AllThingsD » chartbeat

Why Betaworks Broke Up the Band

Peter Kafka — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 02:08:58 +0000

Inside baseball for people who pay attention to early round start-up investing and/or the clubby New York tech scene: Andy Weissman, one of the co-founders of the Betaworks holding company/incubator/startup-maker, is leaving for Union Square Ventures, the high-profile VC firm.

Here’s USV principal’s Fred Wilson’s comment, via email: “Union Square Ventures is very fortunate to be able to add Andy Weissman to our partnership and we think he is a perfect fit for the entrepreneurs we want to work with and the sectors we want to participate in.” (More below.)

That will cause a small ripple in startupland, because Weissman was the one steering Betaworks’ investment portfolio. His partner John Borthwick handled the operational parts of the business, which has founded and/or nurtured startups like Summize, TweetDeck, Chartbeat and Bitly.

With Weissman’s departure, Betaworks’s focus will change. “Though we will continue to do seed stage investments, our primary focus will be on building the core capabilities of the companies that we acquire and grow in-house,” Borthwick said told his employees via email today. Betabeat first reported the news.

What Borthwick didn’t explain in his email is that he and Weissman had previously planned on raising a “sidecar fund” that would essentially split Betaworks into two businesses: An operating company run by Borthwick and an early-stage VC shop run by Weissman.

But that plan was discarded this summer, at least in part because of opposition from Betaworks’ investors, who include RRE Ventures, Intel, AOL and the New York Times. Investors argued that they had put money into a company where investing was only a component of the plan, not a full-time occupation; by raising a new investment fund, they argued, Betaworks would essentially be competing against some of its backers.

People familiar with the company say that the plan’s collapse didn’t lead directly to Weissman’s departure. But the backstory does provide context to his move to become a full-time venture capitalist.

When Weissman lands at Union Square, he’ll have plenty of money to work with. The firm, which has made a series of lucrative bets in high-profile Web 2.0 start-ups including Twitter, Zynga, Foursquare and Tumblr, is in the midst of raising a new $150-$200 million fund.

Four-year-old Betaworks, which now has more than 80 employees, ought to have plenty of money to work with, too. In addition to the $28 million it has raised to date, the company has also been able to turn some of its investments into cash via secondary market sales.

Most notably, it has recently sold Twitter shares it acquired in 2008, when the company bought search engine Summize. That alone should provide a nice cushion for Betaworks if it needs it: Twitter’s value has shot up from $100 million to $8.4 billion over the last three years.

And speaking of ripples, here’s one I’m guessing Weissman may enjoy:

Chartbeat Says the Rise of the Machines Won't Be So Bad if You're a Cyborg

Peter Kafka — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 15:46:17 +0000

Tony Haile has a vision of the future, and it involves turning people like me into cyborgs.

And Haile thinks this is a good thing! It’s part of his pitch for Chartbeat, a Web analytics start-up: He says that very soon “content producers” like yours truly are going to be faced with the choice of becoming robots–that is, replaced with algorithms and machines–or sticking around and injecting ourselves with big helpings of technology and data.

Chartbeat is supposed to help people like me with the cyborg route, by providing real-time information about the way the stuff I make performs on the Web: How many people are looking at a given story, where they’re coming from, how long they’re staying, etc.

Until now, most of Chartbeat’s 3,000 customers have handed that information over to managers and editors. But now Haile is rolling out Newsbeat, a tweaked version of the service that’s supposed to be delivered directly to rank-and-file stuff-makers like me. He’s been working with Web publishers like Gawker Media, Fast Company and Time Warner’s Time Inc. to get the rollout ready.

I’m not entirely opposed to my coming transformation, by the way: Unlike some of my peers–and these tend to be older peers–I like the idea of knowing more about the way people consume the stuff I make.

And it’s inevitable, anyway. On the Web, it’s impossible not to be exposed to performance data. The only question is what kind of data, and how much.

But still. I don’t know exactly what I’m supposed to do with all of this data. The version of Chartbeat that All Things D already uses gives me plenty of personalized information about my stories, and it’s narcotizing to sit around and watch my numbers flick up and down all day.

And if I were running a very big Web site, like, say, the Wall Street Journal, which also uses Chartbeat (and, like this site, is owned by News Corp.), I could put some of that data to work. I could figure out which stories I might want to highlight on the homepage, and try to analyze why others aren’t performing as well as they could, etc.

But from my worm’s-eye view, I don’t know what I’m really supposed to make of my Chartbeat report. Chartbeat tells me that my scooplet this morning on Rock Band is doing well, which is gratifying. But I could also get that information, with a longer delay, via services like Adobe’s Omniture or Google Analytics.

And in any case, then what? That information can’t help me make more scoops, or more interesting stories. And in the end, I’m pretty sure that’s the only way I can I do a better job.

Haile disagrees, of course. So let’s let him make his own case in this interview, which we conducted in the semi-busy hallway outside his office yesterday.

[ See post to watch video ]

Forbes Gets a Facelift. Next Up: A New Body

Peter Kafka — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 22:18:04 +0000

Here’s the new Forbes.com, the product of four months of work by new editorial boss Lewis D’Vorkin. The redesign hasn’t rolled out sitewide yet, but you can get a good sense of it by heading to the new Forbes 400 list, out tonight (spoiler: Bill Gates is still really rich).

The two big takeaways here are that Forbes’s famously cluttered pages have been cleaned up (the print magazine has a new look, too) and that the whole thing looks, and acts, a whole lot like Facebook. That’s very much intentional, says D’Vorkin: “We are putting news, and the journalists, at the center of social media.”

And it’s the restructuring behind the scenes that’s much more important to Forbes than the new look. The business-news publisher (where I worked for a decade) has been faltering online and off, and it has brought in D’Vorkin to fundamentally overhaul the place.

D’Vorkin’s big idea is to import the model he used at True/Slant, his last company. That site employed a small army of freelance bloggers/contributors, each of whom had their own pieces of turf, were encouraged to comment on/link to each other, and were paid based on performance.

If you’re a traditionalist, that approach is worrisome because it undermines the carefully cultivated voice of authority that titles like Forbes banked on. If you like the idea, you can argue that many voices are better than one–and that this is a good way to make a lot of Web traffic/inventory without spending much for it.

I couldn’t understand why that notion appealed to Forbes’s owners, since the site always had lots of page views to sell, but the penny has finally dropped for me: Forbes wants to find a way to lessen its dependence on portals, particularly Yahoo (YHOO), for traffic.

In many ways, the Web site has effectively functioned as a subcontractor for Yahoo, generating stories and slide shows it hoped would land on the site’s front page, in return for a fire hose of traffic via referrals. A cadre of contributors can’t replace that traffic flow, but it’s much better to have page views and unique visitors that Forbes owns instead of rents.

D’Vorkin won’t talk about traffic directly, or about specifics of other internal overhauls he is planning. But broadly speaking, he’s talking up the idea of journalists as “product managers”–tellingly, D’Vorkin has given himself the title of “chief product officer”–who would be responsible for generating their own traffic, recruiting contributors, keeping tabs on their own analytics via Chartbeat accounts, etc.

And if you read between the lines, it’s easy to imagine that all of the Forbes editorial staff will eventually be compensated based on Web traffic, at least in part.

“The journalists are not just creating content, but they are developing brands among themselves, and people who are good at it should be rewarded for it,” D’Vorkin says.

Clean new Web site, brave new world.

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 ]

Meta Voyeurism! Watch Chatroulette's Users Watch Each Other, in Real Time!

Peter Kafka — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 15:26:21 +0000

Remember when Chatroulette was this crazy, sort-of-hard to explain phenomenon with explosive growth?

Right. That was months ago! And it may well have peaked since then.

But! It’s still drawing plenty of visitors. And if you want to watch people watching each other on the voyeur site, in real time, now you can. See this display from Chartbeat, the start-up Web analytics company that competes with the likes of Adobe’s (ADBE) Omniture and Google (GOOG) Analytics and that lets you track visits to a site as they’re happening.

Plenty of great nuggets here for anyone who wants to poke around (Hehheh. Hehheh. I said “poke.” Hehheh.). Like right now, for instance, there seems to be a large number of people from Texas who like the site. You can also peruse the dashboard to divine longer-term trends, like the fact that Chatroulette traffic seems to peak around 8 pm Eastern time.

Oh, and in case you were wondering–it’s safe for work.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

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Tech-Talch – Chatroulette

www.thedailyshow.com

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Meta Voyeurism! Watch Chatroulette's Users Watch Each Other, in Real Time!

Peter Kafka — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 15:26:21 +0000

Remember when Chatroulette was this crazy, sort-of-hard to explain phenomenon with explosive growth?

Right. That was months ago! And it may well have peaked since then.

Oh, and in case you were wondering–it’s safe for work.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c

Tech-Talch – Chatroulette

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor

Tea Party

Almost Famous: Aviary's Israel Derdik

Drake Martinet — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:21:07 +0000

A new feature wherein All Things Digital looks at up-and-coming and innovative start-ups you should know about.

This week: A Skype visit with, some questions for and a few pertinent stats about Israel Derdik and his high-flying media suite, Aviary, a Web-based media-editing platform that enables users to alter, save and present their multimedia creations, all in the cloud.

Who: Israel Derdik, or “Iz” to his friends.

What: CTO of Aviary.

Why: Aviary is a Web-based media-manipulation suite comprised of flash-based tools for in-browser image editing, pattern generation, image effects, image markup, screen capture and audio editing. Let’s call it Adobe (ADBE) Lite.

Where: @iz (Twitter); aviary.com/about (corporate bio); Hewlett, New York (analog place).

Who else: Sumopaint, Pixler, Garage Band.

Five Stats You Won’t Find in His Facebook Profile

Worst Job: Tech Support Intern, Prudential Securities.

Has a Geek Crush on: Gina Trapani, Lifehacker.com.

Gadget of the Moment: Chartbeat app for iPhone.

Wishes There Was an App for: Home automation. “I want to have little touchscreens in every room of the house to control lights, HVAC, alarms, all of it. Basically, I want the touchscreens.”

First Computer: Commodore VIC 20. “My dad brought home a VIC 20 when I was six or seven. We played these little games on it–it had a tape drive. I’ve been hooked ever since.”

Bio in 140 Characters

Born in Brooklyn. CS degree from Brooklyn College. Became an intern at ConEd. Bubble of Web 1.0 burst. Then co-founded Aviary.

The Five Questions

What makes Aviary different from Adobe CS or Garage Band?

Aviary can do lots of things, but there’s nothing to install. It’s flash-based and runs right in your browser. The benefit of running that stuff in the cloud is every time you save it, it saves to our servers, and you can access it from any computer.

We also make it easy to do the basic edits on Aviary. Then, for example, [you could] move the project to Photoshop for more heavy-duty stuff. You can also open other peoples’ works–if they haven’t made them private with a premium account–and see how they did something. We call it “creation on the fly.”

Are users ready for this?

Absolutely. We’re seeing it [cloud computing] more with Gmail; people are moving more of their applications to the Web. I think online image editing is still in its nascent stages, but it’s going to get there. [Aviary is] definitely building for the power user, the top of the pyramid, but it will trickle down.

You just completed a successful round of funding. How will Aviary expand?

Well, we’d love to get into bed with Flickr [Yahoo’s (YHOO) popular image-sharing site]. We can already pull images right from your Flickr account, and very shortly we’ll be able to push images back via their API. Currently, there’s a big hole for video editing and stuff for YouTube.

That’s a really, really tough problem to solve because of the file sizes involved. There is also music creation possibly, as opposed to just looping things together and adding effects.

Every geek has a memory where they saw something new and had to say to themselves, “Dang, I love living in the future.” What’s yours?

I’ll tell you exactly what it is because it really stands out. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Wannado City in Florida. It’s a kids’ amusement park that’s entirely indoors. It looks like a huge city, and the kids can do all the jobs–they can be police officers, and there’s fire trucks going back an forth that the kids can sit in, and there’s a bakery–it’s a really cool place. But what struck me as cool is that they give this bracelet to each person in the family when you walk in, and at any given moment you can walk to a kiosk, swipe your bracelet and see where anyone else in your family is in the building. I assume they are using some kind of RFID tags, but when I saw that I was like, “Wow, that’s really awesome.”

If you could change one thing about the Internet, what would it be?

The worst would have to be bad advice in tech support forums. Sometimes, I go on there, and there is just really bad advice. I look at it and think, “I could do that better.” Incompetence drives me crazy.

The In Living Color Interview

[ See post to watch video ]

I Can't Believe I Am Now Following Ashton Kutcher on Twitter (Though His Smackdown of CNN Was Sweet)

Kara Swisher — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 05:36:16 +0000

Actor Ashton Kutcher crossed the million-follower-on-Twitter line at 11:12 p.m. PDT, beating CNN.

Kutcher simply tweeted: “Victory is ours!!!!!!!!

The CNN cable news channel went over the million mark soon after, but still a clear second.

Here is a pix, below, from Twitter HQ of the Kutcher win, on its database (courtesy of Twitter’s Jessica Verrilli).

The race was getting close as midnight neared on the West Coast.

Not a real race, but a race of the Twits.

That would be Kutcher vs. CNN.

CNN was all over the issue on airwaves tonight touting its Twitter feed, because–you know–there is no more important news to cover, like the weak economy or anything.

And at Twitter’s offices in San Francisco, staff was up monitoring the race to one million “followers,” those who sign up to receive a person’s or organization’s tweets on the hot microblogging service.

Kutcher is scheduled to be on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” later today, along with Twitter CEO and co-founder Evan Williams, when the talk show host will do her first tweet.

Oprah, of course, will get to one million users in 4.67 seconds, which is making everyone on Twitter worry about the looming Fail Whale of all time.

(Oprah Friend-in-Chief Gayle King is already up and tweeting via @kinggayle–with her first one going over 140 characters, oops, just as we all did.)

In a moment of temporary insanity, BoomTown actually clicked the follow button for Kutcher.

What can I say? I like “Punk’d” and want Larry King to go down like a ton of bricks.

Now I am officially worried about what Kutcher–whose Twitter handle is aplusk–will do with his one million minions. Order us all to play idiotic practical jokes on people? Rent Demi Moore movies, even the unwatchable ones (“G.I. Jane” anyone?), over and over? Get 1970s mullets?

If you are so inclined, here’s a chart of the situation now from chartbeat, with the numbers ticking up like a clock, which you can track here (click on the chart to make it larger):

While we wait, here is a video of the famous haircutting scene from “G.I. Jane”: