Here’s a transcript of a quick chat I had with the startup’s CEO this morning, while he was en route to some Silicon Valley meetings. (Don’t worry! No law-breaking here: “Uber is driving,” Crowley assured me.)

Peter Kafka: It seemed like this funding round took a lot longer than you wanted. Do you think you could have done the deal quicker prior to the Facebook IPO?

Dennis Crowley: I don’t know. There’s a lot variables at play here. I don’t want to point to any one particular factor.

The thing that’s important is — hey, we just raised $41 million to do the things we want to do. That’s the thing that we’re psyched about.

I just sent this email out to the team. It’s like “Hey, there’s not a lot of companies that get to play in this space. And guess what? We get to be one of those companies.” That’s a really big, motivating thing for myself, and I think for everyone else.

Union Square’s Fred Wilson explained why a debt deal made sense for you guys. But you can also read between the lines and conclude that if you guys were able to get the valuation you wanted, you would have done a traditional equity deal. Is that a fair assessment?

Some of the things we were hearing from people was that we’re a difficult company to value. Because, you know, we’re rolling out new stuff every single month. And it’s not like we’re just putting a new coat of paint on the app. We’re rolling out new merchant tools, we roll out credit card specials. We’re in this space where we’re reinventing mobile, local, deals with merchants; we’re doing it very quickly.

You look at what we’re doing, and you can see that this is going to be incredibly transformative. And we have some people who say, “you guys are still small, but we can see how you’re going to do it.” And given those circumstances, the way we structured the deal was the best way to do it for a company of our stage and our size.

I understand your messaging about transforming from a check-in tool to a search app. But why are you always talking about becoming a location layer for the Internet? What does that actually mean, and who’s supposed to care about that? Should users care?

We’ve had our share of people who look at the check-in data and kind of pooh-pooh it. “How interesting is it that you know that this random person went to a coffee shop?” That’s why, in a lot of talks that I’ve been doing, I start out by showing this heat-map data-visualization video:

Foursquare check-ins show the pulse of New York City and Tokyo from Foursquare on Vimeo.

One check-in on its own isn’t interesting, and maybe 10 isn’t interesting. But you put millions of these things together every day, and you suddenly have this heat map of where people are. You can start to predict where people are going to be, and what was popular two weeks ago, and what might be popular in the future.

So we can do that, and start sharing that, not just with our users, but developers, too. So we’ve got this point-of-interest database, and we’re sharing that with developers like Path, Vine, Flickr. The stuff that we’ve built is powering the location features for the whole next generation of consumer Internet services.

But just to be clear. If you’re a user, you shouldn’t know or care about that data, right?

Well, a lot of consumers don’t know that Foursquare data is powering this stuff. But there’s also an opportunity there, for every time a Vine is tagged with something, every time a photo on Flickr is tagged with location, there’s an opportunity for Foursquare to layer up that data.

We can say, these are all the services that you’re using, these are all the signals that are coming back to us, and this is how we can make your map a little bit different than your friends’ map, because of all the things that we’ve done across all these different properties.

In your post this morning, you thank 33 million people for trying Foursquare. How many people are using it each month?

We’re not disclosing that.

I talked to you a few years ago about monetization, and your plan then was to rely on a self-serve model. Now you’re hiring lots of sales people. Did your thinking change?

It’s a little bit of both. We have sales people making calls, because that’s how you’re going to go get big national retailers. But I don’t think we’re going to go out there and call every single coffee shop in the country.

Even when we were a much smaller team, we had a million merchants that had signed up. A lot of that came from our user community going to places and saying “Hey, I checked in five times. What do I get?” The users have been teaching the merchants about the product.

I believe as the merchants are becoming more aware of it, we can put those self-serve tools in front of them, and we can make the pitch, where we say “Hey, if you spend X amount of dollars with us, we can drive you Y amount of customers, and we can prove that we’re doing it, and we can tell you if they’re good customers or lousy customers.”

Those are really powerful tools, and we’re taking them and expanding beyond the merchants we have talked to on the phone, and making them available to a million merchants that have already signed up.

You started off as a check-in service, now you’re a search tool. How do you get people who used you for check-ins but then stopped to come back? And how do you reach the much larger group of people who have never used you? How do you grow?

Look at what we did yesterday, when we launched Foursquare 6.0. We put out a new version of the app, and people say “Oh, I get this in a way that I didn’t before.”

It’s amazing — you put search front and center, and people are like “Oh, yeah, I can use this to search for stuff.” And when they search, they realize that it’s a lot richer than other apps they’ve been using to solve the same problem.

So it’s not that you flip a switch, and you launch an app, and suddenly it’s there. But if you build something great, that people use, people talk to their friends about, people show their friends. That’s how this stuff grows. That’s how it’s been working for us since the beginning.

So you’ll build it and they will come?

[Laughs] That’s a good way of putting it. Yeah.

Image copyright Pakhnyushcha

These days, it seems as soon as some new technology begins to gain traction, VCs and journalists herald the arrival of a new technological order. While these predictions often end up being true eventually, many of us are left aggravated that the status quo sticks around for so long. Perhaps no such case is as true as with the cloud. The cloud has, without question, resulted in truly revolutionary benefits to enterprises and consumers, but it always seems to be presented in a very autocratic way: Stop what you are doing, and do things a new way.

Enterprises are obviously the first to accept such requirements. As long as this new solution offers a material benefit to their business, the smart companies will rapidly adopt it and put it to work. Conveniently, they are also quite willing to pay for such benefit, should it be real. This is critical, because consumers hate paying for things, so someone has to underwrite the commoditization of new technology. This is essential to understand because, contrary to what is marketed to consumers, the cloud is expensive.

People are buying and creating unbelievable amounts of content daily, driven by photos, personal videos, music and movie purchases. Movies and personal video have gone from standard definition to high definition — potentially going to ultra-high definition, if CES is any indication — and the trend is clearly moving more toward online purchasing. Music downloads surpassed CD sales two years ago and, even in light of successful streaming services; online music sales continue to grow year over year. Digital photography and videography have also surpassed their physical counterparts. Indeed, photos and videos are no longer things you take only on vacation or on special occasions. Smartphones have enabled us all to shoot photos and video all day long, for even the most mundane reasons. All these devices are continuously increasing resolution, and thus file size.

Gartner estimates that the average household had roughly one terabyte of files by the end of 2012, with that forecast to grow to approximately 3.3TB by 2016. At the same time, it is estimated that people will have, on average, 5.8 Internet-connected devices per person by 2015. There’s no doubt that people will continue to spread more and more data across more and more devices, based on these trends. If these predications are even somewhat accurate, the assumption that the cloud will be able to affordably accommodate all consumer data is difficult to accept.

Cloud storage is not built from hard drives bought off Amazon.com on the cheap. Indeed, whether it is the consumer cloud or the enterprise cloud, cloud storage services are enterprise-grade through and through. “Enterprise-grade” might as well be synonymous with “expensive.” That pricey storage is made up of enterprise-grade hardware, and kept in an enterprise-grade data center. Every step of the way, it is managed by an army of smart people, who are generally well paid. Let’s not forget local and geographic redundancy. The result is that while cloud storage is able to reduce its price slowly over time, consumers are increasing their storage demands on a near-geometric scale. Thus, while consumer cloud services may have a free tier to give consumers a taste of the benefits, virtually none of them offer enough storage to accommodate all the average person’s data. If some company were to cobble together all the necessary Web services to offer this, perhaps built off of Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure or something similar, it would cost nearly $1,000 per year in storage alone, and, of course, there is much more to all this than just storage.

The result is “cloud fragmentation” — users are putting subsets of their files into a litany of separate cloud services. Sometimes this is driven by the amount of free storage, and other times this is driven by an optimization of media type (e.g., documents versus videos). This fragmentation, however, increases complexity and becomes a burden to manage. I often have to think about whether a given document is in Dropbox, Google Drive or SkyDrive. My photos are spread across Flickr, Facebook and Instagram. Some videos are on Vimeo and others on YouTube. Of course, these are only a very tiny fraction of my more than 900 gigabytes of files. This complexity is something I refer to as “cloud overload,” where the number of cloud solutions I have has me scratching my head to remember which one I use for what, or to share with whom.

Why would consumers choose to do this? Price. The free tiers of most cloud services are indeed quite alluring. The marketing is great. The benefits are clear. It is the price that’s unacceptable. To mitigate that, consumers do all they can to extract benefit from the free tiers.

This is a clear divergence between consumer demand and technological reality. Cloud storage is too expensive for consumers to purchase for all their data, so they don’t. The result is user data getting spread across an array of primarily free solutions that fragment features by media type or value proposition (e.g., sharing, backup, etc.).

Occasionally, we see enterprises underwriting technological development that does not lead to the technological maturity and commoditization consumers require, at least not very quickly. This is, without exception, the case with the “consumer cloud.” Consumers require simplicity, convenience and affordability. The consumer cloud is built from services, including storage, sharing and device/platform interconnectivity. We’ve seen many companies emerge as tremendous successes; however, the products that define this space are themselves defined by their compromise in regard to consumer demand and expectations. Changes in user behavior (e.g., stop doing what you normally do, and do it a new way) are the friction that slows ubiquitous adoption. Furthermore, high cost ultimately makes such products, even when widely adopted, niche solutions.

Still, cloud services offer such unbelievable benefit that no one would argue that there is not demand. The question is less about what benefit can be derived from the consumer cloud; rather, it is how it should be delivered.

So, what solution have savvy startups begun to offer? It’s what is increasingly known as the “personal cloud”: A way for users to access all their files, on all their devices, all the time. And best of all, it’s affordable.

Personal cloud services for consumers give users the ability to have all their data on all their devices. While not a consumer platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a good model, since it delivers truly groundbreaking cloud services within a fairly simple service approach. Personal clouds are somewhat analogous to AWS on a consumer level. New personal cloud services have started to build inter-device connectivity into the operating system of your devices, which is conceptually similar to AWS-like services being built into your own computing devices. The result is that instead of users conforming to some new product’s requirements for you to get value, it conforms to the user’s own behavior.

Products like this are technically challenging to build, because they must integrate deeply into some other platform/device; in fact, they often augment it so that the device or operating system itself works in a new way (e.g., as a part of a personal device ecosystem). The result, however, is that consumers are offered a solution that accommodates their demands — one that is simple, convenient and affordable. These services can be cheap or free for any amount of data, whether you have 2GB, 2TB or 2PB, because they are leveraging your own devices to create your cloud and not hardware located in and across multiple data centers.

We all can be overzealous about predicting the future at times, so it is important to take stock of the present. The cloud is producing some of the biggest benefits to enterprises and consumers since the inception of the Internet itself. It is shepherding a variety of services and products that enable content sharing, distribution and access. While enterprises may reap the most advanced benefits of this now, it is obvious that the consumer versions of these technologies are compelling and exciting. The opportunity for companies to innovate is often not measured in features, as much as user experience. This is the unrealized opportunity within the consumer cloud, and the direction so many companies are taking to build the next set of products to affect our lives.

Image copyright J.D.S.

When you phrase the question that way, the answer becomes pretty obvious. You worry about your driver’s license and credit cards and, in particular, the information contained on those pieces of plastic. Wallets and credit cards are really just vehicles for valuable data.

At the same time, those vehicles come in handy when you’re in the checkout line at Target.

This two-part relationship is an essential element in the evolution of what you could call the storage fabric. The storage fabric consists of the ability to access data nearly anywhere at any time, as well as a superstructure of hardware, software and services to deliver and manage it. It’s much like your relationship with electricity — you probably didn’t buy a diesel generator to get electricity into your home: You plugged into the grid.

In the ideal storage fabric, consumers and businesses will store oft-needed information on their smart phones and notebooks for rapid access and better performance. Services like Amazon Cloud Services, Dropbox, or our own eVault, meanwhile, will archive your personal history, filter out redundancies and unnecessary information and gather new material that you might find interesting.

Applying for mortgages, sharing medical information and confirming educational and employment history will be far easier because your history — and the history of those you’re dealing with — will be at your fingertips through secure connections and permissions. Information brokerage services like those being created by Reputation.com will allow you to selectively give your information to marketers.

Your personal devices and the cloud, along with being plugged into the fabric, would also continually study your habits and act in the background to keep you up to date. If your phone falls into a storm drain, you can just switch to a new one: It will have everything you need. If the cloud stalls or there is a security breach, you’re not locked out.

Apple, and companies like those listed above, has started to take initial steps with services like automatic syncing, but we’re still a long way away. Some of these services are for hardware customers only. Sharing can require several steps. In the future, companies will install local storage islands around cities for smoother, faster streaming. Software will be required to help you navigate, prioritize and edit the growing stack of information.

It is easy to forget, but superstructure — hardware — is a crucial part of the equation to make everything easy. Google renamed its document service GDrive for a reason.

A movement toward a storage fabric like this represents the next logical step in the history of information. For the first five thousand years of civilization, information was largely tied to physical media: scribes carved directives from the king in tablets and third grade teachers resorted to the copy machine for homework assignments. The advent of digital and magnetic technologies in the second half of the 20th Century marked a watershed moment, because they dramatically eliminated a substantial portion of the physical bulk and legwork required to store information. Documents and datasheets could be edited on the fly. Just as important, archiving and managing data became fundamentally easier: file clerks, once a substantial portion of the workforce, suddenly were as common as blacksmiths. Still, only finite copies of most documents existed: things could easily be lost.

The Internet took things a step further by breaking the relationship between information and its physical media. Hotmail, the one-time king of email services which Microsoft recently transformed into Outlook.com, probably deserves some of the credit for convincing customers about the benefits of remote access. When Hotmail was founded in 1996, email was still a thing: you downloaded software onto your computer to receive email and all of your messages were stored on your laptop or desktop. With Hotmail, users could suddenly easily access messages anywhere, not just from a particular PC. Consumers no longer owned the drives and computers where their messages lived. The information was theirs, but the superstructure wasn’t.

Flickr, YouTube, and Facebook soon followed. From a user’s perspective, you could make infinite copies and get unlimited access to anything. This split, however, introduces a new set of challenges. Users are no longer responsible for the health and maintenance of the systems that store their data: they expect companies like Amazon, Facebook and Google to do it for them. And while these companies have created state-of-the-art data centers and backup systems that function at incredibly high levels of reliability, reality sometimes intrudes. Crashes occur, and instead of one person in a cubicle complaining about a lost file, it’s a whole swarm of angry, impatient consumers. Security demands will grow as sensitive information shifts finally from paper to active files.

Remote access also potentially means a gargantuan increase in data packets. To keep networks humming, service providers will have to develop caching, recovery and de-duplication strategies to minimize the volume of traffic and the distances individual bits have to travel.

Finally, managing the massive and never ending increase in structured and unstructured data has its own inherent challenges. Which data goes where? When does the consumer want to access that data and how? Companies like Seagate and many others will look to tackle that challenge and deliver on this concept called the storage fabric. Consumers won’t have to worry about the back-end technical gymnastics and complicated algorithms that are managing their data. They only need to focus on a single view of their digital world, regardless of their device.

The hard work, however, will pay off. It will lead to what people think of when they think of the “cloud.” Not the reality of millions of machines anonymously churning away. Instead, it will just be the data, which is more valuable than any individual device.

You won’t have to think about a storage fabric. It will just be there.

Earlier today Yahoo reported fourth-quarter earnings that beat analyst estimates, on still-flattish revenue.

Still, up is up, even if it is not really that much up, so Wall Steet bid up shares of the Silicon Valley Internet giant in after-hours trading.

Now it’s onto the conference call with investors for CEO Marissa Mayer:

2:02 pm: Before the call, you can hear Mayer complaining about the goofy music played during the pre-conference call waiting time.

“We have to get better music,” she says to some minion. “This is not good music.”

Music to my ears! I say we get Beyoncé, lipsyncing or not.

The call starts quickly after that, with the ever-eager Mayer leaping right in with the fourth-quarter news, which is not all that bad.

It’s the first full year of growth in a while — though not the first quarter-to-quarter increase — even if it is only a very modest two percent increase.

That compares to industry-wide gains in revenue of many, many, many times that, but for Yahoo this is cause for a parade. A small parade, with good music, but a parade nonetheless.

“It’s hard to believe this is only my first full quarter here at Yahoo,” says Mayer in an upbeat tone.

She notes that her focus on product excellence and user experience was continuing, with some “early positive trends” in both products and people.

Mayer then list a series of moves, from the free food and better smartphones for employees to the addition of well-regarded entrepreneur Max Levchin to the board to the refreshes of Yahoo Mail and Flickr to the acquisition of some sassy new mobile startups.

Mayer also notes that the company under her purview had removed “385 of highest priority obstacles,” although she did not name any specifics.

I imagine what No. 332 is: Switching out the iceberg lettuce at the URL cafeteria on Yahoo’s Sunnyvale, Calif. HQ campus with some tasty organic mesclun as they have at Google, from whence Mayer came.

Better roughage means better returns!

2:14 pm: Mayer turns the call over to CFO Ken Goldman, also a newbie. As usual, he runs through the numbers that are already in all the releases already. But I am enjoying his New England accent, hoping he will say the slight increase in revenue was “wicked” good.

Goldman, in fact, calls the revenue increase “modest,” which is true, although it sounds like “mah-dist.”

What’s not mah-dist is how much stock Yahoo has bought back, using its windfall from the recent sale of assets in China. It’s $1.45 billion, with more that that left to use for more share buybacks. That should keep Yahoo’s stock up nicely.

Goldman also talks about increases in the company’s search business, although notes that the Microsoft relationship is still not the most fantastic.

He speaks more effusively of Yahoo’s Asian partners, including Yahoo! Japan and China’s Alibaba Group. It’s deserved, since they have been the company’s treasure trove against its meh core performance in recent years.

Not so tasty is the problem Yahoo has with a big-money contract dispute in Mexico, which Goldman reiterates is “without merit.”

2:28 pm: Goldman moves onto Yahoo’s cash position, which is strong and which he says is going to be used to make the company better.

Mayer is back on board, talking about key focuses over multiple years.

She says Yahoo needs a “chain reaction of growth,” which needs to be fueled by a dozen new products that become a daily habits for consumers to increase usage and other metrics.

A nuclear bomb explosion is not exactly the best metaphor for a company’s turnaround, but in Yahoo’s case it is probably a pretty good one, given how stubborn its decline has been.

Mayer then switches the metaphor to one she recently used about “returning to the roots” of Yahoo.

Actually, mixing the metaphors, Yahoo has to blast some significant roots that have gotten in the way of its innovation over the years.

“The best is yet to come,” promises Mayer, in what she says will be a multi-year effort.

Now onto questions from the analysts!

2:40 pm: The first question is about commercialization of its products. Mayer answers she is both pro-advertising and anti-ad — meaning they are good when they add to user experience and bad when they do not.

There will be slight margin declines due to this, which is the real point of the query, which Goldman says will not be too impacted.

The next question is on the weaker performance in display ads and whether mobile ads can ramp up quick enough or not.

Yahoo is not breaking out mobile revenue numbers as yet — it’s not impressive as yet, so that’s what’s going on there — although Mayer points to the number of mobile users increasing to 200 million now.

As to the declines in display, Mayer gives a non-answer, but it is likely due to big changes that new Yahoo COO Henrique De Castro has put into place in the way it sells ads and which AllThingsD.com previously reported on. Mayer earlier in the call had confirmed those changes.

The fact of the matter — which is just what the analyst was asking about — is that Mayer simply has to improve display revenue, which is Yahoo’s core business.

Mayer then addresses the issue of not providing usage metrics anymore. Yahoo has withheld a lot of them since she has taken over, and she says it is because they are not indicative of metrics that, well, she thinks you need to know.

Instead, Mayer points to other metrics that she feels are better, such as number of ads sold and price per click on search.

Speaking of search, the next question is about that. What can Mayer say — and she does — but that Yahoo must also improve in that area. Indeed, it is lucrative low-hanging fruit for the company.

Here comes an interesting observation she makes based on a question of mobile versus desktop, which Mayer says should not be separated as two areas as consumers don’t think that way.

Yahoo is tuning up a dozen products, she says, having started with Yahoo Mail and its Flickr photo-sharing app.

2:54 pm: Mayer is not saying which of this dirty dozen is next to get a makeover.

“We’re investing in small, nimble, excellent teams,” says Mayer, who then tries to reference a famous Margaret Mead quote, but ends up mangling it a bit.

It is, for the record: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

This is true, which might make some Yahoo staffers nervous, since Mayer’s recent stack ranking of them means she can start on employee layoffs anytime she likes to separate the wheat from the chaff.

3:01 pm: Whoo-whee, this is going long and I am getting weary. Mayer has to be some kind of digital Energizer Bunny — she just flew in from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland and moved right into the prep for the Q4 earnings.

Tomorrow, she is presumably off to Las Vegas, where Yahoo’s global sales conference will start and she will doubtlessly be making an appearance.

I am exhausted simply by walking up and down the stairs at my house.

The next question is about third-party publishers and ad tech on mobile.

“Mobile monetization is new for everyone,” she says correctly, making the point that no one knows what is going to shake out.

She uses — as she has used — the example of when people thought search was not a moneymaker until Google proved otherwise.

The problem is, of course, that Google is Yahoo’s biggest rival in this new mobile ad arena, along with Facebook and many others. And Google, as its recent results showed, does know how to make money compared to Yahoo.

The next question is about mobile monetization eating into desktop revenue.

Mayer notes that Yahoo has hired 120 people with computer science degrees in the quarter to work on that area.

In other words, get ready for a symphony of geeks to return Yahoo to relevance.

Would they can pull it off, as that would be a tune worth listening to.

Speaking of something worth listening to, here is a video of Diana Ross’ song, “Chain Reaction,” to enjoy:

For better or worse, apps like Instagram have made sharing with photos easier than ever by allowing you to do it right from your smartphone. But this week I took a look at a new challenger, Yahoo’s Flickr. You might know Flickr best as a Web service, but Yahoo is making a push in the mobile space, and recently released a major update to its mobile app that puts it more on par with Instagram.

Among the big changes to Flickr is the addition of filters. These allow you to apply various effects to your photos to give them an artsy look. You can also now share those images from this app to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. Previously, it only offered limited sharing to Twitter and Flickr contacts.

Both filters and social integration have long been available on Instagram, but Flickr couples them with more advanced editing features. It’s a solid and powerful photo-sharing app, particularly for more serious photographers and current Flickr members. But casual users might find Instagram’s simpler approach more appealing.

Flickr is free, and is available for iOS and Android devices, but only the iPhone app has been updated with all the new features. Yahoo says an iPad-optimized version and Android app are in the works.

I tested it on the iPhone 4, and there are many aspects of the app I like. But two things stood out in particular: The quantity of tools it gives the photographer, and the ease with which you can view a friend’s entire collection of photos.

To upload photos, you can either take a picture right from the app using your smartphone’s camera, or select an existing image from the photo gallery. Afterward, you can apply one of 15 different filters (all named after animals) to enhance the colors in a photo or give them a retro look.

I had fun with the filters, but if you’re more of a purist, you can turn them off in the settings menu.

Perhaps more useful is Flickr’s set of editing features. There are controls to adjust contrast, saturation and brightness. You even get tools to minimize red-eye, whiten teeth and eliminate blemishes. Instagram only offers the ability to rotate an image, add borders, adjust brightness and change focus.

I found the tools handy for cleaning up my camera-phone pictures. For example, after adjusting the sharpness, I could see more details like individual tree leaves in a landscape photo.

I definitely spent more time editing my images on Flickr than I did on Instagram. If you’re simply interested in quickly sharing a photo, or you’re not too concerned with making that lemon tart you had for dessert look like a piece of art, Flickr might be too much.

A big advantage to Flickr is that you’re not forced to crop your picture into a square image, as you are with Instagram. There have been numerous times, particularly with group shots, where I wasn’t able to use a photo in Instagram simply because it didn’t fit within the square frame.

When you’re done editing, you can add tags, titles and description and location information, and then share photos via Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr or email. Images are posted in their original size, and they also show up on your profile page within the app and on your Flickr Web account.

I liked that, from my profile page, I could sort my photos in a list view, quickly see how many comments a photo received, and how many people viewed a photo or added it to their favorite list. With Instagram, you have to click on each individual image to see likes and comments.

As much as I like sharing my own photos, I also love checking out what my friends are up to. To add contacts, you can connect to your phone’s address book, Facebook, Twitter, Gmail or Yahoo accounts to see which of your friends are using the Flickr app. There’s also an Explore page where you can view popular photos or images from other Flickr community members in your area.

The Photostream section of the app lets you view all of your contacts’ images. You can scroll vertically to see recent posts, just like with Instagram. But what’s nice is that each person’s photos are organized in a filmstrip-like format, so you can also swipe horizontally to see someone’s entire photo album.

I found this a quick and easy way to check out a friend’s photo set without having to leave the current screen. With Instagram, you either have to continually scroll down the screen to look for previous photos, or tap on a user’s name to access their entire album from their profile page.

Tapping on any photo will bring up a larger version, and there you can add it to your “Favorite” list or leave a comment. There’s also a little information icon at the top right of the screen that will surface such details as what kind of camera was used, exposure and aperture settings, ISO speed and other extra details. This information might be of interest to you if you’re into photography, but it is probably more than most people need to know.

Privacy and ownership of photos are big issues with these photo-sharing apps. Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, recently took some heat after updating its terms of service to make it sound like the company could sell your photos for advertisements without compensation. Instagram has since backtracked and reiterated that users retain ownership rights of their photos.

Flickr’s terms of service state that each member maintains ownership rights to their photos. You can also apply privacy settings for each image or an entire set of photos.

In many ways, Flickr feels like a grown-up version of Instagram. Some of the features will be more than what people need. But those looking to be social while taking their photography to the next level will find what they need in Flickr.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130117/oh-snap-flickr-takes-on-instagram/feed/ 7 http://allthingsd.com/20130115/yahoo-connections-svp-shashi-seth-is-out/ http://allthingsd.com/20130115/yahoo-connections-svp-shashi-seth-is-out/#comments Tue, 15 Jan 2013 21:46:59 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=285786

According to multiple sources close to the situation, Yahoo Connections SVP Shashi Seth is leaving the company. CEO Marissa Mayer sent an email to staff earlier today saying the last day for one of the top execs of the company would be tomorrow.

[UPDATE: A Yahoo spokesperson confirmed the departure of Seth, as well as that of Chief Information Security Justin Somaini, which I reported yesterday.]

As I reported last night, rumors of the former Google and AOL executive’s departure have been running through Yahoo for months and now it appears to be true.

Sources said Mayer is in the midst of culling top execs, even as some are contemplating departure due to unhappiness under her new regime.

Seth has been in charge of a swath of key products at Yahoo including Yahoo Mail, the Flickr photo-sharing service and many others. Mayer is an experienced product exec from her tenure at Google and has been involving herself deeply in that arena.

Seth also posted a goodbye on the LinkedIn social network, writing:

“After three years I have come to the incredibly hard decision to move on from Yahoo. I truly enjoyed working with an amazing team, that was passionate, hard working, and truly brilliant. I will miss working with them!”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130115/yahoo-connections-svp-shashi-seth-is-out/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130109/mayers-10x-challenge-yahoos-homepage-mail-and-search-traffic-show-significant-year-over-year-declines/ http://allthingsd.com/20130109/mayers-10x-challenge-yahoos-homepage-mail-and-search-traffic-show-significant-year-over-year-declines/#comments Wed, 09 Jan 2013 20:45:18 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=283688

This week in Las Vegas, the new management team running Yahoo — including CEO Marissa Mayer — is at International CES to schmooze with big advertisers and convince them that Yahoo is the place to put large chunks of their marketing budgets.

One of the longtime selling points of the company is the sheer size of its audience, especially for the key money-making parts of the site — the homepage, Yahoo Mail and search.

But private stats from comScore show that those three areas have continued their longtime decline over the last year, in some cases dropping significantly. In November and December, for example, compared to the same two months a year ago, U.S. search was down 28 percent and 24 percent respectively, while mail was down 16 percent and 12 percent.

This matters a great deal, since the troika of homepage, mail and search have been the critical driver of the Yahoo value ecosystem for advertisers.

The impact of those drops is felt all over Yahoo, whose music, movie, games and travel site have also seen massive drop-offs in traffic year over year in those same months.

Stopping the decline is critical for Yahoo, since Mayer herself has underscored the need for size in her pushing for new businesses at Yahoo that are 100 million users in size and/or have revenue prospects of at least $100 million.

While this is a lofty vision, the reality of traffic falloffs on key properties is a vexing issue, especially since they remain its main source of revenue and also an important element in launching future products Mayer is promising will turbocharge the company.

It’s not that Yahoo is not huge, especially compared to most sites on the Web.

As one of the top Internet brands, according to a recent Nielsen report, the average number of total monthly unique visitors for the longtime Silicon Valley Internet company in 2012 was 141.6 million, No. 3 behind Google and Facebook in the U.S. market. Similar rankings were reported by comScore, which placed Yahoo at the No. 2 spot after Google, with 171.4 million monthly visitors in November.

But, for many years, traffic to those important consumer destinations of Yahoo has been on a clear and unstopping decline, statistics (usually from comScore) that the company nonetheless always dutifully puts in its earnings slides — see below — for investors to get some idea of the major and vexing issues facing the company.

That was suddenly ended in the last quarter with the engagement slide removed from Yahoo’s public deck entirely. Not all companies include such stats, so when I inquired as to why the company had made the change, Yahoo PR never returned my phone call.

But it’s not hard to guess the reason for the shift — the numbers were not good and they called more attention to Yahoo’s glaring challenge, which is getting users reengaged with its products by creating what Mayer has dubbed several times “delightful” experiences.

According to numerous sources, that has also been the case within the company too, with the new regime restricting an internal transparency initiative pushed by former Chief Product Officer Blake Irving that shared product performance numbers with the top 100 leaders at Yahoo.

And while it’s an interesting strategic choice, several sources inside the company this week urged me to get ahold of increasingly worrisome numbers from comScore — available to its private clients — comparing November 2011 to November 2012 and also December 2011 to December 2012 at home and work in the U.S.

So I did, getting the same stats from numerous sources — numbers that a spokesman for comScore confirmed were correct.

And, as promised, they are worrisome indeed.

In November 2012, compared to November 2011, the monthly unique visitors to the homepage declined 17 percent to 91.8 million from 110.9 million; Yahoo Mail dropped 16 percent (from 92 million to 77.7 million); and Yahoo search dropped 28 percent (from 93.3 million to 66.9 million).

Also off significantly for all three areas, often by one-third, were a plethora of other stats: Percentage of reach, total minutes, total page views, total visits and more.

One of the only bright spots for Yahoo was the relatively small Flickr sites, which were up 37 percent — 26.7 million versus 19.4 million — in unique monthly visitors year over year. The photo-sharing site — which has been getting a much-needed refresh — was also up in all other stats.

But Flickr — which Mayer (pictured here) has laudably touted and supported after years of inexplicable neglect — is not a money-maker for Yahoo, even if its return does burnish the company’s tech and innovation cred.

In December 2011 to December 2012, the homepage was more stable, gaining four percent in monthly uniques from 109.4 million to 114.2 million, but with other key stats both rising and falling. Total visits were up 14 percent, for example, while average minutes per visit was down 13.6 percent.

But the trouble for mail or search continued, off 12 percent (89.9 million to 78.7 million) and 24 percent (88.7 million to 67.4 million) respectively in monthly uniques, with similarly major declines in all other stats.

Mail recently got a refresh too under Mayer, despite some recent security glitches, so new stats will show if that will help stem the declines. Search is another story all together, with Yahoo in what can only be described as a dysfunctional partnership with Microsoft that numerous sources tell me Mayer is seeking to end.

The homepage, too, is undergoing a redo, with a design that has a decidedly more mobile and social feel, and pushing an ethos of Yahoo becoming a hub for content discovery. It is hoped the new look will boost traffic relatively quickly from its current downward trajectory.

To be fair, there can be lots and lots of reasons for these declines, although most of Yahoo’s competitors are, at worse, seeing a flattening of growth and not outright declines.

And sometimes Internet sites complain that services like comScore undercount, although Yahoo had previously used the firm in its public documents. More to the point, as multiple sources within the company note, the stats are directionally correct in that they closely track with internal Yahoo numbers.

Which is to say, traffic is going down rather than growing. That is clearly why Mayer has loudly stressed mobile since arriving at Yahoo, an area not included in these numbers that many sources said has strong growth to about 70 million monthly unique visitors via its apps and mobile-enabled Web offerings.

But unlike the homepage, mail and search — which push and pull traffic all over Yahoo and are responsible for most of its current monetization — mobile also makes very little money now. And Yahoo — unlike Facebook, which recently did — does not break out mobile results.

So, it will be interesting to see if the company does so when it reports fourth-quarter earnings on January 28 and also if it says anything about continued traffic declines of its traditional Web business in the period and the impact on revenue.

Still, there are lots of ways to counter declining or flat revenues, even with declining traffic — via cost cuts, efficiencies, charging more and selling assets (as Yahoo did in the last quarter). And Yahoo has ably managed to keep its operating margins growing over the years, despite both the declines in traffic and moribund growth in its revenue.

But the real and only fix is the drastic fix to existing tentpoles Yahoo has and the creation or acquisition of products that excite consumers and, therefore, advertisers.

It’s not an easy thing, of course, as well-known venture capitalist Ben Horowitz recently wrote in his blog about the need to focus on products over building and improving culture — one of Mayer’s other big initiatives at Yahoo.

Wrote Horowitz in what I consider one of the clearest articulations of what it takes to win for startups, as well as big companies like Yahoo:

“The primary thing that any technology startup must do is build a product that’s at least 10 times better at doing something than the current prevailing way of doing that thing. Two or three times better will not be good enough to get people to switch to the new thing fast enough or in large enough volume to matter. The second thing that any technology startup must do is to take the market. If it’s possible to do something 10X better, it’s also possible that you won’t be the only company to figure that out. Therefore, you must take the market before somebody else does.”

If you want to take a gander, here are some more of those old Yahoo quarterly engagement slides, which were recently eliminated from its presentations:

(Note: I reached out to Yahoo’s outside PR firm — since they do respond to queries — and also some company execs to get a comment on this story, but so far there has been none.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130109/mayers-10x-challenge-yahoos-homepage-mail-and-search-traffic-show-significant-year-over-year-declines/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130105/yahoos-new-homerun-homepage-is-rolling-out-more-widely-across-several-browsers/ http://allthingsd.com/20130105/yahoos-new-homerun-homepage-is-rolling-out-more-widely-across-several-browsers/#comments Sun, 06 Jan 2013 07:41:33 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=282676

Yahoo appears to be rolling out the newest version of the redesign of its homepage even more extensively across several major browsers, including Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox.

As AllThingsD has previously reported several times, the Silicon Valley Internet giant has been working on a new homepage look, designed to improve its declining consumer usage.

The latest look has been present on all my browsers all day, rather than cycling off to the old version as before. The design is cleaner, with a more touchscreen tablet approach, new icons, and a scrolling news feature. With a more mobile feel, it’s slightly different than previous new versions that Yahoo has been testing over the last few months.

After redoing its Yahoo Mail and Flickr photo-sharing service, sources inside the company said that Yahoo is now close to launching the new homepage. It’s part of an effort called Project Homerun and also a larger effort called Project Zed, which will also include more personalization and a focus on bringing in a range of third-party content.

More on what that means soon …

Until then, here are three different screenshots from tonight from Chrome, Safari and Firefox:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130105/yahoos-new-homerun-homepage-is-rolling-out-more-widely-across-several-browsers/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121226/yahoos-mayer-hoping-what-happens-with-big-advertisers-at-ces-doesnt-stay-in-vegas/ http://allthingsd.com/20121226/yahoos-mayer-hoping-what-happens-with-big-advertisers-at-ces-doesnt-stay-in-vegas/#comments Wed, 26 Dec 2012 22:05:46 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=280666

So far in the six-month reign of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, there has been a pile of attention paid to the flashy cultural changes (free food!), much-needed rehauls of key mainstays (Flickr, Yahoo! Mail, homepage), a focus on attracting entrepreneurial talent (Hey, we got Max Levchin to join the board!) and, of course, the frequent mention of mobilemobilemobile by the former Google product exec.

But on the topic of where the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s search and display advertising business is headed — which is, of course, its key revenue and profit generator — it’s pretty much been crickets.

No longer, it seems, according to multiple sources inside and outside Yahoo. Mayer is planning a series of appearances at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show — which is taking place in Las Vegas in less than two weeks.

That includes sitting for a high-profile fireside chat with Starcom MediaVest Group Global CEO Laura Desmond in front of several hundred ad clients on Wednesday, January 9; organizing a plethora of one-on-one meetings; and throwing a Yahoo dinner party, as well as angling for invites to key parties thrown by others, such as MediaLink’s power player dinner on Tuesday, January 8.

As I previously reported, the company is planning on having this much more prominent presence there in order to reset its sometime rocky relationship with advertisers.

And, not surprisingly, its big weapon at the giant annual confab will apparently be Mayer, who has not yet interfaced significantly with the company’s big ad clients since taking the top job in July. At CES, sources said, Yahoo is hoping the “Marissa Halo” — i.e. the excitement around the decidedly telegenic exec — will help boost its business.

It’s important, since big agencies and advertisers have privately been grumbling about the lack of outreach by Yahoo and also how much more active execs at rivals such as Facebook, Google and AOL have been.

More than one source close to Yahoo said the dissatisfaction was being heard loud and clear at the company. “[Everyone will] take it as an opportunity to vent (again), while Yahoo promises a new beginning,” said one exec.

New beginnings will again be the case, though, with new COO Henrique De Castro also in place. He’s been making a series of moves to rejigger the ad business at Yahoo since he got there earlier in the fall, also from Google, including shifting its sales process to a category model.

In addition, Yahoo execs have continued their noodling on whether or not to make significant ad tech purchases — with no major deals in place yet — along with improving the creaky performance of the company’s own owned-and-operated offerings.

It’s all in the hope that advertisers and agencies will reconnect with Yahoo after the nearly consistent CEO changes over the last year. For those keeping score, after Carol Bartz was fired in the fall of 2011, CEO Scott Thompson made his debut at CES in early 2012, touting Yahoo’s data prowess before being ousted only months later. He was followed by renewed efforts toward marketers by interim CEO Ross Levinsohn.

And now there’s Mayer.

Interestingly, while many major ad players are looking for more specifics about how Yahoo will improve its mobile, search and data products to give better insights to advertisers, they also are simply wanting to hear Mayer’s plans for Yahoo.

“What I don’t see yet is what the vision for Yahoo is, articulating the bigger ideas than just presenting an assemblage of products,” said Rob Norman, chief digital officer of GroupM Global. “And what everyone would still like to see is what is the escape route from being a portal or even reemerging from what that means, so I am really interested in what she has to say.”

Added another top ad exec: “She really has not said anything yet about how she plans to capitalize on Yahoo’s strengths over the next year in the ad space. People are genuinely excited about Mayer, but the stakes are still high for her since everyone feels as if they have already given Yahoo a lot of extra chances.”

High stakes, indeed. But, then again, it is Vegas.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121226/yahoos-mayer-hoping-what-happens-with-big-advertisers-at-ces-doesnt-stay-in-vegas/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121224/happy-holidays-instagram-here-have-a-class-action-lawsuit/ http://allthingsd.com/20121224/happy-holidays-instagram-here-have-a-class-action-lawsuit/#comments Mon, 24 Dec 2012 19:00:54 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=280452 ’Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the Valley, not a creature was stirring — except for Lucy Funes and her attorneys, who are proposing a class-action lawsuit against Instagram, the massively popular photo-sharing application owned by Facebook.

Merry Christmas, Kevin Systrom!

The accusations leveled? Funes is mad about Instagram’s set of Terms of Service amendments made last week, which caused widespread furor among the app’s user base. The suit, which was first reported by Reuters, claims breach of contract based on “the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing,” along with a handful of other California civil code breach accusations.

“We believe this complaint is without merit and we will fight it vigorously,” a Facebook spokesman told AllThingsD.

In a nutshell: Instagram freaked everyone out last week when it updated its ToS, stating that the service had a right to introduce advertising products that accompanied user photographs. Along with the distaste folks had at the thought they may start seeing diaper ads plastered alongside pics of their kids’ faces, the uproar eventually made it seem like Instagram would sell the content created by users in their photos.

Eventually, Instagram dialed back the language, publishing an apologetic note to its site near the end of the week. But the damage had been done, as thousands of users had sworn to leave the service in favor of other photo-sharing applications — in particular, the recently updated Flickr app for iOS.

Funes and company’s biggest grievance with Instagram lies in that cancellation grey area; If users decide to delete their accounts, “customers forfeit all right to retrieve the Property that was previously entrusted to Instagram, which retains rights thereto in perpetuity,” the filing states.

The money quote: “In short, Instagram declares that ‘possession is nine-tenths of the law and if you don’t like it, you can’t stop us.’”

Bummer of a present for CEO Systrom on Christmas Eve. Here’s hoping the gifts left in his stocking fare better.

The proceedings won’t move much until 2013, so for now, head on over to McSweeney’s for another fantastic privacy policy update, courtesy of Santa Claus.

Oh, and here’s the filing if you want to check it out:

Instagram Lawsuit

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121224/happy-holidays-instagram-here-have-a-class-action-lawsuit/feed/ 6 http://allthingsd.com/20121213/along-with-flickr-mail-and-homepage-yahoos-board-will-also-get-a-refresh/ http://allthingsd.com/20121213/along-with-flickr-mail-and-homepage-yahoos-board-will-also-get-a-refresh/#comments Thu, 13 Dec 2012 16:05:47 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=277476

In the last week, Yahoo has redone its powerful Yahoo Mail, refreshed its Flickr photo-sharing service and is also set to release a spanking new homepage design.

It’s part of a series of changes made since new CEO Marissa Mayer arrived this summer from Google, including detailed employee performance reviews, free food, new smartphones and a hunt for innovative mobile properties to scoop up to improve Yahoo’s creaky Silicon Valley reputation.

Now, according to sources close to the situation, that rejiggering will extend to Yahoo’s board too, with an effort to add more Internet savvy members as directors.

That’s actually be an aim for a while, including a board appointment for longtime entrepreneur Max Levchin, which sources said will occur soon.

In fact, Levchin has been mulling the Yahoo board job for a while, having long been intrigued by the company’s troubles and seeing it as an opportunity rather than a liability.

The wooing of Levchin is also not new. As I wrote in February, he had been pegged for a board seat by then-activist shareholder Dan Loeb of Third Point — who is now on the board after winning his fight with Yahoo and ousted former CEO Scott Thompson. But Levchin, as well as SurveyMonkey CEO David Goldberg, did not want to be part of a dissident slate against Yahoo co-founder and then-board member Jerry Yang.

I had written in September that the board was again looking at Levchin, for a seat designated under an agreement Yahoo had made with Loeb.

The hedge fund investor, who owns a large chunk of Yahoo, had the right to nominate a mutually agreed-upon fourth director after the company settled the proxy fight with him earlier this year. The other directors he nominated previously were Michael Wolf and Harry Wilson.

The thoughtful and cerebral Levchin (pictured here) is best known as a top exec at PayPal. He then founded Slide, a then-hot start-up that made apps — then called “widgets” — for Facebook, including some that let you toss sheep (remember SuperPoke!?!).

(I had been hard on Slide back then, noting that the idea of a “Widget IPO” was ludicrous: “It’s a sign to me that suddenly makes the scene feel very bubbly, given that Slide certainly has traffic, but no proven track record to continually make money.”)

But Slide, which Levchin considered a disappointment despite a huge funding valuing the company at $550 million, was sold to Google for $180 million in mid-2010.

Levchin quickly chafed at the search giant, after working on a variety of social efforts there, including clashing with Google+ leader Vic Gundotra. Levchin did not work that closely with Mayer while at Google, although they are friendly.

He eventually left the company in mid-2011, with Google shuttering Slide, and has since been working on a new start-up in San Francisco.

An active angel investor, he’s one of many entrepreneurs in the Web arena that young start-ups look up to, which is the presumable reason for bringing him onto the Yahoo board. Once added, he’d easily be the hippest director in the group.

The Yahoo board changes will also include the departure of some board members, including Weather Channel CEO David Kenny, who had once been considered as a possible CEO of Yahoo. Other rumors that had been raised included a change in chairman, but sources said that this is not the case for now.

When I emailed and texted him yesterday afternoon about the board changes I had heard were coming, Yahoo Chairman Fred Amoroso wrote me: “As a matter of policy, I don’t comment on rumors.”

Kenny also declined to comment yesterday, noting he was on a plane and was not reachable.

Presumbly, he was returning east from the Yahoo board meeting that was held earlier this week in Silicon Valley.

The Yahoo board moves echo similar changes that were made when former CEO Carol Bartz came into office.

The New York Times also posted on the changes, noting Intuit CEO Brad Smith was also leaving the board. Last year, Smith had become a very active board member, especially after Bartz and then Thompson were ousted, but his own board at the financial software company had been asking him to cut back.

Sources said other new directors might also be named to replace him, but that this was not going to be announced by Yahoo at this time.

Until the inevitable board news, here’s a video of one of many interviews I did with Levchin — this back in 2009 — to give you an idea of his stylings:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121213/along-with-flickr-mail-and-homepage-yahoos-board-will-also-get-a-refresh/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121212/as-facebook-and-twitter-feud-over-photos-yahoo-plays-well-with-others/ http://allthingsd.com/20121212/as-facebook-and-twitter-feud-over-photos-yahoo-plays-well-with-others/#comments Thu, 13 Dec 2012 01:21:12 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=277354

After years of neglect, Yahoo launched a majorly revamped version of the Flickr app for iOS on Wednesday morning, adding yet another entrant to the growing ranks of photo-sharing apps.

But this effort is not quite like the others. While major players Facebook — which bought Instagram — and Twitter — which just released its own filter offering — duke it out with their own respective photo offerings, Yahoo is trying make friends.

Picture this: Flickr has integrated itself across the other major social networks, so you’re able to push photos out to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. Not a huge deal — Instagram can do that.

But Yahoo made it a point to highlight Flickr’s ability to take advantage of the Twitter Cards technology, which allows full photos to appear inside of the Twitter stream.

“We’ve worked with our partners to ensure that your photos look gorgeous no matter where they are viewed, on or off Flickr,” according to Yahoo’s blog post.

That comes only days after Instagram pulled its support for Twitter Cards technology over the weekend. It’s the clearest signal to date that Facebook and Instagram want users inside of their network and not looking at their photos inside of Twitter’s stream.

So Flickr’s willingness to use Cards is a win for Twitter. The method of implementing media-rich experiences in the stream is the direction the company is heading to.

(Granted, it’s not a massive win for Twitter. After all, it’s unclear how many active users Flickr still has since going for so long without a respectable mobile app. Flickr needs Twitter more than Twitter needs Flickr, but using another company’s tech in a complementary way seems like a peace offering between the two.)

In turn, Flickr has been granted a concession or two by Twitter. The new Flickr app allows you to search your Twitter friends list to find who also uses Flickr and begin to follow them on the photo service. That’s a big deal, considering Twitter pulled that feature from both Instagram and Tumblr earlier in the year. It’s similar to when Facebook yanked contact importing support from Google back in 2010, but left the feature up and running for Yahoo and Microsoft.

So what’s the lesson here?

Simple. To get off the bench and back into the game, Yahoo needs friends. And right now, Facebook and Twitter are fighting each other and not Yahoo.

Yahoo, in essence, can remain a Switzerland, partnering with those with whom it makes sense and perhaps inching its way toward mainstream consumer relevance once more.

A long shot? We’ll see.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121212/as-facebook-and-twitter-feud-over-photos-yahoo-plays-well-with-others/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20121212/flickr-jumps-into-mobile-photo-fray-with-new-insta-hip-filters/ http://allthingsd.com/20121212/flickr-jumps-into-mobile-photo-fray-with-new-insta-hip-filters/#comments Wed, 12 Dec 2012 17:50:48 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=277288 The tech world has gone bonkers over photo filters. Now add Flickr to the mix.

The Yahoo-owned photo service, as part of renewed efforts toward mobile, has just updated its app for iPhone and iPod touch to include 15 new insta-hip filters, as well as an enlarged view of photos on the mobile screen.

The Flickr app update comes just as Instagram has cut off integration with Twitter, so that photos taken with and shared through Instagram can’t be viewed in Twitter feeds. At the same time, Twitter has started working with Aviary — the photo-editing start-up Flickr also works with — to power its own filters for photos shared directly through the microblogging site. Twitter just rolled out eight photo filters for iPhone and Android yesterday.

Said Flickr, quite pointedly, in a blog post, “We’ve worked with our partners to ensure that your photos look gorgeous no matter where they are viewed, on or off Flickr.” Photos taken with the app can be shared with Facebook, Twitter and Tumbler, as well as via email.

The Flickr iPhone app is free; currently, there isn’t an optimized iPad app, though there is an Android version of the app.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121212/flickr-jumps-into-mobile-photo-fray-with-new-insta-hip-filters/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121127/liveblogging-yahoo-marissa-mayer-first-live-interview-which-atd-had-to-virtually-sneak-into/ http://allthingsd.com/20121127/liveblogging-yahoo-marissa-mayer-first-live-interview-which-atd-had-to-virtually-sneak-into/#comments Wed, 28 Nov 2012 04:06:24 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=273246

Tonight, new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer gave her first public interview since becoming the leader of the troubled Silicon Valley Internet giant.

Not to cranky me, of course, but to the much more amenable Fortune magazine writer and editor Pattie Sellers, who hosted the former Google exec at a dinner in Palo Alto, Calif., as part of the magazine’s Most Powerful Women franchise.

Fortune recently put a glamour shot of Mayer on the cover, and Sellers also did a profile. Now, Mayer was ready to sit down to talk about Yahoo and more.

(I wish I could have reported from the event, and almost did. I had initially been invited to the dinner at the Garden Court Hotel for about 100 guests, mostly women. But I was then waitlisted, and then told by Sellers directly that I could not attend, as the editors had decided to close out outside media and only have Fortune staffers covering it.)

Whatever! I have my ways to liveblog it and do it faster than any magazine writer can — and none involve disguising myself as a cater-waiter or solely using the Twitter feed from Fortune. As if!

Here goes:

7:50 pm: After some lovely cocktails, the audience sits down at about 10 tables of nine people and starts in on the salad course.

Soon enough, the night starts off with a speech by a McKinsey partner (and presumable sponsor of the dinner), delivering some stats as part of a study of some sort about how businesses are using — or should be using — social tools.

More than 60 percent of knowledge workers spend time exchanging information … Social can deliver an estimated $1 trillion in value.

Big news! Not! Even! Slightly! Oh dear, please get to the opening act!

Finally, Sellers gives her intro of Mayer.

8:04 pm: Sellers notes that her conference had hosted Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz in 2010 (she was ousted in 2011), and in 2011 had Mayer when she was an exec at Google (she became Yahoo CEO this year).

Now, in 2012, Mayer is top dog at Yahoo, and the youngest CEO in the Fortune 500.

“Why don’t we just call this ‘the most powerful Yahoo dinner,’” jokes Sellers.

Why not!

Mayer — for those who care, and forgive me, since I am fashion-stupid — is wearing a black frock and some heeled Mary Janes. She gets big applause when Sellers notes that Yahoo stock is up 18 percent since Mayer became CEO.

Note: It did go down when she made a shareholder misstep early in her tenure, but has gone up since she repeated mobilemobilemobile with confidence on a recent earnings call that got investors excited about her tenure.

8:08 pm: By the way, Mayer put in a call for people to vote for her as Time magazine’s Person of the Year (she is on the list of nominees — more kudos from a Time Inc. property).

Mayer starts off with basic PR messaging that she trotted out previously on the recent earnings call, around how she wants Yahoo to be focused on “delighting and engaging users” and how it is a brand that touches people every day.

Therefore, its products need to be inspiring and delightful.

Daily delight! This is the buzzword.

Also, she notes, Yahoo should be the bestest place to work.

As apparent proof of that, Mayer says that all Research In Motion BlackBerry smartphones have been banished, and that Yahoos will be using Apple’s iPhones, Google’s Android phones and Microsoft’s Windows phones.

This has been endlessly reported, even though most other Internet companies do this, but it’s a good line, anyway.

8:12 pm: By the way, iPhones are the most popular with Yahoo employees.

News at 11! (I will add that iPhones are the most popular with the Swisher boys, too, and — irony alert — one of their moms works at Google.)

Sellers then asks about what makes a good product, which is precisely why the product-savvy Mayer was brought in to fix Yahoo.

Says Mayer: “Acute user need.”

I acutely need doughnuts. Does this count?

Also, says Mayer, products have to be created in a way that is “frictionless and beautiful,” and that the offering cannot get in the consumer’s way.

Sellers asks her to name a great product. Mayer notes that she was not talking acquisitions, but quickly namechecks the iPhone and Google.

Since those companies’ market caps are a billionty times bigger than Yahoo’s, she def cannot acquire anything there.

8:17 pm: Mayer also apparently likes some kind of luxury paper made in Germany that looks like velvet. It’s Gmund, by the way.

The topic moves on to Flickr, the once hip photo-sharing service that Yahoo bought and proceeded to ignore. Meanwhile, Instagram.

Mayer says that Yahoo needs to focus on the “global suite” services that are excellent, and on executing them well.

She points out Yahoo’s fantasy football service, mentioning its recent breakdown on game day that sent fans into a tizzy.

It’s a they-love-us-so-much-they-hate-us point.

Yahoo will not do things like online maps, though, Mayer says, noting that where Yahoo cannot compete, it should partner.

Sellers asked about acquisitions.

Mayer: Mobilemobilemobile! (It worked before!)

8:22 pm: Mayer then mentions the importance of small teams that work together, such as its recent Stamped purchase.

She notes that the bigger and more strategic opportunities are around advertising technology. Calling the Rubicon Project!

Mayer veers away from a question about layoffs, a sad Yahoo tradition. I have reported previously that she will make cuts via performance reviews.

At Yahoo, she says, it’s now about performance, not potential: “No offense to potential, but what we really care about now is performance.”

No offense taken!

Also, everyone’s goals will be posted on the Yahoo Web site for everyone to see.

Oh, wait, there will surely be offense taken by those lazy potential people at Yahoo.

Mayer does add that Yahoo should be a “growth company,” and not one defined by cuts.

8:28 pm: “The consumer Internet is growing, and we need to invest,” she says.

To achieve this will be a hard job, and will take multiple years, she adds.

Sellers asks about the Disney turnaround, which Mayer is apparently fascinated with. Mayer does indeed love Disney.

Who doesn’t? (Well, me, but I am an outlier.)

Speaking of Disney, one of its directors, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, sent regrets, but has emailed a question from its board meeting in New York.

Sandberg once worked at Google with Mayer, though the pair is still not working on a search engine together.

Sandberg asks what was most surprising to Mayer about taking over at Yahoo.

Mayer says she thought the job would be hard, and her new baby would be fun. Mayer had her first child at the end of September.

“The job is fun, and the baby is easy,” says Mayer.

Sellers wants to know how Mayer gets it all done. The answer: “Ruthlessly prioritize.”

She notes that that’s why she has not talked to the media at all, and why she will not be talking after this event.

(Well, I guess I will go back to not waiting by the phone for Yahoo PR to call back. Hi Anne! — also looking forward to not getting the holiday media party invite, which is no prob as the Googlers are throwing one the same night and they usually have organic arugula picked by elves they employ that’s acutely delicious.)

Then, as a Wisconsin Green Bay Packers fan, Mayer does her version of the famous Vince Lombardi quote: “God. Family. Yahoo.”

Cheesehead moment! And Mayer and I have so much in common! Mine is: Dog. Family. Yahoo.

8:33 pm: Sellers throws in one more question from famed investor Warren Buffett, who apparently wants to know what, if Mayer was not CEO of Yahoo, would she want to run?

Not Berkshire Hathaway! Mayer says she would build something herself.

It seems as if that is what she is doing at Yahoo, so we await the result.

Until then, Mayer’s mum. So to speak.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121127/liveblogging-yahoo-marissa-mayer-first-live-interview-which-atd-had-to-virtually-sneak-into/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121115/youtube-blocks-israeli-hamas-assassination-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20121115/youtube-blocks-israeli-hamas-assassination-video/#comments Thu, 15 Nov 2012 15:22:48 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=269927 Israel has gone to war with Hamas in Gaza, and it is using the Internet as a weapon, employing services like Twitter, Facebook and Flickr on its behalf.

The idea is familiar to anyone who has a message to push in 2012: Instead of relying on middlemen like the press to convey your story, you can go over their heads, and right to your target audience.

But Internet services themselves are still middlemen, with the ability to block content if they want or need to.

Google, for example, has yanked a video posted by the Israeli military yesterday, which apparently recorded a “pinpoint strike” which killed Hamas military leader Ahmed Jabari in his car.

A message on the world’s largest video site says the clip has been removed because its content violated YouTube’s Terms of Service. “Sorry about that.”*

Update: That was a mistake, YouTube now says. Here’s a comment from a company spokeswoman, via email: “With the massive volume of videos on our site, sometimes we make the wrong call. When it’s brought to our attention that a video has been removed mistakenly, we act quickly to reinstate it.”

What that means in real world terms, according to someone who knows how YouTube’s takedown system works: At some point yesterday, YouTube users “flagged” the video, which triggered a review process, and at some point early this morning, someone at YouTube made the call to take it down. Later on, someone else decided to put it back up.

I don’t know how long the video was off the site, but it was at least three hours, because that’s how long it took me to get the post up after first noticing the clip was gone.

Earlier:

I’ve asked YouTube executives to elaborate. They usually don’t talk about specific takedowns on the record, but I’m hopeful they will in this case, since assassination videos published by military spokespeople are a new YouTube use case.

The company did go into a bit more detail when it blocked an anti-Islam video in Egypt, Libya and other countries in September.

In the meantime, you can peruse the YouTube TOS yourself, and will likely want to pay attention to the part on “community guidelines,” which ban “graphic or gratuitous violence.”  A “tips” primer goes into a bit more detail:

“Don’t post videos showing bad stuff like animal abuse, drug abuse, under-age drinking and smoking, or bomb making. Graphic or gratuitous violence is not allowed. If your video shows someone being physically hurt, attacked, or humiliated, don’t post it. YouTube is not a shock site. Don’t post gross-out videos of accidents, dead bodies or similar things intended to shock or disgust.”

And if you want to see the aftereffects of Israel’s strike, YouTube is okay with that, via this AP clip:

*Meanwhile, the Twitter messages Israel initially used to promote the video have been altered, and a new video has been inserted in their place. Can’t figure out who made this choice, or what they’re trying to say:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121115/youtube-blocks-israeli-hamas-assassination-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121102/after-declaring-it-the-future-of-yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-appoints-intonows-adam-cahan-as-mobile-kingpin-internal-memo-natch/ http://allthingsd.com/20121102/after-declaring-it-the-future-of-yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-appoints-intonows-adam-cahan-as-mobile-kingpin-internal-memo-natch/#comments Fri, 02 Nov 2012 14:03:06 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=266148

Adam Cahan

A very important management shift at Yahoo got a bit lost in last week’s news of CEO Marissa Mayer’s first acquisition, a small mobile start-up called Stamped.

That would be the appointment of former IntoNow founder and CEO Adam Cahan to oversee all of Yahoo’s mobile efforts, as well as its Flickr photo sharing service.

According to an internal memo that Mayer sent out last week to employees, Cahan has been given the title of SVP of Emerging Products and Technology, with a spot on the exec staff, reporting directly to her.

Said the memo (in its entirety below):

“[Cahan] will oversee our mobile efforts, enabled screens (CTV+IntoNow), and Flickr. Adam will be responsible for building a world-class team focused on creating innovative products and experiences that inspire and delight our users worldwide.”

Mayer’s promotion of the slick exec, who has been described by almost everyone I spoke to at Yahoo as smoothly political, is an interesting internal choice by Mayer. He only got to Yahoo recently, after IntoNow was bought by Yahoo for more than $20 million in the spring of last year.

IntoNow was a spinoff from the video advertising company Auditude, which was sold to Adobe for a reported $100 million.

The television indexing start-up had launched in early 2011 as an Apple iPhone app that recognized what was playing on the screen by analyzing the audio from satellite feeds and matching it to listings. The start-up had hoped to eventually license its technology as offer-measurement services for TV advertising and viewership.

As Liz Gannes noted in a post on AllThingsD:

“It’s similar to the Shazam mobile app that many people know and love, which IDs an ambient song by recording it and quickly matching it to an archive. IntoNow users can “check in” to a particular episode once it’s been recognized, like one would check into a restaurant on Foursquare. The goal is to enable conversations around the watercooler and on social networks by helping users connect around what they’re watching and discover new things to watch.”

Cool, although IntoNow’s technology was far more compelling than its consumer promise.

Now, Cahan will be charged with doing both of Yahoo in mobile — which is most likely to be accomplished via a series of small mobile acquisitions, presumably to be stitched together into a cohesive and successful whole.

At least that’s the idea.

Cahan is an experienced exec, having worked at a number of places before founding IntoNow, including MTV Networks, NBC, McKinsey, National Geographic Television and — wait for it — Google, in business operations.

(Being an ex-Googler, which Mayer is, seems to have its advantages at Yahoo these days, with Cahan as the latest example.)

He is most definitely a key hire, because Mayer spent a lot of time stressing how mobile was Yahoo’s No. 1 priority on its recent earnings call with investors.

“Yahoo will have to be a predominantly mobile company,” she said, noting a “focused, coherent” mobile strategy was the top initiative.

Mayer had to say that, of course, even if being a mobile giant is now mostly just wishful thinking at Yahoo, since most of the many efforts the company has made in the arena have been duds. Yahoo has also lost a lot of mobile engineering talent over the years, remaining largely a desktop offering, even as the area has increasingly become where consumers are getting their information.

A blog post by Cahan at Yahoo was widely quoted when the tiny Stamped — which is an online recommendations app — was bought for under $10 million last week by Yahoo.

In it, he noted:

“Most people are always within arm’s reach of their mobile phones. For many of us, it’s the first thing we look at in the morning and the last thing we check at night. Mobile is at the center of how we connect with people, consume information, and pass the time, and we’re focused on making Yahoo! the most inspiring and entertaining way to do just that.”

We’ll see if Yahoo can be a significant mobile player, as Mayer has promised Wall Street. But Cahan has certainly been busy since he got the job, sources said, beginning with the rejiggering of Yahoo’s mobile teams, as well as visiting the Flickr office this week.

Until it all sorts itself out, please enjoy this Oct. 25 internal memo on Cahan and the Stamped acquisition:

YAHOO! PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION — DO NOT FORWARD

Hi All –

As we discussed in our strategy all-hands earlier this month, innovation and talent are essential to delivering against our vision to inspire and delight our users as a part of their daily lives. Many of the areas that require special attention are emerging technologies and Yahoo! products where we’ve not yet reinvented, re-imagined and rebuilt in order to keep pace with changes in user behaviors and platform shifts.

To aid our efforts, I’m promoting Adam Cahan to lead this effort as Senior Vice President of Emerging Products and Technology. Adam will be a member of e-staff and report directly to me. He will oversee our mobile efforts, enabled screens (CTV+IntoNow), and Flickr. Adam will be responsible for building a world-class team focused on creating innovative products and experiences that inspire and delight our users worldwide.

And he’s already making great progress! Today, we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve acquired a very talented mobile team, based in New York City.

Robby, Kevin, Bart, Paul and the entire team at Stamped are a natural fit for Yahoo!. Their experience building fun, useful, personalized mobile products aligns well with our vision to create the best everyday mobile experience for our users. The team will be a great asset for us as we expand Yahoo!’s mobile efforts and create another key center for mobile innovation in New York.

I’m excited that we’ve been able to move quickly and execute well in order to bring on such a talented team. Please join me in congratulating Adam in his promotion and welcoming Anthony, Bart, Geoff, Kevin, Landon, Michael, Paul, Robby and Travis to Yahoo!

Thanks,

Marissa

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121102/after-declaring-it-the-future-of-yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-appoints-intonows-adam-cahan-as-mobile-kingpin-internal-memo-natch/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121028/empty-new-york/ http://allthingsd.com/20121028/empty-new-york/#comments Mon, 29 Oct 2012 04:28:17 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=264336 There’s not a lot of evidence of Hurricane Sandy in New York City just yet — though if you look hard enough, you’ll see some disturbing signs.

The storm is supposed to start hitting the city overnight, peak Monday night, and continue through Tuesday.

Meantime, the most obvious effect is that almost everyone has gone home. So a city that thrives on density is now full of empty space.

New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority, which runs the city’s subway system and other transportation lines throughout the state, shut everything down Sunday evening.

Here’s what three of the city’s busiest transit hubs — Grand Central, Times Square and Penn Station — looked like last night. For more, see the MTA’s Flickr account.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121028/empty-new-york/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120925/a-hangout-for-all-your-social-network-photos/ http://allthingsd.com/20120925/a-hangout-for-all-your-social-network-photos/#comments Tue, 25 Sep 2012 22:12:50 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://allthingsd.com/?p=254220 Nowadays, people are storing a lot of personal photos on a variety of social networks. They capture photos with their smartphone cameras, instantly share them with Facebook, Twitter or Instagram and never see them again.

This week, I tried two methods for gathering photos from all sorts of social networks. I used ThisLife, a service that pulls in photos and videos from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Flickr, Shutterfly, SmugMug and Picasa, as well as from a computer’s hard drive or an iPhone or iPad (via an iOS app). One thousand photos or one hour of video are free; more storage costs $80 or $150 a year. I also tested Seagate’s one-terabyte, $110 Backup Plus Portable Drive, which backs up photos and videos from Facebook and Flickr, as well as its primary function of backing up other computer files.

I was amazed by the trove of photos I didn’t even know I had stored on many sites around the Web, and I spent hours flipping through them.

But is the photo quality on some social networks worth saving? Facebook, for example, resizes and compresses images. ThisLife recognizes this issue and uses image enhancement on each photo to improve things like balance, light and contrast. If it imports from a place where photos were saved in their original size, ThisLife preserves that photo size; it stores video at 1080p HD quality. Seagate simply copies the images from Facebook and Flickr to your computer or Backup Drive. Still, having all of my photos in one place outweighed any image quality concerns.

ThisLife stores photos and videos from social networks in one place.

ThisLife, which uses cloud storage from Amazon Web Services, takes a holistic approach, merging photos from various places, and also offers a timeline of favorite shots, facial recognition for labeling people and gets rid of duplicate photos. ThisLife saves photos posted by its users as well as photos from other people in which the user was tagged, or identified by name.

I connected my ThisLife account to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, Shutterfly and SmugMug, and installed its app on my iPad and iPhone to pull in photos from both devices. I used the ThisLife Desktop Uploader with my MacBook, clicking one button to move more than 7,000 photos from iPhoto into the service, a process that took a couple of days.

The overall interface of ThisLife is elegant, laying thousands of images out in a browse-friendly library that is organized left to right by time. I quickly scrolled through photos from a trip to New Orleans in 2006 (originally posted in Shutterfly) all the way up to my most recent Facebook photos, shared last week. The date of each photo appeared in the center of the screen as I scrolled, so I jumped to dates I knew had memorable photos, like my 30th birthday and a 2010 New Year’s Eve vacation.

I dragged photos onto one another to organize each moment into stacks of images. And I deleted photos I didn’t want. By tapping a heart icon on a photo, I added it to a timeline of favorite photos. The iPad and iPhone apps were a cinch to use on-the-go.

When I found an image I liked, I hit a Share button to send it to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr or to friends’ email addresses. It isn’t obvious enough that you can type in a person’s email. The site first encourages you to share it with friends on their Facebook walls. Later this week, ThisLife plans to introduce a better interface that makes it easier to download images and to tell where they came from. Also this week, it will let people privately share photos with a group of users who can be labeled as viewers or contributors.

Seagate’s Backup Plus Portable Drive backs up photos and videos from Facebook and Flickr.

People nervous about privacy or who want to stop using a social network (like Facebook) altogether without losing all of their posted photos will like Seagate’s Backup Plus. And its ability to fully back up a computer will offer some peace of mind.

Seagate’s social-media backup works on six different drives for Windows or Mac computers; I used the Backup Plus Portable Drive for Mac. This drive is relatively lightweight and portable, measuring about the size of a mini Moleskine notebook. I plugged it into my MacBook using an included USB cord and followed directions to install the Seagate Dashboard software. Once opened, this software prompted me to sign into my Facebook and/or Flickr accounts, and immediately began downloading photos from the sites. In 27 minutes, I backed up copies of roughly 1,100 Facebook photos. A small Auto Save check box will prompt the service to copy new photos from these two sites once an hour.

Since people may not always want a hard drive plugged into their computer for this backup, Seagate creates a folder called My Online Documents on the computer and stores new photos there. The next time a person plugs in the Backup Plus Drive and performs a system backup, the images are transferred to the portable drive. I glanced through photos in a subfolder of My Online Documents, called Facebook, where album names from Facebook were used to group images together.

Right now, Seagate saves only your own shared photos. The company says that by late October, you will be able to save photos in which you were tagged.

If you’re looking for a way to save all the photos you have floating around the Web, ThisLife groups them in a beautiful interface, while Seagate’s Backup Plus is a practical, no-frills option for offline storage.

Write to Katie at katie.boehret@wsj.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120925/a-hangout-for-all-your-social-network-photos/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120923/what-will-marissa-do-mayer-set-to-reveal-her-strategy-to-troops-this-week-in-an-act-of-radical-transparency-internal-memo/ http://allthingsd.com/20120923/what-will-marissa-do-mayer-set-to-reveal-her-strategy-to-troops-this-week-in-an-act-of-radical-transparency-internal-memo/#comments Mon, 24 Sep 2012 00:49:06 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=253175

On Friday, I began a series about the various and sundry things new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer was up to at the Silicon Valley Internet giant.

First up was a look at how she is zeroing in on improving its troubled search efforts and advertising platforms, two business arenas that will get more focus this week when Mayer unveils her plans to the employees of Yahoo at an all-hands meeting.

According to an internal memo Mayer sent out Friday, the confab is scheduled for Tuesday. It comes after two days of meetings with Yahoo’s board of directors last week, in which Mayer outlined the plans for she has come up with to turnaround the company.

[Special note to readers: I would, as usual, embed the entire memo below, but Yahoo's top execs -- most especially, newly installed general counsel Ron "Leaks Are 'Uncool'" Bell -- have worked themselves into quite a lather over the issue of late. Apparently, according to numerous sources, the company is using all kinds of leak-catching tech tools -- free smartphones aren't as free as you might think, if you catch my drift, Yahoos, and I would also advise turning up the music loud when whispering in the Sunnyvale HQ offices -- so I will only quote internal emails only in part going forward to thwart such silliness.]

Pressing on!

In the memo, titled “Board slides, strategy and goals,” Mayer talked about the meetings. There will be two this Tuesday, one in the morning and one later in the day, in order to accommodate Yahoo staffers internationally.

“In an act of radical transparency that will be a tradition moving forward,” Mayer promised that she will go over the slides — which are usually not shared widely — of her “strategy and vision” that she presented at the board meeting on Friday.

“We want to offer you transparency into what happens at the board level as well as guidance as to where the company is going,” Mayer noted.

Kudos to that! (And send all that transparency my way, please!)

Mayer also said in the memo that she will have another all-hands meeting on October 1, where she will begin “rolling out a new system and process for goals for the company,” including annual goals that will be tracked and graded — first on a company level, then to departments, teams and, finally, individuals.

That’s a good idea, of course, because tracking such things has not been a focus of Yahoo for a while now. Not surprisingly, it is very much a practice at Google, from whence Mayer came and where she has been liberally borrowing a wide variety of management concepts.

But she has a few of her own tricks up her sleeve too, according to many sources, in terms of the strategy.

As I previously wrote, Mayer is planning on doubling down on search, as well as advertising platforms. Expect more money spent in both places, as well as a redo of Yahoo’s long-rocky search partnership with Microsoft.

Also up for a refresh is both email and also the critically important Yahoo home page. Both are being redesigned substantially to focus on consumer experience. People who have seen the mock-ups describe them both as more social and as more of a dashboard approach for users than the traditional catch-all portal.

It’s all based around learning technology that Yahoo has been working on called CORE, or Content Optimization and Relevance Engine. There will be lots of linking out and an attempt to make Yahoo more of a platform for others to develop on top of.

It’s a little Facebook-like, said several sources, but more focused on content and other products that differentiate Yahoo. Mayer has decided to back 10 key arenas, such as its powerful Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Sports sites, as well as its Flickr photo offering.

Still, no redesign is set in stone yet, so we’ll see what Mayer has decided on.

It’s also not clear what the e-commerce focus will be, but it is also an area that Mayer has a lot of experience in. Also a big question: What the heck is Yahoo’s non-existent mobile strategy going to be?

In addition, Mayer has already ordered the removal of some ads from both Yahoo’s email service and also its home page, cutting them back to improve the consumer experience. That’s a dicey move since Yahoo makes a big chunk of change from those ads, especially on the home page.

No matter. “Everything she is doing is about the consumer experience,” said a source. “Nothing else matters to her, even if it might matter to the bottom line.”

So far, Wall Street has been wary of Mayer until they see a strategy — the stock has been sitting in the $15 range since she arrived. That said, the high-profile exec does have more leeway from investors, and — perhaps most importantly — from the board.

In fact, at her now weekly Friday meeting for employees, a big group of the directors appeared onstage in a show of support.

A purple show, apparently — all were wearing lavender Yahoo t-shirts with “BoD” stamped on them.

Awwwwww! It’s like a mostly all-boy band! One, by the way, that might get more members soon. Sources told me that director Dan Loeb has been on the hunt to add at least one more person to the group, focusing on landing a Silicon Valley star.

When he was waging his proxy battle on Yahoo he tried to recruit both SurveyMonkey and former Yahoo David Goldberg and also well-known entrepreneur Max Levchin of PayPal and Slide.

While Goldberg joining the Yahoo board is not happening — he just joined the board of the Washington Post — getting Levchin to sign on seems more likely, especially with the focus on attracting innovative talent to the company.

Levchin is definitely that, as are many others Loeb has apparently been trying to buttonhole of late.

More on talent in our next episode.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120923/what-will-marissa-do-mayer-set-to-reveal-her-strategy-to-troops-this-week-in-an-act-of-radical-transparency-internal-memo/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120903/after-eastwooding-exits-dems-take-their-seat-at-the-social-table/ http://allthingsd.com/20120903/after-eastwooding-exits-dems-take-their-seat-at-the-social-table/#comments Mon, 03 Sep 2012 23:13:05 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=247162

Last week’s Republican Convention provided perhaps the most entertaining — albeit, not on purpose — political social meme on the Web, with Hollywood actor Clint Eastwood’s odd performance with an empty chair.

That quickly set off an instant flood of pictures posted on Twitter of people chastising their chairs — dubbed, of course, #Eastwooding.

And also the very funny Twitter account @invisibleobama, who had a nice Labor Day tip for us all:

On this Labor Day, take a moment to remember that today is the last day it’s appropriate to wear invisible seersucker anything.

— Invisible Obama (@InvisibleObama) September 3, 2012

Even President Barack Obama’s tweet-staff got into it by posting the photo below, with the caption: “This seat’s taken.”

This seat’s taken. OFA.BO/c2gbfi, twitter.com/BarackObama/st…

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) August 31, 2012

Now that we are done making fun of inanimate objects, it will be interesting to see what pops up online this coming week at the Democratic Convention, which officially starts tomorrow in Charlotte, N.C.

Obviously, there are Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr links from the main convention homepage, but there is also a share page in which users are being asked to fill-in-the-tweet: “I nominate Barack Obama Because …”

No surprise, the tweets are uniformly upbeat — and likely vetted — which is what you get with socially engineered social media.

Which is why what happens without the manipulations of the message-makers and political pros — that unexpected moment of reality just made for the medium — will be much more interesting to see as the week goes on.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120903/after-eastwooding-exits-dems-take-their-seat-at-the-social-table/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120727/caterina-fakes-pinwheel-is-now-called-findery-after-trademark-dispute/ http://allthingsd.com/20120727/caterina-fakes-pinwheel-is-now-called-findery-after-trademark-dispute/#comments Fri, 27 Jul 2012 20:51:52 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=234959 Pinwheel, the geotagged memory service from Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, is now called Findery. That’s after a photo-sharing start-up called Pinweel got a preliminary injunction for trademark infringement. Both services are small; Pinweel says it has tens of thousands of users, while Findery is not yet open to the public.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120727/caterina-fakes-pinwheel-is-now-called-findery-after-trademark-dispute/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120627/amazons-jeff-bezos-among-backers-pumping-6m-into-photo-editing-start-up-aviary/ http://allthingsd.com/20120627/amazons-jeff-bezos-among-backers-pumping-6m-into-photo-editing-start-up-aviary/#comments Wed, 27 Jun 2012 20:12:46 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=225242 Spark Capital, Bezos Expeditions and other strategic investors have poured another $6 million into Aviary, a photo-editing tools company.

Aviary said it is used regularly by eight million people across 1,200 partner apps including Flickr, MailChimp, Shopify, Box, TwitPic, and Halftone; in the past 30 days alone, the company has helped to edit more than 100 million photos.

Compare it to Facebook-owned Instagram’s filters, which help brighten or provide more contrast to otherwise drab photos. The difference is that Aviary is building a platform of tools that can be used across a wide range of apps and services. Its tools allow even poorly taken camera-phone photos to become more vivid (see photos on right), or take on different hues, like a “soft focus” or “indiglow.”

Aviary’s advanced features also provide tools for creating music and editing audio.

The company declined to announce who its strategic investors were, but said that the additional capital will be used to support new partnerships and build out the company’s team, with the goal of becoming “the industry standard for photo-editing APIs.”

My colleague, Peter Kafka, wrote about how Aviary raised $7 million from the same set of investors in 2009.

Here’s the full release:

Aviary’s usage skyrockets, raises $6M to grow team

New York – June 27, 2012 – Aviary, the leading cross-platform photo-editing solution, today announced a new milestone, having edited over 100 million photos in the past 30 days. Aviary’s platform is now used regularly by 8 million people across 1,200 partner apps including Flickr, Mailchimp, Shopify, Box, TwitPic, and Halftone.

To support their continued growth, Aviary recently closed a $6 million round of funding from Spark Capital, Bezos Expeditions, and to-be-announced strategic investors. The additional capital will be used to support new partnerships, continue to enhance the team, and cement the company as the industry standard photo-editing API.

“Aviary’s growth over the past year has been nothing short of remarkable,” said Mo Koyfman, General Partner of Spark Capital. “As the mobile photo category continues to explode, Aviary is poised to become the photo editing & creativity solution of choice for developers looking to deliver best of breed photo experiences to their consumers.”

Aviary’s recently launched “Photo Editor by Aviary,” a showcase mobile app for iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone, offers developers a way to preview the host of photo-editing features available for implementation into their apps. The app also serves as an opportunity for consumers to install and try Aviary’s technology directly. It was an instant success, having been downloaded nearly a million times in it’s first week alone and recently moving into the App Store’s Top 25 list overall (and top 3 in the Photos category).

“We are thrilled with the positive response we continue to receive from developers, partners, and consumers using Aviary’s technology,” said Avi Muchnick, Aviary CEO & co-founder. “Powering millions of people’s photos every day is an incredibly motivating milestone on our company’s journey to power the world’s creativity.”

About Aviary
Aviary’s mission is to power the world’s creativity. Founded in 2007 and based in New York, Aviary’s technology is used by millions of consumers and over one thousand apps. Aviary’s effects and editing tools, combined with seamless integration, offers app developers unrivaled imaging capabilities at no cost. The SDKs are available for all major web and mobile platforms.

About Spark Capital
Spark Capital is a venture capital firm that partners with exceptional entrepreneurs seeking to build disruptive, world-changing companies. Founded in 2005, the firm is a tight-knit group of partners managing approximately $1 billion across three funds. Headquartered in Boston, Spark maintains an office in New York City and invests across the globe. The firm provides seed and early stage financing to emerging technology companies as well as growth capital to those looking to establish category leadership. Spark Capital invests across a number of key market segments including: advertising & monetization, commerce & services, cloud & infrastructure, social, mobile and content. Spark’s portfolio includes companies such as Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, AdMeld, OMGPOP, ThePlatform, IPWireless and 5Min. To learn more, visit www.sparkcapital.com.

About Bezos Expeditions
Bezos Expeditions is the personal investment company for Jeff Bezos.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120627/amazons-jeff-bezos-among-backers-pumping-6m-into-photo-editing-start-up-aviary/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120529/the-reinvention-of-bitly-a-social-bookmarking-site-for-mainstream-users/ http://allthingsd.com/20120529/the-reinvention-of-bitly-a-social-bookmarking-site-for-mainstream-users/#comments Tue, 29 May 2012 15:38:49 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=213131 Over the past four years, Bitly has become an important online utility, helping people save, shorten, share and track 80 million new links per day.

But Bitly wants to be more than a souped-up link shortener, and today it is relaunching its site as a social bookmarking aggregator, a la Delicious or Pinterest.

Bitly is already at the center of lots of online activity — but only as a conduit. It has become a massive infrastructure project; more than 25 billion Bitly links have been created, and they get clicked on 300 million times per day. Following Bitly’s lead, Twitter, Facebook and Google all launched their own link shorteners.

The new Bitly site, which is rolling out to users starting today, is now centered around personal pages of saved links — kind of like the simplest blog you could imagine.

Instead of bookmarks, Bitly calls these “bitmarks.” Users can create bundles of bitmarks on a certain topic, write personal notes about them and make them public, private or co-curated.

Then there are a bunch of things people can do with their links and other people’s links:

• They can search through them with a very fast search engine.
• They can save them for nicely formatted reading offline in an iPhone app.
• They can tell Bitly to add any link they post to Twitter to their bitmarks, even if it wasn’t originally saved through Bitly.
• They can look through an aggregated “network view” of all the things their Facebook and Twitter contacts have shared, like a Facebook News Feed, but just for interesting links. (Note: This network view currently can’t be viewed on mobile, which is too bad, as it could be a nice way to gather offline reading materials; I suppose it might be a copyright issue.)
• They can see all sorts of interesting stats about who was first to share each link, and how much it has been viewed globally.

Unlike the current Bitly, which is a tool for power users and paying enterprise customers, the redesigned site is explicitly meant to be a mainstream consumer product, Bitly Head of Product Matthew Rothenberg told me. “The URL is the basic unit of currency for the Web. Finding and sharing is something that affects everyone,” he contended.

But Rothenberg — who previously led product at Yahoo’s Flickr and joined Bitly a year ago with the intent of building this consumer product — said that Bitly’s current functionality would remain intact for its existing users.

Bitly product head Matthew "Mroth" Rothenberg

Basically, the new consumer Web site is a way to invert what Bitly has done for four years, and to make a bid to be a destination rather than just a pass-through for traffic.

But why do a social bookmarking site now? Haven’t so many people tried that without mainstream success, until the photo-driven Pinterest?

About the competition, Rothenberg replied, “We are much more focused on this notion of a utility product, in which you can save and organize any URL to any destination; and if you don’t want to share it, you can save it privately, as well.”

Also, for the moment, Bitly also isn’t doing any automated “Open Graph” sharing out to Facebook, leaving on the table a potential big driver of traffic and new users. That was a conscious decision. “We want to make sharing an explicit action,” Rothenberg explained.

Bitly, which spun out of Betaworks and has also recently been discussed as an acquisition target, is backed by RRE Ventures and others, and is in the process of raising Series C funding, as has been reported (though The Verge initially implied the funding round had closed, and from what I understand it has not yet).

Update: Bitly Stands by Redesign Despite User Complaints

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