This just in from the world of news: Mobile matters.

That’s the clear — if not all that surprising — message from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which just announced the winners of a mobile-themed “News Challenge,” awarding $2.4 million to eight media teams.

Most of the winners are little-known up-and-comers, ranging in their focus from political activism to community radio to connecting previously disconnected groups, like farmers in Kenya.

You’ve probably heard of at least one of the winners, though: Wikipedia. The online encyclopedia’s owner, the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, will put $600,000 from the Knight Foundation toward its mobile users in developing countries. Among their plans: Making articles accessible via text, which could be a boon for feature-phone owners.

The other winners:

• Textizen ($350,000), an offshoot of Code for America that wants to conduct local public polling by putting questions in public places and then asking residents to respond via text.
• TKOH ($330,000), which is developing an oral history app to make recording audio and visuals to tell a historical story easier. The app would then let users share those stories with either a small group, like their families, or with the public.
• Witness ($320,000), a human-rights organization making an app that will add metadata to mobile videos. Thus, an app user witnessing a newsworthy event such as a political protest could send an encrypted video of the event to a journalist, with info about where the video was taken automatically baked into the file. Witness program director Sam Gregory said accountability questions have hampered Syrian rebels in the field: “Their material is not trusted by the news media, and is not robust enough to stand up to evidentiary scrutiny,” he said.
• The Cafédirect Producers Foundation ($260,000), which will expand its efforts to enable SMS information sharing among small-scale farmers in Kenya, Peru and Tanzania.
• Digital Democracy ($200,000), a nonprofit seeking to help indigenous Peruvian communities record and share how mining and oil drilling are affecting their lives and environment.
• The Art Center College of Design ($200,000), which wants to develop an open-source way to turn a smartphone into a community radio station. They plan to start their work with a pilot program in Uganda, but Knight Foundation program director John Bracken said he hopes that groups will share what they learn with others in the Knight network over time.
• Abayima ($150,000), which wants to build an open-source application for feature phones that will turn SIM cards into storage devices for news and information sharing. Founder Jon Gosier said this will help political dissidents such as those in Uganda in 2011, whose government kept tabs on its citizens’ SMS activity. “This was explained away as trying to curb messages that might incite violence, but to me, it showcased how vulnerable citizens are when there they only have a single means of communication.”

The company will launch an update to its Messenger app for iOS and Android on Thursday afternoon, allowing users to send short voice messages to one another inside of the application, up to a minute in length.

A clever addendum, bringing Messenger up to par with Apple’s iMessage service (which lets users send voice messages via the voice memo app) and BlackBerry Messenger, while giving it a leg up on basic SMS.

Which is really the service with the biggest target on its back. SMS, the 160-character message service ubiquitous in every country, dominates communication across the globe, from developing countries to the so-called “first world.” And all of the big mobile players like Apple, Google and Facebook want in on that sort of communication virality.

That virality is the key to growth, especially in developing countries inside of Africa, South America and Asia that Facebook is targeting as the next major areas of expansion. Find a way to break into those markets through free, easy communication services — like, for example, letting users access Facebook Messenger for Android without the need for a Facebook account — and you’ll find a way to grow your user base from the ground up via word of mouth.

Also particularly noteworthy: In Facebook’s update on Thursday, Canadian users on iOS can start using Messenger to make VOIP calls inside the app. That’s a pretty Skypey, Google Voice-y move by the social giant. I can only assume that if the test takes off in Canada, the next move down the line will be video calling.

In essence, owning the chains of communication is Facebook’s best path to growth. Now that the service has saturated most areas of the developed world, hitting the billion-user mark and seeing its growth curve begin to flatten, Facebook must think differently: What are the ways people communicate with one another outside of Facebook? And how can we own them, too?

Cloning Snapchat was just a drop in the bucket. Expect more in 2013.

’Twas the night before Christmas,
And Santa’s online.
He’s emailing and calling,
And all just in time.
With holiday cheer,
And a techie assist,
He’s using the Web
To re-check his list.

It won’t fit under the Christmas tree, but there might be one last-minute gift to make the geekiest of little ones happy: A personalized email, video message or phone call from jolly old St. Nicholas.

Previously, parents had to take their children to the mall to meet Kris Kringle, but he’s updated his act with the times and across a long list of Web sites.

Here are just a couple:

• My favorite of the bunch is Google’s “Santa Tracker,” which starts off by walking you through a surprisingly detailed faux-instant-message chat with Santa. After you say you’ve read and agreed to Santa’s Terms and Privacy Policy (no, really, but they are a lot better than Instagram’s), he interviews you about a friend, co-worker or loved one you want him to contact. Then he offers to give them a phone call (but only between 8 am and 9 pm), an email or a Google+ message. (I wonder if Santa puts the naughty and nice kids in different Circles on Google+.)
• Portable North Pole (pictured at top) takes it one step further, letting you send a video message from Santa. And in PNP’s questionnaire, you can tell Santa to cater his message specifically to an adult, or to someone (adult or child) who shouldn’t be on the “nice” list. Since it’s a video call, Santa optionally asks for a photo of the recipient or of you that he can use, or you can just have him use a picture of a gift.
• It’s just one of many, many similar smaller services, but Christmas Dialer layers a business on top of the Christmas-y concept. It gives you one free call from Santa, then charges at least 57 cents for each additional call to your eBay PayPal account. Unlike the other two listed above, though, it asks less information upfront and, as a result, offers far fewer choices of what sort of message the recipient will get.

Pay up.

The social network is overhauling its in-house messaging system with a new set of filters that it says will help users reach out and “Poke” each other more effectively; you can see details here. Part of the overhaul: A test that will allow some users to ping people they’re not friends with, if they’re willing to spend a dollar.

Facebook says the changes are primarily designed to let Facebook users who already know each other make sure their missives connect. But the most interesting part of the move is what the social network is calling a “a small experiment to test the usefulness of economic signals.”

Here’s how it will work: A limited number of U.S. Facebook users will now have the ability to pay Facebook a fee to send a message to other U.S. Facebook users who they don’t know. Facebook isn’t spelling out the cost publicly, but people familiar with the company’s plans say it will start at a dollar a message, and Facebook will tinker with the fee over time. The option will only be available to individual users — not marketers and brands — and Facebook will only allow users to receive a single paid message per week. But users can’t opt not to receive paid messages.

Here’s Facebook’s rationale for the move:

This test is designed to address situations where neither social nor algorithmic signals are sufficient. For example, if you want to send a message to someone you heard speak at an event but are not friends with, or if you want to message someone about a job opportunity, you can use this feature to reach their Inbox. For the receiver, this test allows them to hear from people who have an important message to send them.

Glass-half-empty translation: Facebook is selling access to your inbox — which you previously could have kept closed to anyone you don’t know — to the outside world.

Glass-half-full version: Maybe you do want to hear from those people! And the one-message-a-week cap, combined with the $1 fee, will prevent your inbox from filling up with spam.

In the wake of Facebook’s botched IPO, the company has been working very hard to show Wall Street that it has the ability to generate revenue from all sorts of streams it hadn’t previously tapped — mobile ads, for instance, as well as gifts, and maybe-but-not-quite-yet, an ad network.

But at first blush this doesn’t seem like it belongs in that category. At least not with the restrictions the company is placing on this initial test: If Coke wants to get my attention on the social network, Facebook has an ever-expanding series of ad options it wants to sell them.

Meanwhile, if anyone can figure out how to make pay-to-play work for my real-world inbox — which spam has rendered just about useless — I’m all ears.

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/Fussypony)

Facebook plans to launch the app in the coming weeks, sources say, sometime before the end of the year.

Like Messenger and Camera, Facebook’s new app is standalone and separate from the main Facebook app. After the launch, this will bring Facebook’s app count up to four individual apps (five, if you count Instagram).

Facebook could not be reached for comment late Sunday evening.

Snapchat rose to prominence over the last year thanks to its capacity for sending private, “self-destructable” messages. A user can send a photo message to another friend inside the service, choosing the amount of time that the photo will be available for viewing (usually a matter of seconds). After the user views the photo message for the allotted amount of time, the photo deletes itself from the sender’s phone and the receiver’s phone, and Snapchat deletes the message from its servers. Snapchat also recently added video message capabilities to its service.

Facebook’s competing app will do much the same thing. After users open the new app, they are presented with a list of current message threads between them and their friends. Hold a finger down on one of the threads, and a timer comes up to ask how long the message should be viewable. From there, users are able to send the message — which, just like on Snapchat, will only be viewable for a fixed period of time.

Facebook’s new app is another in a string of the company’s aggressive movements into the friend-to-friend communications space.

For instance, Facebook has been highly interested in the fast-growing mobile messaging application WhatsApp (though Facebook isn’t buying WhatsApp, we’ve been told). Two weeks ago, Facebook launched an update to Messenger for Android, where people without a Facebook account can send messages to one another; it was widely seen as a direct, aggressive move into the space WhatsApp currently inhabits.

Photo messages are obviously important to Facebook, as well. It closed the acquisition of mobile photo-sharing app Instagram for $735 million in September (vying aggressively with Twitter, which also wanted to buy the app). Facebook also launched the standalone Facebook Camera app earlier this year, which the company built in-house.

The new Facebook app comes on the heels of a potential new round of financing for Snapchat. Last week, Om Malik reported that Benchmark Capital will soon lead an $8 million venture round for Snapchat, at a rumored valuation of $50 million.

“We haven’t heard anything from Mark [Zuckerberg] about a Snapchat clone,” Snapchat co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel said in an emailed statement on Sunday evening. “We’re big fans of Instagram and the Facebook platform and we look forward to watching Mark continue to innovate and grow his company.”

For any start-up, watching Facebook move deeper into your territory is certainly daunting. But not all of Facebook’s home-grown efforts have killed off the competition. Facebook Questions, for example, was supposed to signal the end of Q&A site Quora. However, Facebook retired its Questions product after it failed to take off.

To put it another way: May the best app win.

Kik Messenger was early in this category, launching in late 2010 as the first app that mined users’ address books to find friends when they sign up (before that was more closely regulated).

After explosive growth as a cross-platform alternative to the popular BlackBerry chat app BBM — it got its first million users in 15 days — Kik lost a step when it was blocked and sued by Research In Motion. (That was particularly crushing given Kik founder and CEO Ted Livingston had interned at RIM and stayed in touch with the company as he dropped out of college to found his start-up.)

Livingston said this week that his app has not been standing still. Kik still signs up 100,000 new users per day, for a total of 30 million registered users.

Even after the lawsuit, Kik managed to close $8 million in Series A funding from RRE Ventures, Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures — and $4.3 million since then in bridge funding from the same investors as it has paid its legal bills and plotted its next move.

But the company has not added any new features in the past year except for speed and infrastructure improvements across its various free native apps.

Today, Kik is finally adding features, through a new design that tries to allow users to pick and choose what new stuff they want to add without cluttering up the core Kik experience of fast text messaging.

The idea, said Livingston, is to avoid the fate of applications that add feature after feature and “pivot” upon their core idea to the point that users have no idea why they’re useful.

Kik’s concept is essentially a highly controlled app platform that it calls Cards. Users can opt to add the apps — for instance, a YouTube viewing interface or a sketch pad — to their Kik account. If they don’t add the apps, they can stick with good old messaging. When minimized, the Cards are just a tiny line of pixels along the left side of the app that can be swiped out like a drawer.

The Cards are all built in HTML5 so they are easily transferrable across all of Kik’s native apps.

Livingston is particularly proud of this architecture. “We know we’ll be immediately copied,” he bragged. But he feels that his team’s work in building tools and libraries around the HTML5 code to create the Cards is a defensible advantage for the company.

Unlike other social media sites’ app platforms, Kik Cards won’t be open to outside developers. In fact, the company plans for Cards to be its monetization strategy. Livingston said Kik will charge brands and other companies to make and feature custom Cards.

One-to-one messaging is a vastly underestimated form of social sharing, Livingston contended. “We think we can build the most viral network in the world for sharing content.”

Video- and text-messaging service Skype said in a blog post this morning that it’s rolling out a “hotfix” over the next few days to address the messaging bug that has cropped up since the software’s last update.

The bug, which caused some users to send messages to unintended recipients, has been occurring when the latest version of Skype crashes during a chat session. Afterward, the last IM entered may go to a different IM contact after the user restarts Skype, the company explained.

Skype, which is owned by Microsoft, doesn’t know exactly how many people were affected, but says it thinks it’s a small number. The affected versions (you can find more info about them here) include Skype for Windows, Mac, Linux and Windows Phone.

The fix for Windows users is already out, a representative for Skype said. The others will be released over the next few days.

Skype also said that it has confirmed that not all Skype products were affected by this error.

“We can assure that users of Skype 5.9 for Windows, Skype 2.8 for Android and Skype 4.0 for IOS have not been affected,” the blog post reads.

Still, the privacy implications of this sort of error could be troublesome — especially since Skype has come under some scrutiny in the past for possible vulnerabilities in its system.

The bug was first reported by Engadget, after some users complained in a Skype forum about the errant messages.

Instead, the team’s next product is a set of curated real-world social experiences that it will suggest to groups of friends and help them coordinate. And if all goes well, this is to be GroupMe’s business model.

GroupMe co-founders Steve Martocci and Jared Hecht, who still run the company, tell me that this group commerce idea is actually not a wacky diversion, but fully in keeping with their original vision for GroupMe — which was around helping groups of people coordinate themselves and turn their online interactions into offline events.

(GroupMe famously came out of a TechCrunch hackathon in 2010, so it’s kind of amazing that there’s any “original vision” left to execute on.)

With the new “Experiences by GroupMe,” group activities can be suggested in the form of an offer, which may require a certain number of participants to “unlock” (see the screenshot above). Users can automatically split the bill, and GroupMe takes a percentage of sales as its payment.

The Experiences product is at first only available to certain existing GroupMe users in New York City, where the company has assigned its marketing and business development staff to find interesting stuff for people to do together, including fancy meals and VIP tickets to concerts. Later on, GroupMe may use a self-service platform and partnerships to expand elsewhere, said Martocci and Hecht.

We’re headed to New York City for this gathering — our first one held in the Big Apple — with a lineup that is strongly focused on the globalization of mobile and its worldwide implications.

At the D10 conference, we announced Google mobile guru Andy Rubin, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop and Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs, but now there’s more:

First up, we have Mike “Schrep” Schroepfer, Facebook’s VP of engineering.

Facebook is unquestionably a mobile superpower — with more than 500 million mobile monthly active users as of April 2012. But mobile products and monetization of them are the company’s biggest weakness and potential source of competition.

No surprise — Facebook is currently in the process of transforming itself from a Web-first to a mobile-first mentality.

Schrep, who joined Facebook in 2008 from Mozilla, is a key steward of that shift, as Facebook builds its infrastructure, systems and engineering to be mobile-first.

With a couple of computer science degrees from Stanford, Schroepfer is on the board of Ancestry.com and is also a trustee of the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology.

We’ve also landed Jan Koum, the co-founder and CEO of blockbuster cross-platform messaging app WhatsApp.

As a free texting alternative, WhatsApp has insane global scale. It’s the No. 1 paid app in more than 50 countries on iOS. And it’s now one of the Top 10 apps of all time on Android, with more than 50 million installs.

As Ina Fried and I started planning Dive Into Mobile, we were cautious about committing to app makers early in the process, given that the market is so incredibly volatile. But it’s pretty clear that the story of WhatsApp will still be compelling in late October.

Just to give you a sense of the acceleration of this app: As of February 2012, WhatsApp said it was sending two billion messages per day — having doubled from one billion just three months before.

Koum, a Yahoo alum, has somehow managed to keep WhatsApp almost entirely off the press and speaker circuit radar — while fending off acquisition offers aplenty, from what we hear. He’s only ever spoken on stage about WhatsApp at Mobile World Congress, where WhatsApp took home the award for best overall app.

Schrep and Koum join an already strong lineup of timely speakers:

Android head Rubin returns to the D stage to talk about where things are headed. In addition to finding out what tasty dessert follows Jelly Bean, Rubin is likely to talk about the challenges of chasing Apple, bringing Android to ever-lower prices, and its latest efforts to crack the tablet market.

Nokia chief Elop is in the midst of a bold but difficult transition, as he aims to remake the Finnish phone maker. The company’s Windows Phone effort has taken off more slowly then hoped, while its existing Symbian phone business has tailed off faster than expected, adding financial pressure to the big strategic shift.

The result is that Nokia has had to cut jobs, close plants and make other moves designed to give the company the resources it needs. While some cutting was an inevitable part of the transition, the most recent efforts involved deeper moves, including the killing off of the company’s next-generation Meltemi operating system for low-end phones.

Mozilla leader Kovacs has grand ambitions of building a standalone operating system for the open Web. He’s working with Telefónica to release HTML5 devices, which should be a well-timed topic this fall when Dive Into Mobile kicks off.

There will be a lot more to come, of course, including some extraordinary demos, so we’ll update our speaker list as soon as we have more news.

As with all D events, tickets are selling fast.

Also to keep on your radar is our second annual D: Dive Into Media conference, next February in Laguna Niguel, which is being run by ATD media ninja Peter Kafka. The conference will delve into the extraordinary changes the media business is undergoing in every sector — from television and film to music and publishing.

It’s very common today for a reporter to get a phone call or a text from the home office saying, “our competition has X and you need to beat it in the next thirty seconds, preferably less.”

– Dan Rather on the digital news cycle

Email, upper case, lower case, any case, is the electronic version of the interoffice, inter-organizational mail system, the email we all experience today — and email was invented in 1978 by a 14-year-old working in Newark, NJ. The facts are indisputable.

– Noam Chomsky, from a Tuesday statement in support of V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai’s often-disputed claim to have invented email

This creates curious opportunities for fun. When Twilio was in the process of raising its most recent funding round — a $17 million series C led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Union Square Ventures — Bessemer partner Byron Deeter created a Twilio-connected number and asked CEO Jeff Lawson to call it. As recounted by VentureBeat, when Lawson called, he heard automated voice messages asking him to press 1 for $5 million, 2 for $10 million and 3 for $15 million.

Hijinks like this say a lot about the culture that surrounds Twilio, but it’s not well known outside the developer community. Addressing that will be job one for Lynda Smith, its new chief marketing officer, who joined the company on April 23.

Smith is joining Twilio from Jive, the social enterprise software concern, where she was senior vice president of marketing until last fall. As CMO, she’ll be responsible for Twilio’s marketing strategy around the world.

“I think the Twilio brand is huge among developers because it gives that community a chance to play with something they haven’t had before,” Smith told me. “But it’s also getting a lot of traction within the telephony industry. … Voice and messaging are still a big part of the worlds that we live in, but they’ve been difficult to bring into new-world software applications because it’s still tied to some old-world things like hardware and protocols.” First priority, she says, is making sure that people outside the developer world know what Twilio is and what they can do with it.

Before Jive, Smith held a number executive slots at Genpact, Nuance, Genesys and Lockheed Martin. She’s a graduate of Simpson College, and has an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School. She’s also on the faculty at Stanford University, where she lectures on global entrepreneurial marketing.

Twilio is definitely on the move: It landed $17 million in that C round late last year, bringing its total capital raised to about $34 million. It also just announced its second conference in San Francisco, in October. Time to get serious about marketing.

What happened in the interim? Voxer CEO Tom Katis says building a good walkie-talkie app is harder than you think. To work well, Voxer integrates live calls and messaging — two very different models of communication. On one hand, live voice calls are a natural way to talk to someone, but they are plagued by crappy connectivity. On the other hand, written and spoken messages are composed and finished before they are sent as a whole package. They’re not interruptive, but they’re not real conversations.

“You can be light or you can be strong, and we wanted to be both,” Katis said.

Earlier in its development, Voxer spent two years and $7 million building a communication app that focused on live chat, Katis said. But the app failed as soon as 200 people were on the system. After lots of effort spent debugging and rebuilding, it was ultimately scrapped completely.

Then, about a year ago, Voxer released a fully functioning iPhone app with both live calls and messaging. The addition of an Android version in November — and the functionality for users of both mobile operating systems to talk to each other — is what really drove organic growth, Katis said.

Along the way, Katis and his personal friends spent $20 million in total funding Voxer development. (Most of that money came from Katis, who had previous success with his security company, Triple Canopy.)

So what was so hard about building Voxer? Part of it is the app’s patented system design, and another part is the nuts and bolts (the Voxer team uses the trendy Node.js), Katis said.

There’s also some nice subtlety to the Voxer interface that helps conversations flow. For instance, Voxer users can click to listen to a voice recording even before the other person stops talking. And the app automatically speeds up voice memo playback. When the phone’s proximity sensor tells the app a user is moving the phone closer or further from her ear, the volume goes down or up, respectively. It’s neat stuff.

Here’s Katis explaining where he came from and where he’s going:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120412/20-million-later-voxer-raises-its-first-30m-in-venture-capital-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120319/not-surprisingly-u-s-teens-are-texting-more-talking-less/ http://allthingsd.com/20120319/not-surprisingly-u-s-teens-are-texting-more-talking-less/#comments Mon, 19 Mar 2012 17:32:29 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=187765 ICYMI, teens are totes texting more.

And texting is increasingly becoming the communication application of choice for teens, while actually talking on the phone is on the decline.

The not-entirely-surprising data comes from the latest Pew Internet Research Center report, which included responses from nearly 800 U.S. teens, ages 12 to 17.

The study showed that the average number of texts sent by teens of all ages on a typical day rose from 50 a day to 60 a day between 2009 and 2011. Older teens, ages 14 to 17, showed an even greater increase, from a median of 60 texts a day in 2009 to a hundred texts a day in 2011.

And while 30 percent of teens said in 2009 that they used a landline to speak with friends, only 14 percent now say they talk on a landline daily. A third say they never use a landline (the study didn’t seem to offer data on those who asked, “What’s a landline?”). Even talking to friends on cellphones is edging down, from 38 percent in 2009 to just 26 percent in 2011.

Interestingly, though, the biggest texters were also the heaviest talkers, signaling that teens who are into their cellphones … are really into their cellphones.

In general, more teens now own some type of mobile device. Some 77 percent of U.S. teens now own some kind of cellphone, up 2 percent from a couple years ago. There’s no real difference in gender, it turns out, with boys and girls equally as likely to own cellphones, but younger boys — ages 12 and 13 — are the least likely to be early (early) adopters of cellphones.

Most teens are still using basic phones: Some 23 percent of those surveyed own smartphones, compared to 54 percent who own basic cellphones. But the patterns are shifting increasingly toward smartphones, especially among older teens.

Of course, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree: Just under half of U.S. adults now own smartphones, according to this recent report, outnumbering adults who own feature phones by 5 percent.

The new Pew study also shows that teens with parents who have higher education levels are more likely to own cellphones; teens in the ’burbs and teens who are very active on social media are also more likely to have mobile devices, Pew reports.

(Photo courtesy of Flickr/Ei Katsumata)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120319/not-surprisingly-u-s-teens-are-texting-more-talking-less/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120313/deja-hoo-yahoo-had-done-the-pre-ipo-legal-shakedown-dance-before/ http://allthingsd.com/20120313/deja-hoo-yahoo-had-done-the-pre-ipo-legal-shakedown-dance-before/#comments Tue, 13 Mar 2012 13:29:19 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=185191

A hot Internet company poised for an even hotter IPO is attacked in court by a competitor whose lunch it has been eating.

Sound familiar? Actually, it’s just as much Google in 2004 as Facebook yesterday.

What the pair have in common is Yahoo, for whom this kind of patent infringement lawsuit is a whole lot of been there, done that.

In Google’s case, Yahoo was suing the then-smaller company over search patents from its Overture acquisition. The pair settled 10 days before the Google IPO, with Yahoo getting 2.7 million more shares of that stock, which it then sold off relatively quickly.

As part of the settlement from a lawsuit started in 2002, Google licensed U.S. Patent No. 6,269,361, entitled “System and method for influencing a position on a search result list generated by a computer network search engine,” which was owned by Yahoo Overture subsidiary.

In plain terms, the patent was over its key pay-for-performance service, which was at the heart of Google’s business of allowing bidding for search results placement related to relevant keywords.

In Facebook’s lawsuit, Yahoo is alleging intellectual property violations by the social networking giant, and is also taking credit for Facebook’s success.

The 19-page lawsuit over 10 patents — related to advertising, privacy, customization, messaging and social networking — comes as Yahoo is seeking to right itself under new CEO Scott Thompson.

“Facebook’s entire social network model, which allows users to create profiles for and connect with, among other things, persons and businesses, is based on Yahoo’s patented social networking technology,” Yahoo’s lawsuit reads, in part.

(Cue the movie script: If Yahoo had invented Facebook, it would have invented Facebook.)

That includes, Yahoo alleges, Facebook’s popular News Feed, advertising methods, privacy settings and more. The company adds that Facebook has been “free riding” on Yahoo’s intellectual property, and that royalty payments alone will not suffice.

What happens next today will be interesting — way back when, Google finally gave in in the delicate game of chicken with Yahoo, at the last minute.

But it’s not clear whether Facebook will flinch — or not.

Until we find out, here’s the press release from the 2004 settlement between Yahoo and Google to peruse:

Yahoo! and Google Resolve Disputes

SUNNYVALE, CA & MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — August 9, 2004 – Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO) and Google Inc. today announced that the companies have resolved two disputes that have been pending between the companies.

Under the terms of the settlement agreement, Google will take a license to U.S. Patent No. 6,269,361 and several related patents, held by Yahoo!’s wholly-owned subsidiary, Overture, and Yahoo! dismissed its patent lawsuit against Google. The two parties have also resolved a dispute regarding shares issuable to Yahoo! pursuant to a warrant to purchase Google shares in connection with a 2000 services agreement.

In connection with the settlement of the warrant dispute, the patent lawsuit, and in payment for the license, Google issued shares of its Class A common stock to Yahoo!.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120313/deja-hoo-yahoo-had-done-the-pre-ipo-legal-shakedown-dance-before/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120312/worst-but-first-yahoo-uses-words-of-facebooks-zuckerberg-to-poke-him-in-patent-lawsuit/ http://allthingsd.com/20120312/worst-but-first-yahoo-uses-words-of-facebooks-zuckerberg-to-poke-him-in-patent-lawsuit/#comments Mon, 12 Mar 2012 22:00:04 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=185139

On the sixth page of its just-filed patent lawsuit against Facebook, Yahoo quotes the social networking company’s CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg:

“Getting there first is not what it’s all about.”

The quote, which Yahoo contends shows Zuckerberg has “conceded that the design of Facebook is not novel and based on the ideas of others,” is woefully taken out of context, but it’s an attempt to hit home one point:

We were here first and we have more patents.

Even if, as it has turned out, Yahoo has done little over the years with the innovation those patents might represent. Meanwhile, Facebook has run the bases with the wide range of the advertising, messaging, customization, privacy and social networking concepts involved.

Of the 10 patents Yahoo is using in the 19-page lawsuit, filed today in California, the company said: “For much of the technology upon which Facebook was based, Yahoo was there first.”

First but worst, as Yahoo has struggled in recent years to make itself more relevant and prevent the decline of its once mighty business.

Via a series of ineffective leaders and strategies, that has not worked at all, as its business has declined. Now — under the much more in-your-face reign of new CEO Scott Thompson — Yahoo is hoping that courts will determine that what it says it invented counts for something.

“Facebook’s entire social network model, which allows users to create profiles for and connect with, among other things, persons and businesses, is based on Yahoo’s patented social networking technology,” Yahoo’s lawsuit reads, in part.

That includes in the legal action, Yahoo alleges, Facebook’s popular News Feed, advertising methods, privacy settings and more. The company adds that Facebook has been “free riding” on Yahoo’s intellectual property and that royalty payments alone will not suffice.

So what does Yahoo want for this alleged free ride? Triple damages and to enjoin Facebook from operating by using said patents.

Given the scope of the patents Yahoo said it has, that means it wants Facebook to essentially close down.

Therefore, I would be expecting Facebook to poke back in three … two … one …

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