Yahoo has bought Summly, the mobile news reader app founded by a young British entrepreneur.

In a statement, the London-based company said it had bought the tiny outfit, which will close its app. The price was not disclosed (although I will try to find out soon enough). But the company had been seeking additional funding recently at a big valuation, in stark contrast to its small size (less than one million downloads), staff (five) and business model (zero revenue).

(Update: Sources tell me Yahoo paid just about $30 million for Summly, mostly in cash, with 10 percent in stock, for three employees.)

AllThingsD.com reported in December that Yahoo was looking closely at the startup, with CEO Marissa Mayer meeting with its founder Nick D’Aloisio. As we noted then, Yahoo was aiming at trendy mobile “acq-hires” to give the sleepy Silicon Valley Internet giant some sizzle and improve its moribund mobile offerings.

Mayer has been buying up a range of similar small mobile startups, largely for their teams of talented and innovative engineers. And, at a recent employee meeting, its M&A head Jackie Reses said the Silicon Valley company was looking at two significant purchases and a half-dozen smaller ones.

Said Yahoo: “Founder Nick D’Aloisio and the Summly team are joining Yahoo! in the coming weeks. While the Summly app will close, we will acquire the technology and you’ll see it come to life throughout Yahoo!’s mobile experiences soon. We’re not disclosing purchase price or other terms of the deal.”

Yahoo mobile head Adam Cahan wrote a blog post about the deal, as did D’Aloisio, who also tweeted news of it:

@summly has signed an agreement to be acquired by Yahoo!! Excited for the next chapter of Summly! Thanks to all who have supported me.

— Nick D’Aloisio (@nickdaloisio) March 25, 2013

News readers have been getting snapped up of late. CNN acquired Zite for $20 million in 2011, while we reported that LinkedIn was in the midst of buying Pulse for upwards of $50 million.

The 17-year-old D’Aloisio created the high-profile news reading app, which garnered much attention in the last year in the mobile space, which is probably what attracted Yahoo to it.

As I wrote:

D’Aloisio — who looks like he could easily be a member of One Direction if this tech thing did not work out — is perhaps a perfect storm for Yahoo, which is seeking to show that it can attract innovative, young entrepreneurs to the company, while also looking to strengthen its nearly bare mobile cupboard.

Summly is all that and a bag of (fish and) chips, with a very slick app for the Apple iPhone that has become one of the more popular in the App Store since it was re-launched last month. The company has said it has been downloaded 500,000 times.

It deserves the attention, as it is a pleasure to use — think an even hipper version of Flipboard with some more sass. The handsomely designed app summarizes news stories — all using a natural language processing algorithm — in only a few sentences and in under 400 characters. Users can then swipe through topics and stories quickly and click in to be directed to the full story on the original news site.

Summly originally started as a prototype app called Trimit, which soon garnered attention and seed funding from Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing’s investment firm. In no time, it had a range of other investors, ponying up about $1.5 million, including trendy ones like Ashton Kutcher and tech types like Zynga’s Mark Pincus, Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg and Airbnb’s Brian Chesky.

Since then, it has been striking content deals, including with News Corp. (which owns this site) and others, which seem to be attracted by its investor pedigree, its solid technology and — perhaps most of all — its media-darling founder.

To get an idea of the adorable hip factor involved, here’s a really clever video D’Aloisio did with actor Stephen Fry, who is also an investor in the startup:

Summly Launch from Summly on Vimeo.

Justin Santamaria and Gustaf Alstromer

Everybody in tech is all “mobilemobilemobile” these days, but that’s perhaps even more true for Airbnb, given that it’s all about coordinating travel on the go. The company now gets 37 percent of its usage on mobile — it’s less about accommodation browsing, more about interaction between hosts and guests — up from 26 percent last fall.

In recent months, Airbnb has made significant additions to its mobile team, the company tells AllThingsD. It snagged Justin Santamaria, who was at Apple for nearly 10 years and was one of the first engineers on the iPhone, leading development on products like iMessage. Santamaria’s title at Airbnb is “mobile product lead.”

Plus, Gustaf Alstromer joined Airbnb from Voxer, where he won a reputation as one of tech’s leading “growth hackers” for getting the walkie-talkie app hundreds of thousands of downloads per day. Airbnb’s mobile apps have been downloaded 2.5 million times, the company said, up from one million for the iPhone app last fall. Alstromer’s new title is “head of growth.”

There were, of course, the questions on his famously huge Facebook investment many years ago, and why he’s put money in Y Combinator to spur startup innovation.

But it’s clear from his mainstage interview at the SXSW interactive festival in Austin this morning that high-profile Russian investor Yuri Milner of DST Global has been striving to think much bigger thoughts of late.

While he’s gotten a lot of attention for his big bets in the social networking site, as well as with Twitter, Spotify, Airbnb and many others, he’s slowed his investing in the U.S. considerably to focus more on what he and many others in Silicon Valley are calling “moon shot” ideas.

“Somehow, we have lost interest in big ideas,” said Milner, in an onstage interview with Vanity Fair contributing editor Bethany McLean about shifting away from thinking — which he has funded, in part — that has gotten more short-term and pragmatic. “I think we still have a destiny as human beings.”

That has included starting up his Fundamental Physics Prize, which has now become the priciest academic award, last year. And, more recently — with Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and Genentech mogul and Apple Chairman Art Levinson, among others — the launch of the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences Foundation.

As Mike Isaac wrote when that initiative was announced less than a month ago:

“The first round of prize recipients includes 11 scientists from a range of research disciplines, including studies in genetics, cancer research and neural behavior. Each of the 11 prize winners will receive a $3 million award for their work, and Brin, Zuckerberg, Milner and the rest of the sponsors have agreed to a five-year commitment to awarding prizes.”

Milner, who was a physicist in his early career, said onstage that he has been disheartened to see that not enough younger people choose to go into fundamental science anymore. Thus he is aming to make it more attractive via his prizes.

“We don’t have enough heroes who are admired by a large portion of the population due to their scientific achievements,” he said, noting that it will require rewarding individuals in a “disproportionate manner.”

Still, in the Q&A session, the crowd in the Austin Convention Center wanted to know mostly about more earthbound questions, such as what tech company would last 100 years, as IBM has.

According to Milner: Google, Facebook and Wikipedia, due to network effects.

Another attendee wanted to know what he thought it takes to be an entrepreneur these days.

“It’s almost a heroic effort, and kind of goes against set ways of doing things,” answered Milner.

Then someone wanted to know how the political arena could be similarly transformed.

“That, I don’t know,” said Milner.

Moon shot, indeed.

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Last week, a fierce debate erupted over a range of social networks and in the media about a story we posted on Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s new decree that employees at the Silicon Valley Internet company would no longer be able to work from home.

In a sometimes awkwardly worded internal memo I posted from Yahoo HR head Jackie Reses, the company rolled out the new rule — pushed through by Mayer — which requires that Yahoo employees who work remotely relocate to company facilities by June 1.

“Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home,” read the memo to employees. “We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.”

The goal of Mayer to cure what ails Yahoo: Reviving a moribund and enervated workforce that has struggled to innovate and excel over many years. One of the many problems has been the liberal use of work-from-home policies that have been woefully mismanaged to create a culture that is simply not energized.

But, unless I am reading the memo wrong, the ban is not just limited to those who have arrangements to work from home full time — which number in the hundreds — but also employees who take one or two days a week at home.

Top sources told me that Mayer has been particularly irked about Yahoo parking lots that are slow to fill in the morning and quick to empty by 5 pm — which is atypical at other tech companies such as Google. (Mayer was a longtime exec at the search giant.)

At first, she tried to change culture in ways that rained down tasty perks on employees — such as free food and smartphones. Mayer has also been practical, instituting please-be-here Friday afternoon FYI weekly meetings and stricter performance reviews.

But she is now inevitably doling out more unpleasant medicine to the troops, starting with the banning of work from home, which has caused a big ruckus both internally and externally.

Some inside the company are clearly appalled, especially since it might more severely impact working mothers.

“When a working mother is standing behind this, you know we are a long way from a culture that will honor the thankless sacrifices that women too often make,” read one email I got from an internal source, referring to the recent birth of Mayer’s baby.

Many others at Yahoo’s Sunnyvale, Calif., HQ pointed to the nursery Mayer had built — for which she paid personally — next to her office as a perk others at Yahoo do not get.

“I wonder what would happen if my wife brought our kids and nanny to work and set em up in the cube next door?” joked a husband of another employee who will be losing her work-from-home privileges.

Yahoo employees, as far as I can see from its company careers page, offers the typical Dependent Day Care Flexible Spending Account, where staff can pay “dependent care expenses, such as day care or after-school care, with pre-tax dollars.”

While it is fair to raise the issue of how employees will cope given the sudden change in HR policy, others also think that limiting work at home is a good idea because it galvanizes culture and creates a spirit of collaboration that has been missing at Yahoo for far too long.

“Marissa is doing what good leaders do,” wrote one person on Twitter. “Making sure her Yahoo team is communicating & working TOGETHER.”

That is actually a sentiment expressed by Google CFO Patrick Pichette at a recent talk in Australia, when asked about telecommuting at Google:

“The surprising question we get is: ‘How many people telecommute at Google?’ And our answer is: ‘As few as possible’ … There is something magical about sharing meals. There is something magical about spending the time together, about noodling on ideas, about asking at the computer ‘What do you think of this?’ These are [the] magical moments that we think at Google are immensely important in the development of your company, of your own personal development and [of] building much stronger communities.”

That said, officially, many Googlers are allowed and even encouraged to work at home. The company told me when asked about work-from-home policies: “We do not have a formal policy and leave Googlers to use good judgment.”

It is the same for Facebook, which confirmed a “policy to provide flexibility as work permits.” In fact, one exec at the social network giant noted to me that its entire camera app was built from an engineer’s garage, with the group staying away from the office as long as they wanted to build it from home.

Business networking site LinkedIn also said it had “no formal policy at present,” but noted that many employees work from home full-time and part-time as the situation warrants and in consultation with managers.

It goes on and on like that throughout the tech scene, part of an ethos of letting tech talent make its own rules — from what they wear to when and where they work — that is deeply ingrained in the culture.

A Hewlett-Packard spokesperson said of the tech giant: “We do not ban [work from home] and many HP people do it … it is not at all an issue at HP and hasn’t been for years. Some folks have a regular schedule, while others can do it from time to time with the okay of their supervisors.”

An AOL spokesperson said the company doesn’t ban work from home.

A Netflix spokesperson referenced a well-known premium video company’s job deck, which stressed a “freedom and responsibility culture” and notes, “We don’t measure people by how many hours they work or how much they are in the office. We do care about accomplishing great work.”

Twitter had a different twist, but still supports working from home. Said a spokesperson: “We believe there are significant tangible and intangible benefits when employees are working under the same roof. We also recognize that every so often it’s important to be able to work remotely, and we allow for that flexibility.”

A Cisco spokesperson said the networking company also allows it, but it has to be approved by a direct manager: “It is certainly utilized by those employees who earn it. And, of course, with our collaborative suite of technologies like Webex (with video) and telepresence it is the next best thing to being there in person.”

A Microsoft spokesman said that the software company “offers flexible work schedules for all employees.”

Perhaps one of the best companies for a long time in the telecommuting space has been IBM. From its corporate Web page, also touting the environmental benefits:

“IBM was one of the first global companies to pioneer programs to reduce employee commuting. It has sustained these programs for nearly two decades. Two key aspects are its (a) work-at-home program and (b) mobile employees program. Today, more than 128,000 (29 percent) of employees globally participate in one of these programs. In 2011, in just the U.S. alone, IBM’s work-at-home program conserved approximately 6.4 million gallons of fuel and avoided more than 50,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions.”

Startups are much the same.

Said an Airbnb spokesperson of the online housing rentals site: “It’s a flexible policy and managers determine what’s appropriate on a case-by-case basis.”

At location startup Foursquare, a spokesperson said, “Our policy is to allow for ‘flexible work hours’ — and that applies to both the hours you work, and where you work from. While we don’t have any dedicated remote employees, our folks do work from home on occasion and we’re fine with that.”

Private social networking company Path is much the same, according to a spokesperson: “Path has a work-from-home policy. The manager and employee work out the details together.”

The only company I queried that did not respond immediately is Apple, which has been known for a long time to have much tighter rules with its employees. I will update when I hear from the company.

I also have emails in to Amazon, which is already known for flexible working policies.

But, overall, Mayer is forging new ground with her work-from-home ban. Whether that is enough to turbocharge the Yahoo culture is anybody’s guess.

Keith Rabois, the former Square COO who left the company in the midst of unproven allegations of personal misconduct, is weighing an offer to join Silicon Valley venture firm Khosla Ventures, according to sources close to the situation, and is currently leaning toward accepting the job there.

But, that could change. In an interesting twist, the longtime entrepreneur and investor has also been in discussions with Airbnb CEO and co-founder Brian Chesky to become COO or president there.

Both the VC and the startup have been doing reference checks on Rabois, news of which has gotten out in the ever-chatty Silicon Valley scene. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier today that Rabois had been in talks with the San Francisco-based online housing rentals company.

But sources with knowledge of the situation said that Rabois — who has played the No. 2 to a string of high-profile entrepreneurs, including Peter Thiel at PayPal, Max Levchin at Slide and, most recently, Jack Dorsey at Square — seems “99 percent” ready to move into a more formal investing role.

Of course, there is still that one percent chance he might not, underscored by the eternal lure of the hot startup for serial entrepreneurs like Rabois. That said, he has also been an active angel investors for many years, with a wide-ranging portfolio, and is on many boards, including Yelp’s.

The choice of two very attractive alternatives is in stark contrast to the more tense situation for Rabois just a month ago, after accusations of sexual harassment arose related to a relationship he had with a Square employee.

Rabois has denied the allegations aimed at him and at the San Francisco payments company, which have not yet turned into a lawsuit, and has thus far been backed by Square. Rabois called the accusations by the employee “fiction” and a “shakedown.”

That said, due to the controversy around the serious workplace issue, he stepped down from his job as COO.

“At the end of the day, this is personally embarrassing to me, because when anyone’s life is exposed to a public forum, it creates quite a damaging situation,” said Rabois at the time in an interview with me. “As we looked at it, it was going to become a distraction that was going to hurt the company.”

Curtis, who started at Airbnb a week ago, was previously a director of engineering at Facebook, where he had worked on the company’s growth team since 2011.

Airbnb now has 50 engineers on a team of more than 500, up from 18 engineers at the beginning of 2012. CTO Nate Blecharczyk said the company expects to hire another 50 engineers before the end of the year.

That’s for continued work on projects like search, fraud, scaling and dynamic pricing — as well as new products around “creating more meaningful trips,” as Blecharczyk described it.

Curtis had previously been at Yahoo for nearly eight years, where he worked on products such as Yahoo Mail. He described the appeal of joining Airbnb as a compelling opportunity to have impact on a small, fast-growing team.

Airbnb is not necessarily an engineering-driven company, but that’s key to its charm, contended Blecharczyk.

“We’re enabling offline experiences through online products,” he said. “Changing people’s behavior is science and art, and it’s rare that there’s such a rich intersection.”

San Francisco-based Airbnb booked three million guests in 2012, with 300,000 listings.

Airbnb’s growth has been explosive over the past few years. It’s an alternative to going the usual hotel route, allowing travelers to stay in local homes and apartments rather than the Marriott.

Problem is, if you’re looking to visit, say, San Francisco for the first time, you don’t know what districts would be the best place for you to stay. So if you’re a bigger fan of Italian food than Mexican, for instance, you wouldn’t necessarily know that North Beach is probably a better fit for you than the Mission.

Neighborhoods, the company’s latest product, aims to fix this. Airbnb has recruited teams of “local experts” to give detailed information on specific locales. They’ll specify, for instance, how easy it is to travel on foot or by public transportation, or whether it’s better to rent a car. Each neighborhood comes with recommendations on local shops and restaurants, and with maps that tell exactly where the place you’re considering staying is situated.

Like every major site these days, the largest emphasis is on photos. Airbnb has employed a team of people to shoot the community haunts. Each neighborhood page is plastered with high-quality shots of nearby food establishments, pretty parks and other local ephemera.

Neighborhoods will begin with more than 300 neighborhoods across a handful of major cities like London, Rio de Janeiro and, of course, San Francisco.

If all of this sounds familiar, it’s because it is. Travel guides like Fodor’s and restaurant review pioneer Zagat have offered local suggestions for years in the travel book space, while the rise of sites like Yelp have made it easier to discover local businesses based on the wisdom of crowds. And in recent years, Web giants like Google have pushed hard into this space with products such as Google+Local, which pairs location-based local discovery with Zagat guide ratings for restaurants.

But the additions signal larger ambitions for Airbnb, as the company shapes itself into a more integrated accommodation service. Like most travel services already know, we plan our trips around the stuff we want to do. Staying in a place that’s best suited to our interests makes the most sense, and the philosophy is that local advocates know best, and should be the ones doing the write-ups.

The big initiative now is convincing small, independently owned businesses that working with Airbnb is a good thing. Within each pilot neighborhood, Airbnb also plans to host “Local Lounges,” essentially hubs for travelers to look up much of what’s good to visit nearby.

Right now, they’re situated within a few coffee-shop launch partners, but my guess is that Airbnb wants to convince other types of businesses to follow suit. (See the Airbnb-backed study on how good the start-up is for San Francisco for more evidence of this.)

Now all that’s keeping Airbnb from becoming a full-fledged Orbitz or Travelocity competitor are integrated flight- and car-booking services (though Airbnb already has a deal with Hipmunk for any traffic that Hipmunk sends Airbnb’s way). That may make sense as the company scales, but we’ll have to see how neighborhoods and local lounges play out.

The new service is available in select cities beginning today, with plans to go wider in the coming months.

Florent Peyre, the co-founder and president of CasaHop, a home-swapping site, has left the company.

After getting the New York-based company off the ground earlier this year, Peyre confirmed that he decided to move on, but will continue as an adviser. No word on what he is doing next.

The social travel site, which is following in the footsteps of other sites like Airbnb, launched in May and had raised about $1.2 million in funding. The impressive investor list includes Lerer Ventures, First Round Capital, Betaworks and many other angels.

Peyre, whom I interviewed in this video in June, founded the company along with Paul Berry, the former CTO of Huffington Post. Prior to joining CasaHop, Peyre was the VP of Business Development and Strategy at Gilt City, Gilt Groupe’s daily deals business.

Airbnb’s existing investors, including Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, are expected to also participate in the round, these people said. How the investment might be divided between Mr. Thiel and Founders Fund, a venture capital firm he co-founded, remains unclear. The people added that the terms of the deal are still being negotiated and could change.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The Library of Virginia

The payments company said the cash would go toward developing new payment capabilities and international expansion. In total, it has now raised $70 million in capital.

Braintree is not the only one after PayPal’s multibillion dollar business. Another start-up vying for a chunk of the business is San Francisco’s Stripe. The general claim by these newbies is that Stripe can provide a much more streamlined process for accepting payments for retailers and consumers — at least compared to the 14-year-old incumbent.

In the case of Braintree, it claims it is processing more than $5 billion in payments annually for more than 3,000 mobile and online merchants, including Uber, Fab, Airbnb and HotelTonight. It charges 2.9 percent plus 30 cents per transaction, and works in more than 30 countries and accepts 130-plus currencies. In a statement, NEA general partner Ravi Viswanathan said the investment reflects the firm’s confidence in the company’s technology: “We believe Braintree has the strengths to challenge all the incumbents in the payment space, including Paypal.”

Earlier this year, Braintree acquired mobile payments start-up Venmo for about $26 million to add another PayPal feature to its service: Digital wallet and person-to-person payment capabilities.

Yahoo’s David Hantman, who has been its deputy general counsel and VP of global public policy, is taking a similar job at the online rentals start-up Airbnb, according to an internal email memo he sent today.

The job move is interesting, given the many regulatory issues that the San Francisco-based company faces in local markets as it grows.

Hantman is already coming out swinging in his internal memo to Yahoo staffers about the departure:

“[Airbnb has] some huge challenges with a few antiquated laws in their biggest markets, so my job will be to help them convince governments that allowing people to rent out their own homes or apartments should not be a problem, and that in fact it is great for the economy and for the tons of people that can only pay their mortgage or rent through the extra income they get from airbnb … As always, I like to be on the right side of history, and I believe in the mission and the team over there.”

An Airbnb spokewoman (also a former Yahoo) confirmed the hiring. (I did not even try Yahoo’s current PR personage, as I already have the memo and she never calls back, anyway.)

Here’s Hantman’s full email to Yahoo staffers on the move:

From: David Hantman
Date: Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 9:41 AM
Subject: A brief announcement to help clutter your inbox
To: David Hantman

Friends –

With apologies for the impersonal nature of this e-mail, I wanted to let you know that I recently accepted a job at an exciting new company called airbnb, and will thus be leaving Yahoo! next month. I am already assisting in the process to select my successor, which will hopefully be complete soon.

This is a bittersweet departure for me, since I leave behind an awesome team and a company I love and believe in. But while I have loved every day of my 5+ years at Yahoo!, I am very excited to return to my startup roots. When I graduated law school way back in 1994, the first thing I did was to co-found an Internet company with a couple of friends. That company eventually went public, but I walked away for my Capitol Hill dream long before it had a viable business model (or really anything other than a few of us trying to convince the world that the Internet was going to be awesome someday). For the last five years, I have had the privilege of working for and among my heroes — people who turned a simple list of neat web sites in 1995 into a company that serves 700 million users and helped revolutionize the way people get and share information around the world.

Now, though, I have a second chance at the startup life — this time at a company whose brilliant founders have already proved it to be an amazing and disruptive business. I am excited to join an incredible team at airbnb and, hopefully, to be a small part of their future success. Airbnb is maybe the most successful little known company in the world. Millions of people have used the service to rent rooms or entire apartments — even private islands — as an alternative to hotels. They have some huge challenges with a few antiquated laws in their biggest markets, so my job will be to help them convince governments that allowing people to rent out their own homes or apartments should not be a problem, and that in fact it is great for the economy and for the tons of people that can only pay their mortgage or rent through the extra income they get from airbnb. For hundreds of years families have been taking in boarders or renting out extra space, and this service is just bringing that process into the 21st century, at a time when it is more needed than ever. As always, I like to be on the right side of history, and I believe in the mission and the team over there.

Anyway, please let’s stay in touch. I will be headquartered in DC to start, and while this yahoo-inc e-mail will soon stop working, my personal e-mail will stay the same:

xxx@xxx.com [redacted by ATD, since it is Hantman's personal email]

All the best!

David

The Photoset app is separate from the main Tumblr app, similar to the way Facebook built specialized apps for photos and messaging.

As photo sharing has become more mobile and thus in the moment, people often share just one picture rather than a whole edited album. But sometimes it takes more than one picture to tell a full story.

Photoset joins existing stitching and montage apps like Pic Stitch, as well as album apps like Batch, which was absorbed into Airbnb.

Here’s a photoset I made myself without too much trouble — though the service does seem to be a bit overloaded this morning. There’s no way to import to WordPress (just Tumblr, Facebook and Instagram), so a screenshot will have to suffice.

The Fondu team will join Airbnb’s product group in San Francisco, but other assets of the company were not purchased. The service, which focused on recommendations from trusted friends, is to be shut down Nov. 1.

Fondu CEO Gauri Maglik noted that the two companies share a common goal of helping users discover offline experiences.

A spokesperson for Airbnb said, “With their product’s roots in layering discovery and community for trusted recommendations, there is a natural synergy between Fondu and Airbnb. We believe this will make for a better host and guest experience for our growing community.”

New York City-based Fondu had previously been called SpotOn, and had raised $575,000 in seed funding from ENIAC Ventures, the NYU Innovation Fund, Harbor Road Ventures, Blazer Ventures and other investors.

Take the popular travel rental site Airbnb: Amid significant overall growth, it now gets 26 percent of all its traffic from mobile, up from 12 percent a year ago.

Many of those visits come from Apple devices, which account for more than half of Airbnb’s mobile traffic, between the iPhone, iPad and the mobile Web.

The Airbnb iPhone app has been downloaded more than one million times, and now accounts for 12 percent of total Airbnb traffic, up from 4 percent a year ago.

Airbnb does have an Android app, but it’s not nearly as popular, accounting for 1 percent of traffic now as well as a year ago.

Airbnb hosts and guests use their mobile phones for all sorts of tasks, but one of the biggest ones is messaging each other. Last month, more than 530,000 Airbnb messages were sent from mobile, and messages were replied to three times faster on mobile than from the Web.

If you run a big Web site that’s shifting to mobile and can share your own numbers, let me know — I’d like to try to collect them in the lead-up to our D: Dive Into Mobile conference next month.