Allen, who forms his estimates after repeatedly searching Google+ for uncommon surnames, said Google+ is up to 62 million registered users as of today.

Why the bump? For one thing, Google has stepped up Google+ promotion, including releasing a holiday ad of the Muppets rocking out in a Google+ Hangout. There’s also one with basketball great Bill Walton.

At the current accelerated rate, Google+ would have 293 million users by the end of 2012, but Allen said he thinks Android activations will drive the growth rate higher. That seems more intuition than science, though.

(I say: More Muppets!)

Allen, who founded Ancestry.com, also noted that Google+ users seem to be more active sharers, on average, than their Facebook peers. He said the average Google+ user uploads five times more photos per day than the average Facebook user.

Announced Tuesday, the novel, high-risk project conceived by renowned aerospace designer Burt Rutan seeks to combine engines, landing gears and other parts removed from old Boeing 747 jets with a newly created composite craft from Mr. Rutan and a powerful rocket to be built by a company run by Internet billionaire and commercial-space pioneer Elon Musk.

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As of Sept. 22, the same day Facebook offered its latest vision for the social Web, Google+ had 43.4 million users, with 30 percent growth over two days previous, according to Allen. (Allen counts profiles by searching for a set of 400 uncommon surnames, and now inflates his estimate by 15 percent to account for private accounts and names that don’t include Roman characters.)

That recorded growth explosion is most likely due to a combination of Google+ opening up to the public and getting its first real marketing last week — which included an animated arrow on the massively trafficked Google.com homepage to entice Google search users to sign up.

Any Web start-up would kill for user stats that include both 30 percent growth in two days and tens of millions of people, but success for Google+ would mean becoming a much more mainstream product than it is today.

Consider the context. Competitive pressures without a doubt contributed to some recent Facebook feature launches, but Mark Zuckerberg and company successfully exorcised their Googley demons at f8, where the new Timeline self-expression features and Open Graph auto-sharing tools were announced.

Google+ wasn’t even mentioned once at the press conference following Zuckerberg’s keynote — which was a stunning omission, given the recent tech punditry focus on the Google-Facebook war.

Image via Tom Anderson on Google+. 

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

It’s Ian King’s job to find it.

Often clad in a kilt, and sporting a Grizzly Adams-like coiffure, Mr. King is traveling the globe in search of the 7094 and other obscure, often huge, old computer gear. The machines will stock Mr. Allen’s appointment-only Living Computer Museum.

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Apparently, Google+ isn’t quite the frat party it first appeared to be.

Early reports had figured the membership of Google+ to be upwards of 87 percent male. But evidently the data on which those estimates were based — culled from sites like Socialstatistics.com and Findpeopleonplus.com — was skewed. Now, new analysis performed by Paul Allen of FamilyLink and Ancestry.com shows a very different gender balance.

Using a method he calls “surname-based random sampling,” with which he correctly predicted Google+’s 10 million member milestone, Allen found Google+ to be 66.4 percent male and 33.6 percent female.

That’s a dude-heavy social environment, compared to its more gender-balanced rival Facebook, but one whose gender distribution is a bit more equitable than the 90:10 ratio of men to women previously reported.

And it might be becoming more balanced by the day. According to Allen’s estimates, Google+ was 77 percent male and 23 percent female on July 4. Three days later it was 68.4 percent male and 31.6 percent female, and today it’s nearing a 2-to-1 male/female ratio.

“Google+ is quickly turning pink,” Allen said in a post to Google+. “The poster of 18 men in a hot tub that has been passed around for the past week or two is not reflective of reality and is not what Google+ is going to end up being.”

That said, it was an awesome picture.

[Image credit: Evil Milk]

Of course, Google itself has one billion monthly unique visitors and just a teensy bit of brand recognition, and it seeded its new network carefully. But Plus is invite-only. Just imagine what would happen if Google opened the floodgates by promoting Plus on all its products.

If we look back, Google actually did have a bigger social network launch in the past, but not organically: It rolled out Buzz as a feature of Gmail available to all users. (Google doesn’t say how many Gmail users there are, but it’s well into the millions.)

Facebook, by contrast, took more than two years to reach 10 million users, and only hit the milestone after opening its network beyond college and high-school students.

Facebook’s numbers are slightly different, because it only counts users who were active within the last month. But at this point, every single Google+ member has been active within the last month.

I’d like to cast a broader net for examples, if anyone has them, but I’m having trouble finding historical active user counts for fast-growing networks like Sina Weibo. We also know Twitter grew somewhat slowly out of the gate, but it has resisted disclosing official active user counts.

Products built on top of existing social networks, and ones built for virality rather than invite-only rollout, however, have the potential for a much faster growth curve. Zynga’s most recent launch, Empires & Allies, got to 10 million users in nine days, just slightly behind the pace of CityVille, according to Inside Social Games and AppData.

UberMedia CEO Bill Gross, whose company is currently most active in the Twitter ecosystem but will presumably also develop clients for Google+, recently predicted that Google+ would hit 100 million users faster than any service in history. Well, Google’s numbers don’t make that a reality yet, but there’s only 90 million to go!

Meanwhile, Page also said on Thursday that Google+ facilitates one billion items shared and received per day. We clarified with Google the way it calculated this number.

Essentially, each counted “share” is the number of people who potentially see any one item.

If a user shares a picture with a Google Circle of 40 people, that counts as 40 shares — even if all 40 people don’t actually look at the photo. If a user shares something publicly, it’s not counted.

Google said this is consistent with the way it counts sharing in Gmail and other products. However, it’s a bit of a tricky metric; at first glance it would be easy to think that Google means one billion items are posted to Google+ on a daily basis already — which it doesn’t.

One interesting side note about Google+ reaching 10 million users — the milestone had actually been estimated by an outside researcher using fascinating methodology. Paul Allen, the founder of Ancestry.com who is now at FamilyLink, calculated the percent of the U.S. population that had signed up for Google+ by comparing user surnames to census data and extrapolating for international users. He estimated Google+ had 10 million users as of July 12 (two days before the second-quarter earnings announcement).

After earnings came out yesterday, Bradley Horowitz, the Google VP who coleads Plus development, gave credit to Allen in a Google+ post of his own. “BTW, +Paul Allen… Tip of the hat to you sir. Neat parlor trick. Statistics FTW!”

Photo credit: CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA

I have to say, Gates is one tough customer. But–having interviewed both him and Allen many times over the years–I am going to say gently that perhaps Allen is overstating the incident to sell books and maybe his recollections are, um, cloudy with a chance of sour grapes.

Here’s a video excerpt of the CBS television show, airing this Sunday:

BoomTown scrambled the All Things Digital jet (aka, United Airlines, Seat 7A) late last night to get up to Microsoft’s big event for its online advertising clients today.

Called “Imagine 2011: Marketing Leadership Summit” and held at its Redmond, Wa. HQ, the two-day gathering is designed to wow peeps by trotting out a spate of strategery concepts those who buy advertising on Microsoft’s various digital offerings from its Bing search service to MSN to Xbox to Windows Phone 7.

Some program topics: “Elsewhere USA,” “Teens Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out” and “Audience Buying Goes Real-Time: True or False?”

Presumably the goal of all this heavy-duty thinkery is to get these marketers to buy more ads from Microsoft by warning them about being left behind on the platform as the train chugs inevitably off to the digital future.

And just in case that doesn’t work, there will be a free concert tonight featuring the hipster band Train for the Imagine 2011 attendees at Microsoft Co-founder Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project venue to open those ad wallets.

Hey, Geek Mister: Stop sending all those digital marketing bucks to Google and Facebook and give them to us!

Before a panoply of various social, design and anthropology experts pontificated, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer kicked off the day with his patented loud and lovable Ed McMahon act, complete with the booming catchphrases.

Hey-Yo!

“You have to move forward or die!” (About the Web.)

“If you wanna get big, you have to think big!” (About the Windows 7 Phone smartphone deal with Nokia.)

I love the U.S. government, I don’t want to give it a hard time.” (About its crappy Web site, not the antitrust conviction thing.)

Ballmer outlined some key trends, which are not new to anyone paying attention over the last five years: Location; social; pervasive displays; ubiquitous connectivity; computers everywhere; cloud; data; and natural user interaction

He also joked about how there were 10 fake Steve Ballmers on Facebook, all using Steve Ballmer photos. Imagine that!

You’d think Microsoft’s badillion-dollar investment in the social networking site would get you a verified account!

Status: Monkey boy mad!

Actually, pissed off is more related to the fact that the person who conceived and organized the Imagine 2011 event was former global ad sales head Carolyn Everson.

But, she left the company in mid-February after only six months, for essentially the same job at Microsoft partner Facebook.

Since then Microsoft and Facebook have been wrangling over the talent raid, including Microsoft even considering legal action to block the move.

Nonetheless, the show must go on and it did in a pretty classy way.

But not without another road bump in today’s action–the news that Microsoft’s own marketing head, longtime company veteran Mich Mathews, was leaving the software giant later this year.

The departure had the halls buzzing about what happened and who will be taking over the big job with a $1 billion marketing budget.

Maybe some external CMO sitting right there in the audience or perhaps some internal Microsoft candidate such as Yusuf Mehdi or Capossela?

I suppose it’s time for some strategery stat!

Until it is all figured out, here is the music video for Train’s hit song, “Hey, Soul Sister”:

The allegation is part of a critical portrait in the book of Mr. Gates, with whom Mr. Allen formed a friendship in grade school that evolved into one of the iconic partnerships of American business. The book, “Idea Man: A Memoir by the Co-founder of Microsoft,” is scheduled to go on sale on April 17. A draft of the memoir was viewed by The Wall Street Journal. An excerpt of the book appeared on Vanity Fair’s website early Wednesday.

The book gives a revisionist take on some details of Microsoft’s history and the relationship between Mr. Gates and his former partner, the two of whom have long been viewed as cordial if not close friends.

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In fact, three of them are tangled in a lawsuit, alleging patent infringement.

Seattle-based Tippr has filed suit against two of its closest rivals, BuyWithMe and DealOn.

All three pale in comparison to the deal-swagger of Groupon and LivingSocial. While they may have close to a hundred employees and meddle in a dozen or so U.S. markets, in comparison, both LivingSocial and Groupon have thousands of employees who curate deals in hundreds of markets on an international basis.

In the lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court of Washington Tippr’s parent company is claiming that the two are infringing on patents related to the use of an online buying group system for aggregating demand. Kashless is requesting an award equal to an undisclosed amount of damages caused by such infringement.

This lawsuit could be seen coming from a mile away.

In December, Tippr announced a strategy around what it considers a very strong patent portfolio.

Tippr’s CEO Martin Tobias explained to us that in late 2009, it acquired the patent portfolio of defunct Mercata, a Paul Allen-backed group-buying venture from Web 1.0. Tobias traded stock in Kashless for the patents, which included more than half a dozen patents covering areas like price optimization, demand curve modeling and buyer-seller interaction models.

His idea is to license the right to use those patents to anyone, ranging from its white-label partners to its competitors. The idea even has a name: the patent licensing program for group-buying.

Tippr offers constant reminders that it owns these patents, listing them on the bottom of every page on its Web site. It also writes in its description that: “You can be assured that Tippr is using the most advanced proprietary technology to deliver you the best deals on anything you buy with us.”

This is not the first patent fight in the daily deals space. In November, Groupon counter-sued a company called MobGob in Chicago, referencing patents that predate the founding of the company.

Earlier this month, Tippr also filed for a preliminary injunction against BuyWithMe for “using or disclosing Kashless’s confidential information,” reports TechFlash. The suit claims a former Kashless employee, Andrew DeLorenzo, violated an agreement by disclosing financial information about Tippr to BuyWithMe founder Andrew Moss. (BuyWithMe has since hired Jim Crowley as CEO.)

Tobias said in a statement sent to us: “Tippr, the industry’s first patented, white-label group buying platform, owns the deepest portfolio of issued patents in the group buying space. Its patents cover many of the most fundamental aspects of group buying systems and methods. The company cannot comment on the pending litigation regarding patent infringement by the defendants, but Tippr continues to be committed to true innovation as reflected in its considerable patent portfolio.”

Another wrinkle in the plot is that DealOn was acquired by ReachLocal for $10 million last week.

Allen sued Google, Apple, AOL, eBay, Facebook, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples and Yahoo in August, but the case was dismissed earlier this month, with Tuesday set as the deadline for Interval to file an amended complaint. As noted by open source industry blogger Florian Mueller, the new claims include allegations that Android infringes on Interval patents, adding to a growing list of legal claims being leveled in the mobile arena.

U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman on Friday set a Dec. 28 deadline for the plaintiff, a company controlled by Mr. Allen called Interval Licensing LLC, to file an amended complaint. A spokesman for Mr. Allen said it plans to do so soon, calling the judge’s order a “procedural issue” that won’t halt the case.

The suit, filed in August, names tech companies Google Inc., its YouTube subsidiary, Apple Inc., Facebook Inc., Yahoo Inc., AOL Inc., eBay Inc. and Netflix Inc., as well as OfficeMax Inc. and Staples Inc., as defendants. The complaint accuses them of infringing four patents covering technology developed at Interval Research Corp., a Palo Alto, Calif., lab and technology incubator that Mr. Allen financed but that closed down about a decade ago. Mr. Allen is a co-founder of Microsoft Corp.

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After analyzing your address book, emails (only Gmail and Google Apps for now), calendar and other information you give it, Aro compiles a linked library of topics and people that are relevant to you. Then it uses that information to help you complete actions that usually are tedious on a smartphone because they require users to open all sorts of different apps.

Say you’re using the Aro mail client: Any name that’s mentioned in an email will be highlighted in a bubble that you can click on to see all the people by that name in your address book and call one directly. You can also search through all your correspondence with that person over time, through various email addresses and phone numbers.

Or if someone schedules an appointment with you and you view it in Aro, you can add it to your calendar from within email, look up more information and get directions to the location right there.

Aro synchs all this information back to the original hosts of your email and calendar, though you don’t ever have to open the old apps on your phone.

I’ve been trying Aro for the last couple of days and I can start to see the potential. However, it’s pretty awkward to have the Aro parallel experience layered on top of everything I’m used to doing. My existing phone, email, SMS, address book, calendar and mobile browser apps are now all redundant with Aro versions. The simple action of making a phone call on my setup now requires clicking through an Aro dialog, then a Google Voice dialog–it’s a little too much.

These tools would be much more awesome if they were more tightly integrated into the operating system itself rather than as a whole bunch of apps. Aro CEO Jon Lazarus says he’s working to strike deals with carriers and handset partners to release phones with tighter Aro integration, which would help a lot.

Playing around with Aro makes me think about the potential for a smarter mobile phone that combines Aro-integrated apps with something like Siri’s voice-activated commands. Siri, which launched at D7 and was bought by Apple, is a virtual personal assistant iPhone app that helps users tie into a whole bunch of Web services to do things like make reservations at nearby restaurants. You can start to imagine how a phone would understand a lot more about its owner, and actually help get things done.

Seattle-based Aro, whose parent company is called Kiha, has raised more than $20 million over the past three years from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen (the company was originally developing for Windows Mobile, actually, but it switched to Android last year). Aro came out of stealth only a few weeks ago in the run-up to Web 2.0. Here’s a (somewhat cheesy, yes) demo video of how it works:

Mr. Allen, who co-founded Microsoft (MSFT) with Bill Gates, on Friday sued Apple Inc. (AAPL), Google Inc. (GOOG) and nine other companies asserting they are using technology developed about a decade ago at his now-defunct Silicon Valley laboratory. Mr. Allen, a pioneer of computer software, didn’t develop any of the technology himself but owns the patents.

None of the defendants could immediately be reached for comment.

Patent litigation in general is on the rise and Mr. Allen’s lawsuit comes amid high-profile successes of firms such as NTP Inc. and Acacia Research Corp., which enforce patents without making products. Courts have tried to rein in patent litigation with mixed results, and Congress has yet to act on legislation that would do the same.

For Mr. Allen, the lawsuit marks new terrain. He is aggressively going after companies, including many of Silicon Valley’s biggest names, that he thinks are violating technology that was developed at his Interval Research Corp., a Palo Alto, Calif., lab and technology incubator he financed with about $100 million during the Internet bubble.

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Could the social group-buying space get any frothier?

Well, yes, it could.

After the recent $135 million funding of Groupon that valued the Chicago start-up at upwards of an eye-popping $1 billion, rival LivingSocial announced to today that it had raised a more modest $14 million in a Series C round.

The Washington, D.C. start-up had raised $25 million in a Series B venture financing only a month ago. And it raised $10 million on top of that since 2008.

Sources estimated the valuation for LivingSocial is several hundred million dollars now.

The newest round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners; Earlier investors U.S. Venture Partners, Grotech Ventures and Steve Case’s Revolution are also participating.

Ironically, Case’s former No. 2 at AOL (AOL), Ted Leonsis has been an early investor in Groupon.

LivingSocial said it will use the new pile of cash to expand to dozens of new markets, adding it was launching four new cities now: Portland, Orange County, Charlotte and Philadelphia.

It now operates in 18 cities across the country.

For those in Silicon Valley who do not consider these prices for all these social e-commerce sites high at all, BoomTown is here to tell you that in the real world the figure is not actually modest, except in comparison.

But LivingSocial will need every penny if it is to compete with Groupon and a growing spate of competitors in the local space, much as is also happening in the social status update arena.

The local outcome for most will inevitably be a sale to a big Internet company like Amazon (AMZN).

Or oblivion, especially since so many similar offerings makes the whole market confusing for both local businesses and customers

In general, most offer a daily deal with a huge discount on a wide range of products and services–from spas to skydiving–in dozens of U.S. cities, for large groups of potential buyers on the Web, through email or via social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Using social tools, the idea is use collective buying power to get low prices and push customers to local businesses.

If a deal reaches the number of buyers it needs, which can be in the thousands, these services sell vouchers to the consumers and collect a hefty fee for the sale from the businesses it sends customers to.

The plus for many small businesses is to get a crack at a lot of new consumers–think of it as social networking lead-generation.

This kind of thing has been tried before, of course, centering on consumers who group together to get discounts on items by purchasing in bulk.

In Web 1.0, there were many group-buying sites, most of which failed badly. One of the more high-profile ones, Mercata, received $90 million in funding from investors, including Paul Allen’s Vulcan Ventures.

No matter in 2010!

That’s due to the VC frenzy going on, spurred by winner-take-all theories–Groupon, for example, got most of its recent mountain of cash from champion Russian overspenders, Digital Sky Technologies.

However it turns out, here is LivingSocial’s official press release:

LivingSocial Raises $14 Million Series C Round Led by Lightspeed Venture Partners; Launches in Portland, Orange County, Charlotte and Philadelphia

Company Also Begins Offering Hyperlocal Deals in Seattle Area–Users Can Now Get Deals Even Closer to their Homes

$14 Million Round Comes on Heels of $25 Million Series B Announcement Last Month

Washington D.C., April 29, 2010–LivingSocial, the social commerce leader behind LivingSocial Deals and top Facebook applications Visual Bookshelf and Pick Your Five, today announced that it has completed a $14 million Series C round of venture funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with U.S. Venture Partners, Grotech Ventures and Steve Case’s Revolution, LLC participating. Because of the rapid growth, and high user demand, LivingSocial will use the capital infusion to expand into additional markets–bringing Deals to dozens more cities throughout the U.S. in 2010. This additional funding comes on the heels of the company’s recent $25 million Series B round announced last month.

“We’ve known and admired the LivingSocial team for a long time, and I have bought many of their terrific local offers. They’ve done an excellent job of growing their user base through smart media buying and excellent knowledge of social channels and virality,” said Jeremy Liew, managing director of Lightspeed Venture Partners. “With this financing round, LivingSocial is very well positioned to bring their great offers to even more people.”

LivingSocial is also launching its Deals program in four new markets: Portland, Orange County, Charlotte and Philadelphia. This brings LivingSocial live in 18 cities across the country with major plans to expand to dozens of markets throughout the year.

“We’re constantly receiving requests from our users to expand and launch in their markets, and this recent funding round will allow us to do just that,” said Tim O’Shaughnessy, CEO and co-founder of LivingSocial. “We’re really excited to introduce LivingSocial to Portland, Orange County, Charlotte and Philadelphia to continue generating huge savings for our users and even bigger returns for our merchants.”

LivingSocial users throughout the country saved an average of more than $32 each in March, and have saved tens of millions of dollars since the launch of Deals in 2009. By signing up for LivingSocial’s free daily online service, people are saving an average of 50-70% at their favorite places, such as the hottest local restaurants, spas, sporting events, hotels, and other local attractions.

Because LivingSocial wants to give consumers more availability to the program, the company is launching hyperlocal deals for the Seattle area. Now consumers in areas like Tacoma and Bellevue will start getting deals targeted to their location, in addition to Seattle proper. Hyperlocal deals not only help more consumers explore new things in their city, but these deals also provide merchants with a greater opportunity to reach local audiences on the LivingSocial Deals platform.

LivingSocial is now live in 18 markets including: Washington, D.C., New York City, Boston, Atlanta, Austin, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, the Twin Cities, Chicago, Raleigh Durham, Denver, San Diego, the San Fernando Valley, Portland, Orange County, Charlotte and Philadelphia. Dozens of additional cities are expected to roll out in the coming months. For more information or to sign up your city, go to http://livingsocial.com.

Groupon, the social buying site that has become one of the hotter start-ups of late, has gotten a giant round of funding from the same Russian investors that backed social networking powerhouse Facebook and game phenom Zynga.

Digital Sky Technologies is the main funder of the round, but Battery Ventures is also participating.

The money, the company said, will be used to grow the business–and to speed far ahead of numerous rivals–as well as cash out employees and early investors.

Groupon is profitable and has 270 employees.

In December, Groupon nabbed $30 million in its second round of funding, led by Accel Partners.

The innovative Chicago-based service, which launched only a year ago, previously received $4.8 million in funding from New Enterprise Associates, as well as $1 million from an angel investor.

Groupon features a daily deal with a huge discount on a wide range of products and services–from spas to skydiving–in dozens of U.S. cities, including Chicago, Boston, New York and San Francisco, for large groups of potential buyers on the Web, through email or via social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Using social tools, Groupon–a mashup term for “group” and “coupon”–tries to use collective buying power to get low prices and push customers to local businesses.

If it reaches the number of buyers it needs, which can be in the thousands, Groupon sells coupons to the consumers and collects a hefty fee for the sale from the businesses it sends customers to.

At the cost of discounting and paying off Groupon, small businesses get a crack at a lot of new customers–think of it as social networking lead-generation or perhaps, the “Social Shopping Network.”

Groupon grew out of a project of The Point, an online community launched in 2007 for organizing group action.

This kind of thing has been tried before, of course, centering on consumers who group together to get discounts on items by purchasing in bulk.

In Web 1.0, there were many group-buying sites, most of which failed badly. One of the more high-profile ones, Mercata, received $90 million in funding from investors, including Paul Allen’s Vulcan Ventures.

But now the group-buying space has been reinvigorated, with a spate of competitors, some of which are clear copycats of Groupon.

Here’s an interview BoomTown did with Groupon CEO and founder Andrew Mason, one of the more affable and level-headed entrepreneurs around–at least until this megafunding. (Don’t go changing, Andrew!)

I have been quite interested in the innovative Groupon, as I said in that post in March:

“The last time I really was truly bullish on a start-up and its founder–BoomTown’s motto is wait-and-see rather than hype-it-up–was AdMob’s Omar Hamoui. That turned out pretty well, with the sale of the mobile advertising site to Google (GOOG) for $750 million last fall. My 2010 start-up that passes the slightly-less-raised-eyebrow test is Groupon.”

Here’s the video interview with Mason:

Here’s the official press release:

GROUPON RECEIVES $135 MILLION FROM DST AND BATTERY VENTURES

Investment to Support Rapid Growth of Social Commerce Globally

Chicago/Moscow, April. 19, 2010–Groupon, the leading social commerce site, today announced that DST, a leading global internet investment group, will lead an investment round of $135 million in the Company. A portion of the investment will be used to fuel Groupon’s global expansion, and the rest will be used to facilitate liquidity for employees and early investors.

DST comprises the majority of the investment, with participation from Battery Ventures, which is also a new investor in Groupon.

Groupon leverages group buying and social media to provide its millions of customers big discounts on the best local businesses in more than 50 cities across the United States and in Canada. To date, customers have purchased over four million Groupons on deals ranging from spa treatments and golf outings to fine dining and skydiving and have collectively saved over $150 million on these deals.

“Our growth is a reflection of the positive impact Groupon is having on consumers and businesses at a very early stage of the market development,” said Andrew Mason, founder and CEO of Groupon. “We are very pleased and excited to welcome DST and Battery as shareholders and we look forward to benefiting from their vast knowledge and experience of the social media sector as we continue executing on our growth plans in North America and globally.”

“This investment underscores our view that social networking and community based activity will drive, shape and define the web’s evolution in the years ahead,” said Yuri Milner, Chief Executive of DST. “Groupon, with its strong management team, offering and vision, is pioneering social commerce and is redefining the local advertising space. We look forward to being long-term partners of a company that is on a path to becoming a global Internet leader.”

“We’ve followed the social commerce phenomenon for many years, and are thrilled to have the chance to back such a visionary management team,” said Roger Lee, General Partner, Battery Ventures. “They saw a massive opportunity very early, and have executed flawlessly to define it and take the leadership position. We think there is a lot of runway ahead, and are energized to support the team in their quest.”

Founded in November 2008, Groupon has been aggressively expanding to cities throughout the United States, with plans to be in 100 cities by the end of 2010. Earlier today Groupon announced that it has launched its service in Orlando, Fort Worth, Tucson and Toronto, its Canadian city.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100418/groupon-grabs-135-million-from-dst-and-battery-valuation-above-1-billion-for-social-buying-site/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20100311/rich-dude-who-backed-new-york-times-bumps-techs-gates-as-worlds-richest-man/ http://allthingsd.com/20100311/rich-dude-who-backed-new-york-times-bumps-techs-gates-as-worlds-richest-man/#comments Thu, 11 Mar 2010 17:31:33 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=25457

Microsoft bigwig Bill Gates got hip-checked off the top perch as the richest man in the world by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim (pictured here), on the annual Forbes list of the world’s Richie Riches.

Slim came to the rescue of the New York Times (NYT) a year ago, forking over $250 million to help the cash-strapped media company.

Often in the No. 1 spot, Gates actually got shoved off in 2008 by megainvestor Warren Buffett (now No. 3), with whom he is good friends.

Gates returned to the top rank in 2009, and now Slim–a telecom-and-more tycoon–has surpassed Gates’s net worth of $53 billion slightly with a $53.5 billion kitty.

Here are some of the other U.S. tech dudes–mostly based in Silicon Valley–on the list, in the Top 100:

No. 6: Oracle (ORCL) CEO and founder Larry Ellison ($28 billion)
No. 24: Google (GOOG) co-founder Sergey Brin ($17.5 billion)
No. 24: Google co-founder Larry Page ($17.5 billion)
No. 33: Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer ($14.5 billion)
No. 37: Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen ($13.5 billion)
No. 37: Dell (DELL) CEO and founder Michael Dell ($13.5 billion)
No. 43: Amazon (AMZN) CEO and founder Jeff Bezos ($12.3 billion)

Both Apple (AAPL) CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs (No. 136 with $5.5 billion) and Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg (No. 212 with $4 billion) rank in the longer list.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100311/rich-dude-who-backed-new-york-times-bumps-techs-gates-as-worlds-richest-man/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20100311/latest-trend-for-vcs-is-overfunding-group-buying-start-ups-livingsocial-nabs-25-million/ http://allthingsd.com/20100311/latest-trend-for-vcs-is-overfunding-group-buying-start-ups-livingsocial-nabs-25-million/#comments Thu, 11 Mar 2010 14:52:32 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=25442

Start-ups that offer users big discounts via socially-charged local group-buying services are getting a lot of attention these days, especially from venture firms.

Today, it’s Washington, D.C.-based LivingSocial, which just announced a $25 million Series B round, led by U.S. Venture Partners.

The funding will be used to expand its footprint of cities, among other initiatives.

Sites such as LivingSocial feature a “daily deal” with a huge discount from a wide range of local businesses, such as restaurants and spas. They use social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter to turbocharge consumers into action.

This kind of thing has been tried before, of course, centering on users who group together to get discounts on items by purchasing them in bulk.

In Web 1.0, there were many group-buying sites, most of which failed badly. One of the more high-profile ones–Mercata–got $90 million in funding from investors, including Paul Allen’s Vulcan Ventures.

Still, the group-buying space is getting mighty competitive of late. Recently, Chicago-based Groupon grabbed $30 million from, among others, Accel Partners.

BoomTown, in fact, did a video interview with Groupon founder Andrew Mason last week, after which I was inundated with press releases from a half-dozen wannabe competitors.

Ironically, for businesses based on discounting, there seem to be no price cuts when it comes to group-buying start-up funding.

Here’s the full press release:

Social Commerce Leader LivingSocial Raises $25 Million Series B Round, Led by U.S. Venture Partners

Funding to Fuel Expansion to Dozens of Cities by Year End; Chicago, Denver, Raleigh Durham, and San Diego launch today

Washington D.C., March 11, 2010–LivingSocial, the social commerce leader behind LivingSocial Deals and top Facebook applications Visual Bookshelf and Pick Your Five, today announced that it has completed a $25 million Series B round of venture funding led by U.S. Venture Partners, with Grotech Ventures and Steve Case’s Revolution, LLC participating. With this round of funding, LivingSocial Deals is launching in four additional cities: Chicago, Denver, Raleigh Durham and San Diego, making the program live in 13 markets across the country, growing to dozens of cities by year-end. By signing up for LivingSocial’s free daily online service people are saving an average of 50-70% at their favorite places, such as the hottest local restaurants, spas, sporting events, hotels, and other local attractions, giving local merchants the Web prowess of viral marketing proven through LivingSocial’s explosive Facebook success.

“With more than a million people already using LivingSocial Deals, online group buying is a movement that is clearly resonating with consumers,” said Tim O’Shaughnessy, CEO of LivingSocial. “This round of funding enables us to accelerate our growth throughout more cities and combine our feet-on-the-street approach with our social channel expertise to offer our 85 million customers great deals at local businesses, while giving merchants a no-risk way to get customers through their doors.”

LivingSocial is the premier local activity discovery engine–the place where anyone can find out what’s “hot” in and around their city. As a result, it not only gives local merchants an innovative way to reach nearby customers, but also leverages LivingSocial’s unprecedented social media knowledge to grant merchants access to the company’s extensive community of more than 85 million people. With LivingSocial, merchants get the viral power of the Internet, the reach of the LivingSocial community, and the leverage of the iPhone platform.

LivingSocial today also launched an affiliate program for sites large and small, producing a revenue opportunity for affiliates, such as blogs and other sites, and broadening the advertising reach for merchants to the farthest ends of the Web. LivingSocial affiliates can generate revenue by delivering amazing discounts targeted to their loyal readers. Creating a centralized affiliate program gives participating merchants reach into new media, without requiring them to create, develop and manage individual relationships with an ever-growing cast of bloggers or other local content sites. More information can be found at http://livingsocial.com/affiliates.

“Local merchants deserve the ability to link online advertising spend with store visits, not just site visits,” said Ted Maidenberg, Principal at U.S. Venture Partners. “LivingSocial is at the forefront of a profound shift in the way local merchants engage with new and existing customers. This investment will allow them to continue to evolve the program and reach new markets so more merchants can reap the rewards of what LivingSocial has to offer.”

LivingSocial’s group buying service has grown rapidly since its launch in August 2009, expanding from Washington, D.C., to New York City, Boston, Atlanta, Austin, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, the Twin Cities, Chicago, Raleigh Durham, Denver, and San Diego, with more cities rolling out in coming months. Also, with the first social savings iPhone application, LivingSocial users can get savings on-the-go and be alerted when new deals are available through push notifications and even redeem directly from their iPhone. LivingSocial users throughout the country have already saved millions of dollars, with tens-of-millions more on tap throughout 2010.

“We’re really excited to bring LivingSocial to Chicago, Denver, Raleigh Durham and San Diego as these markets have such vibrant populations,” added O’Shaughnessy. “The deals we offer reflect the diversity and unique nature of each city, encouraging the exploration of nightlife, culture, entertainment, and outdoor activities.”

For more information or to sign up for your city, go to http://livingsocial.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100311/latest-trend-for-vcs-is-overfunding-group-buying-start-ups-livingsocial-nabs-25-million/feed/ 6 http://allthingsd.com/20100304/groupons-andrew-mason-speaks/ http://allthingsd.com/20100304/groupons-andrew-mason-speaks/#comments Thu, 04 Mar 2010 17:00:03 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=25036

The last time I really was truly bullish on a start-up and its founder–BoomTown’s motto is wait-and-see rather than hype-it-up–was AdMob’s Omar Hamoui.

That turned out pretty well, with the sale of the mobile advertising site to Google (GOOG) for $750 million last fall.

My 2010 start-up that passes the slightly-less-raised-eyebrow test is Groupon, a group-based social buying service that nabbed another $30 million in funding in December.

So earlier this week, I sat down with Groupon’s Midwesternly-nice Andrew Mason, 29, to talk about where the start-up is headed with its pile of dough and growing base of consumers who want to make a deal.

The Chicago-based Groupon has actually raised a total of just under $36 million from angels, New Enterprise Associates and Accel Partners so far.

Not that it needs it. The company–like AdMob–is profitable, despite having 200 employees and and a lightning growth path to expand its base of local sites.

The innovative service, which launched only a year ago, features a “daily deal” with a huge discount on a wide range of things–from spas to skydiving and, recently, pole-dancing lessons–in more than two dozen U.S. cities, including Chicago, Boston, New York and San Francisco.

Not everything works–a recent offer of a lobster dinner shipped to buyers was a bomb, as was a tour of Michael Jackson’s childhood home in Gary, Indiana.

The deals are offered to large groups of potential buyers on the Web, through email or via social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Using social tools, Groupon–a mashup term for “group” and “coupon”–tries to use collective buying power to get low prices and push customers to local businesses.

If it reaches the number of buyers it needs, which can be in the thousands, Groupon sells coupons to the consumers and collects a hefty fee for the sale from the businesses it sends customers to.

At the cost of discounting and of paying off Groupon, small businesses get a crack at a lot of new customers–think of it as social networking lead-generation or, perhaps, the “Social Shopping Network.”

Groupon grew out of a project of The Point, an online community launched in 2007 for organizing group action.

This kind of thing has been tried before, of course, centering on consumers who group together to get discounts on items by purchasing them in bulk.

In Web 1.0, there were many group-buying sites, most of which failed badly. One of the more high-profile ones–Mercata–got $90 million in funding from investors, including Paul Allen’s Vulcan Ventures.

But now the group-buying space has been reinvigorated, with a spate of competitors, some of which are clear copycats–which, touchingly, really bugs Mason.

There is even a site, called Yipit, that aggregates all the group-buying sites.

Here’s the video of my interview with Mason at the Accel offices in downtown Palo Alto, Calif., on his second visit to Silicon Valley–as well as a video below it from Groupon about how the service works:

Learn How Groupon Works! from The Point on Vimeo.

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