Chris Dixon will indeed be the latest VC to join Andreessen Horowitz, as I had reported earlier was likely, starting in January.

Dixon is a lively and interesting choice for the high-profile Silicon Valley venture capital firm, having been a successful serial entrepreneur, a savvy angel investor and also a voluble tech scene commenter in blogs and on Twitter.

Perhaps most interesting is that Dixon, who is largely based in New York, will move to California to join what Marc Andreessen describes as a “single-office” firm.

In other words, Chris, get ready to be force-fed at Hobee’s!

In all seriousness, Andreessen said in an interview today that his big criteria for picking Dixon was because, “when the next Mark Zuckerberg walks into the room, we want them to say, ‘I want that person.’”

In addition, he noted that Andreessen Horowitz has a “bias for entrepreneurs … and Chris is the real deal when it comes to being an entrepreneur.”

Indeed, Dixon was CEO and co-founder of SiteAdvisor, which was acquired by McAfee, as well as recommendations engine Hunch, which was bought by eBay a year ago.

He is one of the founding members of Founder Collective, an East Coast-based seed-stage venture firm run by entrepreneurs, and is also an active angel investor, including in Skype, Invite Media and OMGPOP. Previously, he programmed financial algorithms at a high-speed options trading firm and has also worked at Bessemer Venture Partners.

Dixon, whose job at Bessemer was junior, said that he became interested in Andreessen Horowitz once he learned more about them after helping the start-ups he had invested in with fundings. He was especially struck by all the added help the firm provided in areas such as recruiting.

While he said his investing as a partner there would be “non-thematic,” he noted that it was likely he would “tilt more toward consumer” investments.

“I am going to try to pick the special bird,” he said, paraphrasing a quote by famed Sequoia Capital VC Mike Moritz. “And not the flock.”

Here is a blog post on the move by Dixon and one by Andreessen, in which he apparently thinks I leak for a living.

According to sources, well-known New York techie Chris Dixon is in the final stages of discussions to become a partner at the high-profile Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz.

While the deal is not yet complete, Dixon seems likely to become the firm’s latest addition. It’s not clear what his area of specialty will be, but it is likely to center on start-ups, given his experience.

Dixon is one the more voluble and energetic tech players on the New York scene, as well as a serial entrepreneur with several prominent exits. He was CEO and co-founder of SiteAdvisor, which was acquired by McAfee, as well as recommendations engine Hunch, which was bought by eBay a year ago.

He is one of the founding members of Founder Collective, an East Coast-based seed-stage venture firm run by entrepreneurs and is also an active angel investor, including in Skype, Invite Media and OMGPOP. Previous to this, he also programmed financial algorithms at a high-speed options trading firm and has also worked at Bessemer Venture Partners.

In his bio on the Founder Collective site, Dixon said: “I think one of the reasons I can be helpful to entrepreneurs is I’ve worked in the trenches on both the startup side and the investor side.”

His selection by Andreessen Horowitz is an interesting one, since it is the first by the firm of a solidly New York-area techie, although it is not clear if Dixon will move to California or not.

He’s also not been afraid to tangle with VCs in his frequent blogging. In one post in July, titled “Shoehorning Startups into the VC Model,” he noted:

“A startup should raise venture capital (or ‘venture-style’ angel/seed funding) only if: 1) the goal is to build a billion-dollar (valuation) company, and 2) raising millions of dollars is absolutely necessary or will significantly accelerate growth. … Unfortunately, many of these startups graft VC-friendly narratives onto their plans and raise too much money. Short term it might seem like a good idea but long term it won’t.”

Adam Cahan

A very important management shift at Yahoo got a bit lost in last week’s news of CEO Marissa Mayer’s first acquisition, a small mobile start-up called Stamped.

That would be the appointment of former IntoNow founder and CEO Adam Cahan to oversee all of Yahoo’s mobile efforts, as well as its Flickr photo sharing service.

According to an internal memo that Mayer sent out last week to employees, Cahan has been given the title of SVP of Emerging Products and Technology, with a spot on the exec staff, reporting directly to her.

Said the memo (in its entirety below):

“[Cahan] will oversee our mobile efforts, enabled screens (CTV+IntoNow), and Flickr. Adam will be responsible for building a world-class team focused on creating innovative products and experiences that inspire and delight our users worldwide.”

Mayer’s promotion of the slick exec, who has been described by almost everyone I spoke to at Yahoo as smoothly political, is an interesting internal choice by Mayer. He only got to Yahoo recently, after IntoNow was bought by Yahoo for more than $20 million in the spring of last year.

IntoNow was a spinoff from the video advertising company Auditude, which was sold to Adobe for a reported $100 million.

The television indexing start-up had launched in early 2011 as an Apple iPhone app that recognized what was playing on the screen by analyzing the audio from satellite feeds and matching it to listings. The start-up had hoped to eventually license its technology as offer-measurement services for TV advertising and viewership.

As Liz Gannes noted in a post on AllThingsD:

“It’s similar to the Shazam mobile app that many people know and love, which IDs an ambient song by recording it and quickly matching it to an archive. IntoNow users can “check in” to a particular episode once it’s been recognized, like one would check into a restaurant on Foursquare. The goal is to enable conversations around the watercooler and on social networks by helping users connect around what they’re watching and discover new things to watch.”

Cool, although IntoNow’s technology was far more compelling than its consumer promise.

Now, Cahan will be charged with doing both of Yahoo in mobile — which is most likely to be accomplished via a series of small mobile acquisitions, presumably to be stitched together into a cohesive and successful whole.

At least that’s the idea.

Cahan is an experienced exec, having worked at a number of places before founding IntoNow, including MTV Networks, NBC, McKinsey, National Geographic Television and — wait for it — Google, in business operations.

(Being an ex-Googler, which Mayer is, seems to have its advantages at Yahoo these days, with Cahan as the latest example.)

He is most definitely a key hire, because Mayer spent a lot of time stressing how mobile was Yahoo’s No. 1 priority on its recent earnings call with investors.

“Yahoo will have to be a predominantly mobile company,” she said, noting a “focused, coherent” mobile strategy was the top initiative.

Mayer had to say that, of course, even if being a mobile giant is now mostly just wishful thinking at Yahoo, since most of the many efforts the company has made in the arena have been duds. Yahoo has also lost a lot of mobile engineering talent over the years, remaining largely a desktop offering, even as the area has increasingly become where consumers are getting their information.

A blog post by Cahan at Yahoo was widely quoted when the tiny Stamped — which is an online recommendations app — was bought for under $10 million last week by Yahoo.

In it, he noted:

“Most people are always within arm’s reach of their mobile phones. For many of us, it’s the first thing we look at in the morning and the last thing we check at night. Mobile is at the center of how we connect with people, consume information, and pass the time, and we’re focused on making Yahoo! the most inspiring and entertaining way to do just that.”

We’ll see if Yahoo can be a significant mobile player, as Mayer has promised Wall Street. But Cahan has certainly been busy since he got the job, sources said, beginning with the rejiggering of Yahoo’s mobile teams, as well as visiting the Flickr office this week.

Until it all sorts itself out, please enjoy this Oct. 25 internal memo on Cahan and the Stamped acquisition:

YAHOO! PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION — DO NOT FORWARD

Hi All –

As we discussed in our strategy all-hands earlier this month, innovation and talent are essential to delivering against our vision to inspire and delight our users as a part of their daily lives. Many of the areas that require special attention are emerging technologies and Yahoo! products where we’ve not yet reinvented, re-imagined and rebuilt in order to keep pace with changes in user behaviors and platform shifts.

To aid our efforts, I’m promoting Adam Cahan to lead this effort as Senior Vice President of Emerging Products and Technology. Adam will be a member of e-staff and report directly to me. He will oversee our mobile efforts, enabled screens (CTV+IntoNow), and Flickr. Adam will be responsible for building a world-class team focused on creating innovative products and experiences that inspire and delight our users worldwide.

And he’s already making great progress! Today, we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve acquired a very talented mobile team, based in New York City.

Robby, Kevin, Bart, Paul and the entire team at Stamped are a natural fit for Yahoo!. Their experience building fun, useful, personalized mobile products aligns well with our vision to create the best everyday mobile experience for our users. The team will be a great asset for us as we expand Yahoo!’s mobile efforts and create another key center for mobile innovation in New York.

I’m excited that we’ve been able to move quickly and execute well in order to bring on such a talented team. Please join me in congratulating Adam in his promotion and welcoming Anthony, Bart, Geoff, Kevin, Landon, Michael, Paul, Robby and Travis to Yahoo!

Thanks,

Marissa

As part of the unveiling, eBay CTO Mark Carges provided a glimpse of how the company plans to make the shopping experience more social.

“It’s a no-brainer, in terms of where we go next,” he said in an interview.

After it was announced on Wednesday, the new homepage slowly started rolling out to consumers in the U.S. What they will notice first is a more contemporary feel that looks more like a mobile application than it does an e-commerce site. Recommendations will appear based on your past searches, and the algorithms will change as you interact with the feed. In the end, consumers will have ultimate control, so even if you buy razor blades and coffee filters on eBay, you don’t necessarily have to see them in your feed.

Next, Carges said, eBay will be adding a community layer for consumers. Users will be able to share their feeds, or follow other feeds. A good example would be an eBay seller who has created a collection of goods he or she is selling and makes that feed available to others to follow. Motifs could form round comic books, coffee or shoes, for example.

“I’ve been here for four years, and have focused most of my time on making search better,” Carges said. “But shoppers have also said they need browsing and inspiration capabilities. We felt now was a time to bring out a way to personalize passions, whether it is their hobbies or things they like to buy — and bring it to life in the feed.”

The comparison to Pinterest is already worn out, but the personal and social features only accentuate the overlap. Pinterest has done an excellent job in creating a huge community that refers ideas to one another. The commonalities between its homepage and Pinterest are not lost on Carges, but you could nearly see him wincing through the telephone line each time they came up. “It’s also very unique in a couple of ways,” he said. “One is that it’s instantly shoppable. Other sites have highly visual metaphors, but the difference is that we have done it in the context of shopping.”

That is true of “other sites.” In many cases on Pinterest, the item that someone is recommending could be sold out or be three or four clicks deep — which can be way beyond a consumer’s tolerance level. In contrast, eBay wants buying to be insanely easy. As part of the homepage redesign, it narrowed down the number it clicks to make a purchase from four to one.

EBay’s move to a more social and browsable model is part of a broader trend of e-commerce companies trying to become more social. To date, retailers efforts in the space haven’t produced much. Most experiments have revolved around using Facebook to create a more personalized experience. For instance, people who logged into retail sites with their Facebook credentials would, in theory, see recommendations based on their stated interests. And other retailers have come up with nifty ways for purchases to occur directly on a Facebook feed. Even Facebook is trying to figure out commerce, with its recent launch of Facebook Gifts.

Over the past two years, eBay has been investing heavily in social. Last year, it hired Don Bradford as VP of social, and made it one of its four priorities, along with local, mobile and digital payments. Before joining eBay, Bradford worked at Microsoft Live Search communities and MSN Hotmail, and worked shortly at Yahoo, where he was VP of Communities.

Previous social experiments for eBay have included things like group gifts, which allow multiple people to chip in to buy a present. The company has also enabled users to log in to their Facebook account on eBay’s homepage to get product recommendations on past purchasing habits and things you have “liked” on your Facebook page, such as movies, books and music.

While this week’s homepage design isn’t the largest project the company has undertaken over past few years, “it’s the most visible,” Carges said. “The thing we’ve been focused on in the turnaround was under the covers and deep in the tech, search and algorithms. These are things that buyers see.”

Internet stocks got a much needed boost today, after the market rose to its highest levels in three months on solid earnings reports and less worry about the economic disaster in Europe.

The downhill-sliding of Facebook stopped again today, with a 3.9 percent rise to close at $21.92. While still off more than 42 percent since its May IPO, the social networking giant got itself back on the prettier side of $20.

Content portal AOL also had a 3.7 percent gain, likely due to news of a patent dispute settlement, to close at $33.83. It is up an impressive 124 percent for the year.

LinkedIn, one of the few Class of Web 2.0 winners, rose 2.8 percent to $111.55; the business network is up 77 percent for the year.

Better still: Zynga, which has been suffering badly of late, was up about 8.1 percent to close at $2.94 (the online gaming company is still down 69 percent year to date). The same was true of Groupon, another stock loser of late, with its shares rising more than 10 percent to $7.25, which is still down 65 percent for the year.

Also up strongly was recommendations site Yelp, which gained 8.7 percent to $25.43.

Also up smartly: Travel site Kayak, up 4.2 percent to $32.68; video service Brightcove, up almost 6 percent to $14.74; reservation site OpenTable, up 1.9 percent to $40.29; music streaming service Pandora, up 2.5 percent to $9.79; and collaboration software company Jive, up just over 2 percent to $19.11.

In contrast, Internet giant Yahoo gained less than a half of a percent in today’s trading, though it did finally remain above the $16 price barrier to close at $16.04. It is down a little more than a half of a percent for the year, despite the recent splashy hiring of new CEO Marissa Mayer.

Google, too, saw only a quarter percent rise, to $642.82. The search giant is also down a half of a percent for the year.

The new feature, called Decide Score, analyzes ratings and reviews from across the Web, to provide a score on a scale from 1 to 100 for a variety of products, from consumer electronics to vacuums to outdoor grills.

Think of it as Consumer Reports, except that that the results are driven by data and not people.

“We are stripping out the bias to return a subjective data-driven score,” said Mike Fridgen, CEO of Decide.com. “More and more people are going directly to Amazon to begin their search, but the problem is, they don’t give you a clear idea what the best products are.”

To get the scores, the company sifts through more than 200 terabytes of data, including two million user reviews from online retailers, such as Amazon and Best Buy, as well as 7,000 professional opinions from online reviewers. The service launches in beta today for more than 22,000 consumer electronics and appliances across 16 categories.

The technology that goes into the product was built by the Seattle-based company, which is the brainchild of the folks behind Farecast.com, which helped predict whether it was the right time to buy an airline ticket, or if a price drop was coming. Farecast was purchased by Microsoft three years ago for $115 million, and is now Bing Travel.

In a demonstration, Fridgen showed me how a TV set on Amazon can have great reviews, but only gets an average review on Decide. From there, Decide recommends other TVs that have better scores and are cheaper. The problem with Amazon is that “it’s one source, and it’s only user reviews, which doesn’t tell the whole story,” he said. “We’re looking at experts and user reviews. There’s all types of bias in sources, and Amazon regularly has higher scores.”

However, getting consumers to change their behavior from starting their shopping experience on Amazon to starting their search on Decide will be a difficult one. ”No doubt about it, that will be a challenge for us,” he said.

When consumers do go to Decide first, Fridgen said that people follow its recommendations and are three times more likely to click through and purchase. Third parties that are using Decide’s content, like Bizrate.com, are seeing positive metrics, as well.

Right now, the company makes money from affiliate fees when people click through and make a purchase, but Fridgen says they’ve been more focused on making a good product. Over the past year, Decide has made more than seven million recommendations, and has saved consumers $75 million. Its mobile app has been downloaded more than 100,000 times.

E-commerce site Amazon is taking the first step in bringing the recommendation technology that it is known for to the daily-deals space.

To be sure, no one has yet solved targeting in the space — men are still being offered Brazilian bikini waxes and women get pitched discounts to the barbershop.

But today, AmazonLocal is helping customers build a profile that lets them say what they like, dislike or are neutral about, based on a number of categories, ranging from entertainment and travel to health, beauty and shopping.

“We are reasonably new to to the deals space, but we aren’t new to the personalization experience,” said Mike George, Amazon’s VP of local. “This is a logical extension of a competency.”

For now, Amazon’s first steps are fairly tame.

Users will be able to log in to their profile to specify what they like and don’t like. They will also be able to update their preferences from a specific deal page. The capabilities are nearly identical to ones being offered by both Groupon and Google.

For instance, George said he is not interested in eyelash extensions, or for that matter, any hair-care services, since he shaves his head. “Our engine and algorithms will ensure they don’t end up in my inbox,” he said.

However, the holy grail of recommendations is clearly when consumers get relevant offers without spending any time at all on updating their profiles. To do that, the deals provider would have to know the consumer’s interests and spending habits. Clearly, Amazon is one of those merchants that has that data.

George said that level of integration is not happening today, and declined to provide a road map for when that might be coming.

But you could imagine sometime in the future getting an offer to see Justin Bieber in concert if you’ve purchased his album on Amazon.com, and other parallels between purchases made online and local experiences.

“It’s an interesting thing to think about — the intersection of consumer products and services that are fulfilled by local merchants,” George said. “There are some things that are logical that I believe we will discover that we would never have really thought about. This part is very new to us.”

Starting today, Decide.com will choose 10 deals that it is so sure about that if its prediction proves wrong and the price drops within two weeks of purchase, Decide will automatically alert the buyer and pay them the amount of the price drop (up to $200).

The new feature is being launched today by the Seattle company, which is the brainchild of the folks behind Farecast.com. Like Decide.com, Farecast predicted whether it was the right time to buy an airline ticket. Farecast is now part of Microsoft’s Bing. Unfortunately, Farecast never had a guarantee.

In a statement, Mike Fridgen, president and CEO of Decide, said: “We want to show our users this isn’t just lip service — we’re actually willing to put our money behind our data-driven recommendations.”

The guarantee will be applied to 10 designated deals on the site every day, from consumer electronics to refrigerators and videogames.

Today’s deals include an HP 14-inch laptop for $500, representing a 23 percent savings; a 55-inch HDTV from LG that costs $1,199, representing a savings of 37 percent; and the Haier 1.7 cubic-foot refrigerator for $80, representing a 20 percent savings.

If any of those products become cheaper over the next two weeks, a buyer needs only to submit a photo of themselves with the product, and then Decide will send the money via PayPal or check.

While it sounds generous, the program probably pencils out financially, too. Of course, Decide hopes that its predictions are correct, but if they aren’t, the company has some buffer, because it earns a commission on the sales it generates.

To be clear, the company is not partnering with the retailer on these deals, but it does earn a referal fee or commission from the retailer if it generates a sale. Some of those rates are hefty; Amazon, for example, pays 4 percent on electronics product referrals.

Since launching last June, Decide says it has served up more than seven million recommendations, which have resulted in an average savings of $87 per product.

When it comes to recommendations, there seem to be a few distinct approaches: Collaborative filtering based on a larger audience, learning a user’s personal preferences or analyzing friends’ choices and reviews.

The restaurant recommendation app Alfred tweaked those boundaries today with a neat little feature that makes group recommendations. So if you tell Alfred (which is made by a company called Clever Sense) who you’re dining with, it will spit back a restaurant you and your Alfred-using friends are all likely to enjoy.

I doubt most people are so picky that this would be tremendously useful, but the idea of group personalization seems promising — for instance, I could see the value in a group-filtered music playlist for a party or a book group reading choice.

The “check-out” is dissimilar to the more familiar “check in.” Its purpose is to let your friends know whether you liked a place or hated it, whereas the “check in,” available from Foursquare, Gowala, Facebook Places and others, is used for broadcasting your location to let your friends know where you are.

The check out feature is ultimately supposed to provide enough feedback to the service to understand your preferences, so it can make better recommendations the next time you’re out.

The application was developed by Bizzy, a wholly-owned subsidiary of ReachLocal, which is a publicly held local online advertising company.

Bizzy, which launched only in November, is trying to create a service that’s more tailored to your specific tastes than Yelp or another provider. For instance, Gadi Shamia, Bizzy’s founder, president and general manager, said it should already know if you are a vegetarian or whether you like Mexican food.

Starting this evening, there will be an update available for the Bizzy application in both the iTunes and Android markets.

To “Check Out,” a user opens the application, picks the place they are currently at, and then ranks their experience based on one of three emoticons: a happy face, a so-so face or the sad face. If they have time, they can leave a more detailed description.

To make more accurate recommendations, Bizzy crunches the information it collects from its users to pair up similar tastes across its database in order to draw conclusions about what someone might like based on similar profiles.

The more check outs it can generate, the better its recommendations will become. Since the service launched in November, it’s collected more than 140,000 favorite places from Bizzy users, and has produced more than a million recommendations, Shamia said.

For now, Bizzy is focused on creating a consumer product and will figure out how to monetize it later, but the tie-ins to ReachLocal’s audience is fairly obvious.

Last month, ReachLocal acquired DealOn Media, a daily deals site for $10 million. Eventually, those deals could show up as sponsored links within the recommendations results on the Bizzy application. Shamia said it’s not live today, but you could imagine of the recommendations it generates for the user, one could be more appealing if it offered 30 percent off.

Bizzy, which has 17 employees, is funded exclusively by ReachLocal and has a separate headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif.

However, the youthful chief executive said that as a big mobile geek, he’s excited to see what all the phone makers have in store.

“This is like the South by Southwest of mobile,” Crowley said, referring to Austin’s annual tech and culture festival.

He’s also eager to meet with carriers and phone makers to convince them to more deeply integrate Foursquare into their devices and services.

People mistakenly think of Foursquare as just a game where people boast to their friends about all the places they have been, Crowley said, but what underlies that is a hugely powerful database of places filled with all kinds of recommendations and other inside information.

Over time, Crowley hopes Foursquare will be able to tap the aggregate data and serve it up in useful ways, as well as help individuals get personalized recommendations based on their past check-ins.

One way Mobilized tries to get a sense for the strength of the different mobile platforms is by asking time-crunched developers how they are allocating resources. Crowley said Foursquare, which now has about 50 employees, has three developers on iPhone and two each on Android and BlackBerry. The company used outside partners to create its Nokia and Windows Phone 7 apps.

As for Crowley, he’s been splitting his time between an Android device and his beloved iPhone. His well-worn phone is covered front and back with various stickers–all the easier to pick out his device, he says. But Crowley doesn’t have the iPhone 4, instead sticking with the 3GS. Crowley said his colleagues all upgrade to the latest and greatest and someone needs to make sure the service still works on older gear.

“I like to keep it one generation behind,” he said. “Someone’s got to take one for the team.”

I pressed him on the potential for dangers with all this checking-in, including concerns about physical safety. Without trying to dismiss the issue, Crowley noted that he’s been checking in with his location as long as anyone–since 2000–and has yet to have anything bad happen. The worst thing that’s happened to him, he said, is people showing up to parties uninvited.

For more from Crowley, check out the video we did in the lobby of his Barcelona hotel.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110213/checking-in-with-foursquares-dennis-crowley-at-mobile-world-congress-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110203/the-locker-project-helps-you-stalk-yourself-online/ http://allthingsd.com/20110203/the-locker-project-helps-you-stalk-yourself-online/#comments Fri, 04 Feb 2011 06:30:13 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=3247 A new start-up called Singly is building an open-source service called the Locker Project to help users archive and leverage their own data, Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb reports tonight.

Singly was founded by Jeremie Miller, who created the open-source instant messaging protocol XMPP. It won the O’Reilly Strata data conference‘s start-up competition this week, and has already raised some funding from individual investors. (I’d hoped to attend Strata in person, but got caught up in an endless stream of little news items this week.)

Giving users clearer ownership and better access to their data is a geeky topic but an increasingly relevant one, for privacy and other reasons.

Singly will reportedly offer a hosted version of the Locker Project, or just the code itself, for users to collect their participation on social media sites and even their click streams, financial records and heart-rate monitors. This concept is known as “exhaust data,” i.e., what users emit as they motor around the Web.

Then, Locker Project users can run yet-to-be-built apps to analyze their exhaust data in order to find patterns, make recommendations, set alerts and do whatever else they can imagine.

So many things we do these days can be recorded, and already are. Rather than just allowing behaviorally targeted advertisers, governments and credit card companies to stalk us, the thought behind projects like this is that we users can gain value out of stalking ourselves and analyzing our own data. I wrote a bit more about the justifications for this stuff during my old gig at GigaOM.

And to be sure, other companies and organizations are exploring the idea of personal archives too–for instance, the recent Y Combinator start-up Greplin is building a unified personal search tool that members can use on their email, calendar, storage and social Web accounts.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110203/the-locker-project-helps-you-stalk-yourself-online/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20110202/security-software-taxes-and-wi-fi-for-ipads/ http://allthingsd.com/20110202/security-software-taxes-and-wi-fi-for-ipads/#comments Wed, 02 Feb 2011 23:00:02 +0000 Walt Mossberg http://mailbox.allthingsd.com/?p=839 Q:

I have a Windows PC. Microsoft sends regular updates to their “computer protection” software. Do I still need other security software?

A:

It depends what you mean by “computer protection” software.

If you are using Microsoft Security Essentials, then you already have security software and don’t need another brand, unless you are unhappy with it.

If you are referring to general security updates to Windows, these do close vulnerabilities in Windows, but don’t obviate the need for security software.

Q:

I’m an accountant and do a few tax returns for my clients in my spare time. Would you please give me some recommendations on a computer that I could use for preparing tax returns and filing them electronically?

A:

While preparing tax returns might require some skill on your part, it doesn’t require an especially powerful computer, or one configured in any particular manner. Pretty much any PC or Mac on the shelves can do it.

If you have a favorite tax software program, perhaps one geared more to accountants than to average consumers, you might check its system requirements and be guided by these.

For instance, if it runs on only certain versions of Windows, or requires a certain amount of memory, you should buy accordingly.

Q:

We have two new iPads, the models with only Wi-Fi connectivity. Can I use the Wi-Fi hot-spot feature of an Android phone to provide them with Internet access?

A:

Although I haven’t tested this scenario, I see no reason why not.

The hot-spot feature creates a Wi-Fi network from a cellular data connection and should work with any Wi-Fi capable device, including your iPads.

You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox and all of Walt Mossberg’s other columns online at the All Things Digital website, http://walt.allthingsd.com. Write to Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110202/security-software-taxes-and-wi-fi-for-ipads/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110131/mixtent-builds-a-database-of-talent-one-face-off-at-a-time/ http://allthingsd.com/20110131/mixtent-builds-a-database-of-talent-one-face-off-at-a-time/#comments Mon, 31 Jan 2011 17:02:17 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=3001 Is there any way to know whether people will be good at a particular job before you hire them? Can you understand just how talented they are at a particular skill relative to their peers?

Those are hard questions to answer, especially online. The best LinkedIn has to offer are résumés and recommendations, usually written at the request of the user. But a new company called Mixtent, built on top of LinkedIn, aims to solicit simple feedback about people to understand how they fit into the network of potential employees.

Mixtent brings up two people in a user’s LinkedIn network and asks a question–for instance, “Who is a better product manager?” It asks users to repeat these comparisons again and again in order to build leaderboards of talent in different categories. Mixtent CEO Jonathan Gheller calls this a “game-like approach to capturing data.”

That simple act of brutal comparison is familiar on the Web, dating at least back to the seminal product HotorNot (which showed pictures of two people and asked, “Who is hotter?”). The HotorNot model was also part of the genesis for Facebook, through an earlier Mark Zuckerberg project called Facemash (which compared the looks of Harvard students). More recently, another corporate/social start-up called Cubeduel launched a very similar site for users to rank their coworkers.

But what Mixtent wants to do is build these tiny acts of ranking–which in my experience feel somewhat mean, but Gheller promises are completely anonymized–into a collective intelligence network that can algorithmically compare people’s abilities. The company will then sell analytic products to companies so they can better understand their employees and potential hires.

There are a ton of start-ups tackling the social side of corporate recruiting and similar topics; call them the LinkedIn 2.0s.

Gheller says of the competition, “This is a big and obvious space to fix, but we’re trying to solve a narrow problem (how we qualify people) that we’re hoping will be big.”

Mixtent is only five months old, angel-funded and based in Redwood City, Calif. Gheller had previously built a start-up called FashMatch, a somewhat similar collective intelligence platform for creating clothing outfits. He sold FashMatch to Like.com, which was bought by Google last August for $100 million.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110131/mixtent-builds-a-database-of-talent-one-face-off-at-a-time/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110126/microsoft-consumers-should-think-twice-before-broadcasting-location/ http://allthingsd.com/20110126/microsoft-consumers-should-think-twice-before-broadcasting-location/#comments Wed, 26 Jan 2011 23:16:38 +0000 Ina Fried http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/?p=3035 As more and more services tap into location-based data, consumers need to take steps to make sure they are aware just how broadly they are sharing that information.

That was one of several points stressed by Microsoft Chief Privacy Officer Brendon Lynch, who sat down with Mobilized ahead of his appearance at a Churchill Club event Wednesday night focused on location-based services.

Among the company’s recommendations is that consumers think twice before taking actions such as broadcasting their location when they are alone or sharing geo-tagged photos of their home or children.

Microsoft did some research in December that found that three in five consumers are aware of location-based services and roughly half say they have used such a service, with one in 10 of those surveyed saying they use such services on a daily basis.

While the most common reported usages were for things like navigation, traffic and weather, about 18 percent of respondents said they were using a service like Foursquare, Facebook or Google Latitude that broadcasts their location.

The software maker is releasing the results later on Wednesday ahead of Friday’s commemoration of Data Privacy Day. This year, the company decided to focus its efforts on location-based services.

“This is a high-stakes, high-value data element,” Lynch said.

Lynch also noted that people sharing location with their social network might want to review just how wide that network is.

“I actually believe [sharing of] location data is a situation which probably should cause people to really go review that list,” he said.

And while there is a responsibility on consumers to be more aware, Lynch said, those building services and products also need to do their part.

“You can build it into the experience to actually make people aware that this is going to happen and they have a role to play in the choice,” he said.

Microsoft’s research found that privacy concerns are a barrier for some to adopting location-based services, particularly in the U.S. About half of overall survey respondents said they would be more comfortable with such services if they had more information on just who was seeing the information being shared.

The company also found that while 94 percent of consumers find location-based services to be valuable, they weren’t terribly willing to pay, and those who were often weren’t willing to pay more than $10 for such services. That seems to indicate more promise for advertising-funded services, especially since nearly half of those who have seen a location-based mobile ad have taken action on the ad–vastly higher than the response rates seen on traditional online ads.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110126/microsoft-consumers-should-think-twice-before-broadcasting-location/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110126/greystripe-targets-regional-mobile-ads-not-the-more-trendy-hyper-local-ads/ http://allthingsd.com/20110126/greystripe-targets-regional-mobile-ads-not-the-more-trendy-hyper-local-ads/#comments Wed, 26 Jan 2011 14:00:09 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=1969 If there’s one area of mobile advertising that’s hot right now, it’s hyper-local, or the ability to target coupons, offers or recommendations within a block or two of a person’s location.

But San Francisco-based Greystripe, a mobile ad network, says there’s a bigger opportunity in selling brand advertising when you take a slightly larger view.

“When we looked at the market for local and hyper-local, there’s no brand play there. We asked ourselves, how do you get rich media into a hyper-local experience? It’s not obvious, but the big place for the brands to place ads is at the regional local level,” said Greystripe’s CEO Michael Chang.

To that end, Greystripe is announcing a strategic partnership with Media Networks, Inc., a Time Inc. company, which goes by MNI for short.

Greystripe will leverage MNI’s 80-person sales team, which was focused exclusively on local buys online to sell mobile ads, while MNI will rely on Greystripe’s expertise in mobile and inventory of mobile applications and Web sites. It’s the first time MNI has moved into mobile, and for Greystripe, it will represent a significant expansion beyond its 12-person sales team.

Chang said even though you see local plays, like Groupon and LivingSocial raising billions of dollars, the regional play is not to be forgotten. The hyper-local guys, he says, are often going after the same dollars allocated to the Yellow Pages, whereas there’s a separate bucket for big brands wanting to advertise locally.

Examples include a car dealership that covers a whole region, a hospital that treats patients in an entire county or a McDonald’s franchise that owns multiple locations.

“It’s not so fine grain,” he said.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110126/greystripe-targets-regional-mobile-ads-not-the-more-trendy-hyper-local-ads/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110125/why-is-google-spending-10-million-on-fflick-perhaps-to-predict-box-office-success/ http://allthingsd.com/20110125/why-is-google-spending-10-million-on-fflick-perhaps-to-predict-box-office-success/#comments Wed, 26 Jan 2011 00:36:37 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=2312 When I first read on TechCrunch that search giant Google is in the process of acquiring the movie-tweet analysis service Fflick, it triggered a memory that prompted me to start digging through my Gmail account. Once that digging was done I had found a year-old paper produced by two researchers at Hewlett-Packard that in turn led me to an interesting theory about one reason Google may be shelling out for this service, which at first glance looks like nothing more than one of dozens of consumer recommendation engines geared toward movies.

This research paper was produced by two social-computing researchers at HP Labs: Bernardo Huberman and Sitaram Asur. It’s titled “Predicting the Future With Social Media” [PDF here], and it looks at Twitter as a means of predicting the box-office success of newly release films based on the number of people tweeting about them and the sentiments contained in those tweets.

They argued that Twitter was a far better predictor of box-office success than the motion picture industry’s “tracking” reports that studios have used for years. In fact, the two researchers said at the time that Twitter could predict with nearly 98 percent accuracy whether a movie would be a hit or a flop in its first weekend of release. For the study, they mined nearly three million tweets referring to 24 different movies over a time period of three months.

Fflick does some sentiment analysis of its own, but uses that data to help Twitter users decide whether they are going to buy a ticket to a movie based on whether their Twitter friends liked it. Could it be that Google wants to mine that same sentiment data to help movie studios predict box-office sales?

As I said, this is only a theory–one that I admit I’m stretching to the max. I can’t find any connection between the two researchers and Ffflick’s four founders, or its investors, which includes the Founders Fund, though there needn’t be one for my theory to be close to the mark. Fflick was started in August of last year, about five months after the paper was published. And the paper itself was widely covered at the time, in particular by the Los Angeles Times.

Since neither Google nor Fflick is commenting on this deal, which is supposedly still pending, I thought it was worth suggesting as a possible motivation on Google’s part.

Electronista thinks it may have something to do with forecasting popularity on Google’s forthcoming YouTube movie project and the need to predict.

I did check in with the paper’s principal author, Huberman, by email to ask what he thought. His reply: “Sentiment analysis of tweets is great for marketing studies and Google wants to go there since they have search going on with Twitter.” Time will tell if this is what Google has on its mind.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110125/why-is-google-spending-10-million-on-fflick-perhaps-to-predict-box-office-success/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110125/nileguide-acquires-decade-old-10best-for-travel-content/ http://allthingsd.com/20110125/nileguide-acquires-decade-old-10best-for-travel-content/#comments Tue, 25 Jan 2011 14:33:29 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=2732 San Francisco-based NileGuide wants to be the alternative to scuzzy keyword-stuffed travel information from content farms. The company, which pays local editors to maintain free, user-generated content, has acquired 10Best.com, a profitable edited travel recommendations site from EnVeritas that’s been around since 2000, to help boost NileGuide’s traffic to three million visitors per month. Terms were not disclosed, but NileGuide said it will keep a portion of 10Best’s staff in Greenville, S.C.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110125/nileguide-acquires-decade-old-10best-for-travel-content/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110111/amazons-android-appstore-will-lean-heavily-on-e-commerce-mechanics/ http://allthingsd.com/20110111/amazons-android-appstore-will-lean-heavily-on-e-commerce-mechanics/#comments Wed, 12 Jan 2011 00:42:43 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=1571 Amazon officially stepped into the mobile applications ring last week by opening up a platform to developers that will eventually make way for an Android superstore.

To get a bigger picture of the retailer’s plans, we caught up with Aaron Rubenson, category leader for Amazon Mobile Services, and Ameesh Paleja, general manager for the Engineering Division of Amazon Mobile Services.

The one message that was exceedingly clear was that Amazon’s app store efforts will lean heavily on its years of retailing experience in an effort to change the way applications are marketed and sold on phones today.

So far, the shopping experience on Google’s Android Market has been disappointing. Developers have had to deal with sub-par marketing techniques and inadequate payment methods. Likewise, customers have to wade through thousands of applications that are difficult to pay for.

The difference in the approaches of Google and Amazon are as easy to explain as saying that one was built by a search company and the other a retailer.

“We have a lot of infrastructure and technology to maximize revenue. At the end of the day, our hope and goal is to leverage the systems we have built and to bring it to the app world,” Rubenson said. We can have a broad array of merchandising and marketing tools available to get developers’ apps in front of the customers and make them really simple to buy.”

To break it down, there’s at least three ways Amazon can differentiate itself from Google’s own Android Market: pricing, recommendations and payments.

Pricing: This is by far and away the biggest differentiation between Amazon’s Appstore vs. the Android Market, or even Apple’s App Store. When it comes to price, Amazon will decide how much to sell a game or application for — not the developer (although he or she will have some influence).

Amazon will set a sales price for an app, and developers will set a list price. Developers will earn 20 percent of the original list price, or 70 percent of the sales price, whichever is greater. The benefit of this model is that Amazon has the resources to monitor sales across the board and come up with a strategy that will maximize sales much faster than a developer or publisher would normally be able to react.

Recommendations: Amazon will also be able to increase sales by making recommendations that are based on a consumer’s wide range of interests, spanning across all of Amazon, including books, music, movies and more — not just apps. Apple and Google don’t have that insight because they don’t have such a wide variety of inventory. “That tech and the recommendations right now are so-so, there’s a lot opportunity to improve,” Paleja said.

For instance, Amazon would know if you bought a fancy cooking utensil and could recommend a recipe app, or cooking game.

Payments: This is also a huge differentiator. While the app store will initially only be available to consumers in the U.S. that’s expected to change. It has “tens of millions of customers who have credit cards on file” in dozens of countries worldwide.

Google’s Checkout payments system, which is one of the only payments systems available on the Android Market, doesn’t have that scale or scope. It’s flawed to the point that in some countries users can only download free apps. Often times, consumers have also not gone through the trouble of signing up for Checkout. Amazon’s payments system is more comparable to how consumers have a credit card stored in their iTunes account.

Despite Amazon’s list of competitive advantages, it is not the only third-party trying to make better app stores. Other companies, such as PocketGear, which recently got funding from the investment arm of Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt, and GetJar has a head start in working with developers. Carriers and handset-makers are also prepping developer programs.

It’s not clear when the store will be open to the public, other than that it will launch sometime this year. The store will support both free and paid apps and will be available both on Amazon’s homepage and both handsets and tablets.

Unlike Google, Amazon will have an approval process for apps, which has the goal of making sure apps work and don’t impair the device, but it won’t be selective based on content. “We are big believers in innovation, and that we’ll find a large range of innovation,” Rubenson said.

The two declined to comment on whether Amazon would share revenues with the carriers, handset makers or Google, although would confirm they are in discussions with a number of players in the space to get their app store on devices.

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