AllThingsD » BetaWorks

Ifttt Raises Funding for Its Digital Duct Tape Service

Liz Gannes — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 17:01:03 +0000

Ifttt, a start-up that helps even nontechnical users manipulate and connect Web services to do their bidding, has closed its first funding round.

It’s not unexpected that the hot young two-person company would get some cash; in fact, before the round closed, some of it was already reported by ReadWriteWeb.

To be specific, the Ifttt funding was $1.585 million, and came from backers including NEA, Lerer Ventures, Betaworks, Greylock Discovery Fund and CrunchFund.

Ifttt stands for “if this, then that” and rhymes with “lift.” The name’s awkwardness shows a bit of the technical/nontechnical line that Ifttt is trying to straddle.

Users can set up “recipes” to do things like notify themselves with an email when a type of item is posted on Craigslist, cross-post their Flickr photos to Facebook, or archive their Instagram photos to Dropbox.

My colleague, Drake Martinet, who was first to report on Ifttt back in February, called it “digital duct tape.”

Ifttt co-founder Linden Tibbets said this week that the funding will be used to help his two-person operation hire more people. He said some of his goals for Ifttt are to create tools so developers would incorporate his service within their apps (though Ifttt functions on other people’s APIs, it doesn’t yet have an open API of its own), and also to manage the messy smorgasbord of notifications that spray out of social apps. “We could be what RSS could have been,” Tibbets said.

While Tibbets didn’t say how many people are using his service, he did say that, so far, Ifttt users have created 500,000 total tasks that have been executed 90 million times.

Saul Hansell Departs AOL to Be EIR at Betaworks

Kara Swisher — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 21:57:09 +0000

Saul Hansell, the prominent former New York Times tech reporter who went to AOL several years ago to head one of its content efforts called Seed, will leave the company to become an entrepreneur in residence at Betaworks.

The move to the New York venture firm is the right one now, said Hansell in an interview today.

“I have been watching people go starts thing for a long time and now I want to go start things,” he said. “I’ve got some ideas around news that I want to explore.”

Hansell, in a blog post, did try to not paint the move as as anti-AOL one:

“I know my friends in the technology press well enough to suspect some of them will see my move as part of a broader trend at AOL. I’m not sure the easy take is the right one. Based on my experience, I am more bullish on [AOL CEO] Tim Armstrong’s clear vision of a company built from the ground up for online journalism and the potential of AOL’s assets to achieve that vision.”

Hansell joined AOL the day after it split from Time Warner to run what he jokingly calls the “free-range, organic content farm” of Seed and has remained through its many iterations, including the purchase of the Huffington Post.

He is currently the “Big News” editor in that unit, which centers around topics.

Here’s Hansell’s blog post on the move:

Heading into the workshop.

Two years ago, when I explained to my children why I left the New York Times, one of the greatest spots ever to be a reporter and writer, I told them that I wanted to be an inventor. Since then, I’ve had the thrilling experience of being part of AOL, which is doing more than nearly anyone else to rethink the way that news is gathered, presented and paid for.

Now it’s time to strike out on my own and seek my fortune as an inventor. I’ve left AOL, and Monday I started as an entrepreneur in residence at Betaworks. If you’re not familiar with it, Betaworks has started and invested in a number of companies that are on the vanguard of real-time social experiences — several of which relate to news and publishing — including Bit.ly, ChartBeat, TweetDeck, and News.Me. It’s run by John Bortwick, whom I first met in 1997 when he sold his startup, Total New York, to America Online. We’ve become friends, and I couldn’t think of a more fertile environment in which to germinate a new idea than the bustle of creativity bursting out of the Betaworks loft in the meat packing district.

I know my friends in the technology press well enough to suspect some of them will see my move as part of a broader trend at AOL. I’m not sure the easy take is the right one. Based on my experience, I am more bullish on Tim Armstrong’s clear vision of a company built from the ground up for online journalism and the potential of AOL’s assets to achieve that vision. At AOL, I’ve had the pleasure of working with some of the smartest and most dedicated journalists, engineers and product executives I’ve ever met. And the brilliant acquisition of the Huffington Post brought in many more people who have been outpacing the industry through journalistic innovation.

I will always be grateful to Tim for giving me the chance to prove that I had more to contribute to a journalistic organization than simply articles and to Arianna for inviting me to join the HuffPost team. And I’m in debt to so many who offered so much advice –some of which I ignored to my own detriment — on the nuances of technology, product design, PowerPoint, and the ways of big companies. Yet as AOL continues to refine its organization, it became clear that this was the time for me to try my hand at starting a company.

It’s too soon to say much about what I’m doing. But I think there is a lot left to invent around both how to present news to people that takes advantage of the technology available today.

I expect you’ll see a lot more soon.

Qwhisper Is Looking to Solve Social Search With a Dose of Uber-Geek

Drake Martinet — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 18:01:15 +0000

Sometimes a start-up’s product is pretty, sometimes it’s from famous founders and occasionally it’s dead simple.

Qwhisper is none of those things — in fact, it’s barely even a product at this point. But its team of founders are attacking a devilishly hard problem.

The company and Web app of the same name attempt to search and categorize social media updates with an accuracy that even the sector’s giants have been unable to deliver thus far.

“Search for social is really tough. When someone mentions Mars, you don’t know if they mean Mars the planet, the god, Bruno Mars, the rover, or the candy bar,” said Qwhisper co-founder Eldar Sadikov. “With Web pages, there are all kinds of context clues to help you figure things out, like links and other data. Social content is just so much shorter — you have to be very sophisticated to [make sense of it].”

What that means for us avid Twitterers is that, as of now, searching for a category of tweets is not a useful endeavor — and forget about searching for tweets about a simple but amorphous topic such as “popular music.”

But Sadikov’s Qwhisper, which is in private beta, makes use of some new search algorithms to reorganize a user’s social streams.

Its founders claim the search and sort technology of Qwhisper can reliably deliver tweets to the user based on a topic, category and search term.

So, how does Qwhisper do it?

Sadikov made an attempt at outlining just how complex it is for a computer to make sense of a stream of single tweets:

“You need much more sophisticated natural language processing technology [for social] than what is needed for Web pages. [The system must] understand words like “lol,” “cuz,” “gonna,” “gotta” — because there is so much colloquial language in social content, compared to Web sites.”

Only after dealing with those problems, which are in themselves complex enough for several research papers, can Qwhisper layer in the really complex processing to answer such contextual questions as: What does this person do normally? And, what does that person normally talk about?

But every start-up with a search component boasts custom algorithms, so why should users be confident that Qwhisper’s are superior?

Qwhisper is touting the company’s intellectual pedigree.

Sadikov and some of the other co-founders left their PhD programs at Stanford’s InfoLab to start Qwhisper — the same InfoLab where Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed some of the early parts of Google.

Sadikov also spent time at Google, where he worked on building an algorithm for organizing small sets of words together in contextually relevant groups.

Not too long after, he gathered a group together to launch Qwhisper using some of the same concepts.

If Qwhisper or the engine that powers it proves successful, the consequences could be far reaching.

Delivering tweets and other social content in contextual channels could mean a whole new class of applications — and advertising — all built around social content.

But complex graph-modeling and multivariate algorithms aside, the litmus test for Qwhisper will be simple user interaction.

“Ultimately, if I post something like ‘saw inception last weekend – amazing,’ the system needs to recognize what that is about … even though it says nothing about movies or genre,” said Sadikov.

I caught him and one of his co-founders, Montse Medina, at the recent Stanford StartX incubator demo day to talk more about Qwhisper:

[ See post to watch video ]

Exclusive: Backupify Closes $5 Million in Round Led by Avalon Ventures

Arik Hesseldahl — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 12:20:57 +0000

Backupify, a cloud-based service that backs up the content of several social networks — including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn — and also the contents of Google Apps accounts, has landed a $5 million B round of venture capital funding led by Avalon Ventures.

Prior investors General Catalyst and Lowercase Capital also joined the round, which brings the company’s total funding to $10.4 million. Avalon’s Brady Bohrmann will join Backupify’s board.

I talked with CEO Rob May, who told me about his plan to accelerate marketing and adoption of Backupify by users of Google Apps, the search giant’s Web-based business suite of applications that is proving popular with businesses. So far, Backupify is being used to back up the files on 5,000 Google Apps domains. He says he would also like to offer Backupify for several other services that users have been requesting. In addition, May wants to boost Backupify’s visibility among the many third-party partners — like, say, Cloud Sherpas — who work with businesses deploying Google Apps.

The outfit is growing fast. It has 175,000 users and stores 200 terabytes of data for its users, not just from Google apps, but also from Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, Blogger, and the Zoho Web-based office suite. One public customer is New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which uses Backupify to back up the Google Apps data generated by some 1,000 users. The data is all backed up to Amazon Web Services, but users can also download local copies of their data.

Why would you need to back up data that’s on a supposedly reliable cloud service? Because you might goof up — and delete something you didn’t mean to — just as easily in the cloud as on your PC. May says that roughly one-third of all data loss occurs because of user error. “We hear a lot of different things. When you delete something, Google assumes you meant to delete it. Sometimes things get deleted maliciously by a hacker, or someone who gets ahold of a password that wasn’t taken care of,” he says. “IT administrators want their own backup copy they can restore from. They trust Google not to lose it, but they don’t always trust their own users.”

Backupify’s $4.5 million A round was also led by Avalon and joined by General Catalyst and Lowercase Capital. Prior to that, First Round Capital led a $900,000 seed round, which was joined by Betaworks and several individual investors, including Chris Sacca and Jason Calacanis.

Skype Pays Around $85 Million for GroupMe

Tricia Duryee — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 22:21:12 +0000

Skype has agreed to acquire GroupMe, a company that has developed a way for groups of people to send messages to each across various smartphone platforms. People familiar with the transaction say Skype will pay around $85 million for GroupMe, which was founded at a TechCrunch event in April 2010. Early investors include First Round Capital, Lerer Ventures and Betaworks; last fall, Khosla Ventures won a bidding war for a $10 million funding round that valued the company at around $35 million. Skype is in the process of being acquired by Microsoft.

Burp! Bitly Swallows Twitterfeed.

Peter Kafka — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 14:00:25 +0000

This is the opposite of a megadeal, but still worth noting: Bitly, the Web-address shortener, has picked up Twitterfeed, which helps publishers automatically send their stuff to Twitter and other platforms.

By definition, this is an “acqhire.” Twitterfeed was essentially a one-man operation, and now that man — Mario Menti — is a Bitly employee.

But in this case, Bitly is also buying Twitterfeed’s small but important set of customers. The company has some two million users, who publish in the range of five million posts a day. Twitterfeed already used Bitly to automatically shorten those Web addresses, but now Bitly can lock that business up, or at least try to do so.

That’s important when big players like Twitter, Facebook and Google are increasingly looking to lock up or at least restrict the data they let out of their own ecosystems.

Bitly may also try to migrate some of Twitterfeed’s customers to SocialFlow, a more sophisticated Twitter publishing tool, which, like Bitly, is also a start-up built by the Betaworks guys.

Crowdsourcing Platform ChallengePost Raises $4 Million

Peter Kafka — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 04:00:48 +0000

Start-ups that rely on the Internet as a source of free labor are nothing new. But the idea keeps coming back, in different forms, because it seems to work.

Latest example: ChallengePost, a two-year-old start-up that helps companies and non-profits run “challenges” that use the Web to crowdsource everything from cool app ideas to slogans that promote absentee voting.

The New York company has raised a $4.1 million Series A round from a group of investors led by Bob Borchers, a former Apple executive who’s now at Opus Capital, along with names like BetaWorks, Delicious’s Joshua Schachter, Mahalo’s Jason Calacanis and Qualcomm founder Irwin Jacobs.

The new money, which came after $600,000 in angel funding, is being used to expand the company from a two-man operation to one that employs 14 people.

The idea is to expand the company’s client base — to date, its most visible clients have been the federal government (including Michelle Obama, who used it to run an “Apps for Healthy Kids” challenge) and New York City (which has used the company to run a Gotham-specific apps contest. So far the challenges they’ve hosted have offered more than $40 million in prize money.

Founder Brandon Kessler says he also wants to expand the company into “problem identification,” where Web users can suggest challenges that ought to be sponsored. There shouldn’t be a shortage.

Fox News's Twitter Triggers: Crime, Murder, Casey Anthony

Peter Kafka — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 14:04:37 +0000

How does Fox News get Twitter users to its Web site? By talking about violence and crime.

At least that’s what worked for the news channel on a single day this spring. That’s according to SocialFlow, a start-up that specializes in Twitter analysis and distribution.

SocialFlow says that on May 25, these were the top five keywords that drove traffic from the @FoxNews Twitter account to its FoxNews.com site:

Crime
Casey Anthony
Murder
Obama
IMF Chief

The Anthony trial dominated lots of news outlets and Twitter conversations for a few months, so it’s not a huge surprise to see related terms generating attention among Fox’s online audience.

But FoxNews Twitter followers were interested in other scary stuff beyond the Anthony trial. Other popular keywords included “boy found dead,” “kidnapper” and “global terror.”

All of this data comes from a report SocialFlow has produced that looks at what works on Twitter for several different news sites. Here’s how Fox News’s top five keywords compared to the ones that worked for the New York Times, Al Jazeera English and the Economist. (Fox News, like this Web site, is owned by News Corp.)

And here’s a “word cloud” that includes more terms that worked on that single day:

The point of the SocialFlow report isn’t to draw any conclusions about different news sites’ audiences — you can do that on your own. SocialFlow is really trying to illustrate that different news sites’ Twitter audiences respond to different stuff, at different times, in different ways.

And SocialFlow says it can figure that stuff out, and then help sites’ Twitter feeds decide what and when to publish. (Disclosure: AllThingsD has recently started with working with SocialFlow for Twitter feeds like this one.)

SocialFlow is yet another Twitter-centric project from Betaworks, the New York-based investment group and start-up hatchery, which uses data from both Twitter and Bitly, the Betaworks-created URL shortener/data warehouse.

It seems to me that if SocialFlow works as advertised, it’s exactly the kind of the thing that Twitter would want to own for itself, to bolster its nascent advertising program. My hunch is we’ll come back to this one later.

Bitly Gets a New Boss

Peter Kafka — Mon, 16 May 2011 13:23:17 +0000

Bitly has raised $14 million in a few years, and shrinks more than 8 billion Web addresses a month. And it’s done all that without anyone running the company full time.

Until now. Technology vet Peter Stern, whose last start-up ended up being acquired by Facebook, is bitly’s first official CEO.

He’s taking the reins from Betaworks CEO John Borthwick, who helped hatch bitly as one of his incubator’s projects and has overseen it since, while juggling lots of other balls at the same time.

Stern founded Zenbe, an email start-up that Facebook “acqhired” last fall, but most of his résumé predates the Web 2.0 era: He was co-founder of online brokerage Datek Online, and prior to that he helped build “cool electro-optic sensors and devices, most of which are classified.”

Bitly doesn’t make a whole lot of money helping publishers shorten their Web addresses, but it does get its hands on lots of data about stuff people share with each other on the Web. Just how valuable all that data can be is an open question, and in the past the company’s name has been floated as an acquisition target for Yahoo et al.

The fact that the Betaworks guys have hired a full-time manager for the company suggests that they’re not selling anytime soon. It’s a good bet that they’ll work to use that data in interesting ways. The first example we’ve seen has been in the News.me iPad reading/aggregation app, which bitly owns and powers.

Good news for people like me, by the way, who like the News.me concept but don’t read that much on their iPad: Stern says a version for Apple’s iPhone is in the works.

Bloom.io Raises Funding for Playful Data Visualization

Liz Gannes — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 21:44:29 +0000

Bloom.io today announced it has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Betaworks, SV Angel and Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield.

The San Francisco-based company–which has already made some basic demo apps to show Facebook and Twitter updates as a series of pretty blooming bubbles–says it will make data visualization applications for iOS and the Web to help users discover personally relevant information, streaming audio and video content.

Bloom’s team comes from Stamen Design, Trulia and The Barbarian Group. Bloom President Ben Cerveny told NetworkEffect that the company’s first apps will be for the iPad, introducing different metaphors such as space travel or sand in a sandbox for ambient and active views of social media data.

Cerveny calls these “post-textual experiences,” and you can imagine a big, trippy personalized screensaver or social playlist on your tablet.

Bloom promises that its apps “aren’t merely games or graphics,” but rather “new ways of seeing what’s important.”

Kickstarter Fesses Up: The Crowdsourced Funding Start-Up Has Funding, Too

Peter Kafka — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 01:47:02 +0000

Kickstarter has all the requisite characteristics for a hot startup: an ah-ha! concept, a growing user base, and great buzz.

The one thing it doesn’t have are stories about investors clamoring to throw money its way. And the three-year-old company has never disclosed a funding round. Is it possible it has never taken in any money?

Nope. It’s not. I hear that Kickstarter, which helps artists and entrepreneurs raise money for their projects via crowd-sourced donation, has itself raised around $10 million in venture backing so far.

Its investors are high-profile, too: Union Square Ventures is the company’s best-known backer, but Kickstarter has also received money from the Betaworks incubator/seed investment fund, along with contributions from well-known entrepreneuer/angels like Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Vimeo co-founder Zach Klein and Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake.

Kickstarter’s public profile has been shooting up, up, up–most recently, as the company that helped fund watches made out of Apple’s iPod nanos — and its backers are a bit of an open secret in tech circles. But for whatever reason the company hasn’t wanted its investors chatting about it.

Union Square, for instance, doesn’t include the company in its public portfolio. [UPDATE: Now they do. "Recently the company has been getting a lot of attention and it has become clear to all of us that the quiet period is over," USV partner Fred Wilson writes in a blog post this morning. "So now we get to add the Kickstarter logo to our investments page and we can talk about the company publicly as much as we talk about it privately.]

That quiet period is over now, though, courtesy of a profile in the new issue of Wired magazine. The story is primarily about the company’s origins and ambitions, but casually mentions Union Square’s backing, and identifies Fake, Klein, Dorsey, Meetup founder Scott Heiferman and comedian David Cross (!) as other investors.

I asked CEO Perry Chen for more details about the company’s funding, but didn’t expect much. And via a pr agency, I ended up with a list of other angels, but nothing else. Here it is, for the record: Josh Stylman; Peter Hershberg; Joi Ito; Chris Sacca; Joshua Schacter; Matt Haughey; Josh & Jared Kushner; Chris Kaskie; “some other friends.”

The Wired issue with the Kickstarter profile is just landing in subscribers’ mailboxes now, and should be on newsstands and iPads next week. If you’re waiting for a free peek, though, you’ll have to be patient–the magazine usually waits a bit before it puts a new issue up on the Web. Meantime, here’s a look at the cover, via the magazine’s Twitter account:

[Kickstarter image credit: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid]

Video: GroupMe Dudes Talk Group Messaging Phenom (and Drink Beer at the Same Time)

Kara Swisher — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 22:01:45 +0000

If you had to pick the hotsy-totsy start-up to win the media darling of South by Southwest award for 2011–following in the precious footsteps of Foursquare and Twitter from years past–it would probably have to be GroupMe.

The group messaging/conference call/location/photo sharing service has, as these things tend to, garnered a lot of heat since its debut less than a year ago.

That has, of course, also meant the requisite big venture funding–$11.5 million in total–for the New York-based GroupMe, including from SV Angel, betaworks, First Round Capital, Lerer Ventures, General Catalyst Partners and Khosla Ventures.

And, no surprise, the dead-simple idea now has many start-up rivals, all vying to use combine mobile, texting, social, location, groups and smartphones into some unholy megatrend.

Still, GroupMe has built a slick little offering, which is likely to get scooped up by some bigger entity (or perhaps just copied, which is the sincerest form of flattery in tech).

Until then, its Co-founders Jared Hecht and Steve Martocci are enjoying their day in the sun–quite literally, at their free grilled-cheese-and-beer giveaway at SXSW this weekend in Austin, Texas.

Here is my video interview with their-future-is-so-bright-they-have-to-wear-shades pair:

[ See post to watch video ]

Former Google Social Lead Launches Ditto Discovery App

Liz Gannes — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 20:00:50 +0000

Ditto, an iPhone app and new company to help users get quick recommendations about restaurants and movies, launches today.

The app is notable because it was created by Jyri Engeström, who previously founded Jaiku, a Twitter competitor that Google bought in 2007. Engeström was then Google’s “head of social,” but left dissatisfied in 2009. Pieces of the never-released product he’d been developing at Google showed up in Google Buzz, Profiles and Latitude, according to Engeström.

Engeström, a sociologist by training, said the rise of the mobile touchscreen was part of what brought him back to the game, because he thinks he can create a meaningful and fun experience without requiring users to do much typing.

Ditto users press big colorful buttons to indicate what they want to do–for instance, eat out. Then a user receives recommendations for nearby restaurants directly from friends but also from processing friends’ historical check-in data. That seems similar to Foursquare, but Engeström said it’s more useful, because users turn to Ditto before they make a decision about where to go or what to do. In that way, it’s a bit more like a social Q&A service.

The current Ditto app also supports movie recommendations, and will add other categories like books and music, with the idea that a user could consume recommended content directly on the phone from Netflix, Spotify or Kindle. Engeström also said the company will develop for Android next.

This horizontal approach to discovery will likely be hard to pull off, because users with app-filled smartphones aren’t sitting around waiting for the perfect all-purpose social recommendations app.

So if attracting users does prove to be hard, would Engeström sell out, given his negative experience with Google? What about in the context of Beluga, the group messaging app that already sold out to Facebook this week, before its inevitable larger competitor had even launched anything like it?

Engeström said one advantage he has over Beluga (whose founders worked for and with him at Google) is that recommendations are monetizable through advertising and affiliate relationships–whereas SMS costs money and doesn’t have an obvious business model. He also attested that Ditto has already had acquisition inquiries before it even launched.

Ditto has raised $775,000 from Betaworks and True Ventures, and has a team of three based in San Francisco.

Bill Gross's UberMedia Raises $17.5 Million From Accel, Index and Steve Case

Kara Swisher — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 17:04:37 +0000

UberMedia, which just bought TweetDeck for $30 million in equity last week, has raised $17.5 million, in a round led by Accel Partners.

The valuation for the Pasadena, Calif., start-up founded by well-known entrepreneur Bill Gross (pictured here)–which was actually struck some month ago–is $40 million.

Accel’s Jim Breyer will join the board of UberMedia, maker of social media reading and posting tools, which is currently largely aimed at the Twitter ecosystem.

“We are hoping to work very closely with Twitter, which is certainly our goal, as well as other social media platforms like Facebook,” said Breyer in an interview with BoomTown this morning, answering a question about previous tensions between Twitter and UberMedia. “There will be a lot of efforts to monetize Twitter and there is no silver bullet.”

Index Ventures and Steve Case’s Revolution Ventures also participated in the round.

The company did not reveal the amount raised, nor the valuation for UberMedia.

But many like him are trying to find a way to monetize the huge microblogging platform–including Twitter–and take advantage of its enormous scale.

Gross founded the start-up last spring.

Armed with $3.5 million in venture funding from a group of leading investors, including Index, Revolution, betaworks, First Round Capital and angel investors such as Mahalo’s Jason Calacanis and BuzzMachine’s Jeff Jarvis.

Started in Gross’s Idealab start-up incubator and called TweetUp (and then PostUp), it was initially cast as a keyword-based bidding marketplace akin to Overture/Goto.com, the first paid search system he created a decade ago.

TweetUp also offered an organic search service to surface the best tweets. This put it at odds on several fronts with Twitter, which began to aggressively move to take over key parts of its business that had largely been left to third-party developers.

That still remains UberMedia’s essential goal, and Breyer hopes that the new investment will show Twitter that UberMedia hopes to work in harmony with it, as other developers have done successfully with Facebook. (Accel and Breyer himself are big investors in the social networking giant, so he should know.)

“Like Twitter, we want to drive the customer experience,” he said, pointing out successes such as the Zynga gaming service. “This is a lot like Facebook several years ago and cooperation worked out well for everyone.”

Here’s the official press release:

Accel Partners Leads Investment Round in UberMedia, Jim Breyer Joins Board of Directors

PASADENA, Calif.–February 14, 2011–UberMedia, the leading independent provider of applications for reading and posting to Twitter and other social media platforms, today announced that it completed a financing round led by Jim Breyer of Accel Ventures. Existing investors Steve Case of Revolution Ventures and Danny Rimer of Index Ventures also participated.

“At UberMedia, our goal is to enhance the Twitter experience with functionality in our clients and to be the best partner with Twitter in growing and enhancing their ecosystem,” said Bill Gross, Founder and CEO. “In particular, the addition of Jim Breyer to our board will really enable us to succeed at this mission. His experience on the boards of Wal-Mart, Facebook, Marvel Entertainment, Dell and so many other high-profile consumer brands will be particularly helpful.”

“We’ve been watching closely Bill’s efforts at UberMedia to build upon the ground-breaking communications platform created by Twitter,” said Jim Breyer of Accel Partners. “We see a tremendous business in the kinds of innovations in user experience being developed at UberMedia. The result of these efforts will be an expansion in the number and variety of people engaged with Twitter as well as a method for advertisers to reach consumers in highly targeted and relevant ways.”

And here are two video interview I did with Gross last April when the company was founded:

[ See post to watch video ]

TweetDeck Finds a Home, and $30 Million, at UberMedia

Peter Kafka — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 04:02:48 +0000

UberMedia, the holding company that specializes in Twitter-based start-ups, has added its highest-profile company to date: TweetDeck, the biggest Twitter application not owned by Twitter itself.

UberMedia, run by Internet pioneer Bill Gross, will pay $30 million in cash and stock for the London-based company, which has raised less than $5 million from investors in the last two years.

The deal, first reported by TechCrunch, isn’t done yet, but it’s pretty far along, with signed term sheets, etc. All of TweetDeck’s investors will take a portion of their payout in UberMedia equity, I’m told.

Both Gross and TweetDeck founder Iain Dodsworth (pictured here) have been trying to build businesses within the Twitter ecosystem, though it’s never been clear how Twitter felt about that.

Gross, in particular, has had an uneasy relationship with Twitter: Last year, an earlier incarnation of his company tried to launch an “AdSense for Tweets” product at the same time that Twitter launched its own Google-like ad product, and that didn’t go well.

The two companies have other things in common as well. TweetDeck has been shepherded along by Betaworks, the New York-based holding company/platform/incubator that also specializes in the Twittersphere. And Betaworks is also an investor in…UberMedia.

Here’s an interview I conducted with Dodsworth last April, when the Twittersphere was particularly confused about the prospects of Twitter apps, like TweetDeck, that weren’t owned by Twitter itself. Looks like this one turned out just fine.

[ See post to watch video ]

OMGPOP Wins a $10 Million Round for Social Games From Rho, Softbank

Peter Kafka — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 19:17:07 +0000

Here’s that serious investment money for casual/social games company OMGPOP that I told you about in November: The company has raised $10.1 million in a funding round led by Rho Ventures and Softbank; earlier investors Spark Capital and Betaworks have re-upped as well.

The company, which has made a big push into Facebook games in the last six months, says it will use the new money to develop more games for the social network, as well as for Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android platform.

The new money brings OMGPOP’s total funding to $16.6 million over its four-year history.

Path: The Social App That's Not Viral (By Design)

Liz Gannes — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 05:00:26 +0000

Silicon Valley is in the midst of a mini photo-sharing app boomlet. We have Instagram (which started adding 100,000 users per week as soon as it launched last month), Picplz (which beat out Instagram to get a Series A round with their shared investor, Andreessen Horowitz) and as of tonight Path, from former Facebook exec Dave Morin.

Dave Morin

All three companies make mobile apps (primarily on the iPhone) that allow users to take and immediately share images with friends. It seems kind of simple and mundane, but all these smart people seem to think photo-sharing is the future.

Morin and Path are the most convincing about there being a larger idea behind what they’re doing. San Francisco-based Path is stubbornly focused on close personal connections–a.k.a. real friends.

Unlike every other social site, where there’s an implicit pressure to collect as many friends and followers as you can (and at the same time increase the site’s user numbers), Path is only for the people you really know and trust.

In order to force and foster that kind of sharing, Morin’s team has left out many of the social Web features we’re used to. Users can do only two things on Path: Share photos and view them.

There are no reciprocal friend relationships, no likes or comments, no fun photo-editing filters, no publishing photos to services like Facebook and Flickr, no editing something after you post and no global user search (you have to know the email or phone number for anyone you want to add).

And there are additional restrictions. Users can only ever share with a maximum of 50 people (though they can follow more than 50 people, if invited). Every single post has its own privacy settings–you can share with either only the people tagged in it, or only your share list. If you get sick of someone who’s sharing with you, you can “pause” that person until further notice. Users who don’t have iPhones can view photos on the Web.

The most interesting feature for me is that users see which of their contacts have viewed any one photo. So on Path, you can’t lurk in peace. People know when you’ve seen their posts. This might be a little creepy, but it also could cut down on those annoying awkward conversations that sometimes happen when you’ve seen someone post about something online and then they start telling you about it in person.

Photos are tagged with the location where they’re taken automatically, and users can add people and tags. If someone else takes a picture at that same location, tags that have been previously used near that place recently will be at the top of the list.

The idea is those tags will be used to help users relive their memories stored on the service. So, for instance, someone Morin shares with could retrace his “path” of wine tasting in Napa by zooming in on a map of the pictures he posted from California wine country.

But the thing is, if you want to go try Path (which you’ll be able to do in the U.S. and Canada as of 9 pm PT tonight by going to Apple’s App Store, and in the rest of the world within a few hours), it’s going to seem rather empty at first. You’ll have to seek out friends to share with from scratch–but even worse, nobody will be sharing with you until they decide to add you.

Unlike just about every other social service, Path is not really viral. At all. So even though it’s interesting, its numbers are highly unlikely to correspond favorably to those of competitors like Instagram. And after all, how many mobile photo-sharing apps are you really going to use?

“We really prioritize slow organic growth over hyper-viral growth and going after influencers to build this really steep graph,” said Morin, who formerly helped lead Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect before leaving the company in January. “We are building Path to be a 30-year brand.”

He added, “Many of the photo-sharing apps are photo-blogging apps and popularity contests. On Path, you should always feel comfortable being yourself.”

This antiviral stuff almost seems like overkill, but Morin grounds Path’s feature decisions in the theories of the evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar (known for the oft-cited “Dunbar’s Number” of 150 acquaintances, he also proposes that 40-60 people is the outer bound of our personal networks) and Nobel prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman (who talked about the difference between experience and memory in a well-received TED Talk on happiness).

If this hyper-personal stuff works, I think Path could potentially create a third major category of social network, distinct from the kind of relationships found on the two current giants, Facebook and Twitter. But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves–and c’mon Dave, you should really let people comment on and like their friends’ photos.

Path was co-founded by Morin, Shawn Fanning and Dustin Mierau, both formerly of Napster. The staff also includes Mallory Paine, who helped engineer the iPhone photo and camera apps for Apple, and Matt Van Horn, who formerly did business development at Digg. Fanning is chairman and landlord of the company but is working on his own other projects day-to-day.

Path has already raised a jumbo seed round with Index Ventures, First Round Capital, Founders Fund and Betaworks. The company also provided us with an extensive list of individual angel investors: Ron Conway, Kevin Rose, Ashton Kutcher, Keith Rabois, Dustin Moskovitz, Marc Benioff, Gary Vaynerchuk, Steve Anderson, Tim Draper, Joi Ito, Fadi Ghandour, Matt Cohler, Sam Lessin, Bill Randuchel, Karl Jacob, Paul Buchheit, Ruchi Sanghvi, John Couch, Michael Parekh, Claudio Chiuchiarelli, Maurice Werdegar, Don Dodge, and Chris Kelly.

Don't Call It a "Bubble," Says Fred Wilson. But Things Are…"Troubling."

Peter Kafka — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 17:48:13 +0000

Fred Wilson is one of the most high-profile investors in tech. And his blog is certainly one of the best-read. So if the Union Square Ventures partner says we’re in a bubble, that would be a very big deal.

But Wilson doesn’t use the word “bubble” anywhere in the post he wrote this morning. Instead he refers to “storm clouds” in two markets: One for tech start-up financing, and one for tech workers themselves (courtesy Google, Facebook, et al).

These are ominous clouds! A few excerpts from his post:

“The competition for “hot” deals is making people crazy and I am seeing many more unnatural acts from investors happening.”
“We are also seeing large deals ($5mm to $15mm) getting done in a few days with little or no due diligence. Investors are showing up at the first meeting with term sheets. I have never seen phases like this end nicely.”
“I think both of these situations are unsustainable. And anything that is unsustainable will eventually stop happening.”

On Twitter, I summarized Wilson’s post this way: “@fredwilson says yes, it’s bubbletime.” And then I heard immediately from Betaworks’ Andrew Weissman and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures’ Bryce Roberts, both of whom have invested with Wilson in the past: They don’t think Wilson means there’s a bubble.

And neither does Wilson himself:

Why does it matter if we describe something as a “bubble” instead of “troubling”? I’m not sure that it does for the layperson. But I think it’s very meaningful for professional investors like Wilson. For one thing, if they think it’s a bubble, then their own investors might wonder why they’re continuing to make bets.

It’s also worth noting that even if we are in a bubble, it’s nothing like the housing bubble, or the 2000-era Web bubble (when Wilson was making VC investments via Flatiron Partners): The scale isn’t remotely similar, and the general public has very little stake in the outcome.

But it’s Wilson’s post, so he gets the last word here. Here’s his response to an email I sent asking him for additional input (I’ve added a punctuation mark or two):

I don’t think it’s helpful to use the bubble framework. There is a supply demand imbalance in hot deals and sw engineers, particularly in Silicon Valley. That is driving up prices but also leading to some odd behavior. I just think it’s healthy to talk about it calmly and rationally.

[Image credit: Joi Ito]

Khosla Wins the Bidding War for GroupMe, New York's Start-Up of the Moment

Peter Kafka — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 05:04:25 +0000

GroupMe, a New York start-up that lets users send group text messages on their cellphones, didn’t exist in April. Now it’s worth about $35 million.

Co-founders Jared Hecht and Steve Martocci have raised a $9 million round led by Khosla Ventures, sources say. I’m told the deal will give the company a pre-money value in the “mid-20s.”

Original investors, including First Round Capital, Betaworks, Lerer Ventures and Ron Conway’s SV Angel, who put some $850,000 into the company earlier this year, are all slated to invest again.

As The Business Insider’s Nicholas Carlson has reported, a bidding war for the right to fund GroupMe broke out in the past few weeks. The company ended up with multiple term sheets to pick from before signing with Khosla Monday.

So what is it? GroupMe is a simple, free service that lets users send text messages, on any kind of phone, to groups of friends. It competes against a handful of similar companies, but investors are impressed by its growth chart, which shows it adding tens of thousands of users a month.

They also like the fact that the company is explicitly targeting a wide range of users–not just those using Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android. GroupMe works on any run-of-the-mill “dumbphone,” and part of the company’s pitch is that salt-of-the-earth folks (Church groups! Hunters!) have been using it since it opened up in August.

It’s also worth noting that Hecht and Martocci left jobs at very red-hot start-ups–Tumblr and Gilt Groupe, respectively–to put their own thing together. The two formally hatched their plan at TechCrunch’s Disrupt Hack Day event in May.

GroupMe plans on adding an array of bells and whistles to the service, like the ability to send pictures, and a sort of jerry-rigged location feature in the near future. And the more of those it adds, the more it will look like something that aspires to play in the same sandbox as Twitter and Facebook.

But what investors are really hoping for, at least right now, is that GroupMe follows the same trajectory of another zero-to-hero New York start-up–Foursquare. It’s worth noting that Khosla tried very hard to fund that company’s last round, but missed out. It got this one.

I shot this interview with the two co-founders just two weeks ago* but wasn’t going to run it, because the two of them are framed so comically–Martocci is a tall dude, but he’s not that much taller than Hecht.

But it’s better than nothing, and now that these guys are officially the hot start-up of the moment, it’s time for the rest of you to meet them. Sorry, Jared and Steve. But lousy video about big news is a high-quality problem.

[ See post to watch video ]

*Side note: Hecht had just flown up and back to Boston earlier that morning, which seems that much more interesting in retrospect.

Three Reasons Why Venture Capitalists Are Investing in New York Startups

Alexander Hotz — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 18:21:59 +0000

One criticism leveled at New York City’s fledgling tech scene is that it’s hard for entrepreneurs to find investors in their backyard. But increasingly that argument doesn’t hold water.

The latest numbers from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association show third-quarter investment in New York rose 22 percent over the last year to $335 million. More than 60 percent of those deals were early or seed stage investments, which came from the city’s active Angel community and a new generation of VC firms like Betaworks and Union Square Ventures.

Many of New York’s hottest companies have also seen their latest rounds led by outside investors. Last month advertising platform AppNexus secured a $50 million round led by Microsoft, and in June the location-based service Foursquare received $20 million in Series B funding from the California-based Andreessen Horowitz. Boston VCs have been especially active with Matrix Partners, Spark Capital and General Catalyst, aggressively adding New York companies to their portfolios.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

BoomTown as Judge Judy, Um, Judge BigApps

Kara Swisher — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 09:37:04 +0000

With All Things Digital Global HQ located in the heart of the Castro in San Francisco, BoomTown tries hard not to judge–even that dude who likes to come into the Starbucks (SBUX) naked.

But I made an exception to be a judge for an innovative civic geek contest that New York City is doing for the second year called BigApps 2.0.

Get it? Big Apple…BigApps!

In any case, Mayor Michael Bloomberg is opening up a whole mess of government information–350 data sets from more than 40 agencies–and letting software developers have at it.

According to NYC:

“The City continues to open more data on the www.NYC.gov Data Mine as part of transparency initiative. The Data Mine was established for last year’s competition and, as part of the City’s efforts to promote transparency across agencies, all data will remain available for public use after the conclusion of the competition. Additional datasets will be made available throughout the year.”

Some of the new juicy data includes: CompStat data, buildings complaints and real-time traffic numbers.

The winners for the best apps created to help New York City citizens will get cash prizes totaling $20,000.

Last year, there were 84 apps, including a winner from Big Apple Ed, a guide to schools there.

The new winners will be announced in March of 2011, after fellow judges of mine–including Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson, Hunch CEO Chris Dixon and Betaworks CEO John Borthwick–decide who is the best.

And how much do you want to bet there will be a bed-bug app submitted this year?

Here’s the official press release from NYC:

MAYOR BLOOMBERG Launches NYC BIGAPPS 2.0 COMPETITION

More than 350 Datasets Provided by More than 40 City Agencies and Commissions, Doubling Last Year’s Availability

Competition Builds on Citywide Efforts to Increase Government Transparency and Provide Greater Public Access to City Data

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Deputy Mayor for Economic Development Robert K. Steel and Deputy Mayor for Operations Stephen Goldsmith today launched NYC BigApps 2.0, the second annual contest for software developers and members of the public to create web or mobile applications using City data. Building upon the success of the inaugural NYC BigApps Competition launched in October 2009, the City has roughly doubled the number of datasets available, bringing the total to more than 350. These datasets provide developers and programmers with additional material, including public safety data, buildings complaints, and real-time traffic numbers from which to create new digital applications. Last year’s winning applications are today helping New Yorkers find mass transit routes, review public school information and gather an array of information based on their current location. This year’s winning applications will receive cash prizes totaling $20,000. Deputy Mayor Steel will detail the program this evening at NY Tech Meetup, a monthly meeting of tech entrepreneurs where companies and developers demonstrate new technologies. Deputy Mayor Steel will be joined at the announcement by New York City Economic Development Corporation President Seth W. Pinsky, Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications Commissioner Carole Post and Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment Commissioner Katherine Oliver.

“NYC BigApps combines two of our Administration’s important priorities: making civic information more readily available to New Yorkers and promoting innovation and entrepreneurship in New York City,” said Mayor Bloomberg. “The inaugural NYC BigApps competition yielded an array of creative uses for City data, and–with nearly twice as much data formatted for application use this year–there are even more possibilities with version 2.0.”

“The most important thing that the public sector can do to help create jobs through technology innovation is to provide our talented entrepreneurs with the tools to create new products,” said Deputy Mayor Steel. “The BigApps competition does this by providing open access to City Data. Through the competition, we encourage the development of applications that can then be commercialized, spurring job growth and economic development in New York City.”

“NYC BigApps is redefining the relationship between City agencies and enterprising citizens, all while delivering value to the public,” said Deputy Mayor Goldsmith. “Last year, NYC BigApps contestants came up with innovative applications that would have never been created in the normal course of business. There is more data available for use in this year’s competition, so the potential for new and innovative tools that can benefit New Yorkers is even greater.”

“Last year’s Big Apps competition was an enormously successful way to achieve multiple goals: supporting the City’s important technology sector, giving entrepreneurs opportunities to create new products, and increasing the accessibility and transparency of City government,” said New York City Economic Development Corporation President Pinsky. “This year’s expanded contest promises to promote even more innovation and creative thinking among the vibrant and growing tech community in New York. We look forward to seeing the results of their efforts.”

“NYC BigApps, and the DataMine site that supports it, sits at the heart of the City’s open data efforts,” said Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications Commissioner Post. “This effort complements the many other ways we’ve worked to bring technology to life for New Yorkers, including 311 Online and the 311 iPhone app. Beyond today’s competition, we’ll continue enhancing the functionality of DataMine and expanding the amount of data available there for use across the City and around the globe.”

“At the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, we’re exploring new ways to share information about City resources and services across multiple platforms,” said Commissioner Oliver. “Already we’ve reached new audiences through QR codes on the Staten Island Ferry and on the sides of sanitation trucks, and we’re making the content of our online Video On Demand player available on various mobile devices. The NYC BigApps Competition is the perfect opportunity to further communication between the government and the public.”

The NYC BigApps Competition is open to individuals, and companies and non-profit organizations with fewer than 50 employees. More than 160 datasets have been added to the 190 compiled for the inaugural competition. New York City Economic Development Corporation and the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications coordinated with over 40 City agencies and commissions to provide the datasets, with 15 new City agencies, including the Department of Environmental Protection, the School Construction Authority and the Campaign Finance Board, participating in Data Mine for the first time. New data on public safety, the City budget, complaints to the Department of Buildings, and real-time traffic information will all be available for download today at www.nyc.gov/data .

The Data Mine was established for last year’s competition and, as part of the City’s efforts to promote transparency across agencies, all data will remain available for public use after the conclusion of the competition. Additional datasets will be made available throughout the year. Information and updates on the NYC BigApps competition, as well as official rules, can be accessed at the competition website: www.NYCBigApps.com .

Fourteen winners will be chosen in total, including two new prizes–best application created by a high school, college or full-time graduate school student; and a Large Organization Recognition Award for organizations with 50 or more employees, which will not eligible for a cash prize. A panel of judges from the technology and venture capital community will select winners for Best Overall Application (Grand Prize, Second Prize, Third Prize and five honorable mentions), Investor’s Choice Application, City Talent Award, Student Award, and the Large Organization Recognition Award. Two Popular Choice Application awards will be determined by public voting. Judging criteria will include the benefit to residents, visitors and City government; the quality and implementation of the idea; and potential commercial value.

All submissions are due on January 12, 2011. The Popular Choice Application winners will be selected by public vote through www.NYCBigApps.com between January 26 and February 26. Winners will be selected and announced at an awards ceremony to be held in March.

Last year’s winners included: WayFinder NYC–an application that allows users to find the nearest and best directions to New York City subway and New Jersey PATH stations; Taxihack–an application that allows users to post live comments on New York City taxis and their drivers via email (alert@taxihack.com) or Twitter (@taxihack); Big Apple Ed–an education application that provide residents with an easy-to-use guide to schools in the City, including school searches, top ten lists , analyses , comparison charts , and detailed school profiles ; and NYC Way–an iPhone application that bundles more than 30 New York City resources and provides information sorted by the user’s current location. The developer of NYC Way, MyCityWay, received the first investment by the NYC Entrepreneurial Fund, a $22 million seed and early-stage investment fund established by the City and managed by FirstMark Capital.

The judging panel is comprised of: Dawn Barber, Founder, Tech Meetup; John Borthwick, CEO, Betaworks; Chris Dixon, CEO & Co-founder, Hunch; Esther Dyson, Chairman, Edventure; Stuart Ellman, Co-Founder & General Partner, RRE Ventures; Lawrence Lenihan, Founder, CEO and Managing Director, FirstMark Capital; Danny Schultz, Co-founder & Managing Director, Draper Fisher Jurvetson Gotham Ventures; Naveen Selvadurai, Co-founder, Foursquare; Kara Swisher, Co-Executive Editor, AllThingsD.com; and Union Square Ventures Partner Fred Wilson.

“We are thrilled to be powering the second NYC BigApps competition, with significantly more data made available for software developers and the general public,” said ChallengePost Founder and CEO Brandon Kessler. “We were wowed by the creativity of the apps in the first competition, and we look forward to giving new entrants the great exposure they deserve.”

“New York is home to some of the world’s best developers,” said Foursquare Co-founder Naveen Selvadurai. “It is great to see the City rewarding this talent and taking advantage of it to increase transparency and make the wealth of information on NYC.gov more easily accessible.”

Bit.ly URL Shortener Raises $10 Million

Peter Kafka — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 20:24:33 +0000

Bit.ly, the start-up you’ve probably used recently to send someone a shorter version of a Web address, has raised another round of funding. The service, spun out of the Betaworks incubator, says that the RRE VC fund led the $10 million round, and that partner Eric Wiesen will join the company’s board.

Bit.ly has now raised about $14 million in a couple of years, but so far has only a nascent revenue stream: About 4,000 different companies have white label versions of Bit.ly’s URL shortener (the New York Times, for instance, uses Bit.ly to create addresses like this: http://nyti.ms/bm8lk2). But only some of them pay for that service, at a rate of $1,000 a month.

The real business, which Betaworks CEO John Borthwick says the company will begin to build out with its new money, is turning Bit.ly’s data set into money.

People clicked on six billion Bit.ly links last month, Borthwick says. And he imagines that all sorts of folks, from Google (GOOG) on down, would be willing to pay to license the data.

It’s worth noting that Yahoo (YHOO), among others, has been doing some tire-kicking around the service–maybe more, depending on whose story you’d like to listen to.

Other investors in this round include OATV, Mitch Kapor, Founders Fund, SV Angel, Joshua Stylman, Peter Hershberg and David Shen. The New York Times (NYT), as I have previously written, picked up a piece of Bit.ly this summer as partial payment for its work in in News.me, a yet-to-be-launched social news service for Apple’s (AAPL) iPad.

Real-Time Web Analytics Start-Up Chartbeat Tallies Up More Investors

Peter Kafka — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 16:16:11 +0000

Chartbeat, the real-time Web-publishing analytics service, has added a few more investors to its previously announced $3 million funding round. Joining Index Ventures et al are: Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg, former Verisign CFO Dana Evan and Code Advisors, best known as Quincy Smith’s newish gig.

All three are interesting names to attach to the company: Mullenweg created one of the Web’s most popular publishing platforms; Evan used to sit on the board of Omniture, Chartbeat’s giant rival (which is now owned by Adobe); and this is only the second investment that Code has made in its brief life–it has also put money into Flipboard, the much-buzzed-about iPad publishing app.

Meanwhile, Chartbeat is gaining rapid acceptance at big Web publishers that also use Omniture and/or Google (GOOG) Analytics. We’ve got an account here at All Things Digital, and I can confess that I’ve sometimes spent way too much time watching people come and go on my site–the interface is intuitive and sort of addictive, and it’s kind of like pachinko, that oddly mesmerizing cousin of pinball.

But I’m also not sure what I’m supposed to do with the information that Chartbeat provides me–it’s great to see how many people are reading this particular story at a given moment, but so what? I’ve already written my story–there’s not much else I can do at this point, right?

And if I can’t do much with that information, what can publishers at much larger, sclerotic shops do with the data?

I posed those questions to Chartbeat General Manager Tony Haile, who was kind enough to sit down with me for a minute before heading off to Africa for his honeymoon:

[ See post to watch video ]

The New York Times Gets a Bite of Bit.ly

Peter Kafka — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 19:50:20 +0000

Here’s a quick follow-up to News.Me, the sort-of mysterious social news project that the New York Times (NYT) is developing alongside Betaworks. An interesting deal point, really: As part of the partnership between the two companies, the Times has taken an equity stake in bit.ly, the URL-shortening service that Betaworks built up and spun out last year.

That’s the second time the paper has picked up a piece of Betaworks in the last year. In March, the Times invested in the the New York-based holding company/incubator/investor itself, as part of a $20 million funding round alongside investors like AOL (AOL) and Intel (INTC).

Betaworks CEO John Borthwick wouldn’t disclose the value of the Times’ stake in bit.ly, which has raised about $4 million so far. But the equity represents payment for the initial work the Times R&D group has put into the project, which they handed over to Betaworks this summer. Betaworks also paid out some cash as part of the transaction. No comment from the Times on the deal.

So what is News.Me, anyway? Borthwick won’t elaborate beyond what he told the, um, Times yesterday: It will be social and newsy and cool and it will start out as an app for Apple’s (AAPL) iPad when it debuts later this year.

But the bit.ly connection is an important and obvious clue here: Since Web surfers use bit.ly to shorten a gazillion links a year in order to pass them on–technically, it’s some 30 billion so far in 2010–the bit.ly guys can mine all sorts of data about which Web surfers are interested in a certain story, and which stories a Web surfer’s friends may be paying attention to. You can connect the dots from there.

And assuming bit.ly is a core part of News.Me, it makes it a little less likely that Betaworks will sell off bit.ly anytime soon. But plenty of people think Betaworks has entertained thoughts of selling, though Borthwick insists that the company is not for sale. At one point Google was said to have kicked the tires on the service, and executives at Yahoo have thought hard about the service as well, sources say.

Meet ExtensionFM, the Music Start-Up Google Should Buy

Peter Kafka — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 15:32:18 +0000

You’re going to have to wait some time before you can use Google Music, because the service doesn’t exist yet. But if you want a sense of what it should look like, go play with ExtensionFM, an interesting start-up that plays off Google’s Chrome browser.

In a nutshell, ExtensionFM allows Chrome users to temporarily store, and play, most music they come across as they tour the Web. There’s an explanatory video at the bottom of this post, but the easiest thing to do is simply fire up Chrome, add the service to your browser and go surfing. You’ll be particularly happy if you visit MP3 blogs and Tumblrs.

The problem for Dan Kantor’s New York-based start-up is that, for the time being, it’s got a limited number of potential users. Chrome has less then 10 percent of the browser market, and only a subset of those users are comfortable with the idea of adding “extensions” in the first place.

Perhaps that’s why ExtensionFM has just 25,000 users after launching earlier this year–even after Google (GOOG) gave it a boost by featuring it at its I/O developer conference. But Kantor, who has put in time at various start-ups–most notably Delicious–as well as at Yahoo (YHOO), Microsoft (MSFT) and AOL (AOL), says he plans to expand to other browsers–Apple’s (AAPL) Safari browser just got a lot more extension friendly–and eventually the service will move onto mobile platforms, etc.

That’s the bet, at least. Kantor has raised a seed round from high-profile investors like Spark Capital and Betaworks, so they’re expecting this thing to move on from ultra-niche status eventually.

Or Google could just buy the thing outright and plug it into whatever it does launch, whenever that happens.

In the meantime, here’s a recent sit-down I had with Kantor:

[ See post to watch video ]

And ExtensionFM’s own description of its service: