One of the issues that seems to have gotten lost in the complex transaction that will ultimately break apart News Corp. into two separate entities — an entertainment company and a publishing one — is the fate of its overall digital strategy in the new paradigm.

That arena for the media behemoth is now being headed by Jon Miller, the longtime Internet exec and investor, who was hired by the media giant in 2009 as chief digital officer to lead its tech and online initiatives.

His job has encompassed everything from his failed effort to revive its once mighty Myspace property to selling it and other properties off to working on its Hulu partnership. Miller has also been active in China, looking for digital investment opportunities for News Corp. there.

But now that the company is being cleaved in two, it’s hard to imagine where Miller would land in either new entity.

And, according to numerous sources, he probably will not and is instead in discussions with CEO Rupert Murdoch and others at the company about forming a separate investment fund to focus on digital publishing and media.

It will not be owned by either new News Corp. unit, said sources.

While the possibility is in its early stages and might not happen, the fund could be seeded with money from News Corp. or, more interestingly, from the Murdoch family itself.

Such a shift for Miller would not be a stretch, since he has run an investment fund with Yahoo exec Ross Levinsohn called Fuse Capital. He has worked previously running AOL and also did a stint at IAC.

While Miller has made a number of different investments across the tech landscape, digital publishing has been a particular focus.

Miller and News Corp. declined comment.

(Full disclosure: This Web site is owned by Dow Jones, which is owned — in turn — by News Corp.)

Sailesh wondered aloud, “How much time do we have for any of these?” “How many of them can coexist?” and “Do we really need them?” My answers were, respectively: “A lot.” “Many of them.” and “No, but we want them.” That dinner discussion prompted some observations that I am outlining here, and I invite you to share your own observations in the comments below.

In a nutshell, the Internet has evolved from being a need-driven utility medium with only a handful of winners to a discovery-driven entertainment medium with room for multiple winners. The necessary and sufficient conditions for this evolution are now in place — broadband, real names and tablets are the three horsemen of this New New Web. As consumers, entrepreneurs and investors, we should get used to the fact that the online economy is increasingly blurring with the offline economy, and in the limit, that distinction will disappear. As a result, just as in the real world, the Web of entertainment will be much bigger than the Web of utility.

A Theory of Human Motivation
One framework for understanding the consumer Internet is Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which Abraham Maslow put forward as a way of explaining human behavior at large. The core premise is that once our basic needs of food, shelter, safety and belonging are satisfied, we tend to focus on things that are related to creativity, entertainment, education and self-improvement. A key aspect of this framework is that it’s sequential: Unless the basic needs are met, one cannot focus on other things. As an example, a study in 2011 showed that humans who are hungry will spend more on food and less on non-food items compared to those who are not hungry. Using this framework, we can see how consumer adoption of the Web has evolved over the last 20 years, and why all of the ingredients are only now in place for consumers to use the Web for what Maslow called “self-actualization” — a pursuit of one’s full potential, driven by desire, not by necessity.

1992-2012: Web of Need
Between the AOL IPO in 1992 and the Facebook IPO last month, the Internet has largely been in the business of satisfying basic consumer needs. In 1995, the year Netscape went public and made the internet accessible to the masses, I was a young product manager for a consumer Internet company called Global Village Communication. We were a newly minted public company and our hottest product was a “high speed” fax/modem with a speed of 33.6 kbps. Back then, using the Internet as a consumer or making a living off it as a business was rather difficult, and sometimes simply frustrating. In the subsequent years the basic needs of access, browser, email, search and identity were solved by companies such as AOL, Comcast, Netscape, Yahoo, Google, LinkedIn and Facebook.

2012-?: Web of Want
Today, the billion users on Facebook have reached the apex of Maslow’s hierarchy on the web. All of our basic needs have been satisfied. Now we are in pursuit of self-actualization. It is no surprise that on the Web, we are now open to playing games (Zynga, Angry Birds), watching video (YouTube, Hulu), listening to music (Pandora, Spotify), expressing our creativity (Instagram, Twitter, Draw Something), window shopping (Pinterest, Gojee*) and pursuing education (Khan Academy, Empowered*).

The Web Is Becoming Like TV
How do we make sense out of a Web where multiple providers coexist, serving groups of people who share a similar desire? Turns out we already have a very good model for understanding how this can work: Television. Specifically, cable television. The Web is becoming like TV, with hundreds of networks or “channels” that are programmed to serve content to an audience with similar desires and demographics. Pinterest, ShoeDazzle, Joyous and Alt12* programmed for young, affluent women; Machinima, Kixeye and Kabam programmed for mostly male gamers; Gojee* for food enthusiasts; Triposo* for travellers; GAINFitness* for fitness fans and so on.

In this new new Web, an important ingredient to success is a clear understanding of the identity of your users to ensure that you are programming to that user’s interests. The good news is that unlike TV, the Web has a feedback loop. Everything can be measured and as a result the path from concept to success can be more capital efficient by measuring what type of programming is working every step of the way — it’s unlikely that the new new Web will ever produce a Waterworld.

Why Now? Broadband, Real Names & Tablets
As my partner Doug Pepper recently wrote, a key question when evaluating a new opportunity is to ask “Why Now?” Certainly, companies like AOL, Yahoo and Myspace have tried before to program the Web to cater to interests of specific audiences. What’s different now? Three things: Broadband, real names and tablets.

The impact of broadband is obvious; we don’t need or want anything on a slow Web. With broadband penetration at 26 percent in industrialized countries and 3G penetration at about 15 percent of the world’s population, we are just reaching critical mass of nearly 1B users on the fast Web.

Real names are more interesting. In 1993, the New Yorker ran the now famous cartoon; “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” This succinctly captured the state of the anonymous Web at the time. Reid Hoffman and Mark Zuckerberg changed that forever. Do we find Q&A on Quora to be more credible than Yahoo! Answers, celebrity profiles on Twitter more engaging than Myspace and pins on Pinterest more relevant than recommendations on early AOL chatrooms? I certainly do, and that is largely because Quora, Twitter and Pinterest take advantage of real names. Real names are blurring the distinction between online and offline behavior.

Finally, the tablet, the last necessary and sufficient piece that fuels the “Web of want.” The PC is perfect for the “Web of need” — when we need something, we can search for it, since we know what we are looking for. Searching is a “lean-forward” experience, typing into our PC, either at work or at the home office. The Web over the last decade has been optimized for this lean-forward search experience — everything from SEO to Web site design to keyword shortcuts in popular browsers makes that efficient. However, smartphones and tablets allow us to move to a “lean-back” experience, flipping through screens using our fingers, often in our living rooms and bedrooms, on the train or at the coffee shop. Tablets make discovery easy and fun, just like flipping channels on TV at leisure. These discoveries prompt us to want things we didn’t think we needed.

Early Signs
This thesis is easy to postulate, but is there any evidence that users are looking to the Web as anything more than a productivity platform? As has been reported, mobile devices now make up 20 percent of all U.S. Web traffic, and this usage peaks in the evening hours, presumably when people are away from their office. Analysis from Flurry* shows that cumulative time spent on mobile apps is closing in on TV. We certainly don’t seem to be using the Web only when we need something.

Economy of Need Versus Want
The economy of Want is different from the economy of Need. We humans tend to spend a lot more time and money on things we want compared to things we need. For example, Americans spend more than five hours a day on leisure and sports (including TV), compared to about three hours spent on eating, drinking and managing household activities. Another difference is that when it comes to satisfying our needs, we tend to settle on one provider and give that one all of our business. Think about how many companies provide us with electricity, water, milk, broadband access, search, email and identity. The Need economy is a winner-take-all market, with one or two companies dominating each need. However, when it comes to providing for our wants, we are open to being served by multiple providers. Think about how many different providers are behind the TV channels we watch, restaurants we visit, destinations we travel to and movies we watch. The Want economy can support multiple winners, each with a sizeable business. Instagram, Path, Pinterest, ShoeDazzle, BeachMint, Angry Birds, CityVille, Kixeye, Kabam, Machinima and Maker Studios can all coexist.

Investing in the Web of Want
The chart below shows that over a long term (including a global recession) an index of luxury stocks (companies such as LVMH, Burberry, BMW, Porsche, Nordstrom) outperforms an index of utility stocks (companies such as Con Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric that offer services we all need). The same applies to an index of media stocks (companies such as CBS, Comcast, News Corp., Time Warner, Viacom) which outperforms both the utilities and the broader stock market. Of course, higher returns come with higher volatility — Nordstrom’s beta is 1.6 and CBS’ beta is 2.2, compared to 0.29 for PG&E. It is this volatility that has cast investing in the Want business as a career-ending move in Silicon Valley for the past 20-plus years. As the Web evolves from serving our needs to satisfying our wants and, in turn, becomes a much larger economy, sitting on the sidelines of the Web of Want may not be an option.

Let’s Not Kill Hollywood
With a billion users looking for self-actualization and with the widespread adoption of broadband, real names and tablets, the Web is poised to become the medium for creativity, education, entertainment, fashion and the pursuit of happiness. As the offline world shows, large, profitable companies can be built that cater to these desires. Entrepreneurs and investors looking to succeed in the new new Web can learn quite a few lessons from our friends in the luxury and entertainment businesses, which have been managing profitable “want” businesses for decades. The fusion of computer science, design, data, low friction and the massive scale of the Internet can result in something that is better than what either Silicon Valley or Hollywood can do alone. It is no wonder that the team that came to this conclusion before anyone else is now managing the most valuable company in the world.

Epilogue
When we go see a movie or splurge on a resort vacation, we don’t stop using electricity, brushing our teeth or checking our email. The Web of Want is not a replacement for the Web of Need, it is an addition. Many of the Internet companies that satisfied our needs in the last 20 or more years of the Web are here to stay. In fact, they will become more entrenched and stable, with low beta, just like the utilities in the offline world. Microsoft has a beta of exactly 1.0 — it is no more volatile than the overall stock market. And for those longing for the days of “real computer science” on the Web, do not despair. Just keep an eye on Rocket Science and Google X Labs — there is plenty of hard-core engineering ahead.

Disclosures: * indicates an InterWest portfolio company. Google Finance was used for all of the stock charts and beta references.

Keval Desai is a Partner at InterWest, where he focuses on investments in early-stage companies that cater to the needs and wants of consumers. He started his career in Silicon Valley in 1991 as a software engineer. He has been a mentor and investor in AngelPad since inception. You can follow him @kevaldesai.

Yahoo has confirmed that it hired Google ad exec Michael Barrett as its new chief of revenue.

As I reported earlier, Barrett will be in charge of advertising revenue and operations worldwide at the Silicon Valley Internet giant, including units in the U.S., Europe and Asia reporting in to him. Barrett will report directly to interim CEO Ross Levinsohn.

The move to hire the high-profile exec — who has been working at Google since it bought an ad tech company he ran a year ago — gives Yahoo a boost in its most critical area of business.

The search giant acquired supply-side advertising technology start-up AdMeld for $400 million a year ago. Before that, Barrett had previously worked at a range of digital and traditional media companies.

His hiring is also a clear signal that Yahoo is about to make major changes to its ad business going forward. According to numerous sources, Yahoo is again mulling a plan to abandon or sell large parts of its ad tech business and rely on third-party vendors, including Google.

Sources said Barrett was interested in the big opportunity Yahoo possessed and felt the ad market was still interested in helping it maintain its online ad business.

Here’s the official Yahoo press release on the Barrett appointment:

Yahoo! Appoints Michael Barrett as Executive Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer

SUNNYVALE, Calif., June 18, 2012 – Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) announced today that it has appointed Michael Barrett as Executive Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer. Barrett will be responsible for Yahoo’s advertising revenue and operations globally for the company, with Americas, EMEA and APAC regional leads reporting to him.

“Michael Barrett is regarded as one of the most successful and influential executives in media and technology, and I am thrilled to have him join Yahoo! in this critical role,” said Ross Levinsohn, Interim Chief Executive Officer. “I am confident that his deep industry experience and relationships will help us drive our strategic vision, taking Yahoo!’s industry-leading position to the next level.”

Barrett joins Yahoo! from Google where he led the integration efforts following Google’s acquisition of Admeld, Inc. in December 2011. Barrett joined Admeld as CEO in 2008, and under his leadership the company became the leading global supply side platform solution for premium publishers. Prior to Admeld, Barrett worked at Fox Interactive Media as Executive Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer, where he oversaw worldwide revenue for all properties including MySpace and FoxSports.com and worked closely with Levinsohn. Before that, Barrett served as Executive Vice President of Sales and Partnerships at AOL Media Networks and held senior sales positions at interactive leaders Yahoo!, GeoCities and Disney Online.

“Yahoo! is one of the largest and most iconic Internet companies in the world,” said Barrett. “I am grateful for this opportunity to work with Ross and a group of immensely talented and energized people, all focused on driving Yahoo’s leadership and strategic position on a global basis. I am looking forward to contributing everything I can to that effort.”

In his new role at Yahoo!, which he will assume in early July, Barrett will be part of the senior executive team, reporting directly to Levinsohn.

The Los Angeles-based company has not raised institutional funding yet, but is backed by its founders along with Brody Jenner, stepbrother to Kim Kardashian and son of Olympic decathlete Bruce Jenner (see right).

Jenner has already been busy hyping RocketFrog on his official Facebook fan page, which has more than 58,000 likes, by asking fans to join him in poker tournaments for the chance to win $5 Amazon gift cards.

Additionally, the company said that Myspace founder Tom Anderson will join RocketFrog’s advisory board.

Besides its star-studded alliances, the company’s free-to-play Facebook game stands apart from other casino-based games because it allows players to win a variety of prizes, ranging from movie tickets to music, food and more.

Games include blackjack, slots, roulette, deuces wild and video poker, and prizes during the game’s first month include brands such as Creative Recreation, Steve Angello of Swedish House Mafia, Young and Reckless, World of Dance, Abbey Dawn by Avril Lavigne and Paul Oakenfold.

Many companies are scrambling to gain large casino audiences on Facebook now that it appears that online gambling will become legal in the U.S.

Late last year, the Department of Justice issued a new interpretation of the Wire Act of 1961. Under the new ruling, it interprets the act as only outlawing betting on sporting events — not all events and contests. With that clarification in place, it will now be up to each state to pass legislation outlining operating procedures.

A few companies, such as IGT, Zynga and Caesars Interactive, have already started to get ready and a few states have already passed laws.

RocketFrog’s founder Brett Calapp was previously the CEO and co-founder of Centaurus Games, a subscription-based gaming network that sold to PartyGaming in 2010. He was also the president of the Ultimate Blackjack Tour, an international gambling tour, online game network and hit television show on CBS.

Assuming Yahoo gives its interim CEO real power — either by making him its actual CEO, or at least letting him behave as if he has the job — then he’ll finally have full control of a giant media company. That’s something he’s been working toward for a long time, despite his rep as a guy who enjoys buying companies more than running them.

Just like his predecessors, Levinsohn will have to untie Yahoo’s knotty Asian problem. He’ll also have to spend time repairing relationships with Facebook and figuring out what to do with a Microsoft search deal that hasn’t been a huge success.

But if Levinsohn gets to run Yahoo the way he wants to run Yahoo, he’ll focus on getting the most out of its media business, because that’s his strength.

Bear in mind that this is still a huge business — the portal attracts some 700 million visitors a month, which helped it generate nearly $1 billion in ad sales last quarter. But that business is listing and under attack from Google, Facebook, and a swarm of nimble start-ups pulling eyeballs and dollars away.

If you want to get a sense of what Levinsohn may try to do next, it’s good to review what he did last year, when he had control of the company’s U.S. operations — and what he tried to do but couldn’t get done.

• Ads: Yahoo used to have one of the Web’s best sales operations, but those days are long gone. Levisonsohn spent much of 2011 trying to fix that. Part of that involved restaffing his team, and part of it was a strategy that was supposed to cut out some of the ad tech middlemen and allow the company to increase its yield on the ads it sold. Those moves, which included a would-be alliance between Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft, all went into a holding pattern when Scott Thompson took over in January. Levinsohn will try restarting that again now.
• M&A: Levinsohn has a reputation as a dealmaker because he’s made some pretty big deals. Most notably, he brought Myspace to News Corp. in 2005, then helped the company secure a $900 million ad deal with Google (News Corp. also owns this Web site). Last year, he tried to land another big fish, when he pushed to pursue Hulu. But Levinsohn couldn’t get buy-in from then-CEO Carol Bartz, and Hulu’s owners decided not to sell after all. I think Levinsohn would still be interested in the site under certain conditions, but he’d need more cash than he has on hand to do it. Selling off his Asian assets might make that possible. If he can’t land Hulu, I don’t see him chasing after Instagram-like companies with big price tags and no near-term revenue plans. I do see him making some plays on cheaper start-ups, as well as some technology plays, to shore up/replace the company’s very old infrastructure/platforms.

Over the many years I have covered Yahoo’s expected new interim CEO Ross Levinsohn, I have done several video interviews with him.

And, for my own amusement, I also have nicknamed him “The Hair,” due to his very impressive mane.

We’ll see how impressive the longtime digital media exec will be now that Levinsohn has become the latest head of the Silicon Valley Internet giant.

His job is only interim for now, but in selecting him, the Yahoo board is opting for a more media-centric approach.

Among his claims to fame: He was president of News Corp.’s Fox Interactive Media, where he bought the then-soaring Myspace social networking site. Levinsohn managed to get Google to fork over more than double its price in advertising guarantees and luckily left the company before it went off the rails.

He was also an exec at AltaVista, an early search pioneer, and was head of content and development at CBS Sportsline. Levinsohn also dabbled in investing at Fuse Capital, with current News Corp. digital head Jon Miller focused on digital media and communications companies.

When he was at Fuse, ironically, Levinsohn and Miller were also raised as possible board members by Carl Icahn, who has conducting a different proxy fight against Yahoo.

In the latest fighting, at least, Levinsohn appears the victor.

To assess him, here are two videos I did with him — one in 2007 when he was at Fuse and one from last year at our D: All Things Digital conference (I ask about his hair-care product at the very end).

I also added a recent mockumentary video that Levinsohn for Yahoo’s recent Newfront media presentations in New York, which is pretty funny (and, in Carol Bartz channeling, Levinson curses at the end!):

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120513/meet-the-man-i-call-the-hair-the-video-stylings-of-yahoos-newest-ceo-ross-levinsohn/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120508/myspace-in-privacy-policy-settlement-with-ftc/ http://allthingsd.com/20120508/myspace-in-privacy-policy-settlement-with-ftc/#comments Tue, 08 May 2012 19:45:33 +0000 Ben Fox Rubin http://allthingsd.com/?p=205459 Social-networking service Myspace settled allegations by the Federal Trade Commission that it misled millions of users about its sharing of personal information with advertisers, the FTC said.

The settlement, which comes amid social-networking heavyweight Facebook Inc.’s plans to go public, requires Myspace to implement a comprehensive privacy program, calls for regular and independent privacy assessments for the next 20 years, and bars the company from future privacy misrepresentations.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120508/myspace-in-privacy-policy-settlement-with-ftc/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120502/theres-a-robot-in-your-pocket/ http://allthingsd.com/20120502/theres-a-robot-in-your-pocket/#comments Wed, 02 May 2012 21:38:23 +0000 Amit Kapur http://allthingsd.com/?p=202678 When I was a kid, I dreamed of someday having my own robot. From HAL to R2D2 to KITT, robots were the ultimate technology in my eyes. They could do your chores, order you a pizza, finish your homework, and even warn you when danger was approaching. Today, I’m very excited to see my dream come true because, in fact, there is a robot in each of our pockets.

Let’s begin by drawing the distinction between a tool and a robot. Tools enable us to work more efficiently. Robots do the work for us (in fact, the original word robata means “hard work” in Czech). The vast majority of the Web sites and apps we use today are tools that enable us to work, play and share more efficiently. Over the last few years, through advances in artificial intelligence and data science, Web sites and apps are evolving. There is a new breed of applications focused entirely on working on our behalf. As humans, we constantly seek means to reduce the amount of work needed to reap rewards from a system. While the tools of today allow us to work less, the robots of the future will eliminate much of the work in the first place.

This incredible transformation is happening right before our eyes.

Your Search Robot

A long time ago, we would search for information by painstakingly looking up sources in a card catalog and reading a book. As much of that knowledge moved online, the directory (like Yahoo!) enabled us to browse and find content of interest. In time, the amount of information flowing online overwhelmed the directory — it would simply require too much work to browse the entire Web. Fortunately, a revolutionary tool, search — Google, really — made it very easy to find the documents that contain the answers we’re looking for. But while search presents us with a huge set of choices, it still takes a lot of work to find the answers.

Today, a new technology is eliminating that work by acting on our behalf to find the answers and even solve our problems. Siri is an artificial intelligence client that turns our devices into a virtual assistant. It removes the steps between searching for answers and finding them. Have a question about converting metric units? Ask Siri. Need to order your mother flowers? Let Siri handle that. Need to make dinner reservations for your date Friday? Let Siri do the work for you. And we’re just scratching the surface. We possess the vastness of all human knowledge in our pockets, yet much of our usage is limited to Angry Birds. This transformation to intelligent machines means we no longer have to work as hard to apply the knowledge locked in our devices; they’ll do the work for us.

Your Location Robot

In the 20th century, an enormous yellow book was delivered to our doorstep every year. We would heft this behemoth and flip through hundreds of pages to find a local business or restaurant of interest. Eventually, that process gave way to more efficient tools as local information moved online through apps like CitySearch and Yelp. Recently, via the mobile check-in, we can be presented places of interest and people near our current location. This new layer of geographical context is great, but checking in is still work.

Today, ambient location apps like Foursquare, Radar and Highlight are beginning to do that work for us. By passively monitoring our locations, they alert us to interesting people and places around us. Over time, as they learn our preferences, they’ll be able to filter these places and help us discover the best restaurants and people wherever we are. At last, we are within reach of the “Danger, your ex-girlfriend is in the area!” robot.

Your Personal Robot

Not that long ago, the primary way we would discover new media was through browsing a printed newspaper, magazine rack or record store. As this content moved online, it became much more accessible and real-time. As the option pool grows, we have to put in more and more work to find the content that’s interesting to each of us. There are more and better options than we could ever imagine. But it would take an incredible human effort to find all the needles in the growing haystack.

To address this, many Web sites have offered customization tools for users to focus their experience. But manual customization also requires a lot of work, and it usually fails to paint the rich, dynamic picture of who we are and what we like. Fortunately, a solution is emerging from companies like Pandora (and, full disclosure, my own company, Gravity). Using machine learning, these platforms get to know you based on the things you read about, listen to, or share. They can then move way beyond customization by generating adaptive, personalized experiences that bring the best content on any website or app right to the top. It completely shifts the paradigm from you having to search for information to information searching for you. It’s like having a personal robot who thinks just like you do reach across the Web and return the best music, stories, videos, even daily deals everywhere you go. “Welcome back to ESPN, Amit. The surf report in Venice tomorrow is 3-4 feet, and the Lakers are leading by 10 points at the half.”

All of this paints just a small picture of what’s to come. Imagine the applications in fields like education, health care, or personal finance (wouldn’t you love a robot that does your taxes?). As the Internet starts to work for us, it will enrich our lives in ways we can’t even imagine. I, for one, am very excited that my childhood dream of owning my own robot is finally coming true.

Amit Kapur is the CEO and co-founder of Gravity, a company that makes the Internet adaptive and personalized. He was formerly the COO of Myspace. As an early Myspace employee, he led the development and growth of Myspace Music and Myspace Mobile.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120502/theres-a-robot-in-your-pocket/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120411/l-a-stories-scarfing-up-big-media-at-gobbler-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20120411/l-a-stories-scarfing-up-big-media-at-gobbler-video/#comments Wed, 11 Apr 2012 19:31:58 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=195374

Another very interesting company I stumbled across in a funky building in Hollywood on my recent trip to Los Angeles is Gobbler, which bills itself as a “high-speed file transfer & backup for pro audio.”

In other words, a hopped-up version of Dropbox’s media-in-the-cloud efforts for cool music folks.

Armed with just over $3 million from angel investors like Sky Dayton, David Goldberg and others, the start-up is aiming to help media creators who need a lot more firepower, including backing up, transferring and organizing hefty music, video and photo files.

CEO Chris Kantrowitz knows whereof he speaks, as a designer of big music shows, including Coachella, the annual festival which takes place this weekend and next. He co-founded Gobbler with his sister, former Myspace exec Jamie Kantrowitz.

Here he is in a video interview with me talking about the future focus of the company, as well as where cloud storage is headed — Kantrowitz is one hep dude, so listen up:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120411/l-a-stories-scarfing-up-big-media-at-gobbler-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120224/caterina-fake-fast-growth-for-a-social-app-is-a-very-bad-thing/ http://allthingsd.com/20120224/caterina-fake-fast-growth-for-a-social-app-is-a-very-bad-thing/#comments Fri, 24 Feb 2012 19:00:12 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=177742 Social Web entrepreneurs with successful careers just can’t seem to find their way to a happy and boring retirement. Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake just announced Pinwheel, joining Ev Williams and Biz Stone of Twitter and now Obvious, Joshua Schachter of Delicious and now Jig, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen of YouTube and now Delicious, Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning of Napster and now Airtime, among others, back at the drawing board.

Sure, the new start-ups from these people have a long way to go before achieving the impact of their predecessors, and fresh new innovators like Pinterest and Voxer are popping up all the time. But the good thing is that the repeat entrepreneurs keep evolving their ideas about how people interact, share and express themselves online.

Photo courtesy of Robert Scoble

If you get her started, as I did yesterday, in a conversation at Pinwheel’s office in the Hayes Valley neighborhood of San Francisco, Caterina Fake sounds almost like a professor of social networking philosophy.

One particularly interesting theory of Fake’s is about how an online community should grow in its early days. She thinks the answer is very clear: Slowly.

That’s why Pinwheel, a tiny service that helps users create and find geotagged notes, already raised $9.5 million in funding from investors including Redpoint Ventures, True Ventures, Betaworks and others.

The funding is a way for Fake to beat back elevated expectations of how fast Pinwheel should grow, given her prior success, she said.

“My perspective is it takes a while to grow this stuff,” she said. “It takes time for the culture to grow. You need time to develop antibodies to spammers and trolls.”

The worst thing a social network can do is force growth, she said, pointing to Google’s work on Google+.

She pulled up a growth chart depicting the time it took for various services to reach 50 million users. Google+ took a stunning 88 days, versus 1,046 days for MySpace, for instance (shown here, chart credit goes to Leon Håland).

Adding user registrations at such a fast pace doesn’t leave enough time for a dedicated, engaged user community to organically create itself and establish norms, Fake argued.

“Being an incumbent, you can get seduced on this,” she said, pointing at the steep line for Google+. “It’s like getting high on your own supply.”

Fake added emphatically that the worst thing a start-up social network can do is to buy advertising to attract users. Growth should happen because users find value in a site, and then get their friends to join, she said.

And if users don’t come? Start-ups should try harder to make a better product.

That’s why Pinwheel plans to only slowly let in the tens of thousands of people on its email list, Fake said. And it’s why Pinwheel will ask users to write original notes, rather than filling the many empty places on its map with existing location-based content from around the Web. “We’re not going to suddenly metastasize by adding Wikipedia content,” Fake said.

Of course, 10 million dollars only gives Fake a window of time; there’s no guarantee that location-based storytelling will be a hit, or that Pinwheel will be the one to do it right.

If Pinwheel does end up working out, what it does may well change significantly, Fake admitted. Her advice to herself, and others: “You shouldn’t get attached to a feature set. You should get attached to a problem you’re solving.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120224/caterina-fake-fast-growth-for-a-social-app-is-a-very-bad-thing/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120203/facebooks-ipo-marks-the-end-of-the-web-2-0-era-the-social-web-is-the-new-king/ http://allthingsd.com/20120203/facebooks-ipo-marks-the-end-of-the-web-2-0-era-the-social-web-is-the-new-king/#comments Fri, 03 Feb 2012 18:47:57 +0000 Michael Jones http://allthingsd.com/?p=171191 I recently spent the weekend at a unique event that brought founders, entrepreneurs and investors together. I was fortunate enough to spend time with the original pioneer of social networking: Andrew Weinreich, the founder and original CEO of Sixdegrees.com. For those of you who don’t remember, prior to Facebook, Myspace and Friendster, there was Sixdegrees.com. Initially conceived as a way to manage relationships online, the early Web 1.0 company developed the concept and the product and patented many aspects of modern-day social networking. Through a variety of missteps, the company didn’t succeed (although the patents live on).

At one point, our conversation turned to the idea of a Social Operating System, something that becomes an underlying platform for all things we do online, that creates continual connectivity between you and and all your friends. As I look back over Facebook’s history and excitedly toward its future, I think we can all say that Facebook has essentially captured that vision. It has presented to us a world where applications run on top of a social infrastructure and where our identities travel throughout our digital experience with us through Facebook Connect. I could not be more impressed.

The way the principles of the social operating system continue to evolve will have a tremendous impact on our society.

First, marketing will change. Friend-to-friend marketing has already shown its strength as the driving force of growth for companies like Gilt Groupe, Uncovet.com and Fab.com, whereby you earn credits with the site by referring your friends to sign up. The idea of shifting traditional marketing spend to continually incentivizing your customers to market on your behalf is changing the way I look at developing systems. The idea, though it sounds simple, has many ramifications. For example, it requires new software to be built with a new set of metrics in order to understand how friend-to-friend marketing is working. It would also lower the cost per acquisition compared to traditional marketing spends.

Second, it’s the influencers who will have most of the power. As we become more and more reliant on our social graph for discovery, the less and less dependent we will become on traditional media. This is one of the principles that drives Twitter, Pinterist and YouTube adoption. We can see how effective is it with companies like ShoeDazzle and BeachMint, which build product lines around celebrities and influencers online. By doing this, they immediately drive higher sales. I theorize these influencer networks will be the next ad networks, having the sway to move audiences to new services and drive sales.

Lastly, these new principles of social software design will prevail. Built on top of platforms like Facebook, they will quickly replace older systems. In the last big wave of acquisitions, we saw media companies and portals buying start-ups to bring innovation inside. I believe the next set of acquirers will be from a wider, more distributed set of buyers — ranging from consumer product brands to financial companies — who are looking for innovators building the next generation of solutions on top of the social operating system. (Looking at the staggering growth rate of the socially-minded site Fab.com quickly reminds us that products built with social grow faster than those without.)

With Facebook’s IPO, the general public will be even more vested in its success and thus help to further boost Facebook’s exponential growth. Facebook’s investors will, in essence, collectively help to drive forward the innovation of social operating system platforms. In addition, any companies that rely on Facebook’s technology or its platform — such as Zynga, Renen and Snap Interactive — should also see a lift in value. This wave of new technology companies will reinvent, once again, the way we live online.

Now that Facebook has gone public, I think we can call the era of Web 2.0 over. The social web is taking its rightful place as the new king.

Michael Jones is the founder and CEO of technology studio Science. The former CEO of Myspace, Jones is a long-time entrepreneur, building and selling numerous successful online and mobile businesses. He is also an individual investor in numerous private start-ups, and, in full disclosure, holds stock in some of the companies listed above.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120203/facebooks-ipo-marks-the-end-of-the-web-2-0-era-the-social-web-is-the-new-king/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120130/apple-cheap/ http://allthingsd.com/20120130/apple-cheap/#comments Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:31:28 +0000 Rupert Murdoch http://allthingsd.com/?p=168759

Nothing wrong with MySpace price. Just our totally screwing up every way. Agree Facebook revenues will zoom, but still Apple cheap.

— Rupert Murdoch, via Twitter

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120130/apple-cheap/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20120125/honest-jessica-albas-now-an-e-commerce-geek-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20120125/honest-jessica-albas-now-an-e-commerce-geek-video/#comments Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:05:48 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=167303

From the Web 1.0 Matt Damon-Ben Affleck debacle to the stunt-casting of Justin Timberlake as a Myspace impresario and everything in between, I have been more than dubious about any online effort by a celebrity.

Not surprisingly, it is usually a lot of special effects but little in the way of substance, from an entrepreneurial point of view.

So it was nice to be actually impressed by actress Jessica Alba’s fledgling effort to break into online commerce, via a new site called the Honest Company.

Using an interesting online subscription model and aimed at the modern mom, Honest sells its own private-label, eco-friendly and hipster baby diapers and biodegradable wipes, as well as organic bath/skin care and green cleaning products.

Alba, who is Honest’s president and one of its co-founders, was inspired to bootstrap the start-up after having kids and being confused as to how to find nontoxic products for them in a marketplace of questionable offerings.

Thus, she and Christopher Gavigan, author of “Healthy Child Healthy World,” hooked up with an experienced entrepreneur — Brian Lee, co-founder of ShoeDazzle and LegalZoom — to create Honest, which just launched.

Selling its own products using a monthly “bundle” model differentiates Honest from comparable sites, such as Gwyneth Paltrow’s GOOP, which focuses on classy recommendations of a wide variety of similar fare.

Right now, the online-only Honest effort is using Alba’s high profile and online clout — many millions of fans and followers on social sites like Facebook and Twitter, for example; and also viral marketing, via mommy bloggers — to get noticed.

But the proof will be if Honest can keep its customers coming back every month for more, as it expands its line. (So far, the reviews of the products have been raves, such as this one from salt & nectar.)

Here’s Alba talking about Honest with Lee, in a video interview at the company’s Santa Monica, Calif., HQ:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120125/honest-jessica-albas-now-an-e-commerce-geek-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120123/facebooks-blake-ross-leads-dont-be-evil-effort-to-restore-diverse-social-results-in-google-search/ http://allthingsd.com/20120123/facebooks-blake-ross-leads-dont-be-evil-effort-to-restore-diverse-social-results-in-google-search/#comments Mon, 23 Jan 2012 14:00:45 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=166266 Google’s recent move to promote its own social network on its search engine wasn’t popular with its competitors. Now some engineers from Facebook and other social media sites are fighting back. They’re out to prove that Google can do better — using Google’s own algorithms.

Nerd fight!

Blake Ross

A weekend coding effort, led by Facebook rabble-rouser Blake Ross, gave birth to a browser bookmarklet called “don’t be evil” that rewrites Google’s personalized search results to include content from other social networks. (Ross’s official title is Director of Product, and he was previously a co-founder of Firefox.)

Ross said engineers from Twitter and Myspace also helped out with the bookmarklet, but he didn’t name them. The group launched a Web site today, at focusontheuser.org.

This gets slightly complicated, but you can install the bookmarklet yourself in Chrome, Firefox and Safari, or watch a video about how it works. After you do a normal Google search with personalized results turned on, you can click on the bookmarklet to get an updated version of the results that includes links to Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, Quora, Tumblr, Foursquare, CrunchBase, FriendFeed, Stack Overflow, GitHub and Google+.

I ran into a bunch of hiccups when I tried the bookmarklet out in Chrome, but it worked pretty smoothly in Firefox.

Here’s the background: A couple of weeks ago, when it launched “Search plus Your World” by default for English-language users, Google said that other social networks like Facebook and Twitter don’t let it crawl deeply enough to provide “secure and consistent access” to their users’ private content. So, SPYW could, for the most part, only include Google+ content.

That’s a bit of a ruse, because there’s lots of public content from social networks that Google already indexes. It’s not hard to find Twitter handles and LinkedIn profiles in Google search results. When SPYW launched, Twitter loudly called foul, and people at Facebook complained more quietly.

The thing is, SPYW doesn’t just give preference to private Google+ content in personalized search results. It also actively promotes Google+ profiles and other public content in various locations throughout the search page.

Google+ profiles — but not content from any other social network — now show up in a new “People and Pages” box that sometimes appears in place of ads on the right side of Google’s search-results page, as a type-ahead suggested query within the search box, and interspersed high up in search results for many brands.

Ross and his buddies used Google’s own organic search results and “Rich Snippets” tool to find the social network content that Google already indexes and ranks normally. The bookmarklet then integrates those diverse results into places where Google+ content is exclusively promoted.

This was an independent and unofficial effort, but Facebook is hardly disavowing it. In fact, a Facebook spokesman praised Ross’s voice-over talent (that’s him speaking in the video) in an email to AllThingsD.

While this feistiness makes for a fun story, the moral high ground might be a dangerous spot for Ross to claim.

Facebook notoriously hoards its members’ friend graphs and user emails, doling out access only to partners that it doesn’t see as direct competitors. Users who wish to remove and transport their data to another service are stifled at every turn.

Further, Facebook limits access to search engines, having required Microsoft’s Bing to sign a deal to access content that’s mostly public already. And it’s not like the company provides its own democratic search engine to compete with Google.

(Photo credit: Flickr user StampyTurtle)

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120123/facebooks-blake-ross-leads-dont-be-evil-effort-to-restore-diverse-social-results-in-google-search/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120114/pirates-rupert-murdoch-rails-about-obama-google-and-silicon-valley/ http://allthingsd.com/20120114/pirates-rupert-murdoch-rails-about-obama-google-and-silicon-valley/#comments Sun, 15 Jan 2012 03:14:10 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=163831 On Friday, Rupert Murdoch and his top executives gathered for a daylong private confab in Las Vegas to think big thoughts about digital stuff. I’m guessing there wasn’t a session entitled “How Great is Google?”

On Saturday, the News Corp. CEO used his new Twitter account to rail against the search giant, call it a “piracy leader,” and gripe that it had too much influence in Washington, and the White House, in particular. (Here we need to remind you that News Corp. owns this Web site.) Business Insider has all four of his “Internet makes me angry” tweets (Update: He’s back at it! More below), including the one he deleted, but here are the two relevant ones:

So Obama has thrown in his lot withSilicon Valley paymasters who threaten allsoftware creators with piracy, plain thievery. -

— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) January 14, 2012

 

Piracy leader is Google who streams movies free, sells advts around them.No wonder pouring millions into lobbying. — Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) January 14, 2012

That amounts to an open invitation for Web pundits to sound off, which they were happy to accept. Techmeme is studiously collecting those responses, but the one I like best so far comes from Om Malik:

.@rupertmurdoch you weren’tcomplaining much when google was paying you big ad dollars for MySpace, that hosted some “pirate” stuff #SOPA

— Om Malik (@om) January 14, 2012

The obvious point to make here is that Murdoch’s venting (which his legal and PR handlers would love to quell, but can’t) was spurred by the White House statement which deflated the SOPA and PIPA antipiracy bills today. It’s also not the first time Murdoch has sounded off about Google.

In 2009, he went on a similar anti-Google crusade, though that one was more measured and planned, and involved many of his lieutenants. But do remember that in Rupe’s world, cursing loudly at someone doesn’t mean you can’t do business with them. A year after Murdoch was threatening to boycott Google, he cut a new deal with them. I’m sure it won’t be the last.

Speaking of Murdoch’s lieutenants: We’ll have his top one, chief operating office Chase Carey, at our D: Dive Into Media conference at the end of the month. And we’ll have a high-ranking rep from Google, too: YouTube CEO Salar Kamangar. Guess we’ll have to revisit this with both of them: Grab a front-row seat.

Update: Just like a lot of fellow Twitter users, Murdoch is having a hard time disengaging. Two more here:

Understand more than all allege!Google great company doing many exciting things. Only one complaint, and it’s important.

— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) January 15, 2012

Just been to google search for mission impossible. Wow, several sites offering free links.I rest my case.

— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) January 15, 2012

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