Yes, it’s possible to stay on top of the news entirely from within Twitter and Facebook … but it takes work.

Following the right number of people (so as not to get overwhelmed) posting about a broad variety of topics (so as not to leave oneself ignorant) is an inexact and tedious science.

And call me cynical if you must, but I don’t trust my real-life friends to keep me informed, either: Absent the professional news organizations I follow there, my Facebook news feed would be largely pets, music videos and distressed chatter about how winter is, evidently, cold in some places.

All of this is a roundabout way of making the case for NewsWhip, a Dublin-based startup trying to beat Twitter and Facebook at their own social-news capabilities.

NewsWhip claims its site automatically pulls in and ranks the best trending stories of the moment from Twitter and Facebook, based on aggregated and weighted data of what the world is tweeting, sharing, liking and commenting on. The faster a recent story is spreading online, the higher it moves in the rankings.

CEO Paul Quigley said that speed is his “fundamental metric.”

“If a story has 10,000 shares and is 12 hours old, it won’t necessarily be a big deal,” he said. “We only care about how many shares it got in the last one to two hours, or even 30 minutes.”

Users of the free site or mobile app are greeted with a single column of stories from around the Web, which can be filtered by topic or location. A sister site for news professionals, Spike, lets paying subscribers filter even further by time intervals (“published in the last hour,” “published in the last three hours,” and so on).

Quigley’s pitch is that NewsWhip and Spike are better at surfacing trending news topics than Twitter and Facebook because the filter bubbles created by whom we follow “can cause us to become isolated from alternative ideologies to our own.”

But does it work? This isn’t a review, but I will say the algorithm would need some work before I could make NewsWhip my first stop for news. Unsurprisingly, the stories that gain the most speed and, consequently, the most prominent placement on NewsWhip are very “social-friendly.”

So you’ll see a mix of stories that provoke outrage sharing top billing with pop-culture watercooler fodder in the default “Worldwide” section, and not so much “real” worldwide news of the same moment, which usually makes it to the top of that other little aggregator, Google News.

And within certain topics, the absence of human editors is sorely noticed: I came to the technology section yesterday afternoon expecting something similar to the homepage of (human-edited) Techmeme, with stories about Microsoft’s Q2 or the rocky launch of Twitter’s video app, Vine.

No such luck. Instead, one of the top articles in tech was “GRAPHIC: Girl Puts Apparently Bloody Tampon Where It Should Never Go.” Thanks, but no thanks, Huffington Post.

(I’ll leave the inevitable hand-wringing about what the popularity of these articles says about society, or whatever, to the commenters.)

Still, NewsWhip has potential amid a crowded field of curators and aggregators, and even in the short term it could be a decent alternative news source for, as one example, the majority of American adults who have never seen news on Twitter or Facebook. It’s a good surface glance at the zeitgeist, and for some casual newsreaders, that’s enough.

Hubert Burda Media/DLD Yahoo COO Henrique De Castro, right, in conversation at the DLD Munich conference

Yahoo’s problem: It’s a king of the portal age of the Web, in a time where we’re shifting away from reliance on the portal as we know it. And the big question for those long involved with Yahoo is just how it plans to deal with that major shift.

We haven’t heard many specifics from Yahoo, under the new Marissa Mayer regime, to date. But at the DLD conference in Munich, Germany, on Monday, newly dubbed COO Henrique De Castro gave the tiniest bit of insight into his vision of the portal to come.

“The desktop portal needs to transform itself,” De Castro said. “The personalization is not there, the tech is not there, and generalist portals are losing traffic.”

He wouldn’t talk specifics about Yahoo, unfortunately, citing that he’s only been in the job for two months. (Weak, I know.) But it’s obvious that Yahoo — along with other titans of the portal age like MSN and AOL — is undergoing this “waning portal power” problem.

All this dodging of specifics is frustrating for the the big media ad companies involved with Yahoo, who all want to know just how Yahoo plans to turn around its legacy content destination site — which, though still a powerhouse, is losing steam — into something competitive with today’s market.

It’s especially relevant considering some of Yahoo’s most recent stats; according to private ComScore data obtained by Kara Swisher, Yahoo’s Homepage, Mail and Search products all saw significant year-on-year declines in the remaining months of 2012.

“The winners,” according to De Castro, “are the ones who will aggregate premium quality content at scale, and distribute it in a personalized way.”

Okay then. Translation? None from Henrique, but here’s what I’m imagining. Yahoo’s homepage does a decent enough job of combining aggregated content from outside Web sites, and mixing it with Yahoo-produced media. I’d imagine the next iterations of Yahoo’s main properties do a far better job of personalization — through individual user profile upgrades, incorporation of more social content into users’ media diet and the like.

Update 3 pm CET: As my pal Jason Del Rey reminded me on Twitter, Yahoo has been working on getting personalization right since before the Mayer era at Yahoo — specifically through efforts under VP of Search and Personalization Mike Kerns, who leads the charge with Yahoo’s Social Bar.

Though De Castro admits, in a general, non-Yahoo-specific way, that the technology for key personalization isn’t there yet for these portal sites. Perhaps that’s where Marissa Mayer’s appetite for outside acquisitions comes into play?

And before a company can even think of tackling mobile — which, mind you, is one of Yahoo’s massive weaknesses that yields relatively no monetized fruit compared to the rest of the company’s properties — you first need to nail down personalization, he said. It’s table stakes.

“Once you do that, and the content is personalized and relevant, then you can do the same for different platforms,” De Castro said. “It’s not so much desktop verus mobile, it’s what is the future of the portal on the web?”

What is it indeed, Henrique? We’ll wait for you and Marissa to tell us more come next earnings call — or hopefully sooner than that.

In a timely move, Wavii is bringing its crawling power to Election 2012 with Wavii Politics, a new section of the site that essentially acts as a landing page for the many disparate political articles circulating around the Web.

Just as before, it’s all about looks. Wavii drills down across different categories appropriate to the election — topics like ads, debates, speeches from candidates and fundraising events — and splays them across the page in snippets anchored by photos. Click on a quote cribbed from the article, and the site serves a page filled with articles on the subject, with the most relevant pieces given top billing.

Wavii has taken this topic-based approach to news since its launch. But the company came up with the idea of this curated landing-page approach after one engineer’s idea proved popular. Amid the myriad complaints of NBC tape delays and broadcast confusion during the Summer Olympics, a Wavii employee began an internal project tying together a page keeping tabs on all the big winners of the games by country, medal, event, and so on.

The neatness of the presentation made sense of a muddled situation; one where confused viewers just wanted accurate, instant information amid the mess of press coming out of the events. Naturally, CEO Adrian Aoun tells me, that scenario logically extends to the political arena.

And after the brutal boxing match that was Tuesday evening’s presidential debate, I’m guessing we’ll have a lot of writing to sift through. At the very least, Wavii’s new page will make it prettier to look at.

The final death rattle of the Digg we once knew sounded last month, when tech development firm Betaworks purchased the site for a price much lower than the $160 million dollar valuation the company once heralded.

Betaworks’ plan: Rebuild Digg “as a start-up: Low budget, small team, fast cycles.” That included a complete redesign, which launched earlier this month, in hopes that a fresh start will give the site a new lease on Web life.

Though noble in its aim, Betaworks’ first efforts may have crippled the new Digg before it has a chance to leave the starting line.

In order to remedy many of the costly issues that the former Digg team suffered, Betaworks shuttled a number of features once prominent in Digg’s past iterations; the commenting system has been nuked completely, and all of the past articles and activities shared by past users have been wiped clean from the site.

The upside is, we’re left with a clean design and some nifty new sharing features that sync between mobile and desktop devices. The larger issue at hand, however, is that Digg’s existing user base — however dwindling and meager it was — is left with no virtual footprint on the site whatever. Profile history, submissions, comments — all gone from the new Digg.

Philosophically, this cuts to the heart of what a social, community-based sharing site needs in order to thrive. Digg is essentially only as successful as the volume and quality of content that is shared by its users; users who want to talk with each other about the items they’ve submitted, to riff on and build off of each new link in the network. This concept of community building has been crucial to competitor sites like Reddit — which is currently flourishing, trafficwise, with more than two billion pageviews served in the month of December 20122011 alone — which still retains all of the items that the new Digg now lacks.

Take a look at the latest stats from online ad network and data analytics firm Chitika, which show a drastic drop in traffic shortly after July 30, the day Betaworks launched the new version of Digg. Chitika measured hundreds of millions of ad impressions across the Web to determine referral rates from Digg and a handful of its competitors. The chart below relays that information as an index, with the highest level of traffic assigned the value “1.”

As you can see, Digg’s brief spike came in the wee hours between July 31 and Aug. 1, then went on to plummet and not return for the remainder of the week. That’s rough, especially in the early days of a highly publicized redesign, when Digg should be getting the initial traffic that it needs to foster the growth of its shattered community.

Compare it to the traffic index of competitors like Reddit and StumbleUpon, and Digg has a heck of a lot of ground to make up:

Now to be fair, Betaworks says it still has that old trove of user data, and wants to make it available for the old Digg’s patrons to access. “We believe that users own the data they create,” the company says on its Web site. It’s dubbed the Digg Archive, and the company is working on a way to unearth user data from the previous Digg infrastructure so that users can access it. By the end of this month, Betaworks aims to “open up an archive website to help users find, read, and share a history of their submissions, diggs, and comments.”

Problem is, how compelling is it to open what essentially amounts to a museum of old data from a network that truly doesn’t exist anymore? Sure, it’s nice to have access to what I did when I was an active user, but if that information has no bearing on the new site, it becomes less relevant and interesting to me. That’s a distinct disadvantage against a site like Reddit, which relies on a “karma” system, with points distributed amongst users based on their link and comment-submission history. It’s what makes some users stand out among others, and what keeps many coming back to the site regularly.

Will Digg’s new approach find legs over time? There’s no telling, but in a time where Facebook, Twitter and Reddit are far into their maturity, the new Digg sure has its work cut out for it.

This is a variation on your basic “acqhire,” the difference being that Gannett intends to keep Quickish operating once Shanoff starts working for them. Shanoff says he’ll also work on other digital projects for Gannett, as an “audience-development executive” working for USA Today sports-biz guy Dave Morgan.

Quickish is a fairly straightforward aggegrator that offers a summary and a link for sports stories throughout the day. Unlike aggregators like Techmeme, there’s no special algorithm here — just Shanoff or one of his freelancers picking stories to highlight and sources to link to. It’s closer to what Jim Romenesko does on his media news site.

When Shanoff launched last year, he had plans to replicate the formula with other subjects, but never got to it. More likely what happens now is that Gannett uses Quickish for more niche “verticals” — you could have one of these for Nascar, one for the NFL, etc. — and plugs it into various sites.

The deal is one more sign that Gannett wants to bulk up in digital sports. It has made a series of M&A moves in the last few years, the biggest being its purchase of Big Lead Sports in January.

(Image courtesy off Mike Flippo / Shutterstock.com)

The partnership understandably ended once Microsoft’s big search rival, Google, acquired The Dealmap in August.

“We can confirm that Bing is no longer partnering with The Dealmap and is now partnering with local and daily deal aggregator 8coupons,” a Microsoft spokesperson said. “We’re excited about the partnership with 8coupons and to be able to offer our customers access to great deals and discounts from across the Web — all in one place.”

A spokesperson for 8coupons also confirmed the partnership, adding that it started to replace The Dealmap a couple of weeks ago.

Rather than build a Groupon copycat as Google and Amazon have done, Microsoft has decided to partner with an aggregator that collects offers from various providers around the Web. Deals delivered by 8coupons come from Restaurant.com, Yelp, LivingSocial and GiltCity, among many others, as shown on the Bing Deals homepage.

Google’s purchase of The Dealmap was relatively small, especially compared to its failed $6 billion offer to buy Groupon. So far, The Dealmap is being used for the underpinnings of a pilot project that Google Offers has rolled out in the Bay Area.

In San Francisco, Google works with more than a dozen deal providers so that it can offer a variety of deals every day. It believes that in order to have relevant offers for all types of consumers, you need a lot of good deals, not just one a day.

At AllThingsD, we love Liz Gannes too, but not quite as endearing-creepily as Steve Clausnitzer of Hubski, a “thoughtful” social aggregation site, does.

Like a lot of start-ups, he wants our fantastic social reporter to check out his site and possibly write about it. But, unlike others, to entice Liz Clausnitzer has penned a little ditty that he posted on YouTube.

You need to watch it to experience the full oddball effort (although we all agree on her very lovely smile)– but mission accomplished on us noticing you, Steve!

I can make no promises that Liz will cover Hubski, of course.

But she is not alone in the video PR pleas — embedded below is one from June to our commerce reporter Tricia Duryee about a new online game from Sir Mix-A-Lot (who seems to do this sort of thing a lot):

The arena for news readers on tablets and smartphones is competitive, with high-profile efforts such as Flipboard, Livestand from Yahoo, AOL’s Editions and start-ups such as Pulse and Zite.

The reason for CNN’s acquisition interest — as well as look-sees from several other publishers — is not a surprise: As readers turn more toward using these mobile devices to consume content, big media companies are trying to acquire the technology to serve up their fare to them.

It is a dicey arena, though, where content aggregation meets (and crashes into) content lifting. Vancouver-based Zite, for example, was sent a cease-and-desist letter in March, by a panoply of media companies (not CNN!) alleging various copyright violations.

That happened right after it was launched, with $4 million in funding from angel investors and Canadian grants and an innovative personalized article-picking algorithm.

As Liz Gannes wrote then:

[Then] Zite CEO Ali Davar describes the iPad as a way to “emancipate the technology” his team originated at research at the University of British Columbia.

It had previously been put to work in a browser plug-in called Worio. And, as you might have guessed, browser plug-ins are a tough business.

The free Zite app imports a user’s Twitter tweets, follows and Google Reader subscriptions, offers lists of pre-made categories, and then solicits feedback and refines over time a list of topics and sources the user is interested in. It features articles based on their popularity, number of shares from a user’s network and topic relevance. (Davar said he thinks a person’s Facebook network data is too heterogeneous to reliably recommend articles, so it’s not included as an option.)

Last week, a Canadian site called Techvibes first wrote about the possibility of the sale of Zite to CNN, which is based in Atlanta and owned by Time Warner.

In a press release, CNN said Zite would remain a standalone unit, as a wholly-owned subsidiary of CNN, and that CEO Mark Johnson will continue to run Zite’s operations, but now in San Francisco. CNN also said that Davar will remain an executive director and Mike Klass will continue as CTO.

In a statement, Johnson said: “Zite is thrilled about combining forces with CNN to create a world-class news discovery platform. In CNN, we have found a partner who shares our vision and passion. Being part of the CNN family gives us the capital to grow Zite’s business and continue to innovate in the space.”

The site’s new section joins many other sites’ video verticals which bring you clips from around the Web. But unlike some competitors — see: Gawker, Mediaite and others — the Atlantic is taking a relatively old-fashioned approach to aggregation: It’s asking permission from copyright owners to run their stuff.

TheAtlantic.com edit boss Bob Cohn says his site will get a signed licensing agreement from every owner whose stuff gets featured on TheAtlantic.com’s proprietary video player. (The Atlantic will also feature clips from other sites using their own embeddable players — in those cases, it won’t need to ask for permission.)

That doesn’t mean video makers will get paid — compensation will come in the form of links — but the olde-timey practice highlights the different tack the site is taking here. If you want clips of TV news readers saying embarrassing things, or media magnates getting a pie to the face, there are plenty of places to get those. The Atlantic will instead focus on higher-brow, higher-minded stuff that you probably haven’t seen.

Atlantic editor Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg, a former producer at Current TV who Cohn describes as “an embed in the video-generating community,” is in charge of picking the stuff and will also interview some of the creators.

Here’s a sample of what she’s looking for: An excerpt from “California is a Place,” a slice-o-life documentary series:

Aquadettes from California is a place on Vimeo.

While I was in Los Angeles recently, I was invited to a private screening of a documentary about the New York Times called “Page One: Inside the New York Times.”

The film, which debuted at the most recent Sundance Film Festival, opens Friday.

The documentary is by Andrew Rossi, who spent a year following reporters and editors at the famed newspaper, even as the media landscape shifted dramatically due to the impact of digital technologies.

Luckily for me, one of the movie’s principal characters — and I do mean character when it comes to him — is the Times’ quirky media columnist, David Carr.

I met Carr a dog’s age ago, when he ran “The City Paper” in Washington, D.C. He has only gotten more interesting over time, especially as the Web has transformed the news business.

Actually, wrecked the news business seems more the sensibility of “Page One” and also the audience at the screening, which largely bemoaned the troubles that quality papers have gotten themselves into in the age of the Internet.

Of course, the situation at the Times is a lot more complicated than that and there are some significant benefits to readers in the new paradigm, even if it did not help traditional media.

Carr winks and nods to both sides of the debate in the film — his attack on Web bad boy Michael Wolff over aggregation is priceless, even though he clearly loves the Internet’s thrilling possibilities, too.

As I have previously written, what is probably most interesting is that many of the stories covered by the Times in the film are about the technological forces that have put it and other traditional media organizations through the digital ringer in recent years.

Here’s the video of my interview with Carr — please, as I tried to, ignore his rant at the start about the Times’ failed talent raid on a defenseless little tech blog site! — as well as an exclusive clip and the trailer for the movie:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110615/ready-for-his-close-up-the-nyts-media-dude-david-carr-talks-about-page-one/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110615/at-tomorrows-aol-investor-day-will-execution-focus-mean-cylinders-firing-or-heads-rolling/ http://allthingsd.com/20110615/at-tomorrows-aol-investor-day-will-execution-focus-mean-cylinders-firing-or-heads-rolling/#comments Wed, 15 Jun 2011 13:04:17 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=86796

Talking to AOL CEO Tim Armstrong earlier this week about its investors day tomorrow, he used the word “execution” a lot.

No, not the kind evoking a firing squad if he did not succeed at turning around the New York-based Internet giant soon as he has long promised.

Instead, Armstrong was referring to reassuring big shareholders and Wall Street analysts that AOL was now in a mode of making sure all its many moves to turn around the company will finally begin to pay off.

“Basically, our point is going to be about fully operating around the strategy we’ve built,” said Armstrong in a wide-ranging interview. “It seems right for investors to ask about executing on what we have been doing for the last year and a half.”

It’s certainly the right message for the charismatic executive to be delivering, as he and other top AOL execs present their plans moving forward, especially after what has turned out to be a very hyperactive year.

After deep layoffs, a massive rejiggering of its management ranks and a number of shifts of its business focus, without much advertising increase to show for it yet, Armstrong has also pushed through a series of acquisitions.

It culminated in the high-profile and decidedly dramatic purchase of the Huffington Post in January for $350 million in cash.

Now, said Armstrong, deals will be taking a back seat to products.

“We are diligently staying on strategy and really focusing on products and services,” said Armstrong. “We have laid out the path we are on and now investors want proof of the concept.”

To Armstrong, that means the push of “branded content” and a continued focus on significant properties in key topic areas.

Tomorrow, in news that could worry investors, AOL will be noting that traffic is flat year over year, but explaining that it is due to the outsourcing of its sports and health sites.

“If you added that back in, we would have had a phenomenal year of growth,” said Armstrong. “Our main point will be that this is the right path for AOL.”

In fact, in an unusual wording, he said AOL was betting on the “urbanization” of the Web around big branded sites, which is, in many ways, exactly where the Web was a decade ago with Yahoo, Excite and others.

But Armstrong will be making the point that this retro idea is perfect for today, as marketers look for quality content that attracts big audiences, which has seen its most energetic application in the Huffington Post.

Thus, his linchpin remains the flashy news site’s even flashier co-founder Arianna Huffington, who has cut a very wide swath through AOL’s content efforts since Amstrong made her media czar of the company.

As Armstrong did, she also stressed the focus on unique visitors and ad growth, more video and a laser focus on local.

This includes shoving editorial into every AOL property, including unlikely ones such as Moviefone and MapQuest, and integrating it all to point back to the Huffington Post mothership.

“Much better editorial integration is a centerpiece of what we are doing, surfacing content in new places it was not before,” said Huffington, who used examples of local stories via its Patch unit that have gone global with a special push.

And by global, that also means the creation of new content sites in Europe and elsewhere, in order to build this unusual dream of a fully aggregating world.

“It is a big test of the HuffPo platform aggregation to do this,” said Huffington, who has clearly longed for the kind of money and staff to do this for a very long time. “It has moved a lot faster than I thought it would … but it feels good to be moving on so many fronts at once.”

Many fronts indeed, which might make investors pause. So far, those shareholders have had a continued wait-and-see attitude toward AOL, which has seen its stock decline almost 13 percent from its late 2009 IPO debut.

That’s mostly due to worries about whether the continued and expected fall-off of its lucrative access business can be met by similar increases in its ad business.

That share drop has been especially steep since the beginning of the year, but it has also not been drastic, indicating an interest in continuing to believe Armstrong’s confident — well, confidently delivered, at least — narrative.

As Citi’s Mark Mahaney wrote in a one-hand-other-hand note yesterday about the investor day:

Positives: 1) AOL still remains a top 5 U.S. Internet property; 2) In the latest quarter, AOL’s Display segment grew Y/Y for the first time in ~3 years, and this improvement seems sustainable; 3) At 4x ’11 EV/EBITDA, AOL’s valuation is among the lowest of any ’Net Stock. Negatives: 1) Deteriorating fundamentals; 2) Significant market share losses — ’Net usage, Display Advertising revenue & Search queries; 3) A significant profit hole from the structural decline of its Subs biz; 4) Substantial competitive risk; and 5) An unproven (@ AOL) management team.

“We all like Tim and what he says makes a lot of sense,” added one big investor, who is also attending and has many questions about the efficacy of what AOL is doing, in a common sentiment among its large shareholders. “But we also need to see real results soon.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110615/at-tomorrows-aol-investor-day-will-execution-focus-mean-cylinders-firing-or-heads-rolling/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110414/exclusive-flipboard-confirms-50-million-funding-at-200-million-valuation/ http://allthingsd.com/20110414/exclusive-flipboard-confirms-50-million-funding-at-200-million-valuation/#comments Thu, 14 Apr 2011 20:23:12 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=42652

Late last month, BoomTown posted about a huge venture funding effort by the high-profile and even more highly designed social media reading app for the Apple iPad, Flipboard.

Today, its co-founder and CEO Mike McCue confirmed the $50 million round at an eye-popping $200 million valuation, in a wide-ranging interview at the start-up’s Palo Alto, Calif., HQ.

“We’re obviously thrilled, because we think it confirms our focus that people want a beautifully designed way to interact with content and to share it,” he said. “And there is a lot more to come–on a scale of one to 10, we’re just at a two or three.”

The bulk of the new second round of funding–Flipboard had previously raised $10.5 million–came from New York-based Insight Venture Partners.

Insight’s Jerry Murdock said in an interview that he was excited about the idea of “social endorsement” that Flipboard was pioneering.

“We back great entrepreneurs and Flipboard is that and also in an obviously unique position to solve a problem of media consumption in the digital age,” he said. “The sky is the limit. Or more precisely it is the best environment to consume curated real-time content for Twitter and Facebook, because of the user experience and social endorsement integration with the content.”

Insight is also an investor in Twitter.

Also stepping up in the new Flipboard round is Comcast’s venture arm, as well as previous investors, including Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures and a spate of well known angels, such as Twitter co-founder and product guru Jack Dorsey, Facebook co-founder and Asana dude Dustin Moskovitz, the ubiquitous Ron Conway, actor Ashton Kutcher and the investment company of former News Corp. exec Peter Chernin.

“From a Comcast perspective, we’re intrigued with Mike and what he’s doing with content aggregation,” said Amy Banse, Comcast Interactive Capital’s new head. “We think we can learn from him and he from us.”

Co-founded by longtime entrepreneur McCue (Netscape, Tellme) and former Apple iPhone engineer Evan Doll in January, Flipboard launched to much attention in July.

The elegant Flipboard–which McCue recently told me in an onstage interview at the South by Southwest conference in Austin had zero revenues thus far–has changed the game on the consumption of social media.

Its innovative social magazine concept is attempting to make the social networking universe more accessible, consumable and, perhaps most importantly, visually arresting via its rich app.

Essentially, Flipboard pulls information from media RSS feeds and sites such as Twitter and Facebook data streams and then reassembles it in an easy-to-navigate, personalized format in a mobile tablet touchscreen environment.

In its current offering, there are pull-quotes, photos, videos, status updates and even the first paragraphs of linked-out content. There is also the ability to comment and share, as if one were on a social networking or microblogging site.

McCue said the new giant pile of cash will be used to increase its 32-person staff to about 50, international expansion, small acquisitions and more product development on more platforms.

The next in the arena will be the iPhone version of Flipboard, said McCue, followed by one for the Google Android mobile operating system eventually.

Left unsaid, of course, was the need for funding to fight the likelihood of increased competition in the hot space for delivering both professional and social content to consumers on a wide range of devices.

Rivals are varied, such as Silicon Valley’s most adorable news reader start-up Pulse and also Zite, a news reader which was recently sued for copyright infringement by a group of major publishers.

There are bigger potential players, such as Google, which is trying to find various ways to move into the social space.

In fact, said several sources, Google and others have made acquisition approaches to Flipboard, which has instead opted for raising more funding and staying independent for now.

McCue declined to talk about that, but did note that he is not surprised by publisher interest, especially of the worried and wary kind, in the arena.

“Anyone not respectful of others’ content is going to get in that kind of trouble,” he said, noting Flipboard has struck deals with 17 big publishers so far, including this morning’s announcement about a partnership with Oprah Winfrey’s and Discovery’s OWN cable network. “There is not one half to this equation.”

Right now, the Flipboard app is free and the business plan is advertising and some possible subscription scenarios.

McCue said advertising will be the key to Flipboard’s business plan in the future, although it’s not clear if the company will ever sell advertising itself.

Rather, it will partner with publishers seeking better distribution in the explosive tablet and smartphone market, where Flipboard has been gaining traction quickly.

But until that is sorted out, there is now $50 million more in the Flipboard kitty to figure it all out.

“With this funding, we can grow at the right pace and have a lot of flexibility to get the product right,” said McCue. “And, that’s the most important thing.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110414/exclusive-flipboard-confirms-50-million-funding-at-200-million-valuation/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20110316/exclusive-yahoo-news-head-moves-to-disney-com-which-will-get-big-redo/ http://allthingsd.com/20110316/exclusive-yahoo-news-head-moves-to-disney-com-which-will-get-big-redo/#comments Wed, 16 Mar 2011 22:27:57 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=41686

Yesterday, BoomTown reported that Mark Walker, the head of the powerful Yahoo News site, was leaving the Internet giant for another company.

That company, sources said, will be Disney, where Walker will be leading a major overhaul of its flagship Disney.com site.

The property, which has largely been a promotional and aggregation play for Disney’s many family-oriented offerings–such as its popular Disney Channel cable television shows–still sees 20 million unique visitors monthly.

Walker will report to Jimmy Pitaro, the former Yahoo media head who is now co-president of Disney’s online division with John Pleasants. Walker worked directly for Pitaro at Yahoo.

Walker’s job, said sources, will be to find a new direction for Disney.com, including adding original programming to the site, as well as more personalization for its users.

It’s a big task for Walker, since Disney’s various Web efforts have a long and often rocky history, from its disastrous purchase of Infoseek in 1998 and efforts to create the Go.com portal to its savvy acquisition of several innovative kid-focused sites such as Club Penguin in recent years.

Still, like many traditional media giants, Disney has never achieved the kind of digital success its spectacular brand has promised. The hiring of Pitaro and Pleasants by CEO Bob Iger was a sign that the company was going to make some big changes again.

BoomTown will query Iger about all this at the ninth D: All Things Digital conference this summer, where he’ll be interviewed onstage.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110316/exclusive-yahoo-news-head-moves-to-disney-com-which-will-get-big-redo/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20110307/aol-deal-closes-today-as-more-high-profile-huffington-post-journalism-hires-signal-new-direction/ http://allthingsd.com/20110307/aol-deal-closes-today-as-more-high-profile-huffington-post-journalism-hires-signal-new-direction/#comments Mon, 07 Mar 2011 12:01:55 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=41315 AOL will officially close its $315 million acquisition of the Huffington Post today, according to several sources close to the situation.

The culmination of the deal–which has already been approved by regulators–is set to be announced by the New York-based company this morning, only one month after it was struck.

And–in a clear sign of the shift in its focus toward a more editorially driven direction under the now-official content head Arianna Huffington (pictured here)–sources said the closing will be accompanied by the announcement of the hiring of a half-dozen journalists to AOL’s new Huffington Post Media Group unit.

Among the new reporters are some more high-profile grabs from other media giants, including The Daily’s Jon Ward. He has been the Washington bureau chief for New Corp.’s high-profile online newspaper, which only recently launched.

Also set to join AOL is Yahoo’s senior media writer Michael Calderone.

Interestingly, along with more experienced editorial staff, sources said the announcement will also include new hires via the Huffington Post’s Jefferson Program for Young Journalists.

Sources said the new hires are only the beginning of a series of them, as the impact of the leadership of Huffington becomes clearer.

Along with the news and opinion site, the well-known media personality is now in charge of all of AOL’s varied content properties, including its locally aimed Patch.

Huffington, with obviously strong support from AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, has been talking a lot in a plethora of interviews since the deal was announced a few weeks ago about the importance of creating a new media organization focused on original reporting.

In a way, AOL is now competing with big news sites such as those on Yahoo, as well as smaller niche content and also mainstream entities.

Even before the deal was struck with AOL, the Huffington Post had been heading down that path of pulling in mainstream journalists. Last year, it hired former New York Times economics writer Peter Goodman and former Newsweek columnist Howard Fineman, among others.

The formula? Adding the strong journalism reputation of these reporters to the eclectic mix of socializing, blogging, celebritizing and aggressive aggregating that the site has used to garner huge amounts of traffic in recent years.

As I had previously written, the AOL Way–the same for a strategy document about content on the site–is now the Arianna Way.

Here are Huffington and Armstrong talking about such issues in in an exclusive video interview BoomTown did with them just before they announced the deal on Super Bowl Sunday about a month ago:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110307/aol-deal-closes-today-as-more-high-profile-huffington-post-journalism-hires-signal-new-direction/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110215/new-app-helps-you-decide-whether-to-buy-or-walk-out-empty-handed/ http://allthingsd.com/20110215/new-app-helps-you-decide-whether-to-buy-or-walk-out-empty-handed/#comments Tue, 15 Feb 2011 14:00:41 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=2837 Say goodbye to impulse buys.

Smartphone applications are quickly becoming an easy way to judge a product on the spot, and figure out when to walk away if it’s not exactly what you are looking for.

SearchReviews is launching an application today that provides input on the go, by aggregating more than 36 million customer reviews from more than 1,000 sites around the Web.

Reviews come from sites like TripAdvisor, eBay, Sephora, Wal-Mart, Amazon, Zappos and QVC.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based SearchReviews was founded in September by Ankesh Kumar, who has funded the start-up with $350,000 of his own money.

SearchReviews’ applications for the iPhone and Android are launching today.

Both of them work a lot like others in the market.

A consumer scans a product’s barcode, and then receives a list of results. Other apps in the market today from Amazon, Google and eBay are similar, but SearchReviews is hoping to stand out by having the most reviews. The other apps also tend to focus on price comparison.

SearchReviews may be one way to avoid buyer’s remorse, but to be sure, mobile applications like these are disrupting the way traditional retailers have done business for years. As we’ve written in the past, retailers used to be confident that they could close a sale as long as they could get shoppers into the store, and that’s where they focused all of their attention–on customer acquisition. Now consumers have the tools to decide to leave empty-handed.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110215/new-app-helps-you-decide-whether-to-buy-or-walk-out-empty-handed/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101216/exclusive-tms-acquires-online-video-guide-casttv/ http://allthingsd.com/20101216/exclusive-tms-acquires-online-video-guide-casttv/#comments Thu, 16 Dec 2010 17:37:02 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=1360 Online video search start-up CastTV has been acquired by Tribune Media Services, the widely used entertainment guide metadata provider.

CastTV was founded in 2006 by a husband and wife team, and had raised $3.1 million from investors including Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Ron Conway and Marc Andreessen.

Though she wouldn’t comment on the terms of the deal, CastTV co-founder and President Alex Vikati said, “CastTV was profitable so we weren’t forced to make any decisions.” She, CastTV’s co-founder and CEO Edwin Ong, and their three employees will make up TMS’s Silicon Valley office, rather than moving to join TMS at its Chicago headquarters.

CastTV had stayed relatively under the radar compared to newcomers like Clicker.com, but it still has four million monthly uniques. Unlike Clicker, which has focused on curation and personalization, CastTV takes more of a pure search and aggregation approach. It historically did not exclude unauthorized content streams (though when I checked this morning, this no longer seemed to be the case). CastTV has also focused on detail-oriented features such as device awareness, so it will filter video results to only the formats playable on a certain device.

TMS will combine CastTV’s databases with its metadata service, and operate CastTV.com in conjunction with its own entertainment guide Zap2it.com, which has about double the audience.

TMS counts just about every content provider and guide service as a customer, including Microsoft, Google, TiVo, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, IMDb and the New York Times.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101216/exclusive-tms-acquires-online-video-guide-casttv/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101116/yahoo-announces-a-bunch-of-stuff-it-already-announced-except-local-deals-which-everyone-else-has-already-announced/ http://allthingsd.com/20101116/yahoo-announces-a-bunch-of-stuff-it-already-announced-except-local-deals-which-everyone-else-has-already-announced/#comments Tue, 16 Nov 2010 16:35:39 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=37358

Today at the Web 2.0 Summit conference in San Francisco, Yahoo announced a bunch of new features, most of which the Silicon Valley Internet giant had already unveiled.

(Yes, this is the riveting life of BoomTown.)

Delivered by Chief Product Officer Blake Irving and other execs, the presentation included Sketch-a-Search, quick apps in search and Search Assist, as well as integration of Zynga social games and Twitter into the site and more about its Yahoo Contributor Network.

But there was news: A local offers program, similar to offerings recently made by Facebook and others.

There are 20 partners in this iteration, including Groupon, which Yahoo has tried to buy outright for many billions of dollars.

It seems to have saved some dough with this deal, which is being tested nationwide.

Yahoo’s approach to the discounted daily local deal boom is integration, of course, as well as aggregation, which is its best quality.

Of course, like all the updates, what Yahoo was announcing was essentially table stakes to keep up with what has been going on across the Internet at companies such as Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook.

In fact, one question at the press event this morning focused on the incremental nature of Yahoo’s changes in comparison to others, and whether it can innovate as quickly.

Irving, who is certainly a lively character and knows about those issues from his many years at Microsoft, said he is trying to force a culture where Yahoos can “quickly iterate [products] and “it is safe to innovate fast.”

Let’s hope!

Until then, here are the official press releases on the updates, as well as local offers.

Yahoo_Web 2 0 Announcement_FINAL

Yahoo_ Local Offers Release

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101116/yahoo-announces-a-bunch-of-stuff-it-already-announced-except-local-deals-which-everyone-else-has-already-announced/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20100929/new-york-times-backs-news-aggregation-software-company/ http://allthingsd.com/20100929/new-york-times-backs-news-aggregation-software-company/#comments Wed, 29 Sep 2010 12:00:15 +0000 Russell Adams http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=30432 The New York Times Co. (NYT) is joining a group of news organizations in backing the maker of software that helps publishers aggregate news, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The company, called Ongo, filed a trademark registration in April. In the filing, Ongo describes itself as providing “computer and telecommunications software for use in aggregating and viewing news and syndication feeds.”

The reason for the Times’s investment in Ongo was unclear. As news organizations have grappled with how to deliver their content to digital devices and make money off of those readers, there have emerged a number of efforts to collaborate on packaging and selling content. News Corp. (NWS), which owns the Wall Street Journal, has been talking to media companies about creating a cable TV-type business for news, allowing consumers to set up one bill to access digital content from multiple media companies.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100929/new-york-times-backs-news-aggregation-software-company/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100818/will-facebook-debut-a-foursquare-lite-location-feature-or-a-real-competitor-or-what/ http://allthingsd.com/20100818/will-facebook-debut-a-foursquare-lite-location-feature-or-a-real-competitor-or-what/#comments Wed, 18 Aug 2010 12:11:14 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=32361

Later today, as BoomTown previously reported, Facebook is likely to show off what it has been working on for a while now in the geo-location arena.

We’ll see whassup at 4:30 pm PT, when Facebook will hold a “news event” at the social-networking powerhouse’s HQ in Silicon Valley. (I will be liveblogging from it, natch.)

While most agree that the unveiling of the powerful social-networking site’s geo-location plans will have big impact, it will be much more interesting to see precisely what Facebook will do and how it innovates.

The company has certainly been talking about some sort of location feature for a long time–even as start-ups such as Foursquare and Booyah have grown like gangbusters–so much so that it has become a mini-waiting game in Silicon Valley.

But how Facebook integrates the hot trend into what it has built rather than bought–Facebook considered buying the New York-based Foursquare–is full of all kinds of complexities and possible sand traps.

Here is what I think it might–and should–show off:

NO PLAYING GAMES

There is plenty of that kind of silliness offered by others, and the badge, mayorships and general gaming is not really Facebook’s style.

In fact, gimmickry, which eventually becomes tiresome, is not really one of the tools in Facebook’s arsenal. Creating features–such as the Wall–that have become daily helpers is the ticket here.

In fact, it would be great if Facebook could go radically useful with a check-in feature, which would be for the rest of us who are not interested in broadcasting our presence at New York clubs into the wee hours.

Still, it would be nice to get all kinds of offers and freebies for using the service and giving up even more personal information to the hungry maw of this–still–Mark Zuckerberg production.

SEAMLESS THIRD-PARTY AGGREGATION

A must, given Facebook is all about integration and coordination for its users. It has already easily welcomed in all kinds of third-party services, and it must give developers on its platform geo-location capabilities.

So, any Facebook offering would need to integrate all the current location services, both on the Web site and in its mobile app.

That said, it is also important that Facebook also has a strong and effective offering of its own.

PLEASE MARK, I WANT SOME MORE

Location-sharing needs to be more than location-sharing, IMHO.

That’s because check-ins can become as inane as some Twitter posts.

In my bedroom! Now, in my bathroom! Now, in my kitchen. Hey from the 7-11! Aaaaaagh!

In fact, what is most useful about Foursquare is a part the service seems to give little attention to–user-generated info about various places.

Facebook could give truly helpful on-the-go info if it did a good job here, letting me know–for example–that I need to avoid the shrimp-puff appetizer at all costs or alerting me to the joys of some esoteric spa service.

Best of all, it would be nice if this info were not generated just by my friends, but by everyone. Because my friends are really boring.

WHAT HAPPENS ON FACEBOOK CHECK-IN, STAYS ON FACEBOOK CHECK-IN

Facebook has a long-running and much-deserved reputation for not treating privacy issues with enough concern and care.

While it is one thing to have a status update that you are enjoying 43 cold ones by the Jersey Shore with Snooki, it is quite another to geo-locate your trashy sojourn without a terrific level of control.

And, of course, controls that are comprehensible and easy to use.

Thus, some rules:

Any location service must be opt-in only.

Any location service must be set to private to start and allow users to change settings with each update.

Check-ins must be verified, so people cannot lie and manipulate the system.

The entire Facebook community of 500 million users must know exactly where Mark Zuckerberg is at every moment–wait, that’s just my secret wish.

Well, not a wish: All Facebook execs should publicly and actively be using the check-in services to let us all know that everyone is on the exact same page.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100818/will-facebook-debut-a-foursquare-lite-location-feature-or-a-real-competitor-or-what/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100720/meet-flipboard-mike-mccue-talks-about-stealth-social-magazine-start-up-that-just-nabbed-10-5-million/ http://allthingsd.com/20100720/meet-flipboard-mike-mccue-talks-about-stealth-social-magazine-start-up-that-just-nabbed-10-5-million/#comments Wed, 21 Jul 2010 03:56:38 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=30973

Today, BoomTown gassed up the MINI and headed down to see one of the more innovative new start-ups I have encountered of late.

That would be a new social magazine concept called Flipboard, which is attempting to make the social networking universe more accessible, consumable and, perhaps most importantly, visually arresting via a rich app on the Apple (AAPL) iPad.

Essentially, Flipboard pulls information from sites such as Twitter and Facebook data streams and then reassembles it in an easy-to-navigate, personalized format in a mobile tablet touchscreen environment.

In this social magazine, there are pull quotes, photos, videos, status updates and even the first paragraphs of content linked out to. There is also the ability to comment and share, as if one were on Twitter or Facebook.

Co-founded by longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur Mike McCue and former Apple iPhone engineer Evan Doll in January, Flipboard decloaked itself tonight, announcing both a $10.5 million funding from top Silicon Valley power players and also the acquisition of Ellerdale, a relevancy search engine for the real-time Web.

The funders include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Index Ventures and a spate of high-profile investors, such as Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moscovitz, angel investor Ron Conway, actor Ashton Kutcher and the investment company of former News Corp. (NWS) exec Peter Chernin.

Flipboard currently has about 20 employees at its downtown Palo Alto, Calif., HQ.

“Flipboard is a social magazine filled with all the the things your friends are sharing,” said McCue, who co-founded Tellme, the speech recognition service acquired by Microsoft (MSFT). “We’re trying to bring the timeless principles of print to social media.”

(You can read The Mossberg Solution’s Katherine Boehret’s review of Flipboard here.)

McCue left Tellme a year ago and was casting about for a new start-up when he settled on creating a new way to digest and present the noisy flood of information being spewed 24/7 by social networks.

Kleiner Perkins partner John Doerr, who backed Tellme, said he was immediately intrigued by the idea.

“It is at once intimate and alive and beautiful,” he said in an interview with me earlier today. “This is the next wave of social media and redefines what magazine is…and I think it will be one of the defining apps on the iPad.”

Right now, the Flipboard app is free and the business plan is advertising and some possible subscription scenarios.

Ellen Pao, also of Kleiner and a member of Flipboard’s board, said she hoped publishers, whose Web sites are reconfigured from tweets and other social links by the app, will welcome the new distribution format.

“Traditional publishing is facing a crossroads and this imagines it from the ground up,” she said. “I hope it paves the way.”

We’ll see about old media reactions, which has been decidedly mixed to aggregation apps like this.

The New York Times (NYT), for example, attacked rather than embraced another terrific news reading iPad app called Pulse, accusing it of misusing its content.

It was a stupid move against inexorable concepts such as Pulse and Flipboard, which are beginning to make sense of the changing digital information landscape.

Here’s the video interview with McCue, followed by the official press releases about Flipboard:

FLIPBOARD LAUNCHES WORLD’S FIRST SOCIAL MAGAZINE

INSPIRED BY THE BEAUTY OF PRINT AND DESIGNED FOR iPAD, FLIPBOARD TRANSFORMS THE SOCIAL MEDIA EXPERIENCE

Raises $10.5MM From Legendary Investors KPCB and Index Ventures and Media Innovators Including Jack Dorsey, Dustin Moskovitz, Ashton Kutcher and The Chernin Group

Acquires Ellerdale, Names Arthur van Hoff CTO

FORTUNE BRAINSTORM TECH–ASPEN, COLORADO – JULY 21, 2010–Founded by Mike McCue, former CEO of Tellme, and Evan Doll, former senior iPhone engineer at Apple®, Flipboard™ began a quest today to transform how people discover and share content by combining the beauty and ease of print with the power of social media. Flipboard also announced the immediate availability of it’s Flipboard App for iPad™, a social magazine that brings to life the stories, photos, news and updates being shared across Twitter and Facebook. Flipboard’s first public demo will happen at the FORTUNE Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, Colorado at 4:40pm MDT tomorrow.

“With over 1 billion posts shared every day, social networks are quickly becoming the primary way people discover and share content on the Web. The result is a huge influx of incoming messages and links people must sort through across multiple web sites just to stay up to date,” said Mike McCue, Flipboard’s CEO. “We believe the timeless principles of print can make social media less noisy, more visually compelling and ultimately more mainstream.”

Designed from the ground up for iPad, Flipboard creates a magazine out of a user’s social content. Simply launch Flipboard and “flip” open the cover to get started. From the Table of Contents readers can view their sections and personalize the magazine.

The Facebook and Twitter sections let readers quickly flip through the latest stories, photos and updates from friends and trusted sources. Because Flipboard renders links and images right in the magazine, readers no longer have to scan long lists of posts and click on link after link – instead they instantly see all the stories, comments and images, making it faster and more entertaining to discover, view and share social content.

Flipboard also lets readers easily create sections around topics or people they care about. Choose from Flipboard’s suggested sections on topics such as sports, news, tech and style, with content hand-curated from popular and interesting Twitter feeds. Or, create an entirely new section by searching by topic, person or Twitter lists to make Flipboard even more personal.

The Flipboard App is available for free at www.flipboard.com or from the App Store on iPad or at www.itunes.com/appstore/.

ACQUISITION OF ELLERDALE
As part of it’s quest to fundamentally improve the social media experience, Flipboard also announced the acquisition of Ellerdale (see press release: “Flipboard Acquires Ellerdale”). Ellerdale’s advanced semantic analysis of large, real-time data streams will enable Flipboard to extract, categorize and feature highly relevant and hot trending content from across a variety of social networks. Flipboard will also retain the world-class engineering team at Ellerdale, including Arthur van Hoff, a leading Silicon Valley technologist who played a major role in the creation of Java. Arthur will become Flipboard’s Chief Technology Officer and spearhead the company’s technology strategy.

INVESTORS
Flipboard is backed by legendary investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Index Ventures. Other key investors also include Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, The Chernin Group founded by Peter Chernin, Ron Conway, Alfred Lin, Peter Currie, Quincy Smith, and Ashton Kutcher. The company has raised $10.5 million in a Series A venture capital round.

FLIPBOARD ACQUIRES ELLERDALE TO BOOST CONTENT RELEVANCY IN NEW SOCIAL MAGAZINE

Arthur van Hoff Joins Flipboard as Chief Technology Officer

PALO ALTO, Calif.–July 21, 2010–Flipboard today announced it has acquired Ellerdale, the real-time Web intelligence company. The acquisition concurs with the launch of Flipboard, a social magazine designed for Apple’s iPad, which provides a faster and more engaging way to discover, view, and share what matters on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

Ellerdale, founded in 2008, has developed a Web Intelligence technology that applies semantic analysis to large, real-time data streams to extract relevant and valuable information. To date, Ellerdale has indexed over 6 billion messages from around the social Web and currently processes nearly 70 million messages per day. This technology and data set will be become the relevancy engine for the next release of Flipboard, enhancing the reader’s experience by always surfacing the most important and personally interesting information from Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.

Designed from the ground up for the iPad, Flipboard creates a magazine out of a user’s social content. With Ellerdale’s technology, future versions of Flipboard will be able to extract, categorize and feature highly relevant and hot trending content from across a variety of social networks.

“Ellerdale has developed an impressive solution for understanding the ever-increasing stream of social data coming at us every day,” said Mike McCue, CEO and co-founder of Flipboard. “This technology will add deep relevancy for our readers, enabling us to present social content in a way that is not only more beautiful, but also more meaningful. It’s a great combination.”

Arthur van Hoff, co-founder of Ellerdale, is joining Flipboard as the company’s new chief technology officer. Van Hoff, who played a major role in the development of the Java programming language at Sun Microsystems, and was founder of six high-tech companies, including Marimba, Strangeberry and Zing, will spearhead Flipboard’s technology strategy.

“Combining the two companies creates a situation in which one plus one equals three, bringing together Flipboard’s innovative front-end with Ellerdale’s powerful real-time relevancy engine on the back-end,” said Arthur van Hoff, co-founder of Ellerdale and Flipboard’s new chief technology officer. “Our technology will play a key role in providing readers with the content that matters most to them.”

Mike McCue and Evan Doll founded Flipboard earlier this year and received $10.5M in funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Index Ventures. The founding team members come from Apple, Netflix, Tellme/Microsoft, Aardvark and Adobe. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100720/meet-flipboard-mike-mccue-talks-about-stealth-social-magazine-start-up-that-just-nabbed-10-5-million/feed/ 7 http://allthingsd.com/20100407/waxman-to-wolff-unhand-my-content/ http://allthingsd.com/20100407/waxman-to-wolff-unhand-my-content/#comments Wed, 07 Apr 2010 22:41:59 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=18307 More shots fired in the great Web aggregation war. Or at least in the war between Sharon Waxman and Michael Wolff. The Wrap, the Hollywood news site Waxman runs, has demanded that Newser, the aggregation site Wolff founded, give her site better credit for its stories or stop using them altogether.

Waxman’s volley comes via a cease-and-desist note her site sent to Newser today, embedded below. It comes after a series of back and forths between the two sites, which you can follow here, here and here. Very short version: Waxman says Wolff’s site steals her stuff without attribution; Wolff says his company does attribute the stuff, in some form.

The bigger picture is that the debate about “content creation” and “aggregation,” both of which are pretty ugly and imprecise terms, is just getting started. Even though we’re either 15 years or 40 years into the Internet era, depending on how you want to count. (Probably best to go with 15).

This isn’t the first time Wolff has gotten legal notes from publishers. In February 2009, the New York Times (NYT) complained about Newser’s use of the Times’s iconic “T,” as well as the use of its photos.

Waxman’s argument with Wolff is that Newser either doesn’t link to her site or does it in a way that makes it unlikely that a reader will end up on one of her pages. She’s fine with aggregation in practice, she says, noting that her site repurposes other people’s stories. And it’s worth noting that she’s not firing off an angry letter at the Huffington Post, an aggregator that also uses her stuff extensively.

“There’s a principle here,” she says. “And if everybody who aggregated aggregated the way they do it, we’d all be in a bunch of trouble.”

So what does she expect Wolff and company to do now? “I don’t know,” she says. But “we’re serious… I hope they take it seriously.”

Wolff’s response, via email: “This is a joke letter about a joke allegation based on a joke premise from a joke law firm (in Cleveland at that). Waxman is just looking for press to help her raise a new round of financing. Nothing here is serious.”

Cease and Desist letter from TheWrap to Newser

[Image credit: barnabus]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100407/waxman-to-wolff-unhand-my-content/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100317/yahoo-acquires-citizen-sports/ http://allthingsd.com/20100317/yahoo-acquires-citizen-sports/#comments Wed, 17 Mar 2010 17:39:00 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=36617 BoomTown was right: Yahoo is indeed buying online sports site Citizen Sports, a developer of sports-related apps and games for Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone and for social networking sites like Facebook. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but as BoomTown noted on Monday, estimates put Citizen’s selling price at about $40 to $50 million.

The acquisition is a savvy one for Yahoo (YHOO), which already has a strong sports content business and stands to benefit from the additional social networking and mobile integration that Citizen Sports offers.

Below, the official announcement:

Yahoo! to Acquire Citizen Sports

Strengthens Social Strategy by Combining the Power of the No. 1 Online Sports Destination with the Web’s Most Popular Social Sports Company

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Mar 17, 2010 –As part of its ongoing commitment to be the center of people’s online lives, Yahoo Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Citizen Sports (http://www.citizensports.com), a company that brings the world of sports to fans’ favorite social networking sites and mobile devices through innovative applications. This acquisition will strengthen Yahoo!‘s social strategy of enriching, aggregating and distributing social content from across the entire Web, and offering a highly customizable social experience.

“Yahoo! is in a unique position to combine our deep expertise in content and aggregation technology to offer a highly personalized social experience,” said Bryan Lamkin, senior vice president, Consumer Products Group, Yahoo!. “Sports has been among the earliest online categories to experience rapid social proliferation, and the combination of Citizen Sports leading products with our world-class sports experience on Yahoo! Sports is a win-win for sports fans globally.”

Millions of people across the globe use Citizen Sports’ array of social and mobile products to play fantasy sports, fill out brackets, check live scores and read up-to-the minute news on sports including football, hockey, soccer, baseball, racing, rugby, hockey and cricket. Yahoo! Sports’ content will be integrated into these products, creating a seamless experience for sports fans wherever they are. On Yahoo! Sports, users will be able to broadcast their allegiances, create or join a conversation with friends and fans and cheer for their teams through Citizen Sports’ applications. This integration will further transform Yahoo! into a more personally relevant experience, drive deeper user engagement and create opportunities for advertisers to interact with audiences in new environments.

As the #1 destination for online Sports with more than 39 million monthly unique users in the U.S.*, Yahoo! Sports provides people with the most timely, relevant and comprehensive sports news, information and programming. Citizen Sports’ network of popular applications for Facebook, MySpace (NYSE: NWS), hi5, iPhone and Android span professional, college and high school sports.

“Citizen Sports was founded with the intent to enable fans to access news, scores and fantasy games on the platform of their choice,” said Mike Kerns, founder and CEO of Citizen Sports. “We look forward to becoming a part of Yahoo! and bringing our social experiences to their 600 million users around the globe.”

Citizen Sports was founded by Mike Kerns and Jeff Ma in 2004. Since then the company has brought together millions of sports fans from around the world to enjoy sports and connect with their friends. Citizen Sports is based in San Francisco.

Yahoo! expects to complete this acquisition in the second quarter of 2010. Financial terms were not disclosed.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100317/yahoo-acquires-citizen-sports/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100308/yet-another-media-aggregation-site-yup-and-youll-read-it-techmeme-unveils-mediagazer/ http://allthingsd.com/20100308/yet-another-media-aggregation-site-yup-and-youll-read-it-techmeme-unveils-mediagazer/#comments Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:01:41 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=17129 Does the Web need yet another outlet dedicated to media coverage? Nope. How about another aggregation site? Plenty of those to go around too.

So what if you combined the two? Exactly.

But here’s a not-very brave prediction: Mediagazer, which launches today, is going to do pretty well. For two reasons:

• Like porn or Apple (AAPL) news, there’s always going to be an appetite for this stuff, at least as long as there’s a media business. Because media folks–like me–love to read about themselves.
• The people behind the site are the same ones behind Techmeme, and they’ve got the aggregation formula down cold: Build your site using other people’s work, automate as much as you can, and keep your human interaction to a minimum.

In this case, the human touch comes from Megan McCarthy, who joined Gabe Rivera’s outfit late in 2008 to help run his flagship site. The new one will be self-explanatory to anyone who’s seen the original ’meme. Or the site Jim Romenesko runs, for that matter.

Two other quick notes:

• If you’re the kind of person who notices these things–and there’s a good chance you are–you may note there’s no onanistic “Leaderboard” on Mediagazer yet. There will be, McCarthy promises–the site just needs 30 days of data to get it going.
• Given that Techmeme is as heavy on media stories as it is, there’s going to be some serious crossover between it and Mediagazer. Note, um, the Apple stories on both sites today. That’s not an immediate worry, McCarthy says, though over time, she imagines that some of Techmeme’s media stuff will move completely over to her new site.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100308/yet-another-media-aggregation-site-yup-and-youll-read-it-techmeme-unveils-mediagazer/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100204/what-if-facebook-ever-got-serious-about-becoming-a-news-aggregation-vampire-well-it-would-be-a-sparkly-one/ http://allthingsd.com/20100204/what-if-facebook-ever-got-serious-about-becoming-a-news-aggregation-vampire-well-it-would-be-a-sparkly-one/#comments Thu, 04 Feb 2010 16:11:42 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=24060

Here are two quotes that got me thinking about what would happen if Facebook–whose user base is inexorably marching toward 400 million–ever got serious about the news aggregation business.

First, perpetual apple-cart-upsetter Mark Cuban raised everyone’s hackles this week by taking aim at online sites that aggregate news from other sources, especially Google (GOOG).

Among other colorful things Cuban said during a keynote speech:

“Google is a vampire, and you run scared. There is no reason to be indexed in Google….You haven’t gotten anything back except that you’ve turned into zombies….You’ve got to realize they’re vampires and you can’t be the dumb blonde showing your neck.”

Then, yesterday, in a fourth-quarter earnings call, AOL (AOL) CEO Tim Armstrong, answering a question about the renewal status of its search deal with Google, talked about how other outlets, especially Facebook, are now more important than ever to getting traffic for his company’s content.

“Our strategy on distribution is not relying on search,” said Armstrong. “Fragmentation is our friend.”

It was a curious way of putting it, but the message was clear and correct–it will be increasingly obvious that consumers are inevitably moving away from the only-search paradigm to that of discovery through social and other jacked-up affiliation networks.

Of course, this puts a site like Facebook in the catbird seat, given that vast seas of rich data flow through it all the time.

In fact, Facebook is already one of the bigger sources of traffic to media sites, behind just Google, Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO).

That’s because, at any given moment, Facebook users are trading bazillions of links to articles, blogs, videos, photo images and more, pointing the way to their friends in a giant did-you-see-this mosh pit.

While this is dispersed widely all over the social networking service–on the Wall, on fan pages, in email, in comments–one has to wonder what would happen if Facebook ever decides to start corralling the information with some kind of aggregation method.

Could it pick the most linked and emailed stories of the day? Could it select the most popular photos? Could it tell you accurately what its little slice of humanity was buzzing about on a minute-by-minute basis?

Of course it could, but as more of a new sparkly “Twilight” vampire than the scary old-time one Cuban described.

Not that it will. I once queried Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg about the idea that Facebook could make some sort of newfangled competitor to the still-powerful Yahoo News.

No, she replied pretty flatly, noting that the whole service was already about people sharing all kinds of news and information with their friends.

But, it is clear to me, that–much as Google moved into the automated new business–Facebook could do the same anytime it wants to and create what would probably be one of the top aggregation sites for any topic on the Web.

The Silicon Valley phenom certainly could not be as easily de-indexed as Google by worried media companies, because the skeins of information are so enmeshed that separating them is impossible. And why would you?

In his speech, Cuban urged traditional media creators to stop the aggregation madness.

“Show some balls,” he said. “If you turn your neck to a vampire, they are [going to] bite. But at some point the vampires run out of people’s blood to suck.”

In a deeply socially connected world though, it’s a very different story. And in that world, vampires really do live forever.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

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