No one knows this better than Facebook, the social giant home to thousands of socially integrated apps plugged into its “Open Graph” network. The problem is, it’s not about amassing an enormous cache of apps for the sake of having a lot. Facebook needs its partners to build the best apps, worthy of featuring in the company’s App Center repository.

“We can’t succeed — and we’re really not an interesting product — without a strong developer community around us,” said Sam Lessin, Facebook’s director of Identity Products, at a South by Southwest event on Sunday.

Games were Facebook’s clear breakout hit (hence, the rise of Zynga). Then came the onslaught of music, news and video apps. Now, Facebook is heavily promoting a new class of apps — so-called “lifestyle” apps.

The company is working closely with developers creating apps for actions like reading books, sharing which movies you just watched, and blasting out what your recent fitness stats are to your friends.

Basically, it’s Facebook’s way of fostering more sharing inside its network. Otis Chandler, CEO of the well-adopted social reading app Goodreads, told me that apps in the lifestyle category — like reading, for instance — are more likely to be shared among users, hence Facebook’s increase in promoting apps like Goodreads (among others).

For that promotion, Goodreads gets a much-desired bump in traffic. Since the company launched its Facebook app in January of 2012, Chandler’s company has grown from 6.5 million users to upward of 15 million. (Though not all of that growth is a direct result of the Facebook app, mind you.) That’s a nice signal for other developers in the space looking to build successfully on top of Facebook.

Let’s be clear, though — Facebook isn’t in the goodwill business. The better and more engaging the apps its developers build for the platform, the more sharing and activity Facebook will see throughout its entire network. That means happier users, more engagement and, yes, more use of Facebook’s monetized products.

There’s a caveat here. Facebook has courted app developers before, and then left some of those developers out in the cold entirely with large shifts in the company’s overall platform strategy. Take Washington Post’s Social Reader, for instance: WaPo launched its app in a grand way at Facebook’s F8 conference a year and a half ago, to much fanfare. But after Facebook dialed back the traffic hose to WaPo’s app, WaPo shuttered development on the app entirely.

Facebook would say that this is an example of iterating quickly — or “moving fast and breaking things, if you will — trying out strategies to see what works and what doesn’t. Perhaps that’s fine if you’re Facebook, but not if you’re a company pouring cash into building your app on top of Facebook’s platform.

If you want to go down that discussion rabbit hole, take a peek at my conversation with Facebook’s VP of Partnerships Dan Rose from our Dive into Media conference last month.

Will Facebook stay the course on pushing lifestyle apps as hard as it has lately? I’m sure the developers hope so.

Twitter on Thursday announced a new set of partners to its Certified Products Program, adding to the 12 already given Twitter’s TCPP stamp of approval.

The new folks include companies in two of the program’s key verticals: Engagement and analytics. There are nine new partners with today’s announcement, including companies like Spredfast and Sprout Social, as well as Adobe Social and Percolate.

What it means in a nutshell: The TCPP is basically Twitter’s way of saying, “Hey! We like what you’re doing with our data. Here’s a gold star.” Sorta like Facebook’s Preferred Developer Program.

But more than that, it’s Twitter’s way of signaling to every other developer out there that this is the sort of stuff you should be doing with Twitter’s data. Helping businesses figure out how to make good tweets, or creating products that help with understanding the mess of data flowing through Twitter’s pipes on a minute-by-minute basis.

That’s important for the entire ecosystem of folks who rely on Twitter’s data. After Twitter made it clear that it doesn’t want developers creating third-party Twitter clients — like, say, Tweetbot — the company has been making an effort to guide developers in the “right” direction.

Of note: Twitter has hired a new guy, Zach Hofer-Shall, to manage the program. I’d imagine that quite a few Twitter-focused companies are interested in getting Twitter’s “thumbs-up” (or should I say, “favorite”?), so Hofer-Shall will deal with all of those incoming requests.

Hit up Twitter’s blog post for a full list of the new companies added to the program.

Yahoo said today in a regulatory filing that it had hired one of Google’s top sales execs, Henrique De Castro, as its COO.

Earlier today, I had reported that CEO Marissa Mayer had been close to nabbing the advertising exec, who has most recently been Google’s president of partners business solutions.

De Castro is getting a pile of money for taking the job, including a $600,000 yearly base salary and an annual bonus that could double that figure. In addition, the Silicon Valley Internet giant will give him $36 million in stock grants, including a one-time retention equity award of $18 million and $18 million in the form of performance-based stock options.

He is also getting $1 million in “make-whole” cash for forgoing compensation from Google and $20 million in stock to replace his shares at the search giant that will vest over four years.

That is a very big check, although Mayer garnered an even bigger one when she joined the company in July.

Yahoo’s regulatory statement on the De Castro hiring is embedded below in its entirety, so you can read about his new riches for yourself (unless Yahoo’s persnickety legal head tries to block it).

Said a Google spokesperson about the departure: “We’re grateful to Henrique for all of his contributions at Google and wish him all the best in his new role at Yahoo!”

Both Mayer and also former Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson have made previous overtures to nab De Castro, who has held a number of high-level jobs for Google across the globe, including at DoubleClick, in display ads and with major partners.

While he had previously rebuffed those efforts, this time De Castro bit.

There were signs he might this past week, after De Castro canceled a major offsite for his employees, and several attendees who know him well said he was not present at the company’s first night of its annual Zeitgeist event for advertising and publishing clients. The suave De Castro is usually a more noticeable fixture at such gatherings.

This is Mayer’s first big hire at Yahoo, having added only lower-level or less well-known execs to her stable of talent since she was appointed.

She touted the hire in a tweet, although the news was long out the door, while also noting on Twitter it was her first full day at the office since having her first baby two weeks ago.

My first full day back in the office, and I’m excited to kick it off by announcing my new COO, Henrique de Castro: businesswire.com/news/home/2012…

— marissamayer (@marissamayer) October 15, 2012

The hiring does create a potential issue in the sales arena, especially with current head of revenue Michael Barrett. De Castro and Barrett worked together at Google and multiple sources said the pair did not get along there.

It might not matter. While Barrett has publicly said he planned to stay at Yahoo under Mayer — he was hired by interim CEO Ross Levinson this summer before she arrived — many sources said he does not want to be at the company for the long term.

De Castro has a lot of work to do for the big payout he is getting and it will be a big challenge for him to turn around the troubled organization.

Along with declining growth, search market share, engagement and more, Yahoo also has had a management turnover issue of epic proportions.

De Castro will presumably be in charge of making it all better at Yahoo when he arrives sometime before the beginning of the year and is likely to focus on operations while Mayer zeroes in on products.

One area of trouble: While she has lavished attention on cultural issues and on the company’s tech troops, sources said most of the advertising and media leadership at Yahoo have had little interaction with Mayer since she arrived this summer.

Advertising, of course, is Yahoo’s biggest money maker.

The Portugal-born De Castro has a lot of experience here and is decidedly more of a charmer than Mayer.

More importantly, he is a very high-profile hire, as well as a colorful one. He speaks a menu of languages, dresses with a lot of style and is a worldwide traveler. I know him a little bit and find him to be smooth and confident, even if a little cagey.

Before Google, De Castro worked at Dell and also McKinsey.

All this makes him a perfect choice for Mayer, who is also a former Googler, since she has been considering purchasing a range of companies in the advertising tech space. The most likely candidate of late is PubMatic, which has been in early talks with Yahoo about being acquired.

The Silicon Valley start-up would be a solid add to Yahoo’s ad platform offerings, especially if it wants to stay competitive with Google. PubMatic helps publishers effectively manage their display ad inventory, and competes with Google’s AdMeld.

(Ironically, Barrett ran that start-up, which he sold to Google for $400 million about a year ago.)

Here is the De Castro hiring document from Yahoo:

YHOO-20121015-8K-20121015

And here is the official press release from Yahoo:

Henrique de Castro Named Chief Operating Officer of Yahoo!

October 15, 2012

SUNNYVALE, Calif. – Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) announced today that Henrique de Castro has been hired as chief operating officer (COO). Reporting directly to Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer, de Castro will be responsible for strategic and operational management of Yahoo!’s sales, operations, media and business development worldwide.

“Henrique is an incredibly accomplished and rigorous business leader, and I’m personally excited to have him join Yahoo!’s strong leadership team,” said Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo!. “His operational experience in Internet advertising and his proven success in structuring and scaling global organizations make him the perfect fit for Yahoo! as we propel the business to its next phase of growth.”

“The combination of Yahoo!’s unique properties with high quality content, its renewed focus on outstanding user experience and its massive reach bring tremendous value to users, advertisers and partners,” said de Castro. “This is a pivotal point in Yahoo!’s history, and I believe strongly in the opportunity ahead. I can’t wait to join Marissa and the team and get started.”

De Castro brings more than 20 years experience leading operations, strategy, partner management and revenue generation for some of the world’s leading brands. Most recently, he was vice president of Google’s worldwide Partner Business Solutions group, where he was responsible for advertising platforms and services for Google’s publisher and commerce partners. Prior to that, he led Google’s media, mobile and platforms organization, where he helped to grow the business significantly. Prior to Google, de Castro spent two years at Dell Corporation, where he managed sales and business development operations across Western Europe. He has consulted for McKinsey & Company, where he advised numerous clients across many different industries. His career also includes senior positions in private equity and advertising businesses.

De Castro will join the company on or before January 22, 2013, or as soon as he has satisfied his obligations to his current employer.

One that has gotten a fair amount of attention — in no small part thanks to those who invested in it — is GoodData, founded by CEO Roman Stanek (pictured). A little less than a year ago, it took $15 million in a Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz. That round was also notable because AH had been an early seed-stage investor in the company.

Today, GoodData announced it has kicked its funding up a notch, landing a $25 million Series C led by Tenaya Capital, with participation from a new investor, Next World Capital. Prior investors, including AH, General Catalyst Partners, Fidelity Growth Partners and Windcrest Partners all participated in the round, which brings GoodData’s total capital raised to $53.5 million. Brian Paul, a managing director at Tenaya, will join GoodData’s board.

GoodData’s approach to the big-data problem is to do — what else? — harness the cloud. But it does it in a slightly different manner. Rather than compete directly with the usual providers of business intelligence software, like SAP, Oracle and IBM, it offers its service indirectly via cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services, Dell’s Boomi cloud-integration service, and Okta, the start-up focused on providing unified access to SaaS services.

It’s working. The company’s customer base has surged to 6,000, and bookings — a key indicator of future revenue that has turned into an important metric for companies in the cloud software space, like Salesforce.com — grew by 600 percent in 2011.

While the Consumer Electronics Show and other big events feature acres of tiny booths crammed one against another, Mobile World Congress features a different kind of bigness. The show is spread out over eight big buildings in a historic area of town. Every couple of buildings are set several flights of stairs up from the last one, with the final two buildings just a stone’s throw from the grand National Palace.

Connecting the buildings and lining the promenade between them are various smaller trailers and bungalows.

Unlike the cramped booths at CES, the spread-out nature of Mobile World Congress allows even moderate-size companies a good amount of space to show their wares. Even those with bungalows outside a main hall stand a good chance of attracting visitors. Companies that went with that approach included Acer and INQ Mobile, which was touting its new Android phone with quick access to Facebook and Spotify.

That said, some folks’ presence at Mobile World Congress is clearly bigger than others.

One booth that stands out is Google’s first-ever Android booth, tucked in the corner of Hall 8, just inside the entrance.

The two-story pavilion features many of Google’s partners showing Android applications, as well as a place to create one’s own Android mini-me, plus a sushi-bar-style conveyor belt featuring the many phone and tablet designs based on the Google operating system. Among the designs that scrolled by while I was standing there were well-known names such as Samsung and HTC, as well as less-familiar brands such as China’s ZTE and Alcatel, which is new to Android.

Perhaps the pièce de résistance of the booth is a slide that allows children of all chronological ages to relive their youth and glide down from the top floor back to the bottom. The most popular thing, though, was a series of collectible pins being passed out throughout Mobile World Congress by various Android partners. They were a hot commodity, and by Tuesday afternoon most booths were completely out of their supply of pins, placing green candy inside the dishes instead.

While impressive, the Android booth was not the largest by any stretch. One of the more massive setups I saw was the Ericsson booth, which occupied nearly all of Hall 6. A small Sony Ericsson booth was open to the public. Behind a security gate, though, was a massive spread for the many partners of both Ericsson and Sony Ericsson. It featured two bars and two kiosks serving various tapas.

There were meeting rooms and patio tables for more-casual interactions. On display were all kinds of Ericsson technologies ranging from its core infrastructure gear to all kinds of other products and research projects.

A few caught my eye, including a mobile payment section that featured a “Museum of Money” talking about days gone by when people used paper currency with all its flaws. Under glass were such relics as money, piggy banks and counterfeit-detection pens, while Ericsson showed off its many payment technologies.

In another corner, Ericsson was showing off a vending machine that is paid, not with cash or credit card, but via SMS message. Ericsson has a unit that serves as an intermediary between the vendor and the carrier to manage the transaction.

Whether he is walking the halls of Nokia’s headquarters in Espoo, Finland, or even just buying groceries at the market, Nokia’s chief executive is constantly flooded with suggestions for how the company should regain lost ground.

Elop recalled being at dinner just over a week ago and being approached by three young people who wanted to share their suggestions.

“The three of them couldn’t quite agree on what the right strategy was, but they clearly each had an opinion,” Elop said.

For his part, Elop has deeply considered three possibilities for its high-end smartphone business–sticking with plans to develop around MeeGo (a mobile version of Linux), shifting to Android or adopting Microsoft’s Windows Phone.

Without tipping his hand, Elop spoke with Mobilized last week about the pros and cons of the various options. The interview came before releasing his big “burning platform” memo and literally as the final decision was being made.

For Elop, it came down to which approach would offer enough differentiation and yet would also be part of an ecosystem that would be large enough to attract developers, advertisers, carriers and all the other partners.

“It’s not just differentiation but sustainable differentiation,” Elop said. He also said that as big as Nokia is, it can’t afford to go it alone.

It is also critically important to Elop that the company be more competitive in the United States. Although the company ships more phones worldwide than any other company, its presence in North America is basically nonexistent. And yet, he said, the U.S. is where the pace is set for the high end of the market.

“We need to be in the United States in one way, shape or form,” Elop said. “We have to have a viable way to reopen doors.”

So where did that leave the various options?

Although MeeGo left plenty of room for differentiation, that option would also mean trying to be unique at the same time, as the company would have to convince others to build on the platform.

“For it to be a valid ecosystem, that also implies other [phone makers]–our competitors–would be attracted to it as well,” Elop said. “That’s one of the things that give it critical mass and credibility.”

Although Elop didn’t say so in our interview, his comments in this week’s memo suggest that his confidence there was low.

“We thought MeeGo would be a platform for winning high-end smartphones,” Elop said in his memo to staff. “However, at this rate, by the end of 2011, we might have only one MeeGo product in the market.”

As for Android and Windows Phone, Elop said Nokia could offer a significant boost to either ecosystem.

“Android is growing very nicely; it has significant market share,” he said. “The combination of Android’s existing market share plus the market share that Nokia could bring to the Android ecosystem is a very large number and would signal a very substantial shift in the dynamics of the mobile operating system market.”

As for Redmond’s operating system, Elop said it is early days.

“Windows Phone is in its early formative stages in terms of getting customer traction and so forth. It’s a beautiful product and I say that as someone who is competing with it.”

However, that may not be the case much longer. While Elop was still leaving all doors open when he spoke with Mobilized a week ago, the options appear to have narrowed significantly in recent days. His memo on Tuesday appeared to rule out MeeGo as the best option, while a tweet from Google’s Vic Gundotra suggests Android is out and a tie-up with WIndows Phone is Elop’s final choice.

But, no matter what decision gets made at the high end, Elop said that the company probably needs a separate strategy at the low end of the market, where there is intense competition from Chinese phone makers building phones around low-cost chips from MediaTek.

Friday’s investor meeting will also address other aspects of the company, including its services strategy, its plans for its Navteq navigation unit and its plans to leverage its huge patent portfolio. The announcement also comes just ahead of the cell phone industry’s big trade show, Mobile World Congress, which gets going on Sunday in Barcelona.

Mobilized is here in London and will have live coverage of the meeting, which kicks off at 11 am local time. That’s 3 am PT, so set those alarm clocks early.

Push Pop Press will be a digital book maker, with its first titles coming to iPad and iPhone later this year, according to its Web site.

The San Francisco-based company intends to allow users to “explore photos, videos, music, maps, and interactive graphics, all through a new physics-based multi-touch user interface.”

Matas designed photo and map products at Apple, and left the company in 2009 after serving for four years. According to his LinkedIn profile, he has been working on Push Pop Press since Feb. 2010. His partners in the effort are Kimon Tsinteris, who was formerly a senior engineer on the Apple iPhone team, and Austin Sarner, formerly an independent Mac developer who created software such as AppZapper and Disco.

Push Pop Press appears to be partnered with the New York book publisher Melcher Media.

We contacted Matas for comment this evening but have not heard back yet.

Incidentally, exploring the new frontier of digital books has also attracted other Apple alumni. Another start-up in the space, Inkling, was founded by Matt MacInnis, who had spent eight years at Apple, where his duties included managing its international education efforts.

The headliner was VNXe, its first low-end offering, priced at less than $10,000 and aimed at small and medium businesses, a segment where Dell used to resell EMC equipment. In another bit of product-launch theater, EMC had a fourth-grade boy onstage to demonstrate that the box–which in this case was mounted on the back of another Mini Cooper–could be managed and configured from an iPad.

I caught up with EMC Chief Marketing Officer Jeremy Burton to talk about it and the 40 other products EMC launched yesterday.

NewEnterprise: So 41 products all at once?

Burton: I’ve never been in a situation where the release dates of so many products aligned. We realized we might as well do them all at the beginning of the year. Internally we called it the “mega-launch.”

What kind of opportunities do you see in that lower-end market. This was your first entry into that market.

We estimate maybe a $4 billion opportunity there. We don’t have much of it now, call it zero. We’ve never really built a product that’s tailor made for that market. And for a product like that, you can’t just build it–you have to build it in a way that the channel can make money on and create customer satisfaction. We’ve got several partners who will take this product to market. We’ve committed $20 million there to generate demand and bootstrap the whole thing.

Tell me about this go-to-market effort.

Traditionally EMC has been led by direct sales. We have a sales force and they call on the customer directly. With a products that sells for $9,000 or $10,000 you can’t afford to sell that in the same way. We have to create pull for the product with our partners. You have to get the customers calling to ask for the product. It’s a little bit of everything. There’s advertising, there’s direct campaigns. Anything to get the phones to ring. To get the reps at the events jazzed up we’ve leased a fleet of 21 Mini Coopers. We’ll be doing 108 partner events around the world.

So who do you see as a typical customer for this?

Before I worked for EMC I ran a software company that had about 700 or 800 people. We had about 20 guys in the IT department. We didn’t have a lot of specialists, we had a lot of generalists there. So I’d say any company that’s at less than $25 million in annual sales is a perfect candidate. They’re not going to have the high-end skills to deal with the complexity of the high-end arrays. But they’ll have VMWare, they’ll have exchange environments, they have file shares, and they’ll want to get going quickly.

It’s funny I should be talking to you today. I just published a Q&A with Ping Li of Accel Partners. We got to talking about the storage needs of companies moving to the cloud, particularly around their database environments, and he said the trend is toward running open-source things like Hadoop on commodity hardware. He said he’s not seeing a lot of EMC gear at Google or Facebook or many of the other Web companies. There’s a lot of people who are seeing both a trend and an opportunity around that. What do you see?

If you’re Google and you’ve got your own team of rocket scientists who can build your own file system and kernel and download modules from the Internet every day, you don’t need it. But if you’re Pfizer, you probably have a lot of rocket scientists, but you probably don’t want them working on reconfiguring kernels, you probably want them working on discovering new drugs. And so, picking the techiest of the tech companies and saying they don’t use our stuff, yeah those are companies with the smartest tech guys on the planet. The problem is they’re not in all the Fortune 500 companies in the world, and in fact I’d argue they’re in almost none of them.

So if you want to have that scaled-out commodity storage and you want to manage big data, and you don’t want to hire 1,000 rocket scientists to do it, we can sell it to you. It won’t be true commodity hardware, but then you won’t have to hire so many people to manage it. That to me is kind of the rub. EBay is a big name on the Web, and it uses our Object Storage infrastructure. Could they have built it themselves? Probably. But there’s a little intellectual snobbery inside these companies. They say, “We don’t want to buy your stuff because we’re smarter than you.” Those are the edge cases. If we just get the rest we’re happy.

Let’s talk about the broader picture in IT spending. What are you hearing from your largest customers about their intent to spend this year?

2010 was a decent year. Going into 2010 folks said they thought their spending would increase two to three percent. They probably ended up with three to four percent. Looking out into this year, people seem a little more optimistic. But even still I think it’s in the three to five percent range. One thing we saw in 2009 is that folks didn’t buy much storage capacity last year and instead tried to use what they had. Going into 2010 there were signs of recovery and people started to spend again, and we see that continuing into 2011. One reason for the Isilon acquisition is that we do see a trend toward spending into different areas of the business.

At another level I think I agree with you and with Ping that certain companies will move to Hadoop for a certain class of application and we’ve got a pretty strong relationship between our Greenplum division and Hadoop. What a lot of people want to do is analyze traditional enterprise data in conjunction with something else. What Greenplum has tried to do is bridge the gap between Hadoop and the more traditional storage infrastructure. Hadoop is not going away, and its something that we fully intend to work with.

In particular, the company is already working to re-architect its core BlackBerry Enterprise Server product so that it can also be offered as a cloud-based service, to be hosted by either partners or RIM itself.

“We will be launching a cloud service,” RIM Vice President Pete Devenyi told Mobilized in an interview following a Boston event focused on RIM’s 2011 enterprise strategy.

However, Devenyi said the service offered by RIM directly won’t cover as many types of email servers as its software is capable of supporting, leaving room for partners.

“We’re not going to launch a cloud service for everything, for every combination,” he said. “There are going to be mail servers out there that we don’t connect with through our cloud service. There will be other partners that choose to connect to other mail server providers and they may offer a hosted service on their own.”

Partners could even offer a combination of both mail server and cloud-based mobile device management. The company didn’t say when any of the cloud services might launch.

Another area that the company is exploring is whether to expand its software to manage mobile devices from other makers.

“BlackBerry is and will continue to be dominant in most corporations,” Devenyi said. “It’s not going to be the only device, given the fact that consumers have the choice to bring in their own devices, and IT departments are often letting them in. So there’s a question there. Do those corporations have to manage those devices differently or is there the possibility that RIM might extend capabilities to make it easier for those corporations to manage those devices as well.”

That business would not be entirely new. The company started a program years ago called BlackBerry Connect that allowed businesses to use their BlackBerry servers to manage certain devices when those devices communicated using BlackBerry protocols. However, the new venture, if RIM decided to go ahead, would expand that to managing devices that use their own methods.

“In this case, it would have to be done differently because it would be more native,” he said. “It wouldn’t use BlackBerry protocols to manage those devices, but conceptually yes, we did that with BlackBerry Connect.”

Devenyi stressed that although the company is talking about the possibilities in this area, it has nothing to announce.

“It is not something that we would say is never going to happen,” he said. “If enough of our customers really want us to do it, we know that BlackBerry management is far and away the best management console in the world, and if the right thing to do is to extend a subset of those capabilities to be able to manage other devices, it’s worthy of a conversation.”

The event, at the Marriott Copley Place downtown, is just getting under way. I won’t bore you with every detail, but will post whenever things get interesting.

In the meantime, enjoy this take on Angry Birds for the BlackBerry.

Update, 10:17 am ET: The intro is still going on. RIM Vice President Alec Taylor is talking about the Cuban Missile Crisis for some reason. However, RIM was nice enough to pass out slides for the whole day. Here are some of the highlights:

BlackBerry Mobile Voice System
Launching in early 2011, this is an update to RIM’s effort to unify the desk and mobile phone, offering a single identity, voiceover Wi-Fi calling, a single voicemail box, dialing office extensions and more. RIM says the new version will support more types of business phone systems.

Other features coming later this year include automatic hand-off from Wi-Fi to mobile networks, a “move call from desk” feature and more.

BlackBerry Balance
A new effort to support mixing personal and corporate data on the BlackBerry. RIM is adding features such as the ability for IT to choose to wipe only corporate information from a device or to limit users from cutting work data and pasting it into a personal application or email. Other features include warnings when sending emails or calendar invites outside of the organization, the ability to encrypt media cards and options for preventing access to work data by third-party applications.

BlackBerry client for Microsoft SharePoint
Launching in early 2011, this will bring data from Microsoft’s portal software directly to BlackBerry handhelds. It will work with both the 2007 and 2010 versions of SharePoint and integrates into a number of BlackBerry programs, including E-mail, calendar, Documents To Go and the browser.

PlayBook
As for the forthcoming tablet, RIM says it will ship with 1GB of memory, have 16GB, 32GB or 64GB of flash memory, include a 3-megapixel front-facing and 5-megapixel rear-facing camera and have micro USB and Micro HDMI ports. (I can’t remember if they have said all of that before.) The slides say only that it will ship this quarter and will be “competitively priced,” reiterating past company positioning.

According to the slides, the company also plans to talk about cloud-based device management and changes to allow one BlackBerry server to support multiple corporations.

10:35 am ET: The Cuban Missile Crisis is apparently over, and VP Pete Devenyi is now outlining the company’s business product road map and making the pitch for its strategy.

“We really do have a great story,” he says, noting that the enterprise is different from the “arms race” of the consumer market.

“It’s not just about the number of apps in App world,” he says, noting that businesses can and are building programs just for use within the corporation. Some businesses, he says, have hundreds of internal apps, none of which show up in the public storefront. BlackBerry, he says, also allows businesses better control than rivals over what programs are on a worker’s device. For example, Devenyi says, when workers change groups within a company, the programs they have access to can be updated automatically with programs deleted and added from their devices.

“That kind of power is power that no one else has,” he says. “We don’t read about that much.”

10:43 am: In addition to both the paid BlackBerry Enterprise Server and the slimmed-down free “Express” version of the server, RIM plans to launch an email system aimed directly at small-to-midsize businesses–MDaemon Messaging Server, BlackBerry Edition. The idea is to give smaller businesses a full email server that has full BlackBerry support. The product stems from an acquisition RIM made a year or two ago and offers what RIM says are features similar to Microsoft’s Exchange Server but at a fraction of the price.

The company is also launching “very, very soon” a modest update to its flagship server product, BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5.0.3. It will add more support for employee-owned devices (including the BlackBerry Balance feature described earlier), support for encrypted attachments and certification for Microsoft’s Office Communications Server 2007 R2 and the latest version, known as Lync 2010.

11:18 am: RIM is launching yet another server this year, known as the BlackBerry Enterprise Application Middleware (BEAM). BEAM, which companies would have to buy in addition to their BlackBerry email server, aims to streamline enterprise content for use on a BlackBerry. ‘What that results in is a much more efficient application than you would otherwise have,” Devenyi says. It’s in beta now, he adds.

11:25 am: BlackBerry is launching its equivalent of Find My Phone, known as BlackBerry Protect, which will allow individuals to remotely wipe or post a message if a device is lost. Protect will launch later this year, Devenyi says.

Finally, the company is talking about a number of changes it is making to the core BlackBerry Enterprise Server so that it can run via the cloud. Launching later this year, RIM will have the ability for its server product to be remotely hosted and support more than one business. It’s not clear yet if this will be RIM offering BlackBerry as a cloud-based service or if this is a product for hosting partners, though it sounds more like the latter.

11:32 am: Devenyi told Mobilized that the company is just showing the architectural changes it is making, not saying how it will bring the cloud-based capabilities to market. “We’re still working through a number of those details ourselves.” Devenyi said. “It could be both, but we are not announcing.”

11:42 am: On to the PlayBook finally. Senior Product manager Ryan Bidan gives the spiel. He says there is a lot that the company isn’t ready to share. Addressing concerns around battery life, Bidan notes the PlayBook has a 5300-miliamp battery, but doesn’t give specifics on how much battery life that will translate to.

“We’ll have good battery life,” he says. “Don’t worry about the battery life.”

Other details:
Software updates will be pushed down to the device on an ongoing basis. There will be a version of App World on the device for downloading developer-created programs.

And with that, the formal part of the event is over.

That’s changing starting today, as the company begins to stick “pre-roll” ads in front of several thousand of its clips, including a new set of music videos that hasn’t been available for YouTube mobile until now.

YouTube will start running videos from Vevo, the “Hulu for Music” joint venture that it works with. And it will run ads with those clips, as well as a few thousand other clips, primarily from its network of semi-pro “partners.”

The caveats: The music clips will run only on Google’s Android handsets, and not on Apple’s iPhone or any other competitors’ phones. And the clips will be limited to whatever Vevo has available in its catalog. Which means, most notably, that Google won’t be able to show clips from Warner Music Group, since the company still hasn’t come to terms with Vevo.

That doesn’t mean iPhone users have to go without music videos, of course: There’s a Vevo iPhone app, if you’re so inclined, and there’s plenty of other ways to get music videos on your phone if you want or need to. It’s just that Google won’t make any money when you watch them.

The big picture is that YouTube says it is now generating 200 million video views a day from mobile devices (that number includes both phones and tablets like the iPad), up 3x from last year. And now it wants start turning those views into dollars, or at least pennies.

Worth noting that while YouTube has been most aggressive about putting “overlay” ads on the clips it runs on the Web, it’s not doing so here.

That makes sense, because the format would be particularly annoying on a small screen, where the real estate it eats up would be even more noticeable. And because the point of overlay ads is to get a user to click on them, which opens up a new site. That works fine on the Web, but, again, it seems like a very tough sell on a handset.

A year ago, when Wolf first made that statement, he was right. An iPhone on Verizon would have been a severe blow to Research In Motion. That it will only amount to a sting this year says a lot about how RIM’s business has improved and how its revenue base has become more diverse in the year or so since.

RIM doesn’t disclose the identities of its biggest carrier partners, but it does disclose how much the top three contribute to overall sales, though it’s not hard to figure out that Verizon has traditionally been its biggest customer. A year ago, Verizon’s sales of BlackBerry devices contributed 25 percent of RIM’s overall sales, while the next two largest customers contributed 13 percent and 10 percent, respectively. At least one of those was AT&T.

Today the picture’s different. RIM’s biggest customer–and it may still be Verizon–accounted for only 12 percent of sales in the quarter ended November, while number two and number three each accounted for 9 percent.

RIM’s growth outside its top three countries–the U.S., the U.K. and Canada–has also picked up. According to figures from IDC, in 2007 RIM relied on North America for more than three quarters of its sales. As of the third quarter of 2010, that figure was down to less than 48 percent. And in a lot of these markets carriers don’t subsidize the phone as aggressively as U.S. carriers do, and so RIM ends up having an advantage on price: $250 or so versus $500 or $600 for an iPhone. RIM is also seeing strong growth in its prepaid business outside North America. During its Dec. 16 earnings call, CEO Jim Balsillie said prepaid sales in the U.K. had grown by 245 percent year-over-year.

Then there’s Android. Verizon threw a lot of weight behind Google’s Android platform last year and has been marketing it heavily all year. The results have been mixed. A study by ITG Investment Research last year suggested that Android didn’t give Verizon the competitive bump it had hoped for versus AT&T. Meanwhile, RIM has in the last year moved closer to AT&T and in August launched the BlackBerry Torch with that carrier, though it didn’t go as well as had been hoped.

It’s not like RIM isn’t going to take some damage from the iPhone. RIM shares are down this morning more than 1 percent. But for RIM it could have been much worse. In June, when Bloomberg News reported that Verizon planned to bring the iPhone to its network, I covered the story of how investors freaked out and lopped more than 6 percent off RIM’s valuation. Now investors seem to understand that it’s likely to hurt RIM’s overall share of the smartphone market, but it won’t be the disaster that it would have been a year ago.

Meanwhile, if you haven’t seen it already, make sure you watch the interview Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher did with RIM Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis at D: Dive Into Mobile in December.

PREVIOUSLY:

• How Might the Verizon iPhone Differ From the iPhone 4 (Besides Being Able to Make Calls)?
• Tired: Speculating About Verizon iPhone. Wired: Speculating About Verizon iPhone Sales.
• Verizon iPhone to Debut With Unlimited Data Plan
• Apple CEO Likely to Appear at Verizon iPhone Event
• Verizon Event Set for Tuesday–iPhone Time

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110110/why-verizon%e2%80%99s-iphone-won%e2%80%99t-be-so-bad-for-rim/feed/ 26 http://allthingsd.com/20101231/korea-not-too-keen-on-nexus-s/ http://allthingsd.com/20101231/korea-not-too-keen-on-nexus-s/#comments Fri, 31 Dec 2010 11:38:48 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=54932 Google’s Nexus S smartphone isn’t generating quite the same interest in Korea as its predecessor. Though Korea Telecom eagerly added the Nexus One to its lineup this past June, the carrier has greeted the debut of its successor with disinterest.

“Currently, we have no plans to introduce Google’s latest Android handset,’’ KT spokesman Lee In-won told the Korea Times. Evidently, SK Telecom–the country’s largest carrier–holds a similar view, and the reason seems to be the tight control Google is exerting over the device’s local marketing and customization. SK officials, for example, say they’re having difficulty getting SK’s T-Map navigation service onto the Nexus S.

With the S, Google has taken a dim view of the overlays and carrier add-ons that often mar the Android experience, adding little benefit while undermining its usability. Presumably, the difficulties to which SK refers are the result of this. If the Nexus S is to be pure Android, Google can’t allow its carrier partners to compromise by piling crapware and inferior pay services atop it, can it?

As of this writing, Google has not responded to requests for comment.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101231/korea-not-too-keen-on-nexus-s/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101224/logitech-delaying-new-googletv-too-report/ http://allthingsd.com/20101224/logitech-delaying-new-googletv-too-report/#comments Fri, 24 Dec 2010 16:11:56 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=27476 Google has reportedly told some of its partners to hold off introducing new versions of Google TV. So this one at least sounds right: Google has supposedly told Logitech to stop shipping its version of the Google TV box while Google upgrades the software. The catch: This report comes from DigiTimes, which is sometimes quite accurate about the Chinese supply chain for consumer electronics, but also misses the mark with some frequency.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101224/logitech-delaying-new-googletv-too-report/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101224/does-the-fcc-want-to-kill-hulu/ http://allthingsd.com/20101224/does-the-fcc-want-to-kill-hulu/#comments Fri, 24 Dec 2010 11:31:18 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=27434 One of Washington’s proposed conditions on the Comcast-NBC U deal will force the merged company to offer NBC’s shows to any Web competitor.

So what does that mean for Hulu, which has already locked up exclusive rights to NBC’s Web video?

A couple of possible answers: Perhaps Federal Communications Commission head Julius Genachowski is trying to put a fork in Hulu. Or maybe the conditions he wants to place on the merger are so toothless that they don’t really count as conditions at all.

Background: Each of Hulu’s three partners/owners–GE’s NBC, News Corp.’s Fox and Disney’s ABC–has agreed to mutual exclusivity pacts. If you want to watch one of their shows for free online, you can see them on the networks’ own sites, or via Hulu–either on the main site itself, or via other sites that are taking Hulu’s feed. (News Corp. also owns this Web site.)

But one of the primary conditions Genachowski wants to place on FCC approval for the Comcast-NBC deal is that Web competitors will get access to NBC’s shows, according to the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Here’s the WSJ:

Comcast would be required to offer NBC Universal programming to any online video provider that has reached a similar deal for content with some of NBC’s competitors, such as Walt Disney Co. or Fox Television, a division of News Corp.

That’s a bit vague, so we won’t really know what Genachowski intends until he goes public with his proposed rules. But there are basically two ways to interpret what the Journal is reporting here. Either:

• The FCC wants to make sure that NBC doesn’t prevent Hulu from syndicating its content out to third-party sites, as it’s already doing with Yahoo, AOL and…Comcast. If that’s all Genachowski wants, that’s no big deal, and not really  a restriction at all. Because Hulu’s business plan is predicated on wide distribution. Or….
• The FCC is telling NBC that it has to offer its shows directly to other Web sites. That’s potentially devastating news for Hulu. If, say, Yahoo can license “The Office” directly from NBC, it may not want to bother cutting a deal with the joint venture site. And to be clear: The overwhelming majority of Hulu’s traffic comes from people watching shows from its big three partners.

So which is it? The FCC held a farcical press conference yesterday where it wouldn’t answer any specific questions about the deal. But it would be nice if it could clear this one up soon.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101224/does-the-fcc-want-to-kill-hulu/feed/ 7 http://allthingsd.com/20101124/general-catalyst-heads-west-to-find-some-young-men-and-women-to-fund/ http://allthingsd.com/20101124/general-catalyst-heads-west-to-find-some-young-men-and-women-to-fund/#comments Wed, 24 Nov 2010 08:01:01 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=715 Go West, East Coast VC?

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

On Tuesday, I met up with Neil Sequeira, a managing partner at the firm, who arrived in town a few months ago and is focused on the social Web and new media.

Sequeira said his fellow managing partner Hemant Taneja, who invests in cleantech companies, will be joining him out here soon.

Sequeira’s kids are too young to be in school, he’s from the Bay Area and none of his portfolio companies are based in Boston, so for him it was a relatively easy move.

General Catalyst’s Palo Alto office will soon have 11 people, up from no presence whatsoever a year ago. Sequeira and Taneja account for about a third of the core partnership of the small VC firm.

Sequeira, whose investments include the Internet television delivery company Boxee and the social media marketing company Vitrue, recently had two of his companies sold–Hot Potato to Facebook and ScanScout to Tremor Media– so he’s looking to find a few more board seats to occupy.

He said General Catalyst was happy with its two-x return on selling Hot Potato to the social networking giant shortly after it invested. But to find the really big opportunities on the consumer Internet, the place to be is in Silicon Valley, he said.

I recorded a very quick interview with Sequeira in which he revealed he’s getting the hang of this Palo Alto VC thing pretty well: He’s already done a seed investment deal at the bustling Coupa Café, where we met up.

Here it is:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101124/general-catalyst-heads-west-to-find-some-young-men-and-women-to-fund/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101116/exclusive-meebo-raises-25m-more/ http://allthingsd.com/20101116/exclusive-meebo-raises-25m-more/#comments Tue, 16 Nov 2010 22:43:15 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=417 Meebo has nearly completed a $25 million round of funding led by Khosla Ventures, with Khosla partner Gideon Yu becoming a board observer. This is the Web-sharing toolmaker’s Series D round, and will be announced by Khosla in a speech at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco this afternoon. Existing backers such as Sequoia Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson are also participating in the round, which brings Meebo to total funding of more than $60 million.

Vinod Khosla said in a phone interview that he was particularly interested in Meebo’s plans to make Web sites social through its Meebo Bar, which will soon include ways for users to virtually “check-in” to Web sites. And secondly, he was impressed by the company’s success with brand advertisers.

“I think very few things are so broad that they reach most of the users on the Internet and this is one of those,” Khosla said. (Meebo currently reaches 180 million uniques, double what it had a year ago, so it’s not quite at “most” of the Internet, but it’s growing fast.)

Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg said 87 percent of the company’s advertisers in 2009 returned in 2010, on average doubling their budgets. He said the Meebo Bar has a 1 percent click-through rate.

That relatively high effectiveness is in part because the Meebo Bar is always visible on the pages of its 8,000-plus publisher partners. Sternberg said that by the time users click on the ad, they’ve often spent a good amount of time on the page, so it’s not just an errant click–they’re actually interested in the brand.

The average Meebo user spends 60 seconds with an ad, longer than the canonical television commercial.

Sternberg said Meebo preferred a smaller venture round to the jumbo later-stage deals companies like Yelp, Facebook and Groupon have taken, because he doesn’t want to significantly change the culture of his company. $25 million is the same amount Meebo raised the last time it took funding, in spring 2008.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101116/exclusive-meebo-raises-25m-more/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101115/hey-facebook-this-launch-better-not-be-boring/ http://allthingsd.com/20101115/hey-facebook-this-launch-better-not-be-boring/#comments Mon, 15 Nov 2010 09:09:37 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=347 Facebook on Monday plans to launch an email service for its users at a press event in San Francisco.

The young company has really gotten way too into these show-and-tell events. The formula is down pat: The usual crowd of tech bloggers and mainstream media types, plus some partners, show up at Facebook’s Palo Alto, Calif., office park and wait around for an awkward amount of time. Mark Zuckerberg walks up to the front of the company cafeteria and gives unscripted remarks about how great a few new products are. Product managers come demo them, questions are asked, lunch is served.

This time, at least, the Facebook product launch is in San Francisco, where the Web 2.0 Summit kicks off a little later in the day. (Google CEO Eric Schmidt goes on stage a couple hours after the Facebook event ends.)

Certainly, worse things could happen to me than having to write about a new Facebook product. But if the company wants to make such a big deal about these launches, it should come up with some really great stuff and/or bunch it all together (see: Steve Jobs).

It’s not so much the events; it’s the products themselves. Facebook’s last few launches–coming out of a self-imposed “lockdown” period of intense product development and much overtime work by employees–haven’t knocked any socks off: A gaming platform redesign, the Places check-in tool, a revised Groups feature, a way for users to download their archive of activity on the service, the Kleiner Perkins sFund launch (which Facebook got roped into hosting), single sign-on for mobile, the beginnings of a deals platform. And there were a few launches made sans event: Facebook Questions, high-resolution photos, etc.

All these are nice enough but, at best, slow-burn products. So far, none of them dramatically impact the way the majority of users value and experience Facebook.

That’s because many of them are fringe products; for instance, Pew says only 4 percent of U.S. online adults have ever shared their location with friends using a mobile device. Surely, Facebook can raise those user numbers, but location-sharing is not a mainstream activity and won’t be for a long time.

Still, even as I am bitching, I am setting Facebook up to succeed, because email is actually a mainstream product. The company will have to come through on the feature front, but there’s a good chance tomorrow’s launch could actually matter.

We can only hope.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Image courtesy Flickr user Robert Scoble.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101115/hey-facebook-this-launch-better-not-be-boring/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101021/win7-win-microsoft-recovers-from-vista-stumble/ http://allthingsd.com/20101021/win7-win-microsoft-recovers-from-vista-stumble/#comments Thu, 21 Oct 2010 19:45:49 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=51110
A year after it first shipped, Windows 7 continues to be the commercial success that Windows Vista never was. Microsoft boasted today that it’s sold (or rather sold and pre-installed) more than 240 million Windows 7 licenses to date, making it the fastest-selling OS ever.

As of last month, Windows 7 was running on 93 percent of new consumer PCs. More interestingly, it’s being sold by 100 percent of Microsoft’s OEM partners–quite a bit more than the 70 percent that picked up Windows Vista during a similar time period. Sort of a startling admission, isn’t it? Thirty percent of the company’s OEM partners turned up their noses at Vista.

In any event, analysts have been predicting that Microsoft will sell 300 million or so Windows 7 licenses by the end of this calendar year. Certainly looks possible.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101021/win7-win-microsoft-recovers-from-vista-stumble/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101021/kleiner-perkins-announces-250-million-sfund-for-social-start-ups/ http://allthingsd.com/20101021/kleiner-perkins-announces-250-million-sfund-for-social-start-ups/#comments Thu, 21 Oct 2010 17:38:54 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=51090 During a press event at Facebook headquarters this morning, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers announced a new $250 million fund for start-ups playing in the social space. The venture capital firm’s partners in the effort: Amazon.com, Facebook, Zynga, Comcast, Liberty Media and Allen & Company LLC.

The release below; Kara Swisher is covering the event live.

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Launches $250 Million sFund Initiative for Social Web Entrepreneurs

Amazon.com, Facebook, Zynga, Comcast and Liberty Media to Invest and Help Accelerate a New Wave of Social Web Innovations

October 21, 2010 – Palo Alto, Calif. – Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) today announced the sFund, a new $250 million initiative to invest in entrepreneurs inventing social applications and services. Amazon.com, Facebook, and Zynga, the leading companies defining today’s social and online environment; entertainment and media leaders Comcast and Liberty Media and Allen & Company, LLC, have committed to invest in the sFund and serve as strategic partners. The sFund will provide financing, counsel, and relationship capital for a new generation of entrepreneurs to deliver on the promise of the social web.

“We’re at the beginning of a new era for social Internet innovators who are re-imagining and re-inventing a Web of people and places, looking beyond documents and websites,” said KPCB partner John Doerr. “There’s never been a better time than now to start a new social venture.”

The sFund will be led by KPCB partner Bing Gordon, former chief creative officer and longtime executive at Electronic Arts and board director of Amazon.com and Zynga. Gordon said, “Social is just getting started and the opportunities are vast. As in the early days of the Internet, the race is on. Today every business, organization, and entrepreneur should have a social strategy.”

“Social apps are viral, and when they hit, it often happens suddenly, and then they grow explosively. That’s one of the reasons the scalable, elastic, no capex, variable cost nature of Amazon Web Services is ideal for social apps,” said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com. “The top three companies that develop for Facebook all use AWS.”

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, said, “The Web is being rebuilt around people, and we’re at a point where any app, website, or device can be designed to be social from the ground up. We’re focused on enabling entrepreneurs to build companies that can disrupt their industries.”

Mark Pincus, founder and CEO of Zynga, noted, “Zynga’s successes – such as FarmVille and Mafia Wars – show the speed with which entrepreneurs can transform existing industries and invent entirely new ones through social platforms. Our model demonstrates consumers’ desires to connect with others in new and valuable ways.”

Brian Roberts, chairman and CEO of Comcast Corporation, said, “Social businesses play an increasingly important role in our entertainment and communications products. We’re very pleased to be a part of the sFund and look forward to seeing the great innovations that are generated from its investments.”

All anchor investors in the sFund initiative are prioritizing developer services for entrepreneurs, who will be part of an active ecosystem. The strategic partners launching the sFund each bring unique contributions. Amazon Web Services (AWS) will provide AWS Getting-Started Support for one year, priority access to worldwide Startup Events, and dedicated business and technical support. Facebook will contribute access to its platform teams, beta APIs, and new programs, like Facebook Credits. Zynga will host periodic sessions with sFund companies to focus on management and technical development, including open source collaboration. Comcast Interactive Capital, Comcast’s venture fund, will provide access to Comcast’s resources, teams, and relationships.

Over the past year, there has been unprecedented innovation in social applications. KPCB’s latest social ventures show the breadth of the social opportunity, from seed stage to scale-up, and enterprise to entertainment, including:

Cafébots — The first company dedicated to Friend Relationship Management. By building applications that are useful, fun, and scalable, consumers will be able to extract more information from and make better use of their social graphs. KPCB led a Series A funding for the company founded by a team of Stanford PhDs.

Flipboard — The world’s first social magazine, delivering a beautiful, personalized experience of the news, images, and information being shared by your friends across social network feeds on your iPad.

Jive — Jive’s social software leverages innovations in social to radically change the way work gets done in the enterprise. Jive has over 3,000 customers serving 15 million users. KPCB led a growth stage funding round in July.

Lockerz — A new social commerce company aimed at ages 13-30 creates a revolutionary new way to shop, play content, and connect. In less than a year, Lockerz has grown to more than 17 million members, offering major discounts on the best fashions, electronics, music, and more.

KPCB will have 10 U.S. partners working on the fund, including Chi-Hua Chien, John Doerr, Eric Feng, Bing Gordon, Lila Ibrahim, Randy Komisar, Aileen Lee, Matt Murphy, Ellen Pao, and Ted Schlein. Another four KPCB partners in Shanghai will extend the sFund’s reach in China.

Go to www.kpcb.com/sfund and www.facebook.com/kpcbprofile, or follow us at twitter.com/kpcb to learn more about the sFund.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101021/kleiner-perkins-announces-250-million-sfund-for-social-start-ups/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101016/news-corp-shuts-off-hulu-access-to-cablevision-subs/ http://allthingsd.com/20101016/news-corp-shuts-off-hulu-access-to-cablevision-subs/#comments Sat, 16 Oct 2010 21:18:41 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=24695 UPDATE: That was fast. People familiar with the situation say that News Corp. is changing tactics and will turn on access to Fox.com and Fox programming on Hulu for Cablevision’s customers. This could take a “few hours” to roll out across the Cablevision footprint, I’m told.

EARLIER:
One new twist in the Cablevision-News Corp. fight: News Corp. has cut off Cablevision subscribers’ access to its shows on Hulu, the video site joint venture, as well as on its own Fox.com.

Here’s a screenshot from Fortune.com columnist Seth Weintraub, taken this afternoon when he tried to watch a Fox show on the site, which is co-owned by News Corp., Disney’s ABC and GE’s NBC Universal:

News Corp.’s comment, via Fox Networks PR guy Scott Grogin: “Fox.com and Fox content on hulu is unavailable to Cablevision subscribers.”

And here’s Hulu PR rep Elisa Schreiber:

Unfortunately, we were put in a position of needing to block Fox content on Hulu in order to remain neutral during contract negotiations between Fox and Cablevision. This only includes Fox content. All other Hulu content is accessible to Cablevision internet subscribers. We regret the impact on Cablevision customers and look forward to returning Fox content to those users as soon as possible.

This is an important escalation from News Corp. (which owns this Web site) in its fight to extract more dollars from its cable partners.

In the past, cable subscribers who couldn’t get Fox shows during fee disputes were still able to watch some of them via Hulu. I know that News Corp. has discussed shutting off access to the site during past fee fights, but as far as I know this is the first time they’ve actually done it.

It’s also a logical move, at least from News Corp.’s perspective.

If it’s trying to increase the pain felt by Cablevision and its subscribers, it may as well use every tool it has. And in the past, the Web has been used against programmers like Fox in these fights: Last year, when Time Warner Cable was fighting with News Corp., it prepared a video showing customers how to find their favorite shows on sites like Hulu.

But while the move is certain to rile up the digerati (astonished industry executive to me, over the phone, just now: “That is crazy!) I’m not sure how much real impact it will have in the fight.

News Corp.’s most valuable weapon is access to the Phillies-Giants playoff game tonight, and the New York Giants-Detroit Lions game tomorrow.

Both are scheduled to air on Fox, and many of Cablevision’s three million subscribers who live in the New York area will holler loudly if they can’t see them. But they wouldn’t be able to see them on Hulu or Fox.com, anyway.

Instead, those sites are used to show reruns of Fox broadcast shows. That means Cablevision subs can’t see Sunday night’s episode of “The Simpsons” on Monday, but that’s not the same kind of impact.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101016/news-corp-shuts-off-hulu-access-to-cablevision-subs/feed/ 32 http://allthingsd.com/20100913/youtube-dips-its-toe-into-live-streaming/ http://allthingsd.com/20100913/youtube-dips-its-toe-into-live-streaming/#comments Mon, 13 Sep 2010 07:54:48 +0000 Voices http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=29557 Google’s YouTube is starting its long-awaited move into live video streaming this morning with a limited test of its new platform: Two days of scheduled live programs from four partner channels–Howcast, Next New Networks, Rocketboom and Young Hollywood. The results of the test will help determine when the live-streaming capability will be rolled out to additional partners. Watching closely will be current players in the space, including Livestream and Ustream.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100913/youtube-dips-its-toe-into-live-streaming/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100601/hulus-growth-curve-flattens-out/ http://allthingsd.com/20100601/hulus-growth-curve-flattens-out/#comments Tue, 01 Jun 2010 20:53:50 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=20134 ComScore’s newest video data are out. The takeaway: In April, Google’s (GOOG) YouTube dwarfed every other site. And Hulu came in second, with about 960 million views.

Does that sound familiar? It should: YouTube has always been at the top of comScore’s (SCOR) tallies. And since last November, Hulu’s U.S. video views have bounced around in the same zone, somewhere between 900 million and a billion views a month.

In other words, Hulu’s growth curve appears to be flattening.

Should Hulu be concerned? Not necessarily. The company–a joint venture between News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox, Disney’s (DIS) ABC and GE’s (GE) NBC–says it is now turning a profit, which few (if any) competitors can say. And it says it’s on a pace to double revenue in 2010 from the $100 million it generated last year.

Still, it looks as if Hulu’s most recent growth spurt came last fall, when it added ABC’s primetime shows to its lineup. Unless the company has a very big partnership announcement up its sleeve, it won’t have a new slug of inventory to show off next fall.

CEO Jason Kilar and company have plenty of other issues to deal with. Like: How to launch that subscription service at a price that makes sense, with shows that people want to pay for and that its network partners feel comfortable putting online.

So maybe this isn’t a huge priority. But a flat growth curve can’t be fun to look at, no matter how well the site is working.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100601/hulus-growth-curve-flattens-out/feed/ 0