Asked about his favorite apps, Kutcher pulled out his phone to look at his home screen.

“I use Facebook and Twitter a lot,” Kutcher said at the CTIA trade show in Las Vegas, adding that he also spends a lot of time using Flipboard, Path and Couple — three companies he has invested in.

The actor and investor talked about the importance of mobile, and its current challenges when it comes to user experience and app discovery.

“I don’t think anyone has mastered mobile,” Kutcher said.

Kutcher is the wrap-up speaker at what will be the last spring show for CTIA, which is going from two shows a year to one, with next year’s event planned for September, back in Las Vegas. The final fall show focused on enterprise wireless will be in October in San Jose.

Nextdoor, the private social network aimed at connecting people in neighborhoods, has a different take. The company unveiled its first mobile app on Thursday, essentially a way for residents of communities to stay in close, constant communication on issues specific to their homes, directly from their smartphones.

If you haven’t heard of it, yes, it’s another social network. And yes, it’s about strengthening ties to those you consider close, something like the original vision of the social app Path.

Unlike existing networks, however, Nextdoor isn’t about sharing things like what new band you listened to, or what type of omelet you had for breakfast. It prioritizes utility over recreation. So, in a typical Nextdoor stream, you’ll likely see posts about local garage sales, want ads for babysitters or rooms for rent. And each node of shared information is relegated strictly to the confines of your specifically drawn neighborhood or surrounding neighborhoods, so, in theory, you’re only in contact with people that would actually find this information useful. (Read Katie Boehret’s recent review of Nextdoor here.)

The new app is largely a port of all the website’s features over to a plain, unobtrusive mobile interface (every mobile social stream looks the same these days). You can post updates, welcome new neighbors and the like.

The biggest pitch, which accounts for roughly one-fifth of the user activity on Nextdoor’s network, is for local safety. Users have convened on Nextdoor to report local burglaries, muggings or suspicious activity in their area. Until now, users could only access the site via desktop or the mobile Web. But with the new app, Nextdoor’s pitch is that it will be far easier to keep tabs on your local goings-on, especially in terms of safety issues.

Especially compelling: You’re able to send and receive urgent alerts to your phone. So, if something bad is going down in your neighborhood, a Nextdoor user can send out an alarm that pings everyone in their district, whether they’re at home or not.

And, perhaps most importantly, you’re able to use the app to post photos on the fly.

By now, we’re well aware that photos do quite well when circulating through social networks — see Instagram, Twitter’s filters, Pinterest, et al. Nextdoor’s appeal here, though, again trumps utility over recreation. Snap a camera-phone shot of a stray cat who may belong to someone, a set of keys lost on the ground or a shady-looking dude peering in someone’s window, and your network of neighbors will be able to see it quickly.

“Think about having hundreds of cameras available at any given moment,” Nextdoor CEO Nirav Tolia told AllThingsD. “Everyone has a smartphone.”

That’s a cool enough thought for any local safety enthusiast — if not a little “Big Brother”-ish — and seems much more feasible than relying on patrols or radios. I wondered, though, if something like Nextdoor’s service would encourage locals to pull a Charles Bronson vigilante move on troublemakers, eschewing calling in the actual police.

Anything is possible. But Tolia said Nextdoor members weren’t doing that sort of thing thus far.

Ideally for the company, the app becomes something more than just another icon in your mobile tray — less an app than a tool, and a connection to what’s happening back at your home when you’re out in the world.

Of course, the perennial question remains: Can a smart take on an age-old social function convince people to sign up for yet another social network?

The app is in Apple’s App Store now. I guess we’ll soon find out.

Update 9:29 am PT: And Casey has confirmed his new job via Twitter: “It’s official, I’m a Yahoo! Excited and honored to join @marissamayer and @yahoo,” he wrote, attaching a Path picture (appropriate!) of Yahoo’s welcome sign.

For the past year and a half he has been at Path, Casey was responsible for recruiting the product management team, managing Path’s product road map process — including the most recent introduction of Path’s messaging feature — and developing product strategies to increase growth, retention and revenue, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Before Path, Casey spent the better part of a decade at Google in various roles, first beginning in marketing and then moving over to product management roles via special products. He led and developed Google’s real-time search team, and also worked to drive growth on the Google+ social product. (He also happens to be a former professional cyclist, riding alongside Lance Armstrong before retiring in 2003, when he subsequently joined Google.)

The move over to Yahoo makes sense, as Casey worked closely with Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer during their shared tenures at Google. It is not clear what he will be doing in his new position, but Mayer has been looking hard for good product leads, and has been trying to recruit Casey over to Yahoo for some time. One source said that Casey could be heading to Yahoo’s “Platforms” division, where he would report to SVP Jay Rossiter.

Update 10:17 a.m. PT: And confirmed again! A Yahoo spokeswoman told AllThingsD that Casey starts today as a senior director in the platform organization.

Path did not respond to emails and phone requests for comment late Sunday evening.

Dave Morin, CEO of Path, is adamant that he isn’t doing anything wrong. “Path does not spam users,” Morin told AllThingsD in an interview about the self-proclaimed “personal network” yesterday. “Invites on Path are never sent without a user’s consent — any allegations to the contrary are false.”

That’s in reaction to a recent series of complaints about the hyper-growth the San Francisco-based startup has undergone of late, after Path updated its software to goose growth. The change has elicited some public outcry, blogger criticism and accusations of spamming users.

Which leads to the simple question: Can a mobile app be intimate and private while pushing explosive viral user sign-ups?

There’s no question that Path has taken one of the more traveled-by paths as of late. After it plodded along in the low-millions-of-users range for much of 2012 — which, for an app defined by restricting its users’ connections, seemed appropriate — the service has seen a massive increase in sign-ups in just a handful of months.

It has ballooned to 12 million registered users as of today, Morin said, with most of the growth coming from North and South America — especially, as of late, from the U.S.

That growth spurt, Morin said, has been helped by a new onboarding process that encourages a user to “Promote My Path” via social avenues such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. In addition, they’re now able to opt in to let Path search their address books, Twitter and Gmail accounts in order to invite new people to the service, be it via email, Twitter or — most aggressively — through SMS text messages.

Here’s the big issue: During the invitation process, check-boxes are automatically marked to send messages to your friends, which means you have to uncheck them in order not to send out invites. Technically it’s an opt-in process to send out those invites, as the user must tap a button to send them out. But for the average user who is not paying close attention and just wants to get to the app, it’s easily something that could be missed — and, ultimately, could feel like Path has spammed your network of friends.

All of these elements combined is a shift for an app that was once the epitome of growth-wary. “Private by default,” the company states on its website, limited to 150 friends (though initially limited to 50), and “designed with the people you love, your close friends and family, in mind.”

The Path of today, however, is not the Path of yesterday, and it has had repercussions.

Until recently, users were able to invite their Facebook friends to join Path en masse, sending out as many invitations as you have Facebook friends with only a few taps of the screen. That was another change from past versions of Path, Morin said, which once used an algorithm to suggest only the closest friends you’d want to connect with.

Facebook severed Path’s invite ability over the weekend, however, in the wake of a dust-up with a U.K.-based user who joined Path one evening before bed, only to wake up and find that Path had sent texts, emails and (inadvertently) phone calls lobbying his friends to join Path on his behalf.

It’s worth noting here that Path needs to tread carefully with address book and personal data of its users; Path settled with the Federal Trade Commission earlier this year, after allegedly violating COPPA regulations on collecting user data from individuals under 13 years old.

Facebook confirmed to AllThingsD that it had cut off its “Find Friends” access to Path at the moment, but emphasized that users can still syndicate content from Path back to Facebook. Facebook did not address whether the restriction came as a result of Path’s recent spamming accusations, and Morin told me he didn’t know why Facebook chose to cut him off when it did.

“We certainly hope that Facebook allows users to connect with their friends on Path and with any other partner applications in the future,” Morin said.

Morin, who is a former Facebook employee, seemed to shrug off his relationship problems with the social networking giant. Along with Path’s rapid growth, Morin said, engagement is higher than ever, and Facebook’s “Find Friends” feature contributed to less than 5 percent of new user connections on Path. What’s more, he added, Path’s most recent update added the ability to find friends from a user’s Gmail and Twitter accounts — through a new partnership with Twitter — effectively supplanting the loss of Facebook’s social graph.

Morin also maintained in an interview that the host of growth-promoting features have been introduced at the request of the users, who have sometimes found other ways to connect to outsiders and promote Path — ways which weren’t originally incorporated into the service. “We’ve learned that if users want to do something, we just want to get out of their way and let them do it,” he said.

“Look at the one-star reviews in the App Store,” Morin said. “Making it easier for people to find friends and help them connect on Path is one of our more common requests.”

It’s legitimate to cater to user requests, of course, if that’s all Path has been doing. “The more tools we give people to invite friends, doesn’t mean they will all join,” Morin said. “The limit of 150 friends in particular actually encourages a thoughtful sort of curation,” he said.

But given the company’s most aggressive pushes yet to expand the service, there’s likely more playing into this than simply user demand.

After three years, for example, with upward of $50 million in venture capital raised from every big venture firm and notable angel investor in the Valley, Path is under intense pressure to show what it has achieved with all its efforts. Until recently, the company has also not yet presented much of a monetization model.

So perhaps when you’re touting a valuation in the hundreds of millions, a strictly “personal network” just isn’t enough.

Here’s a transcript of a quick chat I had with the startup’s CEO this morning, while he was en route to some Silicon Valley meetings. (Don’t worry! No law-breaking here: “Uber is driving,” Crowley assured me.)

Peter Kafka: It seemed like this funding round took a lot longer than you wanted. Do you think you could have done the deal quicker prior to the Facebook IPO?

Dennis Crowley: I don’t know. There’s a lot variables at play here. I don’t want to point to any one particular factor.

The thing that’s important is — hey, we just raised $41 million to do the things we want to do. That’s the thing that we’re psyched about.

I just sent this email out to the team. It’s like “Hey, there’s not a lot of companies that get to play in this space. And guess what? We get to be one of those companies.” That’s a really big, motivating thing for myself, and I think for everyone else.

Union Square’s Fred Wilson explained why a debt deal made sense for you guys. But you can also read between the lines and conclude that if you guys were able to get the valuation you wanted, you would have done a traditional equity deal. Is that a fair assessment?

Some of the things we were hearing from people was that we’re a difficult company to value. Because, you know, we’re rolling out new stuff every single month. And it’s not like we’re just putting a new coat of paint on the app. We’re rolling out new merchant tools, we roll out credit card specials. We’re in this space where we’re reinventing mobile, local, deals with merchants; we’re doing it very quickly.

You look at what we’re doing, and you can see that this is going to be incredibly transformative. And we have some people who say, “you guys are still small, but we can see how you’re going to do it.” And given those circumstances, the way we structured the deal was the best way to do it for a company of our stage and our size.

I understand your messaging about transforming from a check-in tool to a search app. But why are you always talking about becoming a location layer for the Internet? What does that actually mean, and who’s supposed to care about that? Should users care?

We’ve had our share of people who look at the check-in data and kind of pooh-pooh it. “How interesting is it that you know that this random person went to a coffee shop?” That’s why, in a lot of talks that I’ve been doing, I start out by showing this heat-map data-visualization video:

Foursquare check-ins show the pulse of New York City and Tokyo from Foursquare on Vimeo.

One check-in on its own isn’t interesting, and maybe 10 isn’t interesting. But you put millions of these things together every day, and you suddenly have this heat map of where people are. You can start to predict where people are going to be, and what was popular two weeks ago, and what might be popular in the future.

So we can do that, and start sharing that, not just with our users, but developers, too. So we’ve got this point-of-interest database, and we’re sharing that with developers like Path, Vine, Flickr. The stuff that we’ve built is powering the location features for the whole next generation of consumer Internet services.

But just to be clear. If you’re a user, you shouldn’t know or care about that data, right?

Well, a lot of consumers don’t know that Foursquare data is powering this stuff. But there’s also an opportunity there, for every time a Vine is tagged with something, every time a photo on Flickr is tagged with location, there’s an opportunity for Foursquare to layer up that data.

We can say, these are all the services that you’re using, these are all the signals that are coming back to us, and this is how we can make your map a little bit different than your friends’ map, because of all the things that we’ve done across all these different properties.

In your post this morning, you thank 33 million people for trying Foursquare. How many people are using it each month?

We’re not disclosing that.

I talked to you a few years ago about monetization, and your plan then was to rely on a self-serve model. Now you’re hiring lots of sales people. Did your thinking change?

It’s a little bit of both. We have sales people making calls, because that’s how you’re going to go get big national retailers. But I don’t think we’re going to go out there and call every single coffee shop in the country.

Even when we were a much smaller team, we had a million merchants that had signed up. A lot of that came from our user community going to places and saying “Hey, I checked in five times. What do I get?” The users have been teaching the merchants about the product.

I believe as the merchants are becoming more aware of it, we can put those self-serve tools in front of them, and we can make the pitch, where we say “Hey, if you spend X amount of dollars with us, we can drive you Y amount of customers, and we can prove that we’re doing it, and we can tell you if they’re good customers or lousy customers.”

Those are really powerful tools, and we’re taking them and expanding beyond the merchants we have talked to on the phone, and making them available to a million merchants that have already signed up.

You started off as a check-in service, now you’re a search tool. How do you get people who used you for check-ins but then stopped to come back? And how do you reach the much larger group of people who have never used you? How do you grow?

Look at what we did yesterday, when we launched Foursquare 6.0. We put out a new version of the app, and people say “Oh, I get this in a way that I didn’t before.”

It’s amazing — you put search front and center, and people are like “Oh, yeah, I can use this to search for stuff.” And when they search, they realize that it’s a lot richer than other apps they’ve been using to solve the same problem.

So it’s not that you flip a switch, and you launch an app, and suddenly it’s there. But if you build something great, that people use, people talk to their friends about, people show their friends. That’s how this stuff grows. That’s how it’s been working for us since the beginning.

So you’ll build it and they will come?

[Laughs] That’s a good way of putting it. Yeah.

At this point, there’s a pretty solid option to lean back and enjoy your yacht and advise companies like Facebook and Path in the earliest days (which he did). But no, Jacob’s next startup is called Hangtime, and it launches today. It’s a mobile app for finding events.

“The nice thing about having been around the block is you start focusing on bigger trends,” is how Jacob put it.

The big idea at Hangtime is “mapping the social future,” Jacob said. So the app (iPhone, Facebook and mobile Web now; Android coming) crunches data (right now, from Facebook) about what events might be interesting to a particular user. The idea is that RSVPs are too structured, and check-ins come too late to join in. On Hangtime, users can privately tell their friends they are “interested in” an event, which Jacob said feels more flexible and natural.

As you might have guessed by now, Hangtime is launching in time for SXSW this weekend, and it’s already loaded with 1,700 events during the festival in Austin.

Karl Jacob

There are a ton of ways to find events, so I’m a bit skeptical that this one will stand out. I will say that it has some neat design elements — for instance, a header bar in the app that depicts the changing position of the sun from day to night to give an ambient signal of when each event starts, as a user scrolls through a big list.

Hangtime has raised $3.5 million in two seed rounds from a lengthy list of investors: 500 Startups, Charles River Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Freestyle Capital, Greylock, Intel Capital, Interwest, Ignition Venture Partners, Science Inc., SV Angel, Tugboat Ventures and Webb Investment Network, and angel investors Mark Goldstein, Tim Kendall, Steven Lurie, Dave Morin, Matt Ocko, Mark and Ali Pincus, Ben Smith and Michael Tanne.

Totally making this up — not an active user — but Path seems like the Mac of social networks vs. Facebook/Windows. (But what’s the iPod?)

– Dan Frommer, via Twitter

A little more than two years after launch, Path, the self-proclaimed “private social network” startup, is beginning to focus more on monetization.

Hence the hiring of Kim Jabal as the company’s first CFO, who will spearhead the large task of eventually turning Path into a profitable service.

Jabal comes to Path after a year-long stint as VP of finance at Lytro, the experimental camera startup, where she handled the company’s finance, accounting and tax-related activities. Previous to that, she spent more than eight years at Google in multiple finance-focused positions, including directorships in the online sales department, investor relations, and ultimately as director of engineering finance.

In an interview, Jabal echoed Path CEO Dave Morin’s recent comments on monetization prospects, focusing in the near term on potential monetization options like virtual goods, or a premium subscription service. Her hiring, too, could begin to dispel the notion that Path is looking for an exit through an acquisition by another major company like Yahoo or Google (the latter of which has courted Path before).

“Look, we’re trying to build a long-term, sustainable company,” Jabal told me. “We’re not trying to sell the company. I wouldn’t have come if I thought they were going to get bought next month.”

She also made it clear that the company is still looking to heavily recruit software engineers.

Jabal started her first day at Path just last week.

Last week, a fierce debate erupted over a range of social networks and in the media about a story we posted on Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s new decree that employees at the Silicon Valley Internet company would no longer be able to work from home.

In a sometimes awkwardly worded internal memo I posted from Yahoo HR head Jackie Reses, the company rolled out the new rule — pushed through by Mayer — which requires that Yahoo employees who work remotely relocate to company facilities by June 1.

“Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home,” read the memo to employees. “We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.”

The goal of Mayer to cure what ails Yahoo: Reviving a moribund and enervated workforce that has struggled to innovate and excel over many years. One of the many problems has been the liberal use of work-from-home policies that have been woefully mismanaged to create a culture that is simply not energized.

But, unless I am reading the memo wrong, the ban is not just limited to those who have arrangements to work from home full time — which number in the hundreds — but also employees who take one or two days a week at home.

Top sources told me that Mayer has been particularly irked about Yahoo parking lots that are slow to fill in the morning and quick to empty by 5 pm — which is atypical at other tech companies such as Google. (Mayer was a longtime exec at the search giant.)

At first, she tried to change culture in ways that rained down tasty perks on employees — such as free food and smartphones. Mayer has also been practical, instituting please-be-here Friday afternoon FYI weekly meetings and stricter performance reviews.

But she is now inevitably doling out more unpleasant medicine to the troops, starting with the banning of work from home, which has caused a big ruckus both internally and externally.

Some inside the company are clearly appalled, especially since it might more severely impact working mothers.

“When a working mother is standing behind this, you know we are a long way from a culture that will honor the thankless sacrifices that women too often make,” read one email I got from an internal source, referring to the recent birth of Mayer’s baby.

Many others at Yahoo’s Sunnyvale, Calif., HQ pointed to the nursery Mayer had built — for which she paid personally — next to her office as a perk others at Yahoo do not get.

“I wonder what would happen if my wife brought our kids and nanny to work and set em up in the cube next door?” joked a husband of another employee who will be losing her work-from-home privileges.

Yahoo employees, as far as I can see from its company careers page, offers the typical Dependent Day Care Flexible Spending Account, where staff can pay “dependent care expenses, such as day care or after-school care, with pre-tax dollars.”

While it is fair to raise the issue of how employees will cope given the sudden change in HR policy, others also think that limiting work at home is a good idea because it galvanizes culture and creates a spirit of collaboration that has been missing at Yahoo for far too long.

“Marissa is doing what good leaders do,” wrote one person on Twitter. “Making sure her Yahoo team is communicating & working TOGETHER.”

That is actually a sentiment expressed by Google CFO Patrick Pichette at a recent talk in Australia, when asked about telecommuting at Google:

“The surprising question we get is: ‘How many people telecommute at Google?’ And our answer is: ‘As few as possible’ … There is something magical about sharing meals. There is something magical about spending the time together, about noodling on ideas, about asking at the computer ‘What do you think of this?’ These are [the] magical moments that we think at Google are immensely important in the development of your company, of your own personal development and [of] building much stronger communities.”

That said, officially, many Googlers are allowed and even encouraged to work at home. The company told me when asked about work-from-home policies: “We do not have a formal policy and leave Googlers to use good judgment.”

It is the same for Facebook, which confirmed a “policy to provide flexibility as work permits.” In fact, one exec at the social network giant noted to me that its entire camera app was built from an engineer’s garage, with the group staying away from the office as long as they wanted to build it from home.

Business networking site LinkedIn also said it had “no formal policy at present,” but noted that many employees work from home full-time and part-time as the situation warrants and in consultation with managers.

It goes on and on like that throughout the tech scene, part of an ethos of letting tech talent make its own rules — from what they wear to when and where they work — that is deeply ingrained in the culture.

A Hewlett-Packard spokesperson said of the tech giant: “We do not ban [work from home] and many HP people do it … it is not at all an issue at HP and hasn’t been for years. Some folks have a regular schedule, while others can do it from time to time with the okay of their supervisors.”

An AOL spokesperson said the company doesn’t ban work from home.

A Netflix spokesperson referenced a well-known premium video company’s job deck, which stressed a “freedom and responsibility culture” and notes, “We don’t measure people by how many hours they work or how much they are in the office. We do care about accomplishing great work.”

Twitter had a different twist, but still supports working from home. Said a spokesperson: “We believe there are significant tangible and intangible benefits when employees are working under the same roof. We also recognize that every so often it’s important to be able to work remotely, and we allow for that flexibility.”

A Cisco spokesperson said the networking company also allows it, but it has to be approved by a direct manager: “It is certainly utilized by those employees who earn it. And, of course, with our collaborative suite of technologies like Webex (with video) and telepresence it is the next best thing to being there in person.”

A Microsoft spokesman said that the software company “offers flexible work schedules for all employees.”

Perhaps one of the best companies for a long time in the telecommuting space has been IBM. From its corporate Web page, also touting the environmental benefits:

“IBM was one of the first global companies to pioneer programs to reduce employee commuting. It has sustained these programs for nearly two decades. Two key aspects are its (a) work-at-home program and (b) mobile employees program. Today, more than 128,000 (29 percent) of employees globally participate in one of these programs. In 2011, in just the U.S. alone, IBM’s work-at-home program conserved approximately 6.4 million gallons of fuel and avoided more than 50,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions.”

Startups are much the same.

Said an Airbnb spokesperson of the online housing rentals site: “It’s a flexible policy and managers determine what’s appropriate on a case-by-case basis.”

At location startup Foursquare, a spokesperson said, “Our policy is to allow for ‘flexible work hours’ — and that applies to both the hours you work, and where you work from. While we don’t have any dedicated remote employees, our folks do work from home on occasion and we’re fine with that.”

Private social networking company Path is much the same, according to a spokesperson: “Path has a work-from-home policy. The manager and employee work out the details together.”

The only company I queried that did not respond immediately is Apple, which has been known for a long time to have much tighter rules with its employees. I will update when I hear from the company.

I also have emails in to Amazon, which is already known for flexible working policies.

But, overall, Mayer is forging new ground with her work-from-home ban. Whether that is enough to turbocharge the Yahoo culture is anybody’s guess.

Under the conditions of the settlement, Path will also be required to submit to privacy audits every other year for the next two decades.

The allegations stem from a period in early 2012, when Path had discovered approximately 3,000 underage users on the social networking service, which collects birthdate information during the signup process — a clear violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

“This settlement with Path shows that no matter what new technologies emerge, the agency will continue to safeguard the privacy of Americans,” said FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz in a statement.

The relatively small Path joins the growing ranks of Internet companies which have faced federal privacy charges, including tech titans such as Facebook and Google. Late last year, Facebook also reached a settlement with the FTC in which the company agreed to many of the same terms as Path, including ongoing privacy audits for the next 20 years. Google, too, agreed early last year to settle with the FTC over privacy violations related to Gmail and its failed product, Google Buzz.

The settlement with Path comes as a last grand act for departing FTC chairman Jon Leibowitz, who, during his four-year tenure, took a particularly hard-line stance on consumer privacy protections, though he has been criticized by some for letting Facebook off the hook in its settlement. Leibowitz and his office also released a set of best privacy practices for mobile application developers on Friday morning, attempting to curb the incidence of future violations, accidental or otherwise.

According to the FTC, Path did not “spell out its collection, use and disclosure policy for children’s personal information,” it didn’t disclose that collection process to parents, and it didn’t obtain “verifiable parental consent before collecting children’s personal information.”

Path CEO Dave Morin

Path had already discovered the underage accounts before the FTC began its investigation, but the fallout from the address-book saga caused the FTC to scrutinize all of the startup’s past actions.

Path responded to the settlement in a statement posted to the company’s blog on Friday morning:

“We want to share our experience and learnings in the hope that others in our industry are reminded of the importance of making sure services are in full compliance with rules like COPPA. From a developer’s perspective, we understand the tendency to focus all attention on the process of building amazing new things. It wasn’t until we gave our account verification system a second look that we realized there was a problem. We hope our experience can help others as a reminder to be cautious and diligent.”

According to the FTC, the settlement also requires Path to delete any and all information collected on said underage children, which the startup has already done.

Shakil Khan — the well-known head of special projects for the popular Spotify music service, who took the same kind of job at Path last year — is departing the personal social networking site.

He will remain a special adviser, and is also an investor in the San Francisco-based startup.

The globe-trotting Khan (pictured here), who arrived at the startup only last March, had worked with Path on a number of efforts, especially in expanding its international presence. Path recently hired Shindo Kimihiko to turbocharge the company’s efforts in the fast-growing Asian markets.

A Path spokeswoman confirmed the departure after I inquired, and the London-based Khan also emailed me this statement:

When I joined Path, the company was just 20 people, only available in a handful of languages and the resources were mainly U.S.-focused. During my time there, we launched in 17 languages, established great teams in marketing, localization, growth and international and doubled the number of staff. As more than 50 percent of Path’s usage is now international, I’d say that my original objective of helping Path to think in more international terms and capitalize on global opportunities is done :) Moving to the next stage of Path’s growth, I remain as a Special Advisor to the company, as well as continuing to spend time with my other investment companies, including Spotify, SecondMarket, Summly, Blackjet and a couple of exciting startups at incubation stage.

Path recently announced that the service — which has raised $55 million in funding — had five million users.

It was widely praised, mostly because, hey, search is fun! And the user interface is pretty slick.

Perhaps lesser noticed, however, was a side effect of searching through your Path history — a social discovery mechanism.

The “nearby” search option lets you find your past entries on locations, well, nearby. So if you’re a San Franciscan who last checked in to a restaurant in, say, Los Angeles, about a year ago, you can run that nearby search next time you’re down in Los Angeles to rediscover and potentially revisit said eatery.

Or, as Path CEO Dave Morin told me, it “reduces the friction of remembering an event.”

That’s all well and good if you like to eat at the same places all the time. But competing takes on discovery from the likes of Foursquare, Yelp, Spindle, Facebook and Google offer other, more feature-rich signals, and the ability to discover new experiences rather than rediscover old stuff you’ve already done.

Moreover, almost all of those competitors draw on far larger data sets than Path currently offers with its five million users. Mining the history of activities of of the masses serves up many more potential opportunities to visit new places.

Here’s where Path deviates: Using search, we can scan back through the history of our friend’s experiences, browsing some of the many places they’ve checked in, and sorting it by city, by keyword, by theme. Within that history, Morin’s philosophy goes, we’re able to find some of the best restaurants, bars, or areas of interest — not, mind you, due to the many signals that the other services rely upon, but because our network of Path pals have visited them.

“Maybe the question isn’t necessarily, ‘Is this the best data set to find a restaurant?’ Morin said. “Maybe the question is, ‘Have my closest friends’ — you know, the ones you’ve befriended on Path — “‘decided to go to these restaurants?’”

It’s a curious approach, and a bit charming, considering it’s somewhat backward from most of the other sites working on discovery. The sample set, by the nature of the network, is smaller by design. And less choice, in Morin’s opinion, makes for better results in the context of Path.

I’m not sure I totally buy that quite yet, however. I wonder, between the Paths, the Foursquares and the Facebooks of the world, just how many folks remember to check in to locations via Path. As always, it runs up against the problem of “Do we need another social network?” by perhaps not being the go-to app for checking in.

Still, it’s novel. And the search function works quite well. Now we’ll see if it keeps users active, engaged and checking in.

For my immediate public thoughts, I use Twitter. I’m speaking to my followers in the moment, addressing the global town square.

For personal, perhaps off-color remarks, I’ll go to Path. I’m only friends with a handful of people on there, most of whom get my sense of humor.

And then there’s Facebook, where I go to recount certain personal experiences — but not all of them — to my friends, mostly those people I know in real life.

Which is part of why on Wednesday, Facebook will begin to introduce a set of small but significant privacy changes across the site, a part of a broader industry-wide battle for user attention and sharing.

This is Facebook’s persistent problem, it’s Achilles’ heel. It is not the social network to end all social networks. It, along with the others, is compartmentalized, relegated to a specific type of sharing for specific people. And it kills Facebook that this is the case.

The crux of this problem isn’t that Facebook can’t fulfill sharing across all these different contexts. It’s because users aren’t able to control what they’re sharing easily enough, and more importantly with whom they’re sharing it.

“We fundamentally believe that when users are suprised, it’s bad for them, and ultimately bad for us,” said Sam Lessin, director of products, identity and Timeline at Facebook. “It’s denigrating on trust.”

In other words, the fewer “Oh God, what embarrassing photo did I just share?” moments we all have, the better.

Some of these updates attack this type of problem directly. Facebook will add a small “privacy shortcuts” tab to the top right-hand corner of your page. It’s a toolbar that lets you manage who can see what you’re posting and who can contact you, along with a link to a full sub-directory of privacy settings. It’s faster access to features that were already there — just buried beneath a host of other menus.

Other updates are smaller in scope, yet tackle the broader issue of sharing transparency. Now, Facebook will pop up two permissions requests when you connect third-party apps — a “read” permissions box, which lets the app access your Facebook data, and a “write” box, which lets you choose whether you’ll let the app publish activity to your Timeline. Before, those two options were collapsed into one pop-up, potentially leading to some user confusion.

Notes will appear to users who hide posts from their timelines, explaining where else on the site these items may appear. A new takedown request tool lets you ask friends to remove posts and photos that you may have been tagged in.

And then there’s the update that will bring some hand-wringing. Facebook is eliminating the option that allows users to choose who can look up their timeline across the site, effectively letting anyone on Facebook find your front page through a name search.

Some people may immediately shout “privacy invasion!” here. And perhaps it is Facebook casting aside some veil of user obscurity. But that’s missing the point.

Yes, your timeline will be searchable. But Facebook has made it clear it wants to be the definitive online identity site — not LinkedIn, not Google, not Twitter. And for a directory of identities to truly work, everyone must have a listing. Your timeline is your listing.

But Facebook’s rationale here is this: A listing is only as public-facing as the information it displays. If you can better control what shows up in the listing, it won’t matter as much that this listing is there in the first place. And again, better control will cut down on the “surprise” issues Facebook wants to avoid.

And this, my friends, is the point. If we can feel at ease and in control of what we’re sharing and with whom, there’s less need for the Paths, the Google+’s, even the Twitters of the world.

“Facebook isn’t just for friends,” Lessin said. “Yes, that’s the center of the graph — but we’ve spent a lot of time developing other audiences.”

Expect to see the changes appear before the end of the year. You can’t miss ‘em. Facebook will plaster site-wide banners at the top of the News Feed informing everyone about the new features.

Just like Facebook said: No surprises is a good thing.

Late last week, I made my way down to Santa Clara Valley Medical Center to visit Brett Bullington, the always energetic and ebullient Silicon Valley exec and investor.

He had gotten into a serious accident last month while cycling across the country to raise money and awareness for a charity in Africa, and had been hospitalized with severe brain trauma.

And, indeed, it was severe, with initial reports about his prognosis — on a Tumblr blog about him — pretty depressing to read. As in most cases, progress is usually slow and sometimes discouraging.

Not in Brett’s case, as it has turned out. As Spanish poet Antonio Machado wrote: “Travelers, there is no path, paths are made by walking.”

And as you can see from the video below, Brett is now walking and doing a very good job of it, considering. Most of all, he is getting better at it day by day.

Indeed, when I visited, I was a bit nervous to see him in a less-than-high-energy state I was used to. But while the room was dark when I walked in, because he was napping, the minute he awoke, he was the Brett I had always known.

He peppered me with questions about tech news, including on how Yahoo’s new CEO Marissa Mayer was doing, and what did I think of Facebook now, and how my partner, Megan Smith, was liking working at Google X.

Brett also felt badly about the accident, especially the toll it had taken on his family, but said few things that were not forward-looking.

As his wonderful wife, Diana, noted to me in an email, Brett is now “truly present.”

Let’s not kid ourselves — it will still be a tough road to recovery. Brett has a triangular-shaped head, due to the large part of his skull that was removed, which needs to be fixed via complex surgery. And he has some moments of forgetfulness and confusion — although they seemed rare when I was there. Most of all, this work is exhausting for him, especially since he is making major strides every day.

But, after seeing him, I am extraordinarily hopeful — Brett might not have recovered at all, and so it was a trip to have him ask me to help him organize a mani-pedi party when he gets home sometime in the first week of December.

Done.

In fact, Brett is going to leave the hospital this week for a day to be with his family on Thanksgiving, which is just the kind of thing to be truly thankful for.

Until he is out and about, here’s a video taken last week of him walking — the helmet is to protect his exposed head in case of a fall:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121119/something-to-be-thankful-for-brett-bullingtons-recovery-path-is-made-by-walking-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121101/path-rebuilds-its-ipad-app/ http://allthingsd.com/20121101/path-rebuilds-its-ipad-app/#comments Thu, 01 Nov 2012 15:00:14 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=265821 Private social network Path launched a new version of its iPad app on Thursday morning, rebuilding the software from the ground up to better complement the tablet medium.

“When people use Path on their phones, it’s always with them,” said Path VP of marketing Nate Johnson. “But the iPad data research we’ve collected shows a different use case. It’s really about coffee time and couch time.”

Now there’s a landscape mode that displays friend activity in a larger format, making better use of the iPad’s additional screen real estate. Users can also browse through daily friend activity, and view maps of all the locations those friends have visited throughout the day.

Johnson compared it favorably against other potential competitors in the space. “Flipboard, for example, presents you with tiles of content that aren’t fixed to time,” he said. “We look at your friend activity day by day.”

That said, Path isn’t quite in the same ballpark as a Facebook, or even a Flipboard, just yet. As of the last announced count, Path has somewhere in the neighborhood of three million active users. Flipboard, by comparison, has upward of 20 million, and Facebook just recently hit the one billion user mark.

Though to be fair, Path’s network is insular by design. As the private social network, it ultimately has a more difficult time spreading its user base far and fast.

The update is for iPad only and, for now, Path is focused on iOS on the tablet front. The updated app is available in the App Store now.

Update: An earlier version of this story misstated that the app for iPad was rebuilt. The original iPhone Path app was usable via the iPad, but not specifically built for it.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121101/path-rebuilds-its-ipad-app/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20121019/how-many-techies-does-it-take-to-elect-a-president-t4o-launches-innovator-series-videos-for-obama/ http://allthingsd.com/20121019/how-many-techies-does-it-take-to-elect-a-president-t4o-launches-innovator-series-videos-for-obama/#comments Fri, 19 Oct 2012 13:00:06 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=261707

A large group of tech luminaries — including LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, Path’s Dave Morin, JLab’s Judy Estrin, Dropbox’s Drew Houston, Craigslist’s Craig Newmark and Box’s Aaron Levie — are part of the launch of a series of online videos today aimed at talking up U.S. innovation and, in the process, touting the reelection of President Barack Obama.

The slick “Innovator Series” of about two dozen videos comes out of Technology for Obama — or T4O, for short — and plans to feature daily short interviews with entrepreneurs and tech execs. Along with touting the need for innovation, the group talks about their “personal lessons of success and failure,” which then sidles politically into “their views on why they believe President Obama is the right leader for increasing innovation and moving the country forward.”

The patter is in that vein, such as this quote from Hoffman:

“Innovation is our key differentiator in terms of competitive business model of the U.S. in the world. We need to continue to attract the best people to build interesting businesses, products, services here.”

CNET co-founder and former CEO Shelby Bonnie, who recently joined investment firm Allen & Co., did most of the interviews for the T4O effort.

“Each of us was looking at what we could do and found that this group had a deep-seated belief in the importance of innovation and ability to innovate in this country,” he said of the video offerings, which were shot mostly out of the Obama campaign offices in San Francisco. “The consistent theme we wanted to get out is that President Obama gets that and believe in innovation.”

No word yet on what GOP geeks — such as Hewlett Packard’s Meg Whitman or Cisco’s John Chambers — are up to for former Gov. Mitt Romney — but until then, here is a sizzle reel of the T4O interviews:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121019/how-many-techies-does-it-take-to-elect-a-president-t4o-launches-innovator-series-videos-for-obama/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120920/how-private-can-you-get-origamis-private-social-network-takes-families-into-the-fold/ http://allthingsd.com/20120920/how-private-can-you-get-origamis-private-social-network-takes-families-into-the-fold/#comments Thu, 20 Sep 2012 17:00:03 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=252528 The natural reaction to the meteoric rise of sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn is to pull back. We’ve seen it with Path and EveryMe, the latter being Oliver Cameron’s friends- and family-centric mobile application launched earlier this year.

Strange thing, these apps: As Cameron tells me, despite what they may be intended to do, users have a way of coopting technology to suit their own needs. As a result, apps like Path and, yes, EveryMe, can feel less intimate, open to far more people than perhaps you originally even wanted.

Enter Origami, Cameron’s new venture into scaling down social to the essentials in your life: Family. After Cameron saw that only 30 percent of EveryMe users were sharing with family — which was the original target group the app was intended to serve — he decided to build another product independent of EveryMe instead of drastically changing up his original app.

“People have valued their privacy for thousands of years,” Cameron told me. “With that in mind, we built Origami, something of a combination of Skype, Picasa and Facebook Groups. Think of it as a Google Apps for families.”

Instead of “relegating the ones we love into scheduled phone calls and greeting cards,” the idea is to incorporate family into our daily digital lives.

It is heavily video- and picture-focused, with an initial emphasis on building for the desktop — “However unfashionable that may be,” Cameron admits. But consider the demographic: Facebook’s high level of older users signed on to the desktop Web before mobile exploded, and Origami caters to that crowd of users.

Something else refreshing: Unlike Path, or the more granular Pair app (which is literally an app for two people), Origami comes with a built-in business model — it’s a premium service. Pay-to-play right from the start. Obviously that may affect user sign-ups initially, but it’s a way to start with revenue right off the bat.

The obvious question is, why reinvent the wheel? Users could just stick to Path or Facebook Groups, but be more judicious in who they add.

Cameron says that existing services that are trying to cater to families aren’t doing a good job of it. Either the user experience is terrible and not entirely family-oriented, or perhaps you make the mistake of adding a friend to your group instead of a family member — it changes the entire dynamic. Origami is aimed at family right from the get-go.

Cameron, co-founder Vibhu Norby and the Mountain View-based team of six will use the existing $4 million raised from rounds with Tencent and other seed investors to work on Origami, while still continuing to develop EveryMe as a separate, standalone product. Cameron told me that he prefers this instead of an outright pivot, though I imagine it may be difficult to focus on building two separate products simultaneously — especially if one takes off.

The company has opened Origami up in private beta beginning Thursday, and is now taking user sign-ups to slowly seed the product out to select groups for initial testing and learning.

We’ll have to wait and see if this time they can keep it in the family.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120920/how-private-can-you-get-origamis-private-social-network-takes-families-into-the-fold/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120810/with-billions-burning-a-hole-in-her-pocket-here-are-some-companies-yahoos-mayer-might-be-eyeing-and-buying/ http://allthingsd.com/20120810/with-billions-burning-a-hole-in-her-pocket-here-are-some-companies-yahoos-mayer-might-be-eyeing-and-buying/#comments Fri, 10 Aug 2012 14:00:45 +0000 Liz Gannes and Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=239432

Now that she could have $4 billion more to play with from the proceeds of Yahoo’s sale of its Chinese assets, here’s a fun new Silicon Valley parlor game to enjoy: “What will Marissa Mayer buy?”

Her moves are more than just an exercise, though, as it’s becoming clear that the new Yahoo chief will be using acquisition as one of the key tools to bring talent into the forlorn Silicon Valley Internet giant and, presumably, foment both innovation and growth.

And there’s nothing like a big splashy acquisition from a new flashy CEO to get people inside and outside of Yahoo thinking the company is cool again.

Mayer is someone who knows from buying, having been involved in many Google acquisition negotiations over the years, including those that worked (Zagat) and those that didn’t take (Yelp and Foursquare).

But now the buck truly stops — and starts — with her.

Previously, Mayer had about $2 billion in Yahoo cash to use, some of which is tied up abroad and cannot be repatriated for tax reasons. While that’s certainly not chump change, it is minuscule in comparison to Microsoft, Apple, Google and even Facebook, all of whom would be bidding rivals in a number of cases, and most of whom — sorry, Mark Zuckerberg — have much stronger stock to also use.

That’s probably why Mayer is looking to add to her war chest. According to a Yahoo filing today, she is conducting a review of a variety of plans for Yahoo and, as part of it, might allocate money from its partial sale of a stake in China’s Alibaba that had been promised as a shareholder dividend or stock buyback, to other purposes.

Translation: Mayer is going on a buying spree.

That’s clear, according to numerous sources, who note that she has been making the rounds all over Silicon Valley and elsewhere, asking about talent, promising entrepreneurs and, of course, good acquisition targets.

“She is really surveying the scene with a lot of energy,” said one person of many she has visited of late. “It clear she wants to put a flag in the ground that she has arrived, and buying something of note will definitely do that more than the less-exciting job of fixing its ad platform, or the horrible prospect of laying off a lot of people.”

But while venture capitalists with struggling companies might cheer and make Mayer their BFF over her possible shopping spree, not everyone thinks this acquisition focus is such a dandy idea, given all that Mayer needs to fix at Yahoo already, and the concern that she might pay too much.

Noted a fantastic analysis from Bernstein Research after the Alibaba cash news:

“Perhaps we are too unimaginative, but given the challenges above and the nature of the competition it faces, from much larger and well-resourced businesses such as Google or Facebook, we have a hard time seeing how today’s Yahoo! could acquire a significant (emerging) Internet or media property, or multiple mid-size businesses, and create value. We see the downside risk of destroying value by overpaying and/or by hampering a rapidly growing but still relatively immature business with the burdens brought about by integration with underperforming Yahoo! as much higher than the upside potential.”

It’s doubtful that Mayer will listen to that — one exec who has heard her noted that “she seems intent on making a big move.”

Advertising tech companies have been high on her list initially, as Mayer has appeared to be considering doubling down on the arena at Yahoo to buck up its suffering assets. Her interest has turned to PubMatic, Mediaocean and Turn, said sources.

And, most recently, several insiders said she has been evaluating Criteo, a retargeting company that is led by former Yahoo exec Greg Coleman.

While some kind of ad tech move seems obvious and soon, there are also some other more consumer-centric product companies Mayer could be mulling, too, said numerous sources.

Here’s a rundown:

Foursquare: Mayer had previously tried to buy Foursquare before it took its last round of funding, when she led local efforts at Google. That makes sense, since it’s in her sweet spot of local and social.

The New York-based company was last valued at $600 million, and is in the midst of trying to prove it’s a real business. But that hasn’t happened yet.

That’s why this name keeps coming up, especially from people who were at Google with Mayer and know her intense interest in the company, as well as its clever CEO and co-founder Dennis Crowley.

Zynga: Some public market companies come at a discount these days, compared to the private ones that are still trading more on promise than revenue. Not so the stock-shocked Zynga, which is a product company, and highly metrics-driven, as Mayer famously is, too.

As its relationship with Facebook bears less fruit, Zynga could benefit from a new platform and audience, which Yahoo has. Zynga would have to come at a premium over its $2.3 billion market cap — although investors clearly aren’t that hopeful about its prospects, considering the company has $1.6 billion in cash.

But would Zynga CEO Mark Pincus — who is friendly with Mayer — agree to be a loyal lieutenant to her? (Admittedly, we’d pay to see that management pairing.)

Flipboard: The elegant Flipboard social reader app was a leap forward in app product design when it first launched a couple years ago. But the app’s growth hasn’t paced with the iPad, despite being a signature demo for the device.

And its formerly extremely friendly relationship with Twitter — where CEO Mike McCue was on the board until recently — is cooling, as Twitter looks to establish a more consistent content display experience across different platforms. Still, McCue has done the long build thing before, having run Tellme for eight years before selling to Microsoft. But while McCue may have the personal stability to be patient, his ability to hire going forward isn’t going to be great until Flipboard figures out Plan B.

Yelp: Yelp is another relatively cheap public consumer Internet company, and another that Mayer had gotten to know in her past Google life. It currently has a market cap of $1.62 billion.

While the Google-Yelp deal went awry, and the local reviews player once turned down a bid from former Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, Yelp might fare better under Mayer, who likes crowd-sourced recommendation sites (see: Zagat).

Path: Path has been an acquisition target for most of its life, given its slow start and its team’s top pedigree. Thus, its name keeps coming up among many looking at what Yahoo needs.

That’s probably because Mayer knows CEO and co-founder Dave Morin well — she also invested in his wife Brit’s online media company — and could consider him a good choice for a top product exec at Yahoo.

But it seems a long shot — those familiar with Morin’s thinking say that he wants to remain independent. More to the point, this was a company that thought it was too good for Google’s bid, so going to Yahoo seems even less likely.

Pinterest: The digital scrapbook phenom is perhaps the hottest — and priciest — name mentioned, and such an acquisition, if Mayer could swing it, would send shock waves through the tech ecosystem.

But, while it is in Yahoo’s wheelhouse of discovery, Pinterest is incredibly young and also revenue-free. That’s an issue for Mayer all over the start-up world, since she now has more pressure to choose buys that are accretive.

(Let it be said: Yahoo is not the wealthy wonderland of Google, where Mayer grew up, and where money grows like kudzu in its organic gardens.)

Still, the Yahoo board is giving her a clearly long runway, so might also not mind a few buys that break the bank and Yahoo’s margins, even if shareholders would.

One major issue with Pinterest: Its quirky co-founder and CEO Ben Silbermann does as he pleases, and we would guess it would not please him to sell right now.

But how about some cheaper options? Those in the know suggested a few good mobile start-ups that aren’t so big, high-profile or expensive:

Bump: This app originally gained fame for the physical exchange of contact info between two phones, but then got more general-purpose. More recently, it has been focused on helping people easily share photos from their phones to their computer. Sounds like a good fit for Flickr. It has raised about $20 million in funding.

Pulse: This smooth newsreading app has an energetic young team and about $10 million in funding. It just released a snazzy Web version.

Foodspotting: The visual restaurant app focuses on helping people find delicious dishes. It’s mobile-first, and it also has the angle of being all-positive, with people only recommending things they like. It has less than $5 million in funding.

While this is a very Silicon Valley-focused list, as these things tend to be, there are many more companies out there in the world that might fit the bill — as well as individuals that the tireless Mayer could woo one by one.

So let the parlor games begin.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120810/with-billions-burning-a-hole-in-her-pocket-here-are-some-companies-yahoos-mayer-might-be-eyeing-and-buying/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120807/nextdoor-the-private-social-network-hooks-up-with-the-city-of-san-jose/ http://allthingsd.com/20120807/nextdoor-the-private-social-network-hooks-up-with-the-city-of-san-jose/#comments Tue, 07 Aug 2012 14:00:00 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=238545 You could say that the city of San Jose and Nextdoor need each other.

Perhaps that’s hyperbolic. But let’s look at the facts: San Jose, the third-largest city in California, could use more efficient ways to communicate official messages with its constituents. And Nextdoor, a social network that bills itself as the private alternative to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, needs more ways of spreading to new users.

Which is why the marriage of the two makes sense. As of Tuesday, the city of San Jose can use Nextdoor to distribute information to the network. With the new hookup, local government can send out messages to all those San Jose residents on Nextdoor, regardless of the neighborhood in which they reside. Ideally, it will mostly contain information on things like utility shutdowns, volunteering opportunities, emergency preparedness — all typical messages that you’d expect from local governmental bodies.

It’s different from the way the network usually functions. Nextdoor members are limited to communication within their neighborhoods, or cordoned-off areas within each district of a city. The idea there is to foster localized discussion within a community, without expanding beyond a critical mass. Unlike the typical user, the city of San Jose will be able to send out messages to everyone at once.

Nextdoor CEO Nirav Tolia

It looks to be a smart pairing between private enterprise and city government. But it is also a broader strategy move for Nextdoor, a network whose virality is self-limited by its very nature. To keep in line with its message of extreme privacy, users can only sign up if they’ve verified their physical address, and even after that, they can’t cross over into interacting with people outside of their neighborhood. Existing users evangelizing the network to newcomers by word of mouth is effective, the company tells me, but it is also slow. So cozying up to local governments, then, is another method of distribution — have San Jose blanket-pitch the service to its residents, and Nextdoor gets a better chance at citywide adoption. And if it takes off in a handful of major cities, it’s easy to think it will spread to others quickly.

The network is still private by design; the city (and other constituents) can only see you if you decide to respond to one of its messages. And even if you do respond, your only viewable information is your first name, last initial and the neighborhood in which you live. The idea is to maintain a level of accountability to fight against spam and abuse, while keeping residents comfortable with the amount of information they’re sharing about themselves.

This is the direction CEO Nirav Tolia thinks we’re trending toward: Localized discussion facilitated through the Internet, and made easier through the mutual trust gained in accountability. “It’s conceivable that in the next 10 years, all of this discourse will move online,” Tolia told me in an interview. “I would like to think that Nextdoor will play a critical role in doing that with cities and local governments.” As of now, more than 60 different cities — most of them in California — are using the network for top-down communications to their residents.

To be sure, Nextdoor isn’t a panacea for governmental communications issues. For one, city government can’t rely solely on Nextdoor for issuing communitywide alerts and notifications, mostly because not everyone in the city is signed up to use the network. And the city is limited on how many messages it can send out per week — and that may be restricting in terms of getting all of its communications sent out.

But the fiscally enfeebled San Jose will take what it can get. Along with the rest of California, San Jose’s budget is in tatters. “We’re broke,” councilwoman Rose Herrera told me in an interview. “Any free tools like these are more than welcome.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120807/nextdoor-the-private-social-network-hooks-up-with-the-city-of-san-jose/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20120725/paths-latest-refresh-is-all-about-growth-and-engagement/ http://allthingsd.com/20120725/paths-latest-refresh-is-all-about-growth-and-engagement/#comments Thu, 26 Jul 2012 04:00:56 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=234005 As the self-proclaimed “personal network,” Path is in something of a difficult position. Unlike a Facebook or a Twitter, the network limits its own viral growth, as it is private by design. You’re held to a maximum of 150 friends. If you’re not in someone’s network, you can’t see any of their activity or details. Inviting others is possible, though not a prominent feature.

Consider Path 2.5, the start-up’s largest version update since Path 2.0 launched last November, the company’s move into giving the private network a higher profile. Launched Thursday morning, the version refresh adds a slew of new features aimed at making the network accessible to those not already using it, lessening the learning curve for newcomers and improving existing features for its current users.

Take, for example, the attention paid to updating interactions and invites. If you want to connect with someone who isn’t on Path, you can send him or her a personalized invite via email or SMS, complete with your own recorded voice message. For those already in Path, you can broaden their network by suggesting new friends to your existing ones.

As the product has evolved over the past year, Path CEO Dave Morin told me in an interview, there have been a number of different use cases: Exclusively family-oriented, family and friends, and then the uber privacy conscious. Path’s job, Morin said, is to follow those different use cases and reach the different demographics through new iterations of the product, like the one we’re seeing in this latest release.

But he is quick to assure that in following the growth, Path is sticking to its original — private — guns: “Our values are to speak to this sort of intimacy,” Morin said. “And we never compromise our values.”

New initiates aren’t left in the dark. The update also brings what Morin calls an “unboxing experience,” essentially a guided tour of how to use the app upon first downloading it. It’s hand-holding to the extreme, in line with the company’s “personal” philosophy.

The other major part of the update fights against another challenge inherent in a closed network: Engagement. Sharing inside of Path means using Path’s set of tools, but many users may find they already rely on other sharing apps. For example: While you may already use Instagram for photos, Foursquare for check-ins and Evernote for note-taking, Path has its own camera, check-in and note-taking features that you have to use in order to feed its network. If users are already hooked into using other apps, that means duplicating the action to share it inside of Path.

That’s why those tools are improving over time. Photos will display in full-bleed in the stream (akin to a recent Facebook product update), and the camera tool has more filters, faster photo-capture accessibility and an actual cropping function. And in addition to sharing what music you’re listening to, you can post what you’re reading or what movie you’re watching. Google loyalists may also rejoice; Path’s Android app has been rebuilt from the ground up, optimized and better-designed after Google’s recent release of the Android Design style guide.

Of course, tools are only good if they’re used, and Path obviously won’t thrive if there’s no activity within the network. That’s where the new “nudge” feature comes into play. If you’ve noticed that a friend hasn’t posted any updates within the app for some time, you can “nudge” them, or request that they create a specific moment — be it a new photo, a location check-in or a comment. Nudges beget user activity, and that activity feeds on itself.

All of this is not to say that Path’s is a dead network. Quite the contrary, according to Morin: Over the past two weeks, Path has seen more organic growth than in the entire history of the product — even more than when the app relaunched with version 2.0. He didn’t give me any specific numbers, but assures that growth is massive.

Still, despite this growth, Path can’t rest on its laurels. It has the unique problem that only closed networks like itself and Nextdoor must face: How do you toe the line of pushing forward and accelerating growth while touting privacy as your flagship feature?

The answer, it seems, is simple: Empower the user, and let them do the work for you.

“It’s always been an evangelistic sort of product,” Morin said. “So we need to put those tools into the hands of people who want to evangelize.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120725/paths-latest-refresh-is-all-about-growth-and-engagement/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120629/path-and-nike-fuelband-pair-up-flaunting-the-benefits-of-a-private-api/ http://allthingsd.com/20120629/path-and-nike-fuelband-pair-up-flaunting-the-benefits-of-a-private-api/#comments Fri, 29 Jun 2012 13:00:03 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=226071 Facebook and Twitter rose to prominence in part because they played so nicely with others. Yes, the sites were great products first. But they became even better platforms, opening their application programming interfaces to let third-party developers integrate their services. And as the platform era matured, open APIs practically became en vogue.

But there is still value in being exclusive.

Path, for instance, is perhaps a prime example of this. It has an API, though it currently only has a single announced partner: Nike. On Friday, the company announced a small update in the partnership, adding integration between Nike’s FuelBand fitness tracking bracelet and the private social network. Path publishes a summary of your FuelBand activity in the form of an interactive graph at the end of each day, complete with included data points on where and when you’ve checked in using Path.

Ultimately, the aim is a mix of motivation and geeking out on data — you can see how close you’ve come to your daily exercise goal, while simultaneously tracking all the places, activities and reasons why you achieved it (or why you didn’t). It’s incremental, building on the previously announced partnership between the two companies when Path first started publishing Nike+ running route updates.

However small an update, it’s also an indicator of Path’s API partnership strategy as a whole. When Path first spoke of its API, the plan wasn’t to open it up to the masses — it was, and remains, a private API, with partners selected in terms of which ones make sense for the company to work with, and which ones make for a better user experience.

“We want to improve the experience for the collective users of both apps,” Path CEO Dave Morin told me in an interview on Thursday, “which is why we’re selective about who we’re partnering with.”

That selectivity means more time is spent on the integration, making the content in a user’s stream actually more attractive. The new FuelBand graphs are sleek, offering users granular information about their fitness activity in a polished interactive graphic. That’s more than can be said for some apps that show up in Facebook’s News Feed, even after Open Graph integration.

“We’re driven by quality,” Morin said. “We’re driven by design.”

And ultimately, the better and prettier the content is that shows up in the stream, the more users will actually want to engage with the product on a regular basis. Quality begets stickiness, and stickiness begets a company with a better chance at surviving.

We’ll no doubt see more companies partnering with Path in the future. My hunch says it’ll be a slow, steady ramp up over time, with Path being selective about who it wants to work with.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120629/path-and-nike-fuelband-pair-up-flaunting-the-benefits-of-a-private-api/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20120628/courting-brands-and-developers-foursquare-unveils-connected-apps-platform/ http://allthingsd.com/20120628/courting-brands-and-developers-foursquare-unveils-connected-apps-platform/#comments Thu, 28 Jun 2012 21:21:03 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=225892 Continuing its push toward becoming a social discovery engine for local places of interest, Foursquare announced on Thursday a developer preview of its connected apps platform. The move essentially allows third-party apps to offer suggestions based on user check-ins; Foodspotting, for example, suggests dishes to order at restaurants, while Path and Instagram integrate better photo sharing.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120628/courting-brands-and-developers-foursquare-unveils-connected-apps-platform/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120628/looking-east-to-predict-the-next-billion-dollar-mobile-company/ http://allthingsd.com/20120628/looking-east-to-predict-the-next-billion-dollar-mobile-company/#comments Thu, 28 Jun 2012 20:16:32 +0000 Joe Medved http://allthingsd.com/?p=225277

photo: NASA

As a U.S.-based VC working for SoftBank, one of Japan’s leading Internet companies, I’ve recently been noticing the recurrence of mobile trends moving from East to West. A few years ago, it was the concept of mobile gaming that exploded in Japan and trickled westward to the U.S. Now, there is a clear rise in mobile social networks in the United States, stemming from ideas that first sprouted from the mobile social companies of the East.

Instagram’s billion-dollar sale astounded many in the U.S., but the fact of the matter is that Japan has already seen multiple billion-dollar companies emerge from the mobile sector, including Gree and Dena. Japan is an obvious leader in the mobile market, with 75 percent of its population consuming mobile media, and networks approaching speeds of 110mbps.

Japan has set numerous precedents in the mobile market, consistently staying ahead of the curve and leading many American companies to look to Eastern trends to see what users want, especially when it comes to social gaming and mobile social networks. The next U.S.-based billion-dollar mobile company will be one that can build on a successful Eastern concept by putting a Western spin on it.

Mobile Gaming
The past few years have seen a massive boom in mobile gaming across the globe. Mobile start-ups such as Omgpop and Rovio have burst onto the scene and companies like Zynga have transitioned into the mobile market, while console-first companies like EA have released mobile products — all of this signifies a huge expansion in the mobile gaming ecosystem. The success of these gaming companies today is, in many ways, the long tail of monetization and delivery strategies created in Asia.

Anyone releasing a game in 2012 knows that, in terms of user acquisition, the freemium model is king. This model keeps moderate users engaged with free features, while also allowing hardcore gamers to customize the gaming experience — fulfilling user needs on both sides of the spectrum while still generating revenue.

Asian gaming companies such as Tencent in China, Gree and Dena in Japan, and Cyworld in Korea are the true trailblazers in monetizing virtual goods and avatars, setting the stage for the rest of the world. Japan’s Gree and Dena, in particular, have revolutionized the way people game, making mobile games not just about killing time, but also about connecting with other like-minded players. Despite Dena and Gree recently moving to end their “gacha” “complete gacha” revenue model, they are still leaders in connecting gaming communities and monetizing users.

After witnessing the success in Japan, start-ups like OpenFeint and Second Life brought the idea of deep social integration to the American gaming world, although with varying degrees of success. Second Life is struggling to maintain its initial momentum, and OpenFeint sold for $104M to Gree after recognizing the huge opportunity in making mobile games social.

Social Networking
Mobile social gaming platforms like Gree and Dena may focus primarily on gaming, but the prevalence of virtual personas and social interaction in the games allow these platforms to double as social networks. Eastern cultures such as Japan have a natural tendency toward introversion, driving the emphasis on the virtual self. Although the West has an inclination toward the real over the virtual self, the interaction between users on these networks still has the same social root.

Another critical component to social networking in the East is mobile structure. Japan showed early on that the future of social networking was mobile, with popular networks like Mixi becoming predominantly mobile back in 2009. Only recently, as Facebook started to shift toward a mobile first strategy, did it finally start to take off with Japanese users.

In the U.S., more mobile-first start-ups are becoming key players in the social space, with companies like Instagram, Path, SocialCam and Viddy drawing substantial attention from users and investors alike. As these new forms of social expression emerge in the mobile market, they bring with them another huge trend of Eastern origin, the virtual persona.

In the early days of the Web, social interaction was primarily anonymous in the U.S.; users selected forum and chat handles that represented what they wanted to share with the outside world. However, as Facebook has become the dominant social graph, some of this anonymity has vanished. Anonymity in Japan’s social networks however, is still extremely prevalent. Studies have shown that 90 percent of social network members use pseudonyms over real names, and only 25 percent of their friends on the networks are close friends offline.

While most Americans do not want a completely virtual persona, many do like having the option to explore connections and express themselves outside the restrictive realm of friends and family in their social graph. Badoo, a European social network that has steadily been increasing its presence in the U.S., just reached 150 million global users by making it easy to meet new people around you. This is also evidenced by the success of dating services like Skout and Grindr that combine location and interests for social discovery.

Examining more traditional social networks, Facebook still leads the engagement race, with users spending six to seven hours a month on the service. But even though Facebook is still at the forefront of user engagement numbers, other social networks that operate on shared interests rather than real life connections are on the rise. Opinion-sharing mobile app Thumb is seeing its users spend 3 hours and 50 minutes a month connecting with others. Similarly, Pinterest is seeing users engage for about an hour and 40 minutes a month on their Web-based virtual pin boards, sharing their interests with other pinners. This type of user engagement is a significant indicator that interest-based interaction is on the rise in the U.S.

Instagram has also shown that mobile apps operating outside the traditional social graph are becoming serious business. By connecting users based on shared interests rather than real-life connections, start-ups like Instagram, Pinterest and Thumb have garnered massive user adoption and engagement.

Instagram is just the first of a new school of billion-dollar mobile companies here in the U.S. By looking to Japan as a model for mobile success, we can expect the next billion-dollar exit to come from the company that creates a mobile experience that allows users to branch outside the confines of their current social graphs, like work, school and neighborhood community, and connect based on the ideas that really matter to them.

Correction: DeNA PR alerted us to the fact that the article originally used the word “gacha” to mean “complete gacha” (aka “kompu gacha”). What does that mean? Joe Medved clarifies: “Gacha is a game mechanic where gamers pay to unlock randomly generated items. Complete gacha is when gamers are spending money in an attempt to collect a set of randomly generated items in order to unlock an even more rare virtual good. The controversy this caused is that many users were spending inordinate amounts of money on many virtual items in an attempt to unlock the rarest items.” Says DeNA’s Tomoyuki Akiyama, “There is a crucial difference between the two… We have no plan to phase out the non-complete gacha mechanic, although we will no longer have the complete gacha mechanic on the Mobage platform as of July 1.”

Joe Medved, a partner at SoftBank Capital, focuses on early-stage consumer and enterprise mobile, social marketing, gaming, and commerce investments. He serves on the boards of BestVendor, CrowdTwist, Jump Ramp Games and Thumb. SoftBank Capital’s other investments include BuzzFeed, Buddy Media, The Huffington Post and Omgpop. You can follow Joe on Twitter @joevc or read his blog at www.joemedved.com.

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