made a move from 2.2 percent of downstream traffic to 4 percent in the last 12 months. YouTube, though, is still dominant: If you’re on the go, and you’re watching a moving image, there’s a very good chance you’re seeing something hosted by the world’s biggest video site.

So what does any of that mean? Short answer: Netflix is streaming more video than ever — it added at least two million American users between measurements, and likely many more — but so are its competitors. So its lead is staying more or less the same. Sandvine said the average Internet household uses about 18 gigabytes of broadband a month — up from 10GB a year ago.

Still here? If so, you’ve probably read Ashlee Vance’s excellent Bloomberg Businessweek piece on the engineering that lets Netflix move all those bits into your house. If not, you should definitely read it now.

* Sandvine researcher Dan Deeth notes that the numbers his company provided last fall were collected in the first two weeks of September, which means that Hulu wouldn’t have had access to a batch of new TV shows from its broadcaster partner/owners. The numbers in today’s report were collected in the first two weeks of March, which means Hulu would benefit from new programming that ran during February sweeps; Netflix would have also benefited from any surge in “House of Cards” viewers.

Peer Car Startups Pair Up: RelayRides Acquires Wheelz

Liz Gannes — Tue, 14 May 2013 07:00:23 +0000

RelayRides is acquiring Wheelz, a direct competitor in the peer-to-peer car rental space.

Wheelz had raised more than $15 million from investors including Zipcar, while RelayRides has raised more than $13 million from investors including General Motors Ventures.

However, RelayRides has a car-sharing user base that is “several times larger” than Wheelz’s membership, said RelayRides CEO Andre Haddad.

The appeal of the acquisition was Wheelz’s hardware technology, Haddad said, which integrates into participating owners’ cars to allow renters to access them from a smartphone app.

RelayRides had previously tried to integrate similar technology that was originally for fleet managers with cars that are constantly being borrowed, and it had the side effect of running car batteries down while not in use. Needless to say, RelayRides car owners didn’t like that much.

The Wheelz “DriveBox” doesn’t have that problem, Haddad said. Incorporating DriveBox into RelayRides will help regular participants avoid the hassle of in-person key exchanges, which are the current alternative.

Plus, Wheelz had built its own distinct user base, starting at college campuses and extending to California cities, which will be incorporated into RelayRides.

Haddad said 10 of the 20 Wheelz employees will join RelayRides in San Francisco, primarily those with hardware and mobile app experience. One of those departing will be Wheelz co-founder and CEO Jeff Miller.

Explaining the difference between the two companies, Haddad said, “Their expertise was very automotive, and they were not as much at ease with building online consumer products.”

One interesting aspect of RelayRides is that it has moved much more into daily and weekly rentals than hourly rentals. That means it perhaps competes more with mainstream car rental companies than the Zipcars of the world. Hourly rentals are now down to 10 percent of revenue.

Haddad, who would not quantify nearly any aspect of the deal or of his business with exact numbers, said that RelayRides’ revenue was up 500 percent year over year.

Twitter Acquires Data Mining Startup Lucky Sort

Mike Isaac — Mon, 13 May 2013 20:49:43 +0000

Twitter announced on Monday it acquired Lucky Sort, a startup focused on making “huge document sets easier to analyze, summarize and visualize.” Three team members from the startup will join Twitter’s revenue engineering department in San Francisco, and the company will slowly transition users off of its system before Twitter shutters the startup’s existing products.

Will Google Deliver on Its Nexus Q Promise? Not at This Year's I/O.

Mike Isaac — Mon, 13 May 2013 15:08:05 +0000

Nearly one year ago, at its I/O developer conference, Google unveiled its Android-powered Nexus Q media player product to much fanfare. Little more than a month after the big reveal, Google suspended the launch of the Q indefinitely.

So, will Google’s I/O conference — set to kick off this Wednesday — bring news of the Nexus Q’s fate?

No, it won’t. Google won’t have any news on the Nexus Q this week, according to sources familiar with the matter. Google didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The Q’s notable absence over the past year is almost as big a deal as its initial unveiling. For Google, the Nexus Q was less a new product than it was a definitive statement; essentially, the search giant was saying that with the fully in-house-designed Q, Google, too, could create beautiful products, just like its greatest competitor, Apple, whose iPhones, iPads and computing devices are fetishized by technologists and design fanatics the world over.

What’s more, the Q was to be manufactured inside the U.S., a stark departure from so many consumer electronics companies whose devices are put together overseas in places such as South America and Asia. And the timing of the initial announcement couldn’t have been better for Google: As Apple was facing harsh criticism for working conditions and wages in overseas operations with partner manufacturing group Foxconn, Google reaped the public relations benefits of claiming to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. of A.

The Q was indeed attractive and well built, a matte-black sphere slightly smaller than a bowling ball, encircled in a thin strip of LEDs which alternated in color when interacting with other Android devices. It was sleek, stylish, an item that any design devotee would feel comfortable situating in the middle of their living room.

Aside from looking pretty, the Q didn’t do quite enough to warrant the hefty $300 price tag. The Nexus Q was for all intents and purposes a direct gateway to Google Play, the company’s Web-based media store which sells MP3s and videos to consumers. Link the Q up to your Wi-Fi network and it would be able to tap into a user’s online repository of Google-stored content. Users could control the Q with their Android smartphones and tablets and, ideally, hold listening “parties,” swapping songs in and out of the “queue” of tracks to be played.

However novel, the Nexus Q paled in comparison to devices from competitors like Microsoft, whose massively popular Xbox is capable of delivering all sorts of downloadable content like games, video and music. Apple, too, offers the Apple TV at a modestly priced $100, and is capable of delivering video and music from its iTunes online media store, as well.

As a result of a wave of immediate criticism, Google suspended the Q’s fate indefinitely, citing “initial feedback from users that they want Nexus Q to do even more than it does today,” according to the company’s statement last July. Google said at the time that it was “postponing” the consumer launch rather than halting product development completely, in order to “work on making it even better.”

Indeed, Google will have to return with a strong product to compete in the battle for consumers’ living rooms, an assault waged across all fronts from the world’s biggest American technology companies. Two years ago, Google unveiled Android @Home, the company’s plan to extend Android-based devices into products like in-home lighting fixtures, signaling the company’s grand ambitions to bring Android out of its traditional mobile device roots.

While we’ve seen little progress in the way of news from Google’s @Home efforts since, Microsoft and Apple continue to push for greater market share with their device and content offerings. Even Amazon is reported to be working on its own set-top box, in order to stream its content directly into the homes of consumers.

So, at this week’s I/O, at least, we won’t be hearing about Google’s Nexus Q plans. But there’s always next year.

Google+ Brings Story Suggestions to Mobile Web Publishers

Mike Isaac — Mon, 13 May 2013 13:30:36 +0000

Google announced Monday that publishers hooked into Google+ can use the social network to offer customized story recommendations via the mobile Web. The new product suggests stories to readers based on what’s relevant on a publisher’s site, or if a user is signed in to their Google account, a story on the site that’s currently popular on Google+. The idea, Google said, is to surface the most relevant content for users, while recirculating more traffic for publishers.

Five Startups for $16 Million: Yahoo's Mayer Is Buying Up Most Mobile App Companies on the Cheap

Kara Swisher — Mon, 13 May 2013 13:16:35 +0000

Because I get bored on Sunday nights, I opened up Yahoo’s recent regulatory filings for some light reading and, as usual, found some tasty information that the company had kindly dropped in for my erudition, but declined to call my attention to.

Namely, that the Silicon Valley Internet giant is paying not so very much for its mobile acquisitions, according to several documents the company has filed.

In fact, Yahoo’s average price paid for each of five of the 10 startups it has purchased since last fall is a tiny $3.2 million in cash.

For example, here’s last week’s 10-Q referring to three of CEO Marissa Mayer’s first acquisitions — content curation app Snip.it, which Yahoo bought in January (funding amount unknown, but the $10 million acquisition price reported by some sites is clearly wrong, as you will see from the filing); recommendation app Alike (funding amount unknown), which was on February’s menu; and recommendation app Jybe (funding amount unknown), which the company picked up in mid-March:

Going back further, Yahoo’s purchase of recommendation app Stamped last October (it had $3 million in funding) and video-chat app OnTheAir ($880,000 in funding) in December were also on the cheap — a bargain at $6 million total — according to its 10-K filed a few months ago:

It will be interesting to see what Yahoo reveals as to the price, and how it will account for the late March acquisition of Britain’s news reader Summly, which AllThingsD reported was a loftier $30 million.

The Summly deal did not appear to have closed by the end of the quarter, so no purchase information has been released, although it will be soon enough, along with that of the more recent string of mobile buys by Yahoo: To-do app Astrid, social polling app GoPollGo, travel rewards app MileWise and mobile gaming studio Loki.

For those four tiny companies, which were doubtlessly also bought for very little, Yahoo did tout what it’s really after in a festive tweet on Friday.

Warm entrepreneurial bodies:

SoundCloud Starts Pushing Its Own Native Ads Out of a New York Outpost

Peter Kafka — Mon, 13 May 2013 13:00:00 +0000

There is an increasingly long list of digital outlets pushing their own version of “native advertising” — ads that want to convince people that they’re just like “real” content.

Now add another one to the list: SoundCloud, the digital audio platform, is trying to court brands with its own specialized ad unit. This one lets a marketer stick what amounts to a moving billboard behind the startup’s signature “waveform” audio units.

Here’s what one of those looks like, from Blue Bottle Coffee:

SoundCloud officially rolled these out in March, but the concept is so new that CEO Alex Ljung said the company hasn’t figured what to charge for it, or how the mechanics will work. That’s one of the reasons he has hired Dan Gerber, a sales vet from Pandora, to open up a New York office next month; SoundCloud started out in Berlin and also has an operation in San Francisco.

“There’s a lot of interest from other brands that want this, and we’re taking it out step by step. We want to build this out,” Ljung said.

Up until now, SoundCloud has only made money with a “freemium” model, where most of its users pay nothing to upload and play audio files, and a small minority pay a monthly fee for extra features.

But just like lots of other Web services that started out ignoring ads, SoundCloud figures its future will involve them, after all. See: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc. SoundCloud has raised more than $60 million in the last few years, so it’s not surprising to see them start playing with ads themselves.

One of the challenges for all these platforms is that every one of them requires advertisers to experiment with a new format, which reduces the chance that any of them will truly scale. (See Felix Salmon’s excellent BuzzFeed analysis for more on this.)

Ljung argues that his audio files reach an audience of 200 million people a month (SoundCloud used to provide “registered user” numbers, which told you how many people could conceivably upload an audio file, it but doesn’t anymore), so presumably that will entice some brands.

On the other hand, audio advertising on the Web is still in its embryonic stage, as a Pandora vet like Gerber knows very well.