Hot Potato

Foursquare’s Crowley Declares Bygones! — And Maybe More? — With Google

Lauren Goode in Social on December 15, 2011 at 8:06 am PT

Foursquare is still the cool kid at the check-in party, especially as more competitors are checking out. But is the party dying down?

News Byte

Come on Down! Loyalize Launches Audience Participation Tools

Liz Gannes in Social on April 12, 2011 at 10:12 am PT

Loyalize launched today to help broadcasters and live event organizers offer mobile apps to get watchers and attendees to check in, play games and win rewards. The San Francisco-based company already has a deal with Motorola for its SocialTV service that was announced last week. Loyalize extends social TV apps like GetGlue to live events, making it sound similar to a white-label version of Hot Potato, the small event-focused community app Facebook bought last year. Facebook also recently added functionality that allows users to check in to events.

Finding the Scale of the Rest of the World Lacking, Early Designer Rejoins Facebook

Liz Gannes in Social on February 14, 2011 at 5:00 am PT

Aaron Sittig, who left Facebook after being the company’s lead designer for five years, is now back at the mother ship, having rejoined in January with the title “product architect.”

With 500-Shareholder Concerns Gone, Will Facebook Make Big Acquisitions?

Liz Gannes in Social on January 7, 2011 at 1:14 pm PT

Now that Facebook is giving itself permission to have 500 or more shareholders, given it expects to go public next year, the company’s acquisitions team may get the go-ahead in 2011 to pursue larger and more complicated deals.

"They Failed": VC Fred Wilson Gets BoomTown's First Annual Someone-Had-to-Say-It Award

Kara Swisher in News on November 29, 2010 at 9:37 am PT

BoomTown has always enjoyed–although I have not always agreed with–the ruminations of Fred Wilson in his must-read blog, A VC. Today, the New York venture investor–heard of Foursquare or Twitter?–penned one that was flatly on point, simply titled”Chasing Returns” about a potential crisis in start-up funding. It’s a meme Silicon Valley might want to pay mind to.

General Catalyst Heads West, to Find Some Young Men and Women to Fund

Liz Gannes in Social on November 24, 2010 at 12:01 am PT

Go West, East Coast VC? In fact, the 10-year-old venture capital firm General Catalyst Partners is moving out two of its partners from Cambridge, Mass., to Palo Alto, Calif.–just in time to avoid the Boston winter.

Facebook Acqhirees Make a Quick Mark on Its Products

Liz Gannes in Social on November 23, 2010 at 5:00 am PT

Facebook has a well-defined M&A strategy of bringing in talent from young, small companies and shutting down their products. But there’s also a pattern emerging for what happens to that talent. Acqhired CEOs hold prominent roles on Facebook’s product team; nearly every recent Facebook product launch seems to have been introduced by an acqhired employee.

News Byte

One More New York Acqhire for Facebook: Zenbe

Peter Kafka in Media on November 16, 2010 at 9:11 am PT

If you’re a big Internet company in a hurry, you can go out and hire engineers one by one. Or you can just buy their start-up. That’s one of Facebook’s favorite tactics, and it did it again earlier this year by buying Zenbe, a small email company that Facebook used to build its “don’t call it email” platform, Caroline McCarthy reports. Zenbe says the deal closed “a few months ago”; I’m reasonably sure it was done last spring. If you’re counting, that’s the third New York-based start-up Facebook has picked up for talent reasons, following Hot Potato and Drop.io.

Mark Zuckerberg Really, Really Wanted to Work With Sam Lessin

Peter Kafka in Media on November 2, 2010 at 10:19 am PT

Facebook paid around $20 million for Drop.io, just so it could shut down the service and hire founder Sam Lessin–a deal that’s not terribly unusual. What is unusual: Lessin’s old Harvard classmate Mark Zuckerberg funded the purchase with precious Facebook shares.

Facebook Adds More Group Control, Data Export, App Dashboard

John Paczkowski in News on October 6, 2010 at 10:55 am PT

In the end, it wasn’t a revamped Events service that Facebook announced at its invite-only media event today. It wasn’t a “check-in” feature, a new iteration of Facebook Credits, a partnership with Skype or a showing of “The Social Network” with a frame-by-frame refutation by Mark Zuckerberg. In the end, it was a series of service enhancements–three, to be exact.

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