I spoke with Drchrono co-founder Daniel Kivatinos this week about the company’s next step, which he said will be an iOS app for patients to store their health insurance and personal information, so they can easily transmit it to doctors. “PatientPad” is planned for release in about two months.

Drchrono already has an app for doctors that helps them track patients’ appointments, records, photos and videos and prescriptions. It is used by about 1,600 doctors, who pay monthly fees for premium features like phone support, speech-to-text and notifications.

The intent for the free “PatientPad” app is to connect to all sorts of personal monitoring device APIs directly to doctors, so a user can control all of his or her medical communications. Patients can use the system independently of whether their doctors use the existing Drchrono app (assuming their doctors will accept such information electronically).

But breaking into the medical industry is hard. Drchrono isn’t even trying to get hospitals to adopt its apps–instead, it’s looking to single-doctor practices. The 2.5-year-old company has moved from New York City to Mountain View, Calif., in part to raise funding.

Kivatinos said he hopes to bring a scrappy consumer market sensibility–honed through participation in the Y Combinator program–to healthcare. Getting doctors on board may require a sales team, but helping patients avoid filling out those annoying paper forms and faxing in records may be something that spreads more easily.

In reality, storing personal records is unlikely to be highly viral, but it may get the word out among patients who then tell their doctors to try Drchrono’s other apps.

Other upcoming PatientPad features, said Kivatinos, may include real-time FaceTime video chats with doctors and emergency doctor searches, where users can trigger an SMS to see who is available and at what price when they need assistance at night or on a weekend.

Kivatinos also has another distribution trick up his sleeve, and it has more to do with timing and circumstance than being scrappy: Pending certification, Drchrono apps will make participating U.S. physicians eligible for $44,000 in economic stimulus incentives for adopting electronic health records.

The start-up, as we’ve written before, was founded by an Apple designer prodigy named Mike Matas. “Our Choice” was first demoed at TED, where Matas wowed the crowd by activating a wind turbine demo within the book by blowing on his iPad and iPhone.

The most distinctive part of the book platform seems to be the ability to pull any multimedia off the page with a two-finger gesture and browse around infographics with one finger (and occasionally your breath). But now that the book’s available, you can buy it for yourself here or watch the tour guided by Al Gore below.

Other iPad-focused interactive book makers include Inkling and 955 Dreams.

Because while the country is a key global market, doing business there is rife with all kinds of thorny challenges and troublesome compromises.

So, despite its progressively weaker denials, numerous sources said Facebook is preparing to launch in China. Now, the social networking giant is working out the details of a localized Chinese offering and trying to execute them as quickly as is prudent.

Perhaps the most important detail of Facebook’s planned China offering is that it will likely be connected to the greater international Facebook community, rather than operated as an independent social network.

While some had advised Facebook to start with a closed Chinese service, sources said the company seems inclined to launch it as a network linked to the rest of the world.

That’s not a decision without controversy, due to the strictures of operating within an authoritarian state.

When Facebook users outside China connect with users inside China, sources said they will need to click through a warning that any material visible to Chinese users may also be visible to the Chinese government.

Over the past few weeks, NetworkEffect has spoken to numerous sources in and around Facebook about how Facebook.cn will come to be.

Picking a Partner

As has been reported elsewhere, Facebook will almost certainly launch its China version in partnership with Baidu.

While Facebook insists that no deal has been signed with anyone, sources within and around the company described Baidu as the most serious competitor.

Alibaba had also been in the running, but sources said its leaders had voiced disagreement with Facebook’s vision for connecting Chinese users to one global social graph, rather than first starting with a closed system.

Alibaba advised the more conservative approach, given that the Chinese political situation is currently quite tricky and the U.S. government would likely find fault with Facebook seeming to play any role in censoring its users in China, said sources.

A source familiar with those talks said of Facebook’s inclination to go with Baidu over Alibaba, “It was an issue of Mr. Right Now instead of Mr. Right.”

Other partners considered included Sina, Tencent and China Mobile, but Sina and Tencent have their own social offerings that were judged to be too competitive with Facebook, said sources.

In the meantime, Baidu–often called the Google of China–is very much like Google in that it has little in the way of social strategy.

Facebook, led by its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, has increased its sense of urgency about having a presence in China. Zuckerberg visited China in December, where he met with entrepreneurs from Baidu, Sina and China Mobile.

Baidu leaders then came to visit Facebook twice in February, at which point some say a deal to work together was struck, although Facebook emphatically denies any official papers have been signed.

Facebook’s current official statement on the matter: “We are currently studying and learning about China, as part of evaluating any possible approaches that could benefit our users, developers and advertisers.”

Baidu had no comment.

The Perfect Time Is Never

Facebook, which is currently blocked in China, finds the market hard to resist despite the ethical implications of cooperating with its government. Zuckerberg said in an interview at Stanford last fall that Facebook determined in 2010 that China was one of the four remaining target countries it was not yet “winning or on a path to win,” along with Korea, Japan and Russia.

Of China, Zuckerberg said specifically: “How can you connect the whole world if you leave out 1.6 billion people?”

Leaders at the company–whose mission is to “make the world more open and connected”–feel it is important to include Chinese users as part of the larger global social network, rather than keeping them separate. The solution they have apparently arrived at is to show the warning messages about connections between the larger Facebook network and the Chinese-censored Facebook.

That sentiment could be looked at as laudable–as it brings a modicum of openness to China–or cynical, in that it requires a major ethical compromise.

That said, Facebook already employs censorship in several countries it operates in currently, such as Pakistan and Germany, in order to abide by local laws.

“It was a very active dialogue inside the company, but there was no other way to operate in China,” said a person familiar with the discussions.

And there aren’t good examples of American Internet companies successfully operating in China for Facebook to draw inspiration from.

Google’s internal moral dilemmas about operating in China are well known. But while Google is primarily a search engine, Facebook’s product is a platform for communication and organizing.

The situation in China is even more challenging following revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa that have been closely tied to Facebook and social media.

Facebook has been careful not to claim any credit for popular uprisings or to align itself as a force of democracy, but others outside the company have made those connections for it.

Facebook currently has about 400,000 active Chinese users, many of whom access the site by evading the so-called “Great Firewall of China” through use of virtual private networks.

Meanwhile, social sites within China are rocketing up in usage and becoming financially significant. Sina Weibo, which is much like Twitter, is said to have something like 100 million users.

And RenRen, the social network that has followed Facebook’s execution step by step, has filed to go public on the New York Stock Exchange with a $4 billion valuation.

Sources close to Facebook said that RenRen’s U.S. fundraising, in particular, is a significant motivator for Facebook to launch its China offering sooner rather than later.

“I would not discount the need for Facebook not to sit by and watch a significant competitor gain that much advantage,” said one person close to the situation.

Nuts and Bolts

Under discussions now taking place, sources said Facebook’s proposed plan could have Facebook and Baidu share the cost of setting up servers in China, and share revenue from the local version of the site. The local partner, Baidu, would presumably manage the censoring of the site and ongoing dealings with Chinese authorities.

As described above, when users outside China opt to connect to those inside China, they would see a warning message about the Chinese government.

As we all know, users are notoriously good at clicking through pop-up warnings without reading them, although this one is sure to get more notice.

Facebook could also use a combination of what it calls input filters and display filters, where Chinese users won’t be able to post or view content that’s objectionable to the Chinese government, but the rest of Facebook can run normally, sources said.

It will be a somewhat complicated technological endeavor to ensure that non-Chinese portions of the site don’t get stored in China.

Finally, Palo Alto, Calif.-based Facebook is considering sending a small group of its employees to help manage operations, but sources close to the company said this issue is still being debated due to safety considerations related to China’s oppressive government.

Ready, Set, Controversy

Net Jacobsson, who led Facebook’s previous effort to enter China–a translated version of the site that was launched around the time of the Beijing Olympics and was live for only a few days before being blocked–said in an interview with NetworkEffect that it’s not just entering China that’s difficult, but what comes after.

Jacobsson is no longer with the company and said he does not have direct knowledge of its current plans.

In addition to complying with rules forbidding political speech, gambling and pornography, as well as government requests for user information, American companies operating in China have to deal with ruthless local competition and incensed and vocal politicians in the United States.

“It will be difficult just trying to manage those two different worlds in a world that is so transparent,” Jacobsson said.

Obviously, Facebook getting involved in censorship in China will be a difficult concept for many people to swallow. In China, censorship is largely expected and normal and citizens are used to reading between the lines.

In the U.S., it’s considered a serious compromise of freedom.

Sources close to Facebook maintain that the company already censors some user contributions in accordance with local laws in Germany, Pakistan and Italy, so abiding by Chinese censorship rules is consistent.

But China’s size, importance and–more to the point–its suppression of free speech are unmatched.

(Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.)

Daytum is at least the third New York-based company Facebook has acquired, and its founders will be moving west to join the Facebook product design team at its headquarters.

AllThingsD Associate Editor Drake Martinet profiled Daytum earlier this year. As he put it:

For data nerds everywhere, the pinnacle of numerical navel-gazing has, at least since 2005, been Nicholas Felton’s beautifully designed “Annual Reports” on the numbers behind his personal behavior.

He has meticulously recorded, quantified, analyzed and laid out all manner of data from his life in a series that riffs on the annual reports that businesses issue to their shareholders.

Instead of earnings and capital expenditure statements, Felton’s reports are full of numbers like cost-per-mile-run at the gym and how many hours he worked from home versus office.

And now, of course, there’s an app for that.

Embedded below is Drake’s video interview with Felton from January:

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Their first move is not an obvious one: they are buying the neglected remains of the Delicious social bookmarking site from Yahoo for an undisclosed amount.

AVOS promises that Delicious users can continue to use the site after they accept a new privacy policy. The company’s first priority, according to an FAQ, is launching a new Firefox 4 extension.

Hurley and Chen, both immensely rich from their success with YouTube, are no longer running the Google-owned video site’s day-to-day operations. Chen left as CTO circa June 2009, while Hurley officially handed over CEO duties to Salar Kamangar in October 2010.

Delicious was acquired by Yahoo in 2005. Founder Joshua Schachter is now running a new company, Tasty Labs. Yahoo had announced internally that it would “sunset” Delicious in December.

Here’s the full release and statement from Yahoo:

Yahoo! Statement
Today YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen announced they have acquired the Delicious technology from Yahoo!. They plan to continue the service that users have come to know and love and make the site even easier and more fun to save, share and discover the web’s “tastiest” content.

Providing a smooth transition for users is important to both companies. There will be a transition period where users can elect to sign up for a new account. Users’ public and private bookmarks will be maintained through the transition period and transferred as they are today when it is complete.

As we have said, part of our product strategy involves shifting our investment with off-strategy products to put better focus on our core strengths and fund new innovation. We believe this is the right move for the service, our users and our shareholders and look forward to watching the Delicious technology develop.

Press Release
YOUTUBE FOUNDERS ACQUIRE DELICIOUS FROM YAHOO!

Promise Users the Same Great Service And Even Easier & More Fun Ways To Save, Share, and Discover the Web’s “Tastiest” Content.

San Francisco, CA., – April 26, 2011 – Delicious.com, the leading social bookmarking service, has been acquired by the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. As creators of the largest online video platform, they have firsthand experience enabling millions of users to share their experiences with the world. Their vision for Delicious is to continue to provide the same great service users love and to make the site even easier and more fun to save, share, and discover the web’s “tastiest” content. Delicious will become part of AVOS, a new Internet company.

“We’re excited to work with this fantastic community and take Delicious to the next level,” said Chad Hurley, CEO of AVOS. “We see a tremendous opportunity to simplify the way users save and share content they discover anywhere on the web.”

“We spoke with numerous parties interested in acquiring the site, and chose Chad and Steve based on their passion and unique vision for Delicious,” said John Matheny, SVP of Communications and Communities at Yahoo!.

The YouTube founders plan to work closely with the community over the next few months to develop innovative features to help solve the problem of information overload. “We see this problem not just in the world of video, but also cutting across every information-intensive media type,” said Chen.

Going back to their roots, Hurley and Chen located Delicious in downtown San Mateo, California, blocks away from where they started YouTube. They’re aggressively hiring to build a world-class team to take on the challenge of building the best information discovery service on the web.

About Delicious
Delicious is the leading social bookmarking service for saving, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. Started in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005, Delicious has built a passionate, worldwide community of millions of users. In 2011, Delicious was acquired by the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. Previously, they co-founded YouTube, the world’s largest video site in 2005, which was acquired by Google 18 months later for $1.76B. Delicious is part of AVOS, a new Internet company based in San Mateo, California.

Khosla Ventures confirmed Yu’s departure and said, “we wish him all the best.”

Yu joined Khosla Ventures in August 2009 and led the firm’s investments in Square and Hunch. Sources said Yu is likely to remain on the board of mobile payments company Square, but that his involvement with other portfolio companies like Meebo and Hunch has not yet been determined.

Yu has played many roles in Silicon Valley, including CFO of Facebook (he left in 2009 after fighting with Mark Zuckerberg), VC at Sequoia Capital, CFO at YouTube when it was sold to Google, and treasurer at Yahoo.

He is also a huge sports fan. Fellow Niners fans can hope Yu’s expertise in strategy trickles down to the offense.

Update: The 49ers have issued a press release:

SAN FRANCISCO 49ERS HIRE GIDEON YU AS CHIEF STRATEGY OFFICER
Former CFO of Facebook and YouTube Joins 49ers

The San Francisco 49ers today announced they have named Gideon Yu Chief Strategy Officer. Yu will be responsible for maximizing the team’s strategic and business prospects, as well as developing new businesses and revenue streams. He will work closely on the Santa Clara stadium project with 49ers Chief Financial Officer Larry MacNeil and Executive Vice President, Stadium Project Patty Inglis, to make sure the organization is ready for construction in 2013. Yu will also play a key leadership role in identifying and integrating new technology into the new stadium, and will focus on delivering the team’s goal to make it an environmentally sustainable building.

“Gideon’s tremendous wealth of experience will help us accomplish our goal of financing the stadium for construction starting in January 2013,” said 49ers President & CEO Jed York. “He will focus on developing an environmentally sustainable building that is also a showcase of innovation.”

“I am extremely excited about this new challenge with the San Francisco 49ers,” said Yu. “Having been privileged enough to work with so many successful organizations throughout my career, I look forward to contributing that experience to the 49ers business and stadium operations. Our goal will be to establish the 49ers among the most technologically advanced sports franchises in the world.”

Yu has had an extensive and successful career in finance, strategy and operations. Most notably, he was the Chief Financial Officer of both Facebook and YouTube, as well as the Senior Vice President & Treasurer of Yahoo!. He was most recently a General Partner at Khosla Ventures, where he led their investment in Square and was its first outside board member. He also previously worked at both Disney and Hilton. Yu earned his BS in Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management from Stanford and his MBA from Harvard.

Yu is active philanthropically, sitting on the boards of the UCSF Foundation, Tipping Point Community and BUILD.

Costa most recently did a short stint as an intern at Facebook and prior to that was a manager of developer products at Google for four years. He told Twitter developers in a posting on their Google group (picked up by ReadWriteWeb) that the company will “be holding a developer-focused event at the Twitter headquarters in a few weeks, so keep an eye out for a registration announcement here later this week.”

This is in line with Twitter telling NetworkEffect that it’s not currently planning a large-scale developer event like last year’s Chirp conference, but developers were of course quick to criticize Costa for presuming that they’ll travel to San Francisco on short notice.

Klout went through a lot of change in the last year. It went from two to 30 employees. It raised $8.5 million in venture capital from Kleiner Perkins and Greycroft Partners. It tweaked its influence ranking algorithm many times (often tweaking the people who have come to depend on it, who sometimes saw their score lowered). It moved to a funky new office in a former shoe warehouse in San Francisco’s hippest start-up neighborhood, SOMA.

And last but not least, Klout had to deal with exponential increases in the amount of data it processes and delivers each month. For example, the company is now on track to process about 1 billion API calls per month, up from 100 million in January of this year. That’s just insane.

What Klout didn’t do in that time is change its Web site, or make clear to visitors what its business model is and who it is serving. The company is trying to do that today.

Klout CEO Joe Fernandez describes what his company offers as a “social credit score.” He told NetworkEffect, “We want to be a standard. We want everyone to know their Klout score.”

Meanwhile, all sorts of companies are finding Klout useful. The company, which has only ever responded to inbound sales queries, according to Fernandez, has run campaigns for Audi and Hewlett-Packard, and works with Nike and Disney on an ongoing basis.

(Fernandez is pictured above wearing his custom Klout Nikes; in the video below he explains why it’s more interesting to help people understand their influence rather than companies understand who is influential.)

While Justin Bieber may have the highest Klout score of all–a perfect 100–effective campaigns often target people in the 40 to 60 range, who are topically influential rather than “mega superstars,” as Fernandez put it. (I don’t take freebies, but I’m apparently in the sweet spot, with a Klout score of 53.)

Klout finds these influential social media users and emails them about special, often local, promotions–say, a trip to Toronto to inaugurate Virgin America’s service there (which has since been discontinued, sadly), or a free laptop from HP, or a weekend in Napa using the new Audi A8.

Recipients of Klout’s emails about free stuff–which are not contingent on tweeting about the goodies–open the emails 80 percent of the time and opt in 70 percent of the time, said Fernandez. And because the promotions are so targeted and have measurable influence over their followers, the effective CPM that brands pay is “still really low,” he claimed.

But Klout feels it’s important to clarify that it is a consumer-focused business. “We’ve thought of 16 possible businesses but the only place we make money is campaigns,” Fernandez said. “We want to be Google, not comScore,” he said, explaining that he means it’s more valuable to be an enabler of many businesses than an analytics seller.

Klout’s business is similar (but not necessarily directly competitive) to other social endorsement companies that use its free API, like Ad.ly and MyLikes (Update: A representative for MyLikes comments that the company has stopped using Klout.). That’s an overlap the company is well aware of, said Fernandez. “We’re a company that’s built on everyone else’s API, so we have to be cool about it and let the market evolve,” he said. “Five hundred of the 2,000 [companies using the Klout API today] are probably doing things that compete with things we may want to do.”

See also: Our interview with researcher Duncan Watts on the temptation of understanding influence.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110425/klout-redesigns-to-emphasize-personal-influence-video/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20110425/google-buys-mobile-customer-feedback-start-up/ http://allthingsd.com/20110425/google-buys-mobile-customer-feedback-start-up/#comments Tue, 26 Apr 2011 01:02:23 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=5895 Google has acquired TalkBin, a customer feedback system for local businesses, as was first reported by TechCrunch. The five-month-old company was only founded as part of Y Combinator’s winter batch, so this is a ridiculously early exit. There are many similar start-ups, including Skweal and Tello.

From what I can gather on LinkedIn and Quora, the team is two young guys from Yale and UC Davis (Michael Ma and Sunny Dhillon) and a Harvard Business School CEO with experience at Bosch and Sears (Qasar Younis). Dhillon had previously worked at Google as a software engineer, but only since graduating college in 2010. The TalkBin crew will work with Google’s mobile and local teams in Mountain View, the companies said.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110425/google-buys-mobile-customer-feedback-start-up/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110425/facebook-pushes-private-sharing-with-new-send-button/ http://allthingsd.com/20110425/facebook-pushes-private-sharing-with-new-send-button/#comments Mon, 25 Apr 2011 19:00:22 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=5880 In a move to support private sharing, Facebook today is launching a companion to its public “Like” button for publishers called the “Send” button.

While to “Like” a Web page is to share your appreciation for it with all your Facebook friends, display it publicly on your profile, and allow the Web site you have “Liked” to publish updates to your Facebook news feed, the “Send” button shares the page with a smaller group on a case-by-case basis.

When a user clicks to “Send” a page on a participating site–launch partners include Gilt Groupe, 1-800-Flowers.com, Huffington Post, People.com, Orbitz and Last.fm–he or she can type in the names of individual Facebook friends, Facebook groups, or email addresses (click to enlarge the screenshot below).

On those participating sites, the “Like” button will appear right next to the “Send” button. Other publishers, including the 2.5 million that already use the “Like” button, can add the “Send” button with a short bit of code.

Though this terminology may be confusing for users, as well as for Web sites that already offer many ways to share their content, it reflects a commitment by Facebook to private sharing.

Facebook is often accused of overreaching to make user activity more public. Many people interpret the company’s trajectory as an ongoing progression toward more exposure of users’ private information for the purposes of advertising. And the public nature of the “Like” button is at the center of that thesis.

But the “Send” button does the opposite: it only shares a Web page privately with a select group.

Facebook’s tools for private sharing are its user message system and its Groups feature, launched last October. The company said today that more than 50 million Facebook Groups have been created, many of them dedicated to families, roommates and co-workers. Along with the “Send” button, Facebook is giving Groups additional features today, including photo albums, polls, and administrator roles.

Will private sharing displace public sharing? “There’s a lot of content that isn’t relevant to everyone,” said Facebook Director of Product Peter Deng in a phone interview with NetworkEffect this morning. He said that lots of content goes unshared on Facebook because it is not appropriate for a user’s entire group of friends. Often it’s mundane things, or highly personal things, that go unshared.

“When I got my wedding photos I made those public, but when I was planning the wedding and the bachelor party, that communication is more intimate,” Deng said.

“We see the private communication as supplementing the rest of communication on Facebook,” Deng said. “We haven’t seen status updates or photo sharing going down at all [since the launch of Groups],” he added.

Meanwhile, Google recently introduced its own version of the “Like” button called +1, which allows users to show their approval of search results. It is entirely public.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110425/facebook-pushes-private-sharing-with-new-send-button/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110425/wael-ghonim-visits-silicon-valley-but-leaves-google/ http://allthingsd.com/20110425/wael-ghonim-visits-silicon-valley-but-leaves-google/#comments Mon, 25 Apr 2011 17:00:43 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=5869 Wael Ghonim, the Google executive detained by the Egyptian government who reluctantly became the face of the Egyptian people’s revolution after helping organize protesters using social media, will leave Google to start an NGO. Ghonim tweeted this weekend, “Decided to take a long term sabbatical from @Google & start a technology focused NGO to help fight poverty & foster education in #Egypt.”

Ghonim had been in Silicon Valley last week to visit Google, Twitter, and Dogpatch Labs. Googlers gave him a standing ovation at an appearance at a company staff meeting that was described as “emotional.”

In a speech at Stanford University organized by the school’s Muslim Student Awareness Network, Ghonim “spent the bulk of his talk outlining practical steps that can be taken to rebuild Egypt, calling upon his audience to mimic the ‘independent initiative’ of the protestors,” according to a campus newspaper report. He also invited attendees to sign up to help Egypt on a Google Doc.

Ghonim has given much credit to the Internet and specifically Facebook for helping facilitate the Egyptian uprising.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110425/wael-ghonim-visits-silicon-valley-but-leaves-google/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110425/how-google-killed-gdrive-and-spiked-its-skype-acquisition/ http://allthingsd.com/20110425/how-google-killed-gdrive-and-spiked-its-skype-acquisition/#comments Mon, 25 Apr 2011 11:00:52 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=5851 This weekend I spent some time reading Steven Levy’s “In the Plex,” an account of the history of Google based on Levy’s deep embedding within the company (see Kara’s video interview with Levy from last week). The book as a whole is captivating, so I thought it might be worth highlighting a couple anecdotes about internal Google conflicts that previously never saw the light of day.

Levy relates that Sundar Pichai (the recently appointed SVP of Chrome who has been leading Google’s software projects for years) spiked Google’s GDrive storage service just prior to launch because he thought it was out of line with the cloud-based future. (Both Pichai and GDrive leader Bradley Horowitz spoke to Levy directly for his book.)

Google was about to launch a project it had been developing for more than a year, a free cloud-based storage service called GDrive. But Sundar had concluded that it was an artifact of the style of computing that Google was about to usher out the door. He went to Bradley Horowitz, the executive in charge of the project, and said, “I don’t think we need GDrive anymore.” Horowitz asked why not. “Files are so 1990,” said Pichai. “I don’t think we need files anymore.”

Horowitz was stunned. “Not need files anymore?”

“Think about it,” said Pichai. “You just want to get information into the cloud. When people use our Google Docs, there are no more files. You just start editing in the cloud, and there’s never a file.”

…Eventually they won people over by a logical argument–that it could be done, that it was the cloudlike thing to do, that it was the Google thing to do. That was the end of GDrive: shuttered as a relic of antiquated thinking even before Google released it. The engineers working on it went to the Chrome team.

In another longer section, Levy describes how Google product manager Wesley Chan, who had pushed for the company’s GrandCentral acquisition and was leading development on Google Voice, concocted and executed a plan to block Google from buying Skype, which it was seriously considering. (The timing and order of these events isn’t made explicit, which is a recurring issue through the book, but I’m a niggler for those details.)

Chan apparently bragged directly to Levy about his machinations:

With [Salar Kamangar and Sergey Brin] on board, Chan devised a plan to kill the Skype purchase. As he later described it, his scheme involved “laying grenades” at the executive meeting where the purchase was up for approval. Chan tricked the business development executive who was pushing the acquisition into thinking that he was in favor of the deal: he had even prepared a PowerPoint presentation with all the reasons Google should buy Skype. Chan says that halfway through the presentation, though, the trap sprang. Brin suddenly began asking questions that the deck didn’t address. “Who’s going to run this?” he demanded. “Not me,” said Kamangar. Craig Walker said he had two kids in school and wasn’t about to make regular runs to Eastern Europe. “What are the regulatory risks?” A lawyer said it might take months to get approval. Finally, Brin looked at Chan and asked why Google would want to take the risk to begin with. Chan dropped his defense entirely and began explaining why Google had no need for Skype.

“At that point,” recalls Chan, “Sergey gets up and says, ‘This is the dumbest shit I’ve ever seen.’ And Eric [Schmidt] gets up and walks out of the room. The deal’s off.”

Ruthless! Which of your darlings have you killed today?

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110425/how-google-killed-gdrive-and-spiked-its-skype-acquisition/feed/ 19 http://allthingsd.com/20110422/twitter-signs-lease-to-stay-in-san-francisco/ http://allthingsd.com/20110422/twitter-signs-lease-to-stay-in-san-francisco/#comments Fri, 22 Apr 2011 20:42:57 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=5841 After much wrangling, Twitter announced today it has signed a lease to stay in San Francisco for the long term. The company is to be the recipient of a payroll tax break in exchange for moving to one of the city’s more troubled neighborhoods. It had previously signed a letter of intent to stay in the city provided such allowances were made to save the company an estimated $20 million in payroll taxes over the next six years.

In a blog post, Twitter said it expected to move to its new Mid-Market office in mid-2012. “San Francisco’s unique creativity and inventiveness is a part of Twitter’s DNA, and we feel like we are part of San Francisco,” the company said.

The Market Square building (formerly known as the San Francisco Furniture Mart) is about eight big blocks away from Twitter’s current SOMA office and will need to be extensively renovated before Twitter can move in. The building was bought last month by Shorenstein Properties for $110 million.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110422/twitter-signs-lease-to-stay-in-san-francisco/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110422/google-updates-its-management-page-by-taking-almost-everybody-off-it/ http://allthingsd.com/20110422/google-updates-its-management-page-by-taking-almost-everybody-off-it/#comments Fri, 22 Apr 2011 13:41:25 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=5823 We’d chided Google recently for its out-of-date management page, given the departures and promotions since Larry Page took back the CEO title on April 4. Now the company has, indeed, updated its management page…by taking almost everybody off of it.

Where before, Google had listed nine people as executive officers, now it only has six, cutting out Shona Brown, Alan Eustace, and Jonathan Rosenberg. What happened to those three? Long-time head of product management Rosenberg is leaving the company; Eustace is now head of “Knowledge,” a.k.a. search, on par with six other “core product area” SVPs; and Brown is now in charge of Google.org.

By the way, none of those changes have actually been announced by Google, though when asked, the company has confirmed they have indeed happened.

That leaves the following:

Larry Page, CEO
Eric E. Schmidt, Executive Chairman
Sergey Brin, co-founder
Nikesh Arora, Senior Vice President and Chief Business Officer
David C. Drummond, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer
Patrick Pichette, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer

Sure, we’re obsessing about a single, mostly static Web page, but what makes these deletions more remarkable is that prior to a major clean-up last year, the management page had something like 70 people on it (here it is on the Wayback Machine).

Meanwhile, a related corporate timeline that diligently lists Google’s launches and other accomplishments hasn’t been updated since Sept. 2010.

But this seems to be the way of the new Larry Page regime: offering less information, not more.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110422/google-updates-its-management-page-by-taking-almost-everybody-off-it/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20110421/formspring-absorbs-whats-left-of-qa-competitor-peerpong-the-people/ http://allthingsd.com/20110421/formspring-absorbs-whats-left-of-qa-competitor-peerpong-the-people/#comments Thu, 21 Apr 2011 22:29:08 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=5813 Q&A start-up PeerPong has shut down, and competitor Formspring has already picked up PeerPong CEO Ro Choy to serve as its COO.

PeerPong “wound down just this past month,” Choy told NetworkEffect, and a couple other members of the PeerPong team joined Formspring as well. To be clear, Formspring did not acquire PeerPong, but at least three of its employees moved over together.

TechCrunch reported Choy’s hiring today, but glossed over the mention of PeerPong. Choy said PeerPong had six employees before it closed.

A cached message from the PeerPong home page reads:

We’re Sorry, but PeerPong is in end of life mode.

When we launched Peerpong.com in early 2010 we believed we could use advanced semantic technology to let people access expertise across social media. We succeeded in finding and indexing over five million people by their knowledge and expertise whether on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin, and helped answer questions from hundreds of thousands of users from these ridiculously smart people over the last year.

Unfortunately we find ourselves in a tough position where the service alone can’t support our business goals and sadly need to discontinue the site. I want to thank everyone who committed their time and effort to Peerpong, including the many members who had great answers for all types of questions, from technology to food to dating, and to the Peerpong team directly for the many months trying to unite NLP/semantics with an engaging user experience. There’s no pithy comment to summarize the experience of trying to make something incredible and falling short, only deep gratitude and few, but significant regrets.

Ro Choy – CEO

PeerPong had raised $2.8 million from Partech International, DCM, First Round Capital and Charles River Ventures after being incubated at Partech under the name Muchobene. PeerPong, which Choy joined as CEO in January 2010 after leaving social app maker RockYou, promised to help connect users to subject matter experts through social media.

Earlier this year, PeerPong was experimenting with a so-called pivot to offer a new service called Rendezvous that would have semantically analyzed users’ Facebook profiles to find events and people they might be interested in. But that didn’t work out either.

Formspring, meanwhile, says that as of this week users of its service will have submitted three billion answers to each other’s questions.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110421/formspring-absorbs-whats-left-of-qa-competitor-peerpong-the-people/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110421/google-offers-really-another-blantant-groupon-copy/ http://allthingsd.com/20110421/google-offers-really-another-blantant-groupon-copy/#comments Thu, 21 Apr 2011 18:43:36 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=5798 Google today launched a sign-up page for its anticipated Google Offers beta, saying the service will soon offer “50% off or more” at “places to eat, shop, play & stay” via “regular emails.” The company said its first beta-testing city will be Portland, Oregon, and also offered options to sign up in neighborhoods in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City.

While there’s little information available as yet, there’s nothing from the snazzy landing page or cute hype-building promotional video that indicates Google Offers will do anything different from Groupon and its various clones. A form asks interested merchants to sign up to be contacted, indicating the platform may not be self-serve.

Not to say copying Groupon is not a bad business model; it’s obviously worked for LivingSocial, and Facebook will soon launch a Deals service as well.

But obviously Google has many weapons at its command, including its sales force, brand and automatic recognition of signed-in users’ email addresses. Plus, there’s the motivational sting of failing to buy Groupon after serious talks late last year. “The possibilities are mind-numbing!” says the Offers video. Or maybe they’re the same as what we’ve seen before.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110421/google-offers-really-another-blantant-groupon-copy/feed/ 6 http://allthingsd.com/20110421/most-app-users-worry-about-the-privacy-of-their-location-data/ http://allthingsd.com/20110421/most-app-users-worry-about-the-privacy-of-their-location-data/#comments Thu, 21 Apr 2011 12:30:44 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=5781 If you were to pick an audience of people that would be the most comfortable with sharing their location, it might be smartphone app users. But in a survey of mobile subscribers who have downloaded an application within the previous 30 days, more than half of them told Nielsen they are are concerned about their privacy when using location-based services and check-in apps.

Specifically, 59 percent of women and 52 percent of men said they are concerned about privacy issues with such apps. Concern about privacy is also more common among older people, but even among the most carefree age group–25 to 34 years–those surveyed said they worried about the privacy of check-in apps.

Only eight percent of women and 12 percent of men described themselves as “not concerned” about such privacy issues (the third option was “indifferent”).

To declare you are not concerned about privacy lapses these days might be akin to saying you’re not worried about natural disasters; it probably has more to do with your personality than you being at risk. Creating such data is an invitation for it to be used in unintended (and not always bad) ways.

Sometimes, it turns out, we create a digital trail of our locations without even realizing it.

But an increasing number of people share their locations on purpose. Foursquare (whose CEO NetworkEffect interviewed this week) had a record three million check-ins on a single day on Saturday.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110421/most-app-users-worry-about-the-privacy-of-their-location-data/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110420/live-blogging-obama-at-facebook/ http://allthingsd.com/20110420/live-blogging-obama-at-facebook/#comments Wed, 20 Apr 2011 20:41:58 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=5759 Facebook today is hosting President Barack Obama at its Palo Alto office for a Q&A session with employees. Having arrived hours early to be metal-detected by the Secret Service, we’ll be liveblogging the chat here unless we pass out from an uncharacteristic lack of Facebook-provided lunch.

Though Obama is out stumping for his reelection campaign, the folks at Facebook will surely ask questions about tech policy and usage of social media. And what we really want to know: has the president visited the fan page for Mark Zuckerberg’s adorable puppy dog yet?

1:43 pm: In addition to strapping young Facebook staffers (who are the ones you’ll see in the camera shots) the White House invited a bevy of Silicon Valley folks–the CEOs of start-ups like Meebo, Yelp and Justin.tv plus regulars like Ron Conway and MC Hammer–as well as local politicians like Nancy Pelosi and Gavin Newsom.

Under-over on what percent of the articles about this event will mention what Mark Zuckerberg is wearing?

(It’s a suit jacket, tie and sneakers.)

1:55 pm: Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg takes the stage, says Facebook has worked with the White House on education, jobs, technology and anti-bullying efforts. Obama has 19 million likes on Facebook, she says.

Sheryl makes a funny: “Even though it’s Facebook, no poking the president.”

Zuckerberg comes in, says lots of people use Facebook to share…pauses. “I’m kind of nervous. We have the President of the United States here.”

Obama enters to much applause. He is also wearing a tie.

Oho! Obama went for it: “My name is Barack Obama and I’m the guy who got Mark to wear a jacket and tie.”

They both take their jackets off. (Thrilling live coverage, huh?)

Obama says he’s here because more and more young people are getting and processing their information through different media and connecting with each other. A good democracy has informed citizens, and Facebook allows us to make sure this isn’t just a one-way conversation.

2:04 pm: Zuckerberg says his first question is about debt. What do you think we can specifically cut in order to make this all happen?

Obama gives a very long answer. He says he has to pay for a lot of things (wars, healthcare, recessions), but his plan is to cut about two trillion dollars as a reduction in spending (“government waste”), another $400 billion reduction in Pentagon spending, and make tax reforms: “people like me and frankly, you, Mark, paying a little more tax.” But healthcare still has to be reformed further to keep down costs, he says, and we need to invest in research in energy and technology alternatives.

Next question is about home buying. Obama says he has a lot of sympathy for people. Then a Facebook employee from Detroit asks about jobs. Obama says his recovery act is working, the economy is growing, and his debt and deficit plan can keep that growth even while cutting spending. The only part of the answer that gets applause is a line about fuel efficiency standards.

Next question, taken from the live stream, is about the Dream Act and immigration. Obama winds through the issue–”What’s undeniable is America is a nation of immigrants”–then gets to the part this audience cares about: techies who can’t get permission to live and work in the U.S.. He calls these people “job generators” like Andy Grove of Intel, and says he wants the laws to be changed.

2:36 pm: Zuckerberg is not doing much moderation or conversing with the president. At most he is reading prompts. It might as well be anyone up there.

I spoke too soon. As part of a question about education, Zuckerberg compliments Obama on his work on Race to the Top.

As part of his eduction answer, Obama says government alone can’t fix education. He says he’s inspired and frustrated by how many smart people are in Silicon Valley, but he always hears stories about how they can’t find engineers and computer programmers, which is a failure of education. Lifting up technology and math and science is hopefully one of the most important legacies I can have as president of the United States, Obama says.

More talk of healthcare. Obama plugs incentives to improve healthcare IT, and incentives for performance to reform health reimbursement policies.

Last question is about Obama’s regrets from his term so far. On healthcare, he says “It was so complicated that at some point people started saying, oh this is typical Washington vapor. I’ve asked myself sometimes if there was a way we could have gotten this done more quickly.” He switches to more positive topics: what he feels he must get done while he is president. That is: balance the budget, reform immigration, fix energy.

Nobody is doing better than these oil companies, Obama says. (Well, maybe Facebook is doing a little better, he kids.)

He urges audience to not get frustrated and remember that the U.S. still has a lot going for it.

Well, it turns out that the town hall had very little to do with Facebook, more like using the company as a proxy for young people.

Zuckerberg offers Obama a Facebook hoody as a token of appreciation.

It might have been simpler for Obama just to ask Facebook to give his campaign some pre-IPO shares.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110420/live-blogging-obama-at-facebook/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110420/this-week-in-goal-setting-foursquare-aspires-to-be-clippy-in-your-pocket/ http://allthingsd.com/20110420/this-week-in-goal-setting-foursquare-aspires-to-be-clippy-in-your-pocket/#comments Wed, 20 Apr 2011 18:42:29 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=5736 The next version of Foursquare is about making check-ins “faster and lighter,” said CEO Dennis Crowley in an on-stage interview with me last night for Girls in Tech in San Francisco. Crowley called his company’s current apps “clunky and heavy,” and said he is testing new versions that will be out later this quarter that should reduce the time it takes to check in from something like 20 seconds to five seconds.

After that, the company will build versions of its apps that include “passive check-ins” that detect where a regular user is and prompt him or her to check in, Crowley said. He also plans to add a sort of Facebook news feed for Foursquare that better filters relevant information rather than just blasting notifications.

Foursquare is ultimately about offline discovery and exploration, said Crowley. He said his goal is for the app to be a sort of personalized helper with personality, like Microsoft’s much-hated and now-discontinued Clippy office assistant, which tried to anticipate what help users might need with a document.

But instead of lamely asking if a user wants help formatting a list, Foursquare’s “Clippy in your pocket” would know who a user’s friends are, what venues they like, what’s going on in their calendars, where they are, if they are walking fast or slow.

This Clippy, Crowley said, would be “the master of the sensors,” combining all that information to make relevant and serendipitous recommendations.

Some things Foursquare doesn’t want to do, Crowley said, are enable mobile payments, help users check into TV shows, and create content. Everything on Foursquare should involve actions tied to space by latitude and longitude, he said.

Crowley offered some stats about Foursquare: It has 8.5 million registered users. They each have an average of five to eight friends on the service (whereas Facebook is for “everyone you’ve ever made eye contact with in your entire life,” Crowley joked).

Foursquare’s main demographic is ages 24-27, though the service is now seeing pockets of users who are parents of new kids and college students. The company is just starting to analyze data to identify its strongest drivers of growth.

Foursquare has 300,000 merchants registered on its platform and 10,000 developers using its API. It employs 56 people and is hiring as many engineers as it can find, Crowley said, noting that part of the reason he’s in California is to find a larger office space for his growing team in San Francisco.

Here’s a video of the talk taken from the audience by Daniel Odio of AppMakr (he also took the photo above). When Girls in Tech puts out their professional version later this week I’ll add it as well.

Dennis Crowley CEO of Foursquare at Girls In Tech from Daniel R. Odio on Vimeo.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110420/this-week-in-goal-setting-foursquare-aspires-to-be-clippy-in-your-pocket/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110420/qwiki-and-rockmelt-swear-off-silicon-valley-users-and-make-ios-apps/ http://allthingsd.com/20110420/qwiki-and-rockmelt-swear-off-silicon-valley-users-and-make-ios-apps/#comments Wed, 20 Apr 2011 15:00:13 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=5720 Two young start-ups, both claiming to target a more mainstream user and content consumer than found in Silicon Valley, are this week launching iOS apps. RockMelt, a browser focused on social networking, is launching an iPhone app, while Qwiki, which creates multimedia summaries of information, is launching an iPad app.

Both companies take pains to say they are not building for the information-horfing techies of Silicon Valley. They also say that the apps are not a broader mobile strategy but rather a dedicated lens for their product that is customized for each respective device.

Also, for what it’s worth, the companies have each raised about $10 million in funding and both were founded when the moon was in the seventh house and Jupiter aligned with Mars. Just making sure you’re paying attention.

In an interview this week, Qwiki CEO Doug Imbruce described how the company’s iPad app–its first non-Web-based version–makes information more relevant because it is correlated with the user’s location. Qwikis are today based on reference material (often from Wikipedia) and combine video, photo and text to introduce topics in an accessible and visual way. Less than half of Qwikis are geo-tagged, said Imbruce.

Imbruce demonstrated how a traveling user could learn more about his or her surroundings by surfing around the iPad app’s map and diving into nearby Qwikis. When the iPad app opens, the front page automatically sets to a map of the user’s location.

Imbruce has a bit of a chip on his shoulder about perceptions that Qwiki is a lightweight project. “Silicon Valley doesn’t get Qwiki because it’s not created for hyper-literate individuals with two degrees from Stanford,” he said, recounting criticism that has dogged the company. We got him to elaborate on this point in the video below.

Meanwhile, RockMelt, which my colleague Katie Boehret reviewed this week, has a soon-to-launch iPhone extension of the company’s browser, which opened to the public about a month ago and has “a few hundred thousand” users.

The RockMelt iPhone app is really more of a social dashboard than a browser, allowing users to scan through their Twitter and Facebook feeds as well as any other Web sites they subscribe to.

To me the app feels a bit like MyYahoo–a sort of lightweight feed reader to help users easily glance at their news rather than checking Web sites or apps individually. Users can open Web pages within the RockMelt app, but this functionality is already basically available through Safari integrations in many social iPhone apps.

The advantage of the RockMelt app is that these key information sources, including social networks, are aggregated and updated in one place. The mobile app doesn’t include all the functionality of the full RockMelt browser; for instance there’s no chat.

RockMelt CEO Eric Vishria said the app is “designed for the average Web user,” especially young people who are avid users of social networking sites. (Forty-one percent of RockMelt’s existing users are in high school or college, and internationally the browser is especially popular in “places where people are going online to be social” like Brazil, India and Southeast Asia, Vishria said.)

If nothing else, since Silicon Valley is often used as shorthand for “early adopters,” it’s interesting that these companies think their prospective users are likely to have iPhones and iPads.

Asked whether “average Web users” have iPhones, Vishria contended that the devices are quite popular in RockMelt’s demographics. Okay, but what about other smartphones? “I don’t want to ship a piece of junk on every platform just to have coverage,” Vishria said.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110420/qwiki-and-rockmelt-swear-off-silicon-valley-users-and-make-ios-apps/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110419/say-media-wolfs-down-dogster/ http://allthingsd.com/20110419/say-media-wolfs-down-dogster/#comments Tue, 19 Apr 2011 21:17:24 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=5710 SAY Media announced today it had acquired the pet community start-up Dogster.

SAY is now built out of the unlikely combination of an ad network (VideoEgg), a blogging platform (Six Apart)–the two merged last year–and a social network for pets and their owners (Dogster).

What makes things even more odd is the company described the justification for the purchase as part of its “evolution to become the home of independent media as it continues to acquire and build media properties with a strong point of view, passionate editors, and active communities.”

Dogster was founded in 2004, raised $1 million in 2006, and described itself as profitable starting in 2008.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110419/say-media-wolfs-down-dogster/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110419/apple-cracks-down-on-app-cross-selling/ http://allthingsd.com/20110419/apple-cracks-down-on-app-cross-selling/#comments Tue, 19 Apr 2011 17:06:16 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=5687 Apple appears to have made multiple moves to crack down on the bustling industry of app developers buying downloads of their iOS apps.

Specifically, Inside Mobile Apps is reporting two big adjustments: in the last few days, Apple has rejected “dozens of apps” that use offer walls, and it has also apparently changed the ranking algorithm for its all-important top apps list to favor user engagement over number of downloads.

Apple declined to comment on the reports.

Offer walls are a method of cross-selling apps, where developers use companies like Tapjoy and Flurry to give users options to install other apps in order to earn virtual currency within a game.

The practice is now less influential on Facebook but incredibly pervasive for free mobile gaming apps, as I reported at length in March. Developers pay per install of their app so they can get on Apple’s top app leaderboards, which previously were determined by number of installs.

Similar practices on Facebook (in fact by some of the same companies; Tapjoy was formerly known as Offerpal) achieved notoriety in late 2009 when they were exposed for their scammy tactics in a series of articles about “Scamville” by TechCrunch.

To get on Apple’s free app leaderboard (which is one of the main ways users discover new apps), developers have been paying Tapjoy something like $30,000 to $500,000 for pay-per-install campaigns. That may seem exorbitant, but it’s seen as significantly cheaper than acquiring users with CPM advertising through Apple’s iAd and Google’s AdMob.

In its rejections of apps with offer walls, Apple has reportedly cited a clause in its developer agreement that prohibits app makers from manipulating or cheating its chart rankings. This is similar to Apple’s approach to mandating use of its own in-app purchasing by starting to enforce an existing clause about it with the rejection of Sony’s Reader app earlier this year.

As for the alteration of its app ranking algorithm, Apple now appears to be weighting factors other than recent number of downloads. That change has resulted in apps that clearly have large numbers of active users, like Facebook and Pandora, jumping up 10 or more spots in the most recent version of the list.

The leaderboard has been shaken up again in the day since Inside Mobile Apps reported the changes (a game called Stylish Sprint is now in the top spot), so other signals–perhaps something to highlight up-and-coming apps–may be in play as well.

And while Apple declined to comment, when we covered this topic in depth in March the company gave us a statement that defended its app discovery offerings, thus downplaying the role of companies like Tapjoy.

Tapjoy, for its part, said in a prepared statement:

Tapjoy has been and continues to be very supportive of the Apple app ecosystem, and we were not surprised about the Top Free & Paid rankings algorithm changes–we’re all for incremental changes that add to the user experience and keep the environment dynamic. But banning the largest and most effective channel for application distribution, engagement and monetization has a significant and long-term negative impact on the user experience, developer innovation and advertiser utility.

The moves bring Apple’s App Store practices closer to that of the Android Market, which uses more than just number of downloads in its app ranking algorithm. Pay-per-install campaigns are less prevalent on Android, though that’s also because much of the developer ecosystem is still focused on Apple.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110419/apple-cracks-down-on-app-cross-selling/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110419/country-no-184-for-google-map-maker-the-united-states/ http://allthingsd.com/20110419/country-no-184-for-google-map-maker-the-united-states/#comments Tue, 19 Apr 2011 07:01:47 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=5674 Google Map Maker, which enlists users to expand and keep up to date Google Maps and Google Earth, will on Tuesday become available in the United States. (Other independent user mapping efforts include Waze and OpenStreetMap, both already available in the U.S. ) A product developed by Google in India, the company says Map Maker has already been used by thousands of cartophiles to edit maps in 183 countries and regions around the world. User edits are usually approved for inclusion in the live product within a few days. And now, that forgotten nation…the U.S..

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110419/country-no-184-for-google-map-maker-the-united-states/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110418/flapon-flapoff-sorry-it-had-to-be-said/ http://allthingsd.com/20110418/flapon-flapoff-sorry-it-had-to-be-said/#comments Mon, 18 Apr 2011 20:36:19 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=5633 Over in the inbox today, we have a pitch for Flapon, a new “topic-based, life-stream integrated social network.”

Flapon? The name triggers a voice in my head singing the Clapper light switch jingle.

“The name was thought of by one of the founders who had been pondering social media and the butterfly-effect,” says the pitch. (The butterfly effect is the idea that something tiny, like the flap of a butterfly’s wings, can affect the course of something big, like a hurricane.)

Stupider names have happened, and stupider things have happened than someone else starting yet another online forum site. But maybe not today.

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