AllThingsD » Jason Calacanis

MyTime Wants to Create a One-Stop Shopping Destination for Local Services

Tricia Duryee — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 21:05:41 +0000

MyTime is a new service launching in Los Angeles today that makes booking appointments for a haircut, carpet cleaning and yoga as easy as checking out on Amazon.com.

The company is backed by $3 million in funding from GRP Partners’ Mark Suster, 500 Startups’ Dave McClure and other angels, including Brian Lee, David Tisch and Jason Calacanis, and was founded by Ethan Anderson, who sold his first startup, Redbeacon, to The Home Depot last year.

Anderson calls the service “the world’s first online open appointment superstore” because it aggregates local merchant calendars in one place online. So far, the company has launched in Los Angeles, where it is working with a few thousand merchants, who have more than half a million appointments available for the next month.

Categories include automotive, health and beauty, home and garden, medical and dental, sports and fitness and pets, but not restaurants or other food services.

On the consumer-facing side, customers come to the site to find open appointments, then book and pay for the services in advance, whether for that day or later.

For the merchant, the service is all about finding new customers and getting new people in the door, much like Groupon.

MyTime will help local service providers fill unused inventory by advertising on Google, Facebook and Twitter. The site will also dynamically price the services, so if there is free time coming up immediately – or in generally slow times or hours — MyTime will encourage customers to book by offering a discount.

The service is free for merchants to get started, but if they elect to use some of MyTime’s premium services, like dynamic pricing or its advertising services, then MyTime will take a 40 percent cut of the revenue it generates from bookings that occur because of the advertisements.

“It’s a generous business model,” Anderson said. “If we are promoting them, only then do we keep the commission. If someone just finds them through the browse or search features, then we don’t charge them. It’s a freemium service.”

However, a majority of businesses do elect for MyTime to advertise on their behalf, he said.

It takes about a day for a company to get up and running and to connect its calendar to MyTime’s system. Merchants then get paid within one to seven days of a customer’s appointment.

The San Francisco-based company has 15 employees and plans to use the cash raised for salaries and sales and marketing. Anderson said they’ll expand to new markets slowly because the service requires a large number of merchants to be on board for it to work. He said if they don’t have a lot of appointments available for customers to choose from, it’s like a retailer being out of stock (in other words, it just doesn’t work).

Interestingly, MyTime didn’t pick San Francisco as its first market because “there are so many startups calling merchants here. Five years into the Groupon craze, and I really feel like they are jaded.”

The Right Thing

Voices — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 08:59:22 +0000

If I say “iOS users overwhelmingly use the Safari browser, here’s the stats”, you’d say “okay, that’s interesting, what can I learn from that, and what opportunity does it represent to the industry?” But if I say “minorities in the tech industry overwhelmingly have this experience, here’s their examples”, you don’t say “Okay, what can I learn and what’s the opportunity?” you start by saying “that’s not true!”

– From Anil Dash in a comment on a blog post by Jason Calacanis entitled “Doing the Right Things,” which was in response to a blog post about racism in tech writing by Jamelle Bouie –Jason Calacanis on Facebook’s Snapchat clone, Poke

Dyn Raises $38 Million From North Bridge; Jason Calacanis Joins Its Board

Arik Hesseldahl — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 13:00:31 +0000

The state of New Hampshire isn’t exactly the place you’d expect to go looking for one of the quiet powers of the Internet, but that’s exactly what Dyn is, and it’s based in the city of Manchester.

Dyn’s speciality is delivering what is known as “managed DNS services,” essentially the phone directory for the Internet. DNS — the initials stand for Domain Name System — keeps track of which domain names (like, say, AllThingsD.com) belong to the numerical Internet Protocol addresses that aren’t as human-friendly, like 205.178.190.40. While it seems trivial, it’s actually a pretty fundamental function of the Internet. If your DNS server goes down, your site is down, which means you’re not making any money.

Dyn provides its clients with a rock-solid DNS lookup service that keeps sites running, even when they’re hit with high demand. It also provides several services around the delivery of email. Its customers include companies like Zappos, Jive, Twitter, and OMGPop.

The company has been running along just fine since 2001, when it was born at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Bootstrapped from the start, it has been growing a lot faster in the last three years –a compound annual rate of about 70 percent per year. If it sounds like an opportunity to you, you’re not alone. Today, Dyn will announce that it has taken a $38 million Series A minority investment from North Bridge.

It has also enlarged its board of directors: At first its board was just two guys: Co-founders Jeremy Hitchcock and Tom Daly. Today, it’s adding three more people, the best-known of which is Jason Calacanis (pictured), the CEO of Mahalo; former CEO of Weblogs Inc., which he sold to AOL; and now co-founder of ThisWeekIn.

“We’ve kind of kept up a friendly rapport with him and have been following the things that he does,” Hitchcock, Dyn’s CEO said. “The time had come to think about governance and professionalizing the company, so we reached out with him, and had dinner with him in June.” Within a few days, Calacanis was ready to take his seat on the board. He is not making an investment.

The other two new directors are Ric Fulop, general partner at North Bridge and co-founder of A123 Systems, and Russ Pyle, general partner at North Bridge.

North Bridge’s interest sort of makes sense when you realize that among its investments are a bunch of Dyn clients, including Disqus, Quora, Demandware, Acquia, and Spil Games. “We have seen Dyn grow into the worldwide leader in Infrastructure as a Service with many of our portfolio companies as customers and are proud to be part of their story,” Fulop and Pyle said in a statement.

And while DNS services are one of those things that, like oxygen, are seemingly uninteresting to talk about until you lose it, the the number of customers that Dyn has gives you a pretty solid idea as to its importance: 2,000 enterprise clients, 450,000 e-commerce clients, and four million active users around the world. It has offices in Manchester and San Francisco, and two in the U.K., in Brighton and Wrexham. Headcount is 170 employees.

Mahalo President Jason Rapp Exits

Peter Kafka — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 20:26:56 +0000

Mahalo President Jason Rapp, who joined the instructional app maker two years ago, is leaving the company.

In a company-wide email (see below), Rapp doesn’t say where he’s headed next, but says he’ll stay on as a Mahalo board adviser.

Mahalo founder and CEO Jason Calacanis first launched his site as a “human-powered search engine” in 2007, and has since pivoted a few times. Most recently, he’s moved the company’s focus from making how-to Web videos to apps for Apple’s iOS platform.

Prior to Mahalo, Rapp worked at IAC and the New York Times.

Here’s Rapp’s memo.

Team,

I’m writing to let you know that I’ll be leaving day-to-day operations at Mahalo. (I’ll remain a board advisor and significant shareholder, so I won’t be too far away.)

I joined two years ago to help my friend Jason Calacanis turn his business around; and with your help we most definitely have. Consider the evidence: over 30 apps in the store, 1.4 million installs, 25 million monthly video views and a 9-show YouTube deal — that plus a killer team of engineers, designers and video preditors prove we are well on our way to re-inventing educational and instructional content. Or in other words, changing peoples lives. I’m super proud of your accomplishments, not to mention a bit sore after completing my first 6 XFitDaily workouts.

The company has never had a clearer path or brighter future (plus a new name!) and for that reason it’s the perfect time for me to step back and pursue my next adventure.

Keep pouring passion into your work — it shows. (I read our customer feedback everyday and so should you. When we do great work it makes a difference in people’s lives.)

Mahalo and see you Inside,
Jason

Why Wasn't SecondMarket Part of the SEC Pre-IPO Stock Attack? CEO Barry Silbert's Happy to Tell You on Quora.

Kara Swisher — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 20:42:19 +0000

It’s one thing to not be targeted in any regulatory action that strafed your competitors, but SecondMarket CEO Barry Silbert used the opportunity to tout just why his company missed the bullets.

In an unusual and interesting post on social answer service Quora, Silbert gave a long answer to the question entrepreneur Jason Calacanis asked there: “Why wasn’t SecondMarket part of the SharesPost/secondary market SEC action today?”

That would be the investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which filed charges, as Arik Hesseldahl wrote earlier this week, “against two managers of private funds that had raised more than $70 million to acquire and trade pre-IPO shares of Facebook and other tech companies with misleading investors and charging undisclosed fees. It also brought charges against SharesPost, saying it had engaged in securities transactions without being registered as a broker-dealer.”

The move was part of a year-long inquiry aimed at secondary markets, where firms trade privately owned shares and options of pre-IPO companies.

Silbert, who runs one of the biggest companies in this sector, apparently decided to make hay while the Feds shone (up). In the Quora post, he noted: “I am proud to say that SecondMarket is not among those investigated or charged, which only reinforces SecondMarket’s ongoing commitment to being the trusted, compliant and fully-regulated marketplace in the startup and private company ecosystem.”

If he does say so himself!

All kidding aside, it is actually a novel way to turn a story that could tarnish everyone nearby into a plus. (Plus, ABC — Always Be Closing!)

Among the reasons that Silbert said SecondMarket was not part of the government probe: “Fully regulated, soup to nuts, from the start” (the company is a registered broker-dealer; “close coordination with private companies on all transactions” (“customized secondary markets,” he noted); “rigid accreditation process” of buyers; and “no disclosure of private company valuation and pricing.”

Jason Calacanis Has One Miiiiiilllllion Dollars to Give Out to Start-Ups (Video)

Kara Swisher — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 20:38:22 +0000

Last night, voluble entrepreneur and tech gadfly Jason Calacanis threw a party at dim sum palace Yank Sing in San Francisco, to kick off his latest LAUNCH Festival.

Several dozen start-ups will be debuting at the event today and tomorrow, showing off their wares before judges (I am one tomorrow afternoon) for eventual prize money in the form of investments or convertible notes from venture firms, like Charles River Ventures, and angel investors, such as Kevin Rose.

LAUNCH has gotten just over $1 million in commitments, which seems to be a nice, round, brag-worthy number.

Here’s Calacanis doing just that, and talking about the start-up scene with me in a video interview:

[ See post to watch video ]

Mahalo Lays Off 25 Percent for Shift to Apps From Video

Liz Gannes — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 16:37:25 +0000

Mahalo, the often-pivoted company run by well-known entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, laid off a quarter of its staff earlier this month.

Jason Calacanis

Mahalo President Jason Rapp downplayed the move in a phone interview with AllThingsD, saying it was part of a transition from cheaply churning out gaming videos in the style of Machinima.com to making educational iPad apps like Learn Guitar.

The layoffs eliminated 18 employees, leaving Mahalo with a headcount of 49, Rapp said. They happened on Oct. 5.

These aren’t the first layoffs for Mahalo. The company had 102 employees in February of this year before making layoffs spurred by Google’s “Panda” update, which downgraded content designed to rank highly in search results. Mahalo was even larger a few years ago when it focused on building its own search alternative, Rapp said.

Rapp noted that while Mahalo’s videos get 30 million views per month, they are not necessarily profitable based on YouTube ads. Educational iPad apps, by contrast, seem to be instant money makers, because users will pay for them. Mahalo plans to gear up to release one app per week, though it only has four out so far. It will also continue to make educational videos.

Mahalo, which is backed by Sequoia Capital, News Corp. and CBS, soon plans to move its headquarters to Culver City from Santa Monica, Rapp said, and it has $5 million of funding in the bank to fuel its shift to instructional content.

Calacanis photo by Flickr user eirikso.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crowdsourcing Platform ChallengePost Raises $4 Million

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Google: No, Government Investigations Have Not Frozen Our Manual Search Tweaks

John Paczkowski — Fri, 27 May 2011 21:05:52 +0000

A report claiming that updates to Google’s search results have been limited to algorithmic changes only due to possible government investigations is untrue, the search sovereign says.

“This report is completely unfounded and false, and nothing has changed in our approach,” a Google spokesperson told AllThingsD.

Published to the Launch Conference blog, the report alleged that Google had forbidden manual adjustments to its search results since its infamous “Panda” algorithm update ostensibly because of “multiple government investigations–and possible investigations.”

According to Google, that’s not at all the case. Its search methods are unchanged since Panda, a measure against the “shallow or low quality content” being driven into the company’s search results by content farms.

“Computer algorithms are the most scalable way to deliver relevant results,” the spokesperson said. “However, manual controls are necessary to improve the user experience in very limited cases, such as security concerns, legal issues and spam.”

In other words, Google denies that a government investigation has caused it to adjust its search approach and, further, that it hasn’t adjusted that approach at all.

But have government investigators asked it for examples of manual, non-algorithmic changes to its search results?

Google won’t say. “We don’t discuss the details of our conversations with government officials,” a spokesperson said.

Still, Launch and its founder, Jason Calacanis–who operates Mahalo, a “human-powered search engine” severely impacted by Google’s Panda update–hold firm to their allegations.

“We stand by our story,” Calacanis said. “Google search teams are behaving differently by laying off manual changes–which they admit doing in the case of spam–because government investigations are asking for examples of manual changes. They, of course, need to take the public position that nothing has changed.”

“No one expects them to say, ‘We used to make a lot of manual adjustments to make search better–you know the obvious stuff that any intelligent person would make–but now that the government is investigating our search results we’re being diligent about not handing them ammunition to regulate us.’”

FURTHER READING: Google and the Evolution of Search

Human Evaluators — Google Engineering director Scott Huffman

Cheating the System — Google software engineer Matt Cutts

What’s Next in Search? Much, Much Better Search — Google Fellow Amit Singhal

Citing Google Search Change, Mahalo Cuts Staff

Peter Kafka — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 03:40:20 +0000

Here’s one ripple effect from the change Google made to its search engine algorithm last week: Jason Calacanis’ Mahalo.com has cut 10 percent of its staff. The site, which started out life as a “human powered search engine” and which is now focusing on “how-to” videos, cited a “significant dip in our traffic and revenue” since Google made its change, which is supposed to “reduce rankings for low-quality sites”. Allen Stern has more details.

Early Adopter: Techie Teens Review Jason Calacanis' Launch Conference

Drake Martinet — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 17:25:11 +0000

After this week’s Launch conference, where tech impresario Jason Calacanis played host to dozens of new companies vying for a piece of the spotlight, I caught up with the conference’s youngest attendees at their own semi-official after-party (all the other parties were 21 and up).

After a few rounds of tea, I asked them to share their post-millennial perspectives on Launch, start ups, and consumer tech culture.

They angstily obliged.

Here’s a short video with Max Swisher, 13, Hunter Owens, 19, and Benjamin Garrett, 20, riffing on whats wrong, whats new, and whats next in tech:

[ See post to watch video ]

The Anti-Social Reviews Site: Skweal Keeps Negative Customer Feedback Private

Liz Gannes — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 08:20:06 +0000

Tyler Crowley, who has long been tech rabble rouser Jason Calacanis’ right-hand man, is branching out and starting his own company. Called Skweal, it is a way for customers to give retailers feedback privately, rather than posting a negative review on a site like Yelp.

What’s funny is that Crowley, who was executive producer of Calacanis’ Launch Conference this week, did actually launch a product there, but it was not Skweal. Crowley demoed LinkPops, which overlays a user’s friends’ tweets about articles onto news sites. But he said afterwards that LinkPops was an idea he and a buddy put together on a whim in the week before the show.

Skweal, on the other hand, is something Crowley has been working on since last year. He said he will soon leave his full-time role as director of corporate development and strategy at Calacanis’ Mahalo to pursue Skweal.

Explaining his odd reluctance to show off Skweal to the home crowd, Crowley said he thought the Launch audience was more interested in consumer products, while Skweal is targeted at retailers.

What Crowley wants to do with Skweal is help retailers “keep negative feedback offline.” The site differs from the many user-generated feedback forums that give users the platform to publicly cast judgment and read each others’ posts–for instance the recently launched Tello, which invites users to review service providers, or Glassdoor, which has employees grade their workplace environments.

Skweal is much more like submitting a paper slip to a locked comment box. And I can see the appeal for us non-confrontational types who would feel more comfortable keeping gripes out of a public forum. But the problem for Skweal is how to attract and connect users and retailers.

Crowley’s solution is this: participating retailers tell customers via a sign or sticker to go to the Skweal Web site to leave feedback. Users offer a rating and comment along with their email address. Skweal disguises that email address and alerts the retailer to log onto a CRM dashboard to review the feedback and respond.

Skweal retailers can choose to get SMS alerts for instant feedback, and they can also see reviews laid out in charts that highlight problem locations and time slots.

If a retailer isn’t registered with Skweal (and of course, the majority currently aren’t), customers can still leave feedback. The company then uses “dark arts,” as Crowley described them, to track down contact information for the retailer, whether email, SMS or Twitter. Crowley deadpanned, “If they don’t respond, then we forward it to a competitor.”

Skweal is free for businesses and users, but retailers with more than one location will have to pay $1 per day per location.

Early Adopter: Quick Hits from the Launch Conference

Drake Martinet — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 09:30:11 +0000

Yesterday was the launch of the two-day Launch Conference, a start-up demo orchestrated by entrepreneur Jason Calacanis.

Aside from presiding over the event–playing a cross between a master of ceremonies and Jerry Lewis at a telethon–Calacanis also put together a field of start-up judges to give feedback to the companies. (Full disclosure: BoomTown’s Kara Swisher will serve as a judge this morning.)

At the end, winners will be crowned by winning a combo of judge and audience votes.

But, since nearly every company that has presented thus far has mentioned that they are seeking funding, the real winners will be the ones that go home with a pocket full of checks signed by the angel investors present.

If that focus was ever far from the minds’ of the audience members, they’d be immediately reminded by Calacanis’ shuttling back and forth between the angel investors in the front row, mic in hand, asking them which companies they will be investing in after the show.

Early Adopter took a swing around the demo pit where all the companies present have set up shop, so here are a few quick hits and highlights:

Trend: Deals are the new social.

It seemed everyone who offered a location-based service was also serving you contextual deals of some kind.

One company, Karma Key, gets my vote for most interesting implementation of the deal at Launch.

While it was not the most polished, and has significant hurdles ahead to reach scale, the company hopes to replace all the paper loyalty-cards we carry in our wallets through a combination of low-tech point-of-sale partnerships and high-tech points systems that are more flexible and secure than punching holes.

Karma Key also delivers metrics on loyalty conversion to the merchants.

Trend: Tech your workout.

The only company demo I saw that made every judge sit forward in their chairs with the glee of new user was Zepp Labs, with a product called GolfSense.

Although it’s little more than a three-axis accelerometer (the kind inside your smartphone) worn on a golf glove, the app allows you to view your golf swing in 3D, and get feedback on both the regularity and conformity, so you won’t repeat a bad swing.

There were other fitness-related companies present, but honorable mention for addressing a real pain point goes to Shoefitr–it maps the inside shape and size of running shoes, so you can see how a new model will fit based on your previous shoes. You can even see a 3D model of the inside space of your desired shoe, with a heatmap of where the new shoe will be looser or tighter.

It is already live at Running Warehouse, an online running shoe retailer, and I imagine tools like this will pop up elsewhere soon.

Early Adopter Picks:

Cabana:

The Cabana team made its demo simple, essentially creating a clone of Instagram, the popular photosharing app, on-stage, with no coding.

Most apps rely on a stock series of functions. Cabana allows the app creator to design the app graphically in a visual programming environment (think Yahoo Pipes, or Max MSP, which is popular with artists and musicians).

Several of the judges who started life as developers did quietly grunt in disapproval over not owning your own code, but similar folks once had the same attitude toward WordPress.

OnCompare:

Its quick pitch: OnCompare is like Yelp for software as a service.

If you have a small or medium business, and aren’t sure which cloud file storage system to use, for example, you can answer a few questions and get statistical recommendations from several service providers based on the features they offer.

Those feature-based recommendations are then added to ranks from people with the hope of helping decision-makers be better informed, at a lower cost, without the need for an RFP.

Moso:

This video-editing app, which is currently for sale in the Mac app store, might be called an Instagram for video, or it might be called a Vimeo for control freaks.

The app allows users to live mix effects, text, and transitions into video (without rendering time) and then post those live–or near-live–video and photo creations to social streams.

I can’t yet tell if users will sink their teeth into this type of social video creation and mixing, but I’m always a fan of a divergent solution to a popular problem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gross founded the start-up last spring.

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the official press release:

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

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

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

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

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

[ See post to watch video ]

Enswers Acquires Soompi Korean Entertainment Community

Liz Gannes — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 07:24:56 +0000

Korean video fingerprinting company Enswers has acquired Soompi, a San Francisco-based company that runs the largest English-language Korean pop culture (K-pop) community site.

Seoul-based Enswers plans to extend Soompi into a video portal, based on relationships it already has to provide video search and copyright detection technology to Korean content providers.

The plan could be particularly interesting given Soompi’s audience is international by design, while online video licensing is traditionally not. A large part of Soompi’s audience is in the U.S., but the company has active members in more than 50 countries.

Soompi founder Susan Kang will remain with the site as chief evangelist, while CEO Joyce Kim will move on. Other terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Soompi has 1.4 million uniques and 22 million page views per month. It started as Kang’s personal Web site in 1998. With Kim at the helm, the company took seed funding in February 2010 from Softbank Ventures Korea.

Kim said she is likely to found another Web start-up. She hails from a family of tech entrepreneurs, including Jared Kim (her younger brother) of WeGame and Jason Calacanis (her brother-in-law) of Mahalo.

Enswers, which was founded in 2007, noted that this is the first time a Korea-based company has bought a Silicon Valley start-up to expand into the U.S. market.

Roll Camera! Jason Calacanis Makes a Video Push at Mahalo, and Wants You to Know About It

Peter Kafka — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 11:00:46 +0000

Jason Calacanis has overhauled his Mahalo start-up yet again. Just ask him.

Actually, no need to: The not-at-all bashful entrepreneur has been working hard to make sure we’re all aware of what he’s calling “the Mahalo 4.0 launch/pivot.”

So there will be no shortage of places to read about this today. And if you want to hear Calacanis pitch his pivot himself, you can do that too, via a livestream of the DLD conference, where he’s presenting right now.

So here’s what you need to know:

Calacanis, who launched Mahalo in 2007 as a “human-powered search engine,” then turned it into an “answers” site, is now trying to move deeper into the “how to” category dominated by Demand Media. Which just happens to be going public today in a very hot offering that will value the company at more than $1 billion. [Correction: Demand will start trading on Wednesday, January 26]
The most important part of the move is a new emphasis on video, which Mahalo is creating itself. That’s a different strategy from Demand’s, which relies on a computer to spit out editorial assignments, then hands them out to an army of freelancers.
Calacanis and Mahalo president Jason Rapp, who came on board last spring, have hired a team of 50 editors, who are now cranking out some 900 videos a week on topics like “How to Cook a Ham.” They plan to have a staff of 100 dedicated to videos by the end of the year.
Mahalo still relies primarily on Google ads for revenue, which the company won’t disclose. But last week Calacanis said incoming dollars from Google’s YouTube have shot up 9x in the last year.
Rapp says Mahalo still doesn’t need to raise any more money beyond its initial round, which brought in $20 million from investors like Sequoia, CBS and News Corp. (News Corp. also owns this Web site.)

If you missed Calacanis’s pitch this morning but still want to see people talking about his site, here’s a promo clip the company supplied. It features Calacanis’s employees, but not Calacanis, so it’s a lot less interesting. But you’ll get the idea.

Mahalo 4.0 from Mahalo.com on Vimeo.

For Calacanis, a New Launch Aimed at TechCrunch

Beth Callaghan — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 17:31:38 +0000

Apparently, Jason Calacanis is still mad at Michael Arrington for reportedly denying him his share of the TechCrunch 50 event. In a conversation with the Guardian’s Jemima Kiss, he describes his plan for revenge: An editorial project called Launch that will take the form of an email publication. How will it challenge–and differ from–TechCrunch? Depth, quality and intimacy, according to Calacanis. “If you get people to commit to an email relationship, it’s the deepest most intimate relationship you can have online.”

D8 Video: Ford CEO Alan Mulally Tells Jason Calacanis Why We're Not Going to Drive Electric Cars Anytime Soon

Peter Kafka — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 17:39:19 +0000

Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis loves his Tesla. So why can’t the rest of us drive an electric car, too? Ford (F) CEO Alan Mulally fielded the question in the final panel of the D8 conference today.

Bonus question for our readers: Since Calacanis won’t tell us how much his Tesla cost, can anyone hazard a guess?

[ See post to watch video ]

Ford CEO Alan Mulally Live at D8

Peter Kafka — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 19:27:26 +0000

Ford CEO Alan Mulally has come to D8 to take the hot seat, a position he should be used to after steering Ford through the recent financial crisis. Ford shunned the bailout money that carried GM through a restructuring and sustained Chrysler through its sale to Italian automaker Fiat.

Ford (F) recently released SYNC, a voice-activation package on some models that integrates the content and functionality of mobile devices with the car itself. SYNC also adds apps to the car, though it’s not clear what these features will mean for the future of American automakers.

Liveblog

Mullaly appears onstage wearing a very bright red vest. Vibrant!

At Walt’s request, Mulally shows off a piece of paper with handwritten notes that purport to explain Ford’s interest in all things digital. Lots of computers are involved in the creation of your Taurus.

12:30 pm: Kara wants to know why cars have been basically digitally ignorant for a long time. Walt: You open the door to you car and it’s 1957 again. Why is that?

For the record, Mulally doesn’t think you should text and drive.

He also wants you to keep your hands on the wheels and eyes on the road. So there’s lots of digital stuff being built into dashboard and console. Like the SYNC iPod/phone, etc., manager.

Ford is playing around with features like allowing drivers to have their text messages read to them. But safety is paramount. All of our data says your safest operation is when you have your hands on the wheel and eyes on the road. But right now, we feel that listening to email and text is a good first step. But we don’t want you sending email and text via voice, at least for now.

12:35 pm: Kara–Why is this taking so long? [i.e., "where is my jetpack?"]

Walt: Yeah! Even fancy German and Japanese cars don’t do it well. It’s pathetic!

Mulally: Don’t blame me! I just got here. Part of the problem is that car development is much slower than consumer electronics R&D cycle. For instance, a lot of competitors have embedded a phone in the car. We’re avoiding that and focusing on interface, so as consumers exchange and swap devices, they can do that.

12:38 pm: A pitch for “My Ford Touch,” which seems to have lots of bells and whistles, but sounds confusing to this frequent walker and subway-taker.

12:39 pm: Walt tries explaining it. “The instrument cluster, which has been on steering wheels forever, is now going to be a on a screen.”

Mulally: Right. We want to make it intuitive. Etc.

12:40 pm: Still trying to explain it. Screen goes on steering wheel and allows customizable controls for operating car, as well as extras.

12:41 pm: Kara–what is that people want to do, anyway?

Mulally: Good question. We watch what people do in cars and try to help them do it, because they’re going to do it anyway. For instance, we’re building in Pandora to our cars. You’ll get the music via the Web, from your cellphone, but you’ll operate it on our panel. Also Stitcher, Open Beak, etc.

A lot of people here are using apps. You’ll get to use them in the car.

12:43 pm: Walt–Will you need a special Ford version of these apps?

Mulally: Yep. You use our API

12:44 pm: Kara wants better navigation services. She doesn’t want to hear a mean German lady giving her directions though.

Walt: Yeah! All of your GPS systems are lousy! The ones on phones are better!

Mulally: We’re with you. That’s why we want to rely on developers to build the good stuff, via our API.

12:47 pm: Let’s talk about the car industry, period. You just got here. You were in aerospace, before. Also, the whole oil spill thing does change the way we look at cars, right?

Mulally: Before I left Boeing (BA), I thought about where the car industry was going. What I decided was that the industry is the soul of Manufacturing–“big M”–all around the world. Lots of stuff goes into this, no matter what country or region. It’s also part of the solution to economic growth, energy independence and environmental sustainability.

On that note: Clearly, the internal combustion engine is going to be around for a while. But we can make them operate more efficiently, etc. Take a v6 and make it run like a v8m, etc. Meanwhile hybrids are tough because you have two different systems: Batteries and internal combustion. Then in the future, we need to move to all-electric. We have a great road map for all of this. First all-electric cars launch this year. Hydrogen is farther out, don’t have the tech for it yet.

12:52 pm: Mulally describes challenges of electric car–need to figure out how and where to get the juice to cars.

12:53 pm: Kara–What about health of business?

Mulally: I like being here much better than testifying in front of Congress.

Kara: How did you get here?

Mulally: I flew! That’s why we have airplanes. For long-distance travel.

12:53 pm: A Zuckerberg hoodie joke.

12:54 pm: Mulally–Time goes fast. Last year, I was testifying on behalf my competitors, who were bankrupt. Now I’m a capitalist. But if GM and Chrysler went away, they’d take the supply base along with them, and they’d probably have put the U.S. into a bona fide depression.

I was asking for temporary help. I didn’t think all of us would end up owning our competitors.

12:57 pm: Mulally–Recovery is coming, by the way. We’ll have 3.5 percent expansion of GDP this year. And Ford is doing well. We’ll have market-share increases.

Kara: What kind of car do you drive?

Mulally: A different one every night.

Q&A

[I hope someone asks about the New York Times series that said that anything you do in your car besides driving is a safety risk. Anyone?]

Q: Please talk about the Mercury situation.

A: We had too many brands. Ford, Mercury and Lincoln. Mercury was supposed to be a gap-bridger between Ford and Lincoln. But the Ford line expanded, so we didn’t need Mercury. “Everybody’s got great options in Ford.” It’s also good news for Lincoln–because we don’t have other premium brands anymore, we’ll refocus on Lincoln for luxury.

Q: Proud Tesla owner Jason Calacanis wants to know why electric isn’t everywhere already.

A: We can make electric cars, but as you know, we can improve them, like battery life.

Calacanis: No. It’s not a problem. Batteries are great at Tesla.

Mulally: Nope. Most of them are too big, too heavy. There’s a lot of room to improve the batteries.

Other point is that the infrastructure has to get there. You need charging stations for people in apartments, in rural areas, etc. When we get there, Ford will be there.

Kara, and Walt want Jason to tell us how much his Tesla cost. Astonishingly, he goes mute.

Q: Did you really say you don’t intend to get a revenue stream from connectivity of cars to data? You don’t want a piece of money made by Yelp, Garmin, etc.?

A: You heard me correctly. We’re laser-focused on safe and efficient transportation. So there’s no conflict of interest.

Q: Walt wants to if these electronics actually sell cars.

A: I demoed this stuff for you, and you’re a tough critic, and you said “whoa!” This technology is absolutely a differentiator.

Q: You’re talking about innovation in cars. Does dealer network have to change too?

A: Absolutely. We’ve been right-sizing the dealer network to match demand for five years. Once you do that, throughput goes up, profitability goes up, interest in improving facilities goes up, etc. Then we can improve consumer experience.

Walt: Because it’s terrible right now.

Mulally agrees without saying so.

Q: China is pushing hard for electric cars. What does that mean for you?

A: I think China is going to continue to take a real leadership position on this. Big population, and they have a chance to really make a difference and maybe leapfrog the past.

Q: There’s that great Ford quote about not listening to his customers, because if he did he’d be in the horse business. So how you do innovate?

A: Stay closet to innovation. And have a point of view about how the industry is going to progress.

Q: Ah! Someone asked about focusing while you drive.

A: Eighty percent of accidents involve taking your eyes off the road. So we’re convinced that the mind has the cognitive ability to do other things while driving as long as you continue to watch the road. So we minimize anything that’s a distraction: Keyboard, certain confusing apps, etc. We are definitely going to be a gatekeeper with regard to apps, because it’s crucial that you not be distracted.

We’re done! Thanks for sticking around. See you in a year!

A note about our coverage: This liveblog is not an official transcript of the conversation that occurred onstage. Rather, it is a compilation of quotes, paraphrased statements and ad-lib observations written and posted to the Web as quickly as possible. It is not intended as a transcript and should not be interpreted as one.

How to Stop Jason Calacanis's Zombie Army From Spamming You

Peter Kafka — Thu, 20 May 2010 10:59:53 +0000

Jason Calacanis’s email list turned into a Frankenstein monster this morning, when one of the list’s 23,286 subscribers realized he could hit “reply all” and spam the rest of us. Unsubscribing to his list won’t make the spam stop–you’re still going to keep receiving the email chain of replies and counter-replies.

This method has worked for me: Create a filter in your email provider that finds and deletes all emails with “jasons-list@jasonnation.com” in the “to” field. In my case, I’ve got a Rube Goldberg set-up with my Gmail and my BlackBerry, so I had to set up a second filter for the phone, too. It’s a real pain to have to deal with this in the wee hours, but it’s better than not having email.

Before I could get the filter installed, by the way, I received this mass apology from “Jason”: “We all make mistakes… http://bit.ly/77X1oO.” Clicking on that link, though, gets you to a YouTube page with a video that’s been blocked by Sony (SNE). [Shrug].

UPDATE: Calacanis, via Twitter, says he has solved the problem.

Paid Search Inventor Bill Gross Moves to Monetize Tweets With TweetUp–And Without Twitter (Plus Screenshots)

Kara Swisher — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 04:00:45 +0000

Just as Twitter finally prepares to announce its plans to make money–after what has seemed an eternity–the man responsible for the invention of paid search is beating the microblogging site to the potentially profitable punch, and without its involvement.

Armed with $3.5 million in venture funding from a group of leading investors, well-known entrepreneur Bill Gross is launching a public beta of TweetUp, a keyword-based bidding marketplace akin to Overture/Goto.com, the first paid search system he created a decade ago.

Gross will be the CEO of TweetUp, which will also offer an organic search service to surface the best tweets, a move that seems to put it in competition with Twitter’s own search service.

This comes just as Twitter is aggressively moving to take over key parts of its ecosystem, which has largely been left to third-party developers.

TweetUp could now give these developers a chance to make money on Twitter without relying on Twitter.

TweetUp is backed by Index Ventures, betaworks, Revolution LLC, First Round Capital and other investors, including Mahalo’s Jason Calacanis and BuzzMachine’s Jeff Jarvis.

And TweetUp has struck a number of distribution deals with well-known Twitter search clients and Web sites–such as Seesmic, Answers.com and others–and will pay them half its revenue.

Gross has been working on the service since February at his Idealab start-up incubator in Pasadena, Calif.

He said he got the idea after he was struck by how hard it was to sort through good tweets from the TED conference, as well as how quickly a substantive tweet he posted, which was related to the global climate change event, disappeared as more recent ones replaced it in real time.

Said TweetUp in a press release about its system:

“In addition to an algorithm that combines a variety of factors to determine relevance, tweeters can bid on keywords in a competitive marketplace very similar to what now occurs at Internet search engines. This sophisticated combination of factors pushes the best tweets to the top of the results of users’ searches, allowing them to find the most compelling tweeters, and it enables serious tweeters to expand their following quickly and cost-effectively. TweetUp search will work alongside Twitter’s traditional search to provide a richer array of results.”

Twitter is also making several moves to monetize itself of late, with most observers expecting an advertising system to be announced soon.

The company has also been adding tools, which puts it in direct conflict with outside developers. On Friday, for example, Twitter announced it was purchasing Tweetie, maker of a popular Apple (AAPL) iPhone client for the messaging service.

The start-up has traditionally relied on third-party developers to build apps for the service, much as Facebook did at its start.

But Twitter management and key investors have recently been signaling that the company would be taking over key aspects of its business. This has caused tensions, obviously, in the wider Twitter ecosystem.

Thus, it will be interesting to watch how Twitter reacts to what Gross is doing with TweetUp.

(BoomTown also did an exclusive video with Gross about it all, which is posted here, as well as a tour of Idealab.)

Here are a few screenshots of TweetUp (click on images to make larger):

TweetUp Client

Answers.com

Business Insider

Business Insider Search #1

Business Insider Search #2

And here’s the official press release from TweetUp:

TweetUp Establishes Twitter Marketplace Where the Best Tweeters Rise to the Top

Unique Combination of a Relevance Algorithm and Bidding System Increases Number of Followers and Improves the Quality of Twitter Searches

PASADENA, CA–APRIL 12, 2010–TweetUp, Inc., announced today a new Twitter marketplace designed to showcase the world’s best tweeters and enable them to grow a highly targeted following. TweetUp is a new patent-pending platform that combines the popularity, relevance and influence of tweets and tweeters with a bid-based marketplace. Major partners, including leading Twitter search clients and top web sites, will display the results, enabling users to easily find the best tweets and tweeters in the world.

TweetUp was founded by Bill Gross at Idealab, where he also devised the first model for paid internet search, Overture/Goto.com, over a decade ago. TweetUp is backed by Index Ventures (investor in Skype, last.fm, Myheritage and Playfish), betaworks (investor in Twitter, TweetDeck, Bit.ly), Revolution LLC (founded by Steve Case, investor in Zipcar, LivingSocial, Everyday Health), First Round Capital (investor in Mint.com, StumbleUpon, CoTweet), Jason Calacanis (founder of Mahalo) and Jeff Jarvis (founder of BuzzMachine).

“Twitter has such tremendous potential as a real-time information network far beyond what has been realized to date,” said Bill Gross, Founder and CEO of TweetUp. “For most people, though, 80% or more of the tweets that fly by them when they’re searching for something are useless noise. For serious tweeters, the task of attracting interested and relevant followers is equally daunting. TweetUp will change all of that.”

TweetUp has addressed the needs of both users and tweeters in a single search mechanism. In addition to an algorithm that combines a variety of factors to determine relevance, tweeters can bid on keywords in a competitive marketplace very similar to what now occurs at Internet search engines. This sophisticated combination of factors pushes the best tweets to the top of the results of users’ searches, allowing them to find the most compelling tweeters, and it enables serious tweeters to expand their following quickly and cost-effectively. TweetUp search will work alongside Twitter’s traditional search to provide a richer array of results.

Danny Rimer, a partner with Index Ventures, TweetUp’s lead investor, said, “TweetUp is an opportunity to bring real-time information to the entire Web, and to do it in a way that creates value for everyone concerned. We feel that TweetUp can dramatically improve both the utility and ubiquity of Twitter, and in doing so build a monetization mechanism for real-time search that rivals that of traditional Internet search.”

TweetUp’s search results will be available to hundreds of millions of individuals through revenue-sharing distribution agreements with leading Twitter clients, including one of the leading multi-platform clients, Seesmic, one of the leading Android clients, Twidroid, the leading source of tweets, TwitterFeed, and the leading social media authority and influence ranking system, Klout, as well as popular web sites including BusinessInsider.com, Answers.com, and PopURLs.

Together, these clients and web sites will bring TweetUp search results to more than 40 million unique users per month and serve more than half a billion impressions per month.

“Increasingly, people looking for answers want more than just black and white facts, but also real-time insights relating to the issues surrounding their questions,” said
Bob Rosenschein, Answers.com CEO. “We are at the forefront of meeting that demand, and partnering with TweetUp is an exciting new way to add value to the
Answers.com user community.”

“I have been sharing in social networks and blogs for ten years and realized the power of having a true community,” said Loic Le Meur, CEO of Seesmic. “This is why
I was immediately attracted to working with Tweetup. People who are serious about sharing and having a community around themselves are also often those who have the most interesting ideas to contribute.”

“We believe that the impact of the real-time web, and of Twitter in particular, has only just begun,” explains John Borthwick of betaworks, a major investor in TweetUp, as well as in TweetDeck and Bit.ly. “Because TweetUp will be accessed on mainstream websites across the world, Twitter will be introduced to hundreds of millions of new people. Furthermore, these new users will experience thoughtful tweets, in context, targeted to them according to their areas of interest, and delivered from serious tweeters who care about building a passionate audience.”

“When we created AOL 25 years ago, we believed in the power of community and built a significant company around it,” said Steve Case, AOL co-founder and founder
of Revolution LLC. “Twitter is proving the power of community continues to thrive, and I am excited to be backing Bill Gross and TweetUp as they innovate in the social
media space by making Twitter more useful to a mainstream audience.”

With today’s announcement, TweetUp launches a public beta period in which tweeters can open an account and begin adding search keywords to their profile. For the first 1000 who sign up, the company is providing a $100 in credits to allow tweeters to see how TweetUp’s network can improve their standing in search resultsand attract more followers.

Prankster Jason Calacanis Talks About His Apple iPad Hoax (Warning: Cute Baby Alert!)

Kara Swisher — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 13:05:30 +0000

While in Los Angeles for a brief second on Friday, BoomTown motored over to the Brentwood home of puckish entrepreneur Jason Calacanis to talk to him about his prank tweets the night before the introduction of the iPad last week.

On Tuesday night before the much hyped launch of the newest device from Apple (AAPL), Calacanis let loose with a series of over-the-top posts to Twitter, claiming he had been a beta tester for the iPad tablet computer for 10 days.

Unfortunately, these were assertions that some in the mostly mainstream media took too seriously.

So was it a jump-the-shark moment for journalism?

It was certainly sloppy, given that Calacanis is well known for slapping Apple around and that the secretive computer giant does not even give its own employees access to new products.

All this might have sent off alarm bells.

But he followed up with a series of tweets on a myriad of features of the new iPad–one nuttier, pricier and heavier than the next, such as a built-in HDTV tuner, a solar recharging pad and more.

For example: “Yes, there are 2cameras: one in front and one in back (or it may be one with some double lens) so you record yourself and in front of u.”

The problem was that a few big media outfits, including CNNMoney.com and WSJ.com, posted reports on the tweets without much of a raised eyebrow or first checking on their veracity with Apple or with Calacanis.

While anyone can get caught in a prank–and this was a pretty elaborate one pulled by Calacanis, who claims he was just trying to point out how ridiculous Apple hype had become–it’s still an instructive moment for journalism.

Here’s my interview with Calacanis, explaining it all (with a little shot of his new baby girl at the end), as well as images of his faux iPad tweets below:

[ See post to watch video ]

Blippy Opens to Public and Scores High-Profile Investors–Including Twitter's Evan Williams–For the Twitter of $$

Kara Swisher — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 14:00:05 +0000

Blippy, a start-up that lets users broadcast their credit card transactions online, will open itself up to the public today and announce a slate of high-profile Silicon Valley investors.

The size of the investment–$1.6 million–is actually not so large as the names on its funding roster.

They include: Sequoia Capital, Charles River Ventures, well-known angel investor Ron Conway, Twitter CEO and co-founder Evan Williams, and a trio of splashy entrepreneurs: Jason Calacanis, James Hong and Ariel Poler.

They are all presumably hoping the site–with the unlikely name of Blippy and headed by longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur Philip “Pud” Kaplan–will become a viral hit with users and yet another step in the continuing socialization of everything a person does online.

The San Francisco-based company, which has only four employees (including Kaplan, who has also put his own money into the venture), has been in invitation-only private beta for the last several months.

In an interview last night, Kaplan said that the site now has about 5,000 users, accounting for $5 million in purchases in just the past few weeks. An average transaction, according to Blippy statistics, is just above $42.

Kaplan said he hoped Blippy would soon log $1 million in transactions per day.

“We are hoping to create a site that is useful and informative to people, based on a Twitter model of sharing information in an open way,” said Kaplan. “People care about what they spend and we think this is an obvious thing to share.”

Indeed, Blippy takes online transparency even further, allowing a user to automatically post on its Web site messages about the type and amount of the transaction every time they use a credit card–at least the one they designate as their “Blippy” card–for others to see and comment on.

The twist of Blippy–whose motto is: “What are your friends buying?”–is that it is more passive than the more active tweeting or texting.

While most of the transactions don’t contain a lot of information–for example, “cat spent $3.55 at In-N-Out Burger”–Blippy is obviously going for deeper information, which it already collects for sites like Apple (AAPL) iTunes and Amazon (AMZN).

Retailers, restaurants and other vendors might also benefit from the flow of information, finally learning who their best customers really are and perhaps rewarding them.

And, of course, the key part is that your friends see what you are buying and you can all jabber (or gripe) online about what you bought, how much you paid and what you thought of the purchases.

How all this will make money is still being pondered, of course, but one might imagine a dedicated Blippy credit card or some kind of innovative analysis of the spending data or even group-sale offers to users.

And integration with Facebook and Twitter seems inevitable, eventually widening the circle of nosy friends, as does the emergence of reviews, mobile apps, search and more.

Kaplan is best known for a site he created during the Web 1.0 bubble, FuckedCompany, which chronicled the ongoing start-up implosion as it happened.

He later started online advertising service AdBrite, followed by a short stint as Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Charles River Ventures.

It was there that he met Blippy co-founders Ashvin Kumar and Chris Estreich.

Kaplan said the money raised was enough to fund Blippy for the next 12 to 18 months.

But why not hear him talk about Blippy? Here is the video of a BoomTown interview with Kaplan, which I posted in late December:

[ See post to watch video ]