AllThingsD » San Francisco

SceneTap Interview: San Francisco's Least Welcome Start-Up Explains Itself (Video)

Liz Gannes — Fri, 18 May 2012 17:08:47 +0000

Late yesterday afternoon, I was supposed to meet SceneTap CEO Cole Harper at a bar in San Francisco, so I could get an in-person view of his company’s nightlife monitoring system that was set to debut today at various local venues.

More than an hour after we were scheduled to meet, Harper finally emerged from the bar. We were no longer welcome to do a press interview inside, he said.

The manager had been tearing Harper a new one, after getting hostile phone calls all week about the SceneTap launch, which local paper SF Weekly wrote up under the headline “San Francisco Bars to Install Creepy Facial Detection Cameras Inside Venues.”

Of the 25 San Francisco bars supposed to launch with SceneTap today, about 10 dropped out after the outcry, Harper said. That hasn’t happened in any of the other six cities where SceneTap is live.

As we finally sat down at a nearby Starbucks, Harper insisted that his company was misrepresented. SceneTap doesn’t record video about patrons or, as the article said, “keep tabs on them via facial recognition technology.” Rather, it quickly scans new entrants at each venue to determine aggregate numbers of people, their genders and ages.

The point is to help people decide where to go by getting a sense of who is already there.

The SceneTap system includes a sensor on the ceiling at each venue’s entrance as well as a nearby camera-like sensor for facial detection — a fuzzier version of facial recognition — that describes and time-stamps each person. No photo or video recording takes place, Harper said.

Bars can pay Austin-based SceneTap a subscription fee to get analytics about their own patrons. Users — currently just under 100,000 of them — can check SceneTap’s iOS, Android and Web apps to see what’s going on locally or elsewhere.

Harper just posted a long open letter addressed (rather broadly!) to the city of San Francisco, assuring them he is not a bad guy with bad intent:

“I realize there are aspects of our technology that could appear to be controversial and raise serious red flags for people, and I assure you I’m not taking it lightly. … Unfortunately, I think I underestimated the controversial aspects of this technology and what the public’s reaction would be,” he wrote.

Harper elaborated in our interview, “Every single bar that we’re working with already had surveillance systems and cameras recording and other things that were extremely intrusive, in the general opinion,” Harper said. “What we’re adding on is really just a layer that helps from a marketing and social element.”

On the one hand, I see his point; the SceneTap set-up is definitely not as bad as it could be. It’s not posting women’s social media profiles on a map like “Girls Around Me.”

On the other hand, it’s not really that hard to decide what bar to go to! And it’s still offputting to think about the system guessing my age and gender and posting it, even in anonymous aggregated form, on the Internet.

Here’s Harper explaining himself and his company, in a video from our interview:

[ See post to watch video ]

Flipboard CEO McCue Likely to Step Down From Twitter Board Over Potential Future Conflicts (Or Closer Cooperation)

Kara Swisher — Mon, 07 May 2012 20:37:24 +0000

According to sources close to the situation, Flipboard co-founder and CEO Mike McCue has approached Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and co-founder Jack Dorsey about moving off the board of Twitter.

It is not clear when McCue — who became a director of the San Francisco social communications company in late 2010 — will step down, but it could come soon.

The reason, sources said, is McCue’s growing feeling that the companies are on a product collision course, with a possible troubled or perhaps more attractive result.

In other words, Flipboard will either face increasing rivalry from Twitter or will end up as a possible acquisition target for it or other companies.

“How users consume and use Twitter is a key part of its future, and that is what Flipboard does well already,” said one person with knowledge of the situation. “There is going to be an inevitable crossroads for the two companies.”

Indeed, Twitter has bought several companies that help users read and discover, such as Summify.

The goal has been to better make sense of the massive amount of data that the service produces daily; to that end, Twitter has pushed to improve its user interface design on a number of devices.

And Twitter is a big part of Flipboard’s app, which is very dependent on the tweet feed and accounts for 70 percent of its links, sources said.

Flipboard is also more of a “mobile first” company, which is where Twitter is also headed even more aggressively.

Already popular on the Apple iPad, Flipboard launched its iPhone app late last year and it is prepping a version for Google Android soon.

That’s why, in addition to being a rival, it is also an obvious acquisition target for Twitter, as well as others such as Yahoo and Microsoft.

In fact, Google already tried to buy it last year, before Flipboard did a massive $50 million fundraising round that valued it at $200 million.

Its investors include Insight Venture Partners, Comcast’s venture arm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Index Ventures and a spate of well known angels, such as Dorsey, Facebook co-founder and Asana dude Dustin Moskovitz, Ron Conway, actor Ashton Kutcher and the investment company of former News Corp. exec Peter Chernin.

Co-founded by longtime entrepreneur McCue (Netscape, Tellme) and former Apple iPhone engineer Evan Doll, Flipboard launched to much attention in mid 2010.

Its innovative social magazine concept is attempting to make the social networking universe more accessible, consumable and, perhaps most importantly, visually arresting via its rich app.

Essentially, Flipboard pulls information from media RSS feeds and sites such as Twitter and Facebook data streams and then reassembles it in an easy-to-navigate personalized format.

Google has mounted a competitor, called Currents, as has Yahoo with its Livestand offering, neither of which have gotten much traction. In fact, sources said, Yahoo is likely to shut Livestand down completely.

There have also been a spate of other similar readers, such as Pulse and Zite.

Spokespersons for both Flipboard and Twitter politely declined comment.

San Francisco's Pursuit of Tech Spurs Questions

Vauhini Vara and Stu Woo — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 12:30:17 +0000

San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee wants to do more to promote the local technology industry than any mayor before him. But some who advocate for low-income residents in this rapidly changing city are saying that’s not necessarily a good thing.

Since he was appointed mayor a year ago and elected to a full term in November, Mr. Lee has made it a priority to boost the city’s economy through the tech industry. Last year, he backed tax breaks to help San Francisco Internet companies Zynga Inc. and Twitter Inc. He visits tech companies weekly and is close to start-up financier Ron Conway.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Walk Score Places a Value on How Easy It Is to Navigate a Neighborhood (Video)

Tricia Duryee — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 12:30:14 +0000

When looking for a new house or apartment, ever wonder what the commute will be like or how far away the grocery store or coffee shop is?

Seattle-based Walk Score has created an easy way to evaluate how walkable and public-transportation-friendly a neighborhood is on a scale from one to 100.

A 90 and higher is a Walker’s Paradise, meaning that daily errands there do not require a car. On the other end of the spectrum, and for scores under 50, it means there are very few amenities within walking distance and that people are car-dependent. For example, Seattle ranks as a 74.

I caught up with Walk Score’s CEO Josh Herst and co-founder and CTO Matt Lerner in Northwest Seattle to hear the company’s story.

Lerner said the premise behind Walk Score is that the real estate industry is stuck on viewing a house based on the price and the number of bedrooms it offers, but in reality, there are a whole lot of more important factors outside the four walls that should be taken into account.

In a study, Lerner said that every Walk Score point translated into roughly $3,000 in home value — which is why New York and San Francisco have two of the most expensive real estate markets in the country; generally, you can get more for your money the farther you travel out from a city’s core.

Walk Score’s data has spread like wildfire, with more than 15,000 sites paying to have access to its data, including aggregators like Zillow.com and other independent real estate sites. Today, the company is rolling out a study ranking the Top 25 major U.S. cities for transportation. New York is predictably at the top of the rankings, with a score of 81. San Francisco is in second place, with a score of 80, and at the bottom of the list is Raleigh, with a transit score of 23. Seattle is No. 8, with a score of 59.

Here’s Herst and Lerner explaining the importance of their data, and how the Walk Score is affecting where people are choosing to work and live:

[ See post to watch video ]

Apple's WWDC 2012 Already Sold Out

John Paczkowski — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 15:55:08 +0000

Apple will hold its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) June 11 through June 15 at San Francisco’s Moscone West, the company said this morning. But if you’re hoping to attend, I’m afraid you’re out of luck. Tickets for the event sold out about two hours after they first went on sale. That’s 10 hours faster than the $1,600 tickets sold out last year.

FaceTagram? InstaBook? Whatever You Call It, All Your Mobile Photo Are Belong to Facebook (for $1 Billion)!

Kara Swisher — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 19:20:59 +0000

If you want a quick analysis of why Facebook would pay $1 billion for popular photo-sharing service Instagram, please ignore the obvious financials that just don’t add up at all and have most of the typically unshockable digerati shocked by the sheer amount of the price.

Actually, it’s pretty simple: Photos. Photos. And, oh yes, mobile photos — lots and lots and lots of them.

Astonishingly, Facebook users already upload an average of more than 250 million images daily, making it the most popular photo-sharing service on the Web.

But it’s not the best by far and not the most mobile, which is Facebook’s biggest weakness — that has been accomplished many others, especially Instagram, the favorite of power users who scoffed at Facebook’s weak tools. (The horror of no filters!)

Now — instead of all those billions of juicy digital photos snapped by an ever-growing legion of smartphone users loading up to the beautifully designed Instagram mobile app and living on the servers of the small San Francisco-based start-up — Facebook has now captured all these memories for its massive social networking site.

And while $1 billion seems an awful lot to pay for that privilege — Twitter is quaking with “OMG!” and “Wow!” and “WTF!” tweets about the acquisition — this is apparently priceless for Facebook in a deal that went down quickly and quietly in recent weeks.

That and the fact that the huge sum prevented Instagram from being scooped up by Google.

It’s a clear signal from CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg — who rules all product efforts at the company — of his intent to dominate all innovations that have to do with owning the social experience.

Because while many Instagram photos quickly made their way onto Facebook — sharing on the service, as well as on Twitter, was a big part of the app’s offering — the future of the Menlo Park, Calif.-based company is tied to having control over key elements of the user experience.

Of all of those — communications, status updates, content linking — it has been photos that have become perhaps the most important part of Facebook, almost since its beginnings.

Photos are what allowed Facebook to grow so quickly and what made it more than just a blue sea of text and links to consumers. Its new Timeline depends on big, pretty photos, and Facebook even recently announced that it would allow full-screen viewing of high-resolution photos on its Web site, a pricey endeavor.

So, perhaps it was inevitable that Zuckerberg would pay up for Instagram, too — he knows a good entrepreneurial success when he sees one and apparently has the power to convince start-ups that he can make their bigger dreams come true.

Whether or not Instagram ever makes money is perhaps beside the point at this moment in time, as Facebook is poised to go public at 100 times the amount it forked over for Instagram.

But that it considers such a purchase worth as much as one percent of its expected valuation says a thousands words. And most of those words are “mobile” and “photo.”

As Ben Jacobs noted on Twitter: “Kodak goes bankrupt and Instagram is worth a billion dollars. 2012, y’all.”

Indeed. And, I have no doubt if Zuckerberg could figure out a way to shove all those Kodak moments from analog snapshots onto Facebook easily, he’d have paid up for that, too.

Clicking on a Fortune: Facebook to Acquire Photo-Sharing Start-Up Instagram for $1 Billion

Kara Swisher — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 17:03:43 +0000

Facebook has just announced that it will acquire Instagram, the popular mobile photo-sharing service, for $1 billion in cash and shares.

The social networking giant posted on the acquisition, its biggest yet, on its site, as well as on CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg’s Timeline on Facebook.

Photos are critically important for Facebook, which has been slow to innovate in the fast-growing mobile arena in the important consumer space. By contrast, Instagram has taken the arena by storm, with its delightful and elegant app and the motto, “Fast beautiful photo sharing.”

Consumers have responded (including me — it is the only non-communications app I use many times a day). The San Francisco-based company — with only 13 employees — had 30 million Apple iPhone users before it came to Google’s Android last week, where it got more than a million new users in just 12 hours.

Still, despite all the usage, Instagram had not articulated a plan for, you know, making money. Now, that will presumably be Facebook’s problem to solve.

The Facebook acquisition has been kept very quiet, with its CEO Kevin Systrom working on it in conjunction with new fundraising efforts that would have valued the company at $500 million. Liz Gannes reported on this effort last week, which was poised to close, in fact, before the Facebook deal was struck over the weekend.

Until now, Instagram has received Series A funding of $7 million led by Benchmark Capital just over a year ago, when it only had 1.75 million registered users.

Seed investors include Andreessen Horowitz — which did not follow on later — and Baseline Ventures. Also in the Benchmark round: Twitter creator Jack Dorsey, former Facebooker Adam D’Angelo and Chris Sacca.

In a blog post titled “Instagram + Facebook,” Systrom promised no change, except for the $1 billion mountain of cash:

“It’s important to be clear that Instagram is not going away. We’ll be working with Facebook to evolve Instagram and build the network … The Instagram app will still be the same one you know and love.”

Zuckerberg also promised that Facebook would keep Instagram independent, and that such a large purchase would be rare for the company, which is set to go public soon.

“This is an important milestone for Facebook because it’s the first time we’ve ever acquired a product and company with so many users,” he wrote. “We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all.”

Here is the full press release from Facebook:

Facebook to Acquire Instagram

MENLO PARK, CALIF. — April 9, 2012 — Facebook announced today that it has reached an agreement to acquire Instagram, a fun, popular photo-sharing app for mobile devices.

The total consideration for San Francisco-based Instagram is approximately $1 billion in a combination of cash and shares of Facebook. The transaction, which is subject to customary closing conditions, is expected to close later this quarter.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, posted about the transaction on his Timeline:

I’m excited to share the news that we’ve agreed to acquire Instagram and that their talented team will be joining Facebook.

For years, we’ve focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family. Now, we’ll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests.

We believe these are different experiences that complement each other. But in order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.

That’s why we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people.

We think the fact that Instagram is connected to other services beyond Facebook is an important part of the experience. We plan on keeping features like the ability to post to other social networks, the ability to not share your Instagrams on Facebook if you want, and the ability to have followers and follow people separately from your friends on Facebook.

These and many other features are important parts of the Instagram experience and we understand that. We will try to learn from Instagram’s experience to build similar features into our other products. At the same time, we will try to help Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook’s strong engineering team and infrastructure.

This is an important milestone for Facebook because it’s the first time we’ve ever acquired a product and company with so many users. We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all. But providing the best photo sharing experience is one reason why so many people love Facebook and we knew it would be worth bringing these two companies together.

We’re looking forward to working with the Instagram team and to all of the great new experiences we’re going to be able to build together.

Sticks and Stones: Third Point Launches "Value Yahoo" Blog (Which Does Not Value Current Leadership)

Kara Swisher — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 14:30:09 +0000

In another high-profile parry in its increasingly aggressive proxy fight against Yahoo, activist shareholder Third Point has launched an extensive Web blog to support its case with investors called “Value Yahoo.”

Along with a long statement — a blogifesto of sorts — about what it will take to fix the Silicon Valley Internet giant, Value Yahoo also tries to keep up the pressure on Yahoo’s board and management.

The purple-themed site — this is Yahoo’s well-known color — features a humorous take on Yahoo’s now dearly departed neon sign in San Francisco, with the banner: “Yahoo Shareholders Deserve Overdue Representation!”

It includes a section on “Failed Leadership,” info on its “Road to Recovery” slate of alternate directors and even an FAQ and mission statement.

“We believe in Yahoo!, its loyal users, committed employees, dedicated partners, and the potential of the brand,” it reads, in part. “Yahoo! shareholders, employees, and partners have suffered for too long with a revolving door of management teams and Directors who have been unable to seize opportunities despite the Company’s enduring role as the premier online source for news, sports, business, entertainment and email.”

By the way, in a clever dig, there is also a Facebook site for Value Yahoo — patent lawsuit or no, you can “like” Third Point’s effort.

Here, for example, is one of Value Yahoo’s charticles:

The goal of all this, presumably, is to get Yahoo to give in to demands for several board seats using its directors, including Third Point’s Dan Loeb. So far, ongoing discussions between Loeb and Yahoo have failed to stop the shareholder battle, which comes in the midst of the company’s wrenching restructuring.

Last week, Yahoo said it had appointed three new directors to its board. In a pointed slap at Loeb, the company said it had rejected him specifically, although Yahoo added that it was willing to accept one of his current choices and another that was mutually agreed to.

Loeb reacted to that, um, badly, with another letter last week that said Yahoo leadership was living in an “illogical Alice-in-Wonderland world.”

The war of words continues with the new site, which Third Point said it will maintain actively like a blog, with updates, charts, filings, outside news stories and more.

(Since Yahoo has apparently banned me from its internal news offering to employees, according to more sources than you can shake a stick at, I hope they can see my work here!)

In its newest post — titled “Why Are We Running for Election to the Yahoo! Board?” — Third Point presents an argument for other shareholders to act, even though Yahoo has actually made a lot of the changes that Loeb has been pushing for already.

(In fact, that’s an FAQ question on Value Yahoo, natch: “Yahoo! has made changes to its Board. Hasn’t Third Point already gotten what it wanted?” Short answer: Vigilance, since they are well-known backsliders over there!)

As the firm notes in its reasons-why essay, with the original bolding on the Value Yahoo blog:

“After years of failed leadership and poor governance, Yahoo! shareholders have a chance to inject experienced, independent voices aligned with their interests. The “Shareholder Slate” — Daniel Loeb, Harry Wilson, Michael Wolf, and Jeff Zucker — seeks a voice and a choice for Yahoo! owners hurt by the current “Legacy Board’s” track record of value disintegration, and wants to prevent the Board from simply nominating their handpicked replacements — the “Insider Slate” — for Yahoo!’s board.”

Exclusive: BermanBraun Buys Most of Shelby Bonnie's Whiskey Media

Kara Swisher — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 16:30:32 +0000

In a deal that was just signed, longtime Silicon Valley exec Shelby Bonnie has sold his social publishing start-up, Whiskey Media, to Santa Monica-based entertainment and interactive production company BermanBraun.

As part of the deal, BermanBraun will get three key sites of San Francisco-based Whiskey, including video entertainment-focused Screened, tech-testing site Tested, and Anime Vice, which covers anime and manga comics. It will also acquire Whiskey’s content-publishing platform.

Two other sites owned by Whiskey — games-oriented Giant Bomb and comic-book database Comic Vine — will be sold to another media company, which is rumored to be CBS Interactive.

Heaped on top of the niche content, aimed at passionate fans, Whiskey mixes in a lot of social networking, as well as user-generated content, along with its professional fare.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

But the major reason for the acquisition is that BermanBraun — which also makes popular sites for large portals such as Microsoft’s MSN (the Wonderwall celebrity site and Glo, aimed at the women’s lifestyle arena) and AOL (upcoming sites on weather, men and pets) — needs to be able to scale its online content production. The Whiskey platform should be able to allow it to more easily grow and create new sites more quickly, as well as mine data across them.

“With the addition of Whiskey’s first rate team and powerful, state of the art publishing, data and social tools platform, we will be able to further enhance our user experience and engagement, and provide our advertising partners with unparalleled data insights,” said Lloyd Braun and Gail Berman, who run BermanBraun, in a statement. “One of the other great parts of this acquisition is that we will have Shelby Bonnie in our lives. We have enormous respect for Shelby personally and professionally, and his insights, relationships and acumen will be invaluable to us.”

Bonnie, who was once CEO of CNET, which he helped found, added: “I have had the pleasure of knowing both Lloyd and Gail for years and they are two incredibly high integrity people who bring passion and creativity to the interactive space. As we see a dramatic changes in the whole media landscape, success will demand new skills and talents. BermanBraun’s content skills and vision joined with the Whiskey platform will create a combination that I believe is without equal. I couldn’t be more excited for the combination.”

Here is a video interview I did with Bonnie in mid-2010 about Whiskey:

[ See post to watch video ]

Viral Video: Finally, "Kara" Becomes a Cyborg (Bucket List, Check!)

Kara Swisher — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 09:00:02 +0000

Here is a very cool — if slightly creepy — video that debuted at the Game Developers Conference this week in San Francisco.

Made by the Paris-based Quantic Dream, developers of the groundbreaking Heavy Rain game, the “Kara” concept video is a look at the future of gaming, using full-body motion capture and a new computer-graphics engine. It is running in real time on Sony’s PlayStation 3 platform.

Mostly, it is just heartbreaking, as a robot comes to life and is quickly scared by the idea of how precious that can be.

Enjoy:

Here's Zynga's Filing on $228M HQ Building Deal (For All You Real Estate Types)

Kara Swisher — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 01:40:12 +0000

Zynga bought its San Francisco HQ building for $228 million, the company said in a regulatory filing, which I have embedded below.

Having enjoyed a party or two in the space at 650 Townsend Street over the years — even before it housed the online gaming company, I vaguely recall an epic Devo concert there during Web 1.0 — I can tell you it is a nice space and that Zynga has fixed it up real pretty.

Zynga CEO Mark Pincus — for those who might not know — is a bit of a real estate mogul himself, having housed Zynga and other start-ups in previous buildings he owned.

This one’s all Zynga’s, which sources said will give the fast-growing company — which just went public — an ability to lock in affordable growth space and also host community events.

I vote to bring back Devo ASAP, now that we can trash the place without worrying about the landlord.

ZNGA-20120305-8K-20120302

HBO Digital Head Alison Moore Talks About HBO Go and More! (Video)

Kara Swisher — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 17:26:23 +0000

Earlier this week, HBO co-Presidents Eric Kessler and Richard Plepler hosted a cocktail party in San Francisco, along with a screening of HBO’s latest original film, “Game Change.”

The idea of the event was to get the Time Warner-owned premium cable channel some much-needed cred among the tech press in Silicon Valley, as well as to talk up its slick and well-done streaming service, HBO Go.

Kessler said that HBO would soon be adding Microsoft’s Xbox 360 to the many connected devices to which HBO Go now distributes the channel’s content. So far, the HBO Go app has been downloaded six million times and is available via cable operators.

Alison Moore, SVP of digital platforms at HBO, talked about that and more in this video interview I did here:

[ See post to watch video ]

Huh? After Spending $278 Million, Salesforce.com Backs Out of San Francisco Campus.

Arik Hesseldahl — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 14:51:45 +0000

There’s a great big collective “huh?” reverberating around the universe of analysts and investors who follow Salesforce.com. The company said yesterday that it was backing away from the development of a new campus complex in San Francisco, a project that has been on the drawing board for more than a year. It had even spent $278 million on a 14-acre parcel of land in the city’s Mission Bay area.

What’s so confusing, though, is that Salesforce is still growing like crazy and adding new employees at a relatively fast pace. Faster than ever before, in fact, and yet it still doesn’t need the new building? Apparently, Salesforce can satisfy its office-space needs by sticking with the traditional leases upon which it has relied so far. As Salesforce chief messaging officer Bruce Francis told Reuters: “We are growing now faster than we were growing at the time when we originally made the decision to build the campus. We are going to need space faster than we could build it.”

But the decision is going to add another log on the fire for Salesforce’s critics, who have argued that its shares are too expensive, and that its CEO, Marc Benioff, has no discipline when it comes to controlling expenses.

And they are growing at an alarming clip: Salesforce’s combined annual operating expenses grew 46 percent year over year to $1.8 billion in 2011, or about 80 percent of sales; up from $1.2 billion, or about 74 percent of sales, in 2010. That’s notably faster that the growth in annual sales, which grew 37 percent from $1.7 billion to $2.3 billion. And let’s not forget that Salesforce finished the year with a $35 million operating loss, versus a $97 million operating profit in 2010.

Salesforce defenders would say that deferred billings are really where you look for indications of growth in a cloud-computing company, and that’s fair: Future billings say more about the uptake of a subscription product like Salesforce.com’s primary cloud-based customer-relations management software than revenue that’s already been booked. And to that point, deferred revenue grew 48 percent, or ever so slightly faster than expenses.

Still, none of that helps explain why Salesforce management felt it was: A) justified in spending $278 million on 14 acres of real estate, and going to the expense of hiring architects and contractors; and B) why it no longer thinks it needs it. The purchase felt like a rash decision then, and backing away from the project feels just as rash now.

Anyhow, the news comes on the heels of Salesforce reporting quarterly results that blew by the expectations of analysts and undid much of the negative buzz that emerged in the quarter before that. Benioff made his regular appearance on CNBC’s “Mad Money” with Jim Cramer to talk about it. Cramer is apparently still liking the taste of the Salesforce Kool-Aid. In his remarks, Benioff discloses that Salesforce just closed a big deal with Hewlett-Packard, along with some other monstrously large transactions with other companies. What neither one of them bothers to talk about is the growth in expenses.

(Image courtesy of I Can Has Cheezburger)

Twitter Grabs Two Googlers for International Advertising Expansion

Kara Swisher — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 07:07:56 +0000

Twitter has hired two high-profile Google execs — Shailesh Rao and Stephen McIntyre — to lead an aggressive international expansion in advertising.

Rao (pictured right) will be joining the online communications network as VP of international revenue, and will be starting in April in San Francisco. In that job, he’ll be in charge of setting up direct sales operations in countries and in regions where Twitter is ready to monetize.

At Google, Rao was most recently head of Google’s display ads business for Asia.

McIntyre (pictured left) has joined Twitter as a director of online sales and operations, which is its self-serve product that will debut to small businesses in March. He will be based in Dublin, Ireland. He was most recently working on Google’s international self-serve ads team in Ireland.

Both will report to Twitter sales head Adam Bain, who heads a staff of 120 employees in the U.S., the U.K., Japan and Ireland.

The pair were not the only Google hires of late at Twitter. The company recently hired U.K. YouTube sales head Bruce Daisley to run its entire sales team there.

msnNOW Launches -- Apparently, Not Your Granddaddy's MSN (Video)

Kara Swisher — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 05:01:45 +0000

Earlier today, I had a trendy San Francisco tea with MSN GM Bob Visse, who came to town to talk about a new site that the Microsoft portal is debuting tonight called msnNOW.

Simply put, it is a way to get them high-twitch youngsters to pay some mind to old, musty portals.

The site, which is offered on multiple platforms from smartphones to tablets to Facebook, tracks the news trends from a variety of real-time sources, and then its editors churn them out for users.

Hey, lookee over here, kids: Drinking diet soda could kill you! And a Philly bakery is charging $55,000 for a cupcake!

You get the idea — but it’s actually a lot of fun and an interesting take, as you can see from the screenshot below of the msnNOW page:

And here’s a video interview I did with Visse about msnNOW:

[ See post to watch video ]

And here’s a video that MSN did about the new service:

Facebook (Eye)PO: Early Investor Reid Hoffman on Mission Vs. Payday

Kara Swisher — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 22:55:47 +0000

With the seemingly endless mishegas at Yahoo these days, I have taken my eye off the Facebook IPO ball. (Eye)PO, get it!?!

But I am back until the next stumble in HooVille, with this interesting and short (and, I know, badly shot) video of Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor and VC and, now, author — is there anything he can’t do? — Reid Hoffman.

It’s from a talk he gave this week at a Fortune magazine event in San Francisco with his co-author Ben Casnocha about their new book, “The Start-up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career.”

In the Q&A, Fortune editor Andy Serwer asked Hoffman about the pending Facebook initial public offering and he gave a typically sharp answer.

While Hoffman does not reveal any juicy deets about the social networking giant, it’s an interesting take on the importance of focusing on “mission” over the expected payday from the slot machine of Wall Street.

Enjoy:

[ See post to watch video ]

Security Start-Up Lookout Invades San Francisco's Financial District

Ina Fried — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 14:00:16 +0000

The folks at Lookout Mobile Security love the view from their new offices at One Front Street in San Francisco’s Financial District.

Who wouldn’t? Peer out of one window and you can see the Bay Bridge. Walk to the other end of the office and you can see the Golden Gate.

But the former hipsters have found one thing that has taken some getting used to: The lawyers and banker types who are the company’s new neighbors. And the feeling is decidedly mutual.

With their skull-emblazoned T-shirts and scruffy looks, Lookout’s security team attracted some strange glances in the days after the company moved in in January.

“People thought we were part of the Occupy movement,” youthful CEO John Hering said in an interview during a housewarming party the company held at the new digs on Friday.

All one would have to do is step inside Lookout’s offices, though, to see that they are closer to the 1 percent. Whether it is the high-tech coffee machine and kegerator with four beers on tap, or the wide array of cereals and Pop-Tarts, it is clear Lookout has everything a start-up could want.

The company has about 100 workers, and the new spot has room for twice that number. It has also made some modifications to make the space more like the hip south-of-Market-Street digs it has abandoned.

Lookout asked for permission to remove the false ceiling to show off the exposed piping, and installed racks for employees to park their bikes. The layout itself reflects a minimalist sensibility, packing restaurant-booth-style meeting areas but no offices — not even for CEO Hering.

Though clearly a shift for the building, One Front Street’s management sees Lookout as its new model tenant, frequently bringing other potential occupants by to show just how hip the space can be.

Here’s a shot of Lookout’s kegerator with cider and beer on tap:

The bike rack:

And, ironically, here are the genuine Occupy protesters I ran into at a downtown mall, shortly after leaving Lookout’s housewarming event:

Health Help: Former Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz Talks About New CareZone Start-Up (Video)

Kara Swisher — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 05:01:08 +0000

I certainly was not expecting the kind of start-up that former Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz — he of the fantastic ponytail — showed off to me at AllThingsD.com Global HQ earlier this week.

No enterprise. No servers. No software.

Instead, a very intriguing new social networking site called CareZone, aimed at helping people managing chronic health care issues, whether it be elderly parents, sick children or others.

The private site, subscription-based and without advertising, feels like Facebook for dealing with illness, creating an online community among family members, as well as others involved in the care.

Among the features: Profiles, journals, contacts, medication information and a lockbox for key files such as advance directives, to-dos and notes.

Having just endured my own health care issue, I can tell you all the things to take care of become pretty complex and confusing, and are mostly done via email, paper and phone calls.

Schwartz said the idea came from his own difficult experience with his child, who has a chronic illness, as well as a recent health crisis his father had.

He is bootstrapping the seven-person start-up, based in San Francisco, which he founded with Apple and Microsoft vet Walter Smith, who is CareZone’s CTO.

The cost is $48 a year, or a monthly fee of $5, for a each patient.

Here’s the video interview I did with Schwartz on CareZone:

[ See post to watch video ]

Gree's New San Francisco Office to Accommodate Hiring Spree

Tricia Duryee — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 18:36:28 +0000

Gree, the Tokyo-based company that bought OpenFeint for $100 million earlier this year and is trying to build a global mobile social network, has aggressive hiring plans in San Francisco. The company said it plans to move into a new 41,000-square-foot office this spring, which will enable it to double its headcount to about 300 employees. The game development studio will focus on developing free-to-play games aimed at the international market.

TasteMakerX Raises $1.8M for Mobile Social App Platform

Kara Swisher — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 11:00:32 +0000

TastemakerX, a San Francisco start-up that is developing a social mobile platform focused on “targeted taste graphs,” said it had raised $1.8 million in funding from a variety of venture firms, including Guggenheim Partners, Baseline Ventures, True Ventures and Tekton Ventures, as well as angel investors. The company said it will release its TastemakerX Music mobile app as a private beta in early March.

Klout Acquires Local App Blockboard

Liz Gannes — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 18:00:05 +0000

Social media influence scorer Klout has made its first acquisition: A local app maker called Blockboard.

The deal indicates new directions for Klout, which to date had not been particularly focused on mobile or local.

Blockboard made a neighborhood discussion board iPhone app that had only been available in its hometown of San Francisco. Its team of four had previously been at companies like Delicious and Craigslist. When I covered the company, I noted that it has more of a Twitter approach to a local social network, where competitor Nextdoor requires real identities, a la Facebook.

Klout said that Blockboard’s app would continue to be available, and that its team would work to improve Klout’s local and mobile efforts.

Klout received a rich valuation in its most recent funding round, which closed last November but was only announced in January. Blockboard, meanwhile, had raised $1 million in 2010 from Joshua Schachter, Mitch Kapor, Founder Collective and others.

The New York Times Bits Blog Gets a Billboard

Liz Gannes — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 20:03:44 +0000

Competition in the technoblogoverse just got a little fiercer! The New York Times Bits technology blog now has its very own billboard on Highway 101.

Specifically, the billboard is on 101 southbound in South San Francisco, just north of SFO. It heralds, “Bits: Everything you need to know on the business of technology.”

A spokeswoman for the Times said she didn’t know when the billboard went up, but said it was part of a broader promotion effort after the relaunch of Bits late last year.

Other Web companies who’ve recently bought billboards on Highway 101 in the San Francisco Bay Area include Zynga, Groupon, Box.net and even the young travel search site Hipmunk.

Campaigns on 101 (warning: Locals frown at people who call it “the 101”!) cost an average of $10,000 to $20,000 per month, with some prominent spots costing more than $30,000 per month, said John Laramie, CEO of ADstruc, a DSP for outdoor advertising.

It should be noted that AllThingsD competes with Bits, obvi.

Also, please excuse the cellphone photo through my dirty windshield; I drove to L.A. this weekend and should really take the car in for a wash.

Boss Talk: Zynga Chief Talks IPO, Lessons Learned

Shayndi Raice — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 21:02:00 +0000

Zynga Inc. Chief Executive Mark Pincus ended 2011 as the face of an overhyped Web initial public offering. Now he wants to show the hype was justified.

Early last year, his San Francisco company, which makes social games such as “FarmVille” that are played on Facebook, was on track for one of the hottest initial public offerings of 2011. But when Zynga finally went public last month, its stock price dropped 5% on the first day of trading and has since consistently traded below its $10 offering price.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

eBay Is the Most Recent Bay Area Transplant to Seek Access to Seattle's Talent Pool

Tricia Duryee — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 14:00:23 +0000

EBay has opened up an office in the suburbs of Seattle, where it has aggressive plans to double the number the employees it has there, to 150.

The e-commerce giant (a term typically reserved for Amazon in these woods) is one of the larger examples companies from the Bay Area that are setting up shop here and looking to soak up some of the Northwest’s rich engineering talent.

Other companies with satellite offices in the Seattle area include Google, Facebook, Zynga and Salesforce.

“I’m surprised I ended up at eBay, but the story is compelling,” said Ken Moss, who was hired in November to be eBay’s VP of managed marketplaces technology; Moss is GM of the Redmond office.

A long-time Microsoft employee whose claim to fame includes inventing the Pivot table in Excel, Moss more recently co-founded CrowdEye, a start-up focused on search technology and later on stock market prediction.

He said eBay’s dedication to the region is one of the biggest selling points for recruitment.

Most of the 75 employees that currently work there were hired over the past few months, and a small team has been here for seven years. Among the newbies I met were a number of Microsoft veterans who had been there for 12 to 15 years.

Moss says he will report directly to eBay’s CTO Mark Carges, which is “a signal to the whole company that diversified development is for real.”

“We are first-class citizens,” Moss said, referring to sometimes strained relationship between remote workers and a company’s headquarters.

Eric Brill, VP of eBay’s research labs, is also based in the Redmond office, and has been working part-time there since joining the company in 2009.

Moss said eBay will be looking to hire a range of technologists, from college graduates to senior leaders, including developers, testers, researchers, data miners and other positions.

While I was at the office on Tuesday, the mountains were peeking out from the clouds and were easy to spot from the floor-to-ceiling windows on the fourth floor. It was easy enough for everyone to have a window seat in the open-floor plan.

Although the employees just moved in on Monday, a sign outside the building already announced eBay’s presence. Inside, workers were busy putting the final touches on the space to make it feel like eBay. Primary colors of red, blue, yellow and green highlighted the office walls; with a bit of Seattle flair, conference rooms were named after Northwest tribes such as Puyallup and Quinault (and other names that might be difficult for San Jose-based employees to pronounce).

But missing were some of the perks that some recruits expect these day — no shuttles to and from work or fancy cafeterias, for instance.

In fact, eBay has a long way to go to compare with what Google has done here. Since entering the market seven years ago, Google has hired more than 900 employees, spread across two locations, a spokesperson confirmed.

One office is in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood; the other is on the Eastside.

The two offices are geographically divided by Lake Washington, which can be crossed by one of two floating bridges — or by boat, if you are crafty enough. The traffic bottlenecks make for a horrendously notorious commute, so having two locations that straddle both sides is a huge perk — like having offices in both San Francisco and San Jose.

Because of Google’s size here, many of its perks are similar to its Mountain View headquarters, including free meals prepared by chefs, frozen-yogurt bars and other, mostly food-based, luxuries.

In eBay’s case, the new digs are located deep on the Eastside, a couple of miles past Microsoft in Redmond, and roughly 15 miles from Jeff Bezos’s empire in downtown Seattle. Recently, Amazon relocated its headquarters to a brand-new campus in South Lake Union, a neighborhood being revitalized by former Microsoft executive Paul Allen.

Other outside companies that have also established sizable tech centers here include Facebook and Zynga. A couple others have gained offices through acquisitions. Electronic Arts, for instance, now has a large office here, after acquiring PopCap; EMC now has big expansion plans here, after purchasing Isilon.

And Geekwire, a Seattle-based technology blog, is good at keeping an ongoing tally, including recent moves into the area by Jawbone and SweetLabs, a San Diego-based start-up, based by Intel Capital and Google Ventures.

Two years ago, Facebook opened an office in the heart of downtown Seattle. It plans to move soon to a 27,000-square-foot space that will have room for about 135 employees. The 70 or so engineers in the office today have worked on projects such as video calling, the Facebook iPad app and other big issues, such as security.

Last April, social game maker Zynga opened an office in Seattle’s historic Pioneer Square neighborhood, hoping to absorb some of the game talent here, spawned from Xbox and Nintendo, and cloud-computing knowledge from Amazon. It has 50 employees today, but declined to say how many it planned to hire in the near future.

As with most of these companies, eBay believes it can find a diversity of talent here that can’t always be easy to hire in the Bay Area.

As a Seattle native, and having covered tech here for the past 12 years, including an eight-year stint at the Seattle Times, I might not be the most unbiased on the subject. But I’ve seen first-hand the breadth of talent here, from Microsoft, Amazon, Expedia, T-Mobile and many others, including a strong start-up pool.

Despite that, the local tech community often suffers from an inferiority complex when it compares itself with the Bay Area, which is much larger. Still, it seems that Silicon Valley companies are finding a number of excuses to travel north to drink from the area’s plentiful tech waters.

Uber CEO Responds to New Year’s Eve Complaints, Plans More Surge Pricing

Lauren Goode — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 04:31:56 +0000

Uber, the San Francisco-based start-up behind a smartphone app that allows users to request car service, had some users uber-angry today over the fares they paid for rides on New Year’s Eve.

Complaints arose on Twitter about the high price of Uber car rides due to so-called surge prices that were put into effect across multiple cities. One user, a San Francisco-based entrepreneur named Brendan Mulligan, described in a blog post how a two-minute, half-mile Uber ride cost him $75. He also offered some tips for improving the app.

Here’s a sampling of complaints from irate Uber customers on Twitter:

Got charged $150 for 2.4 mile ride from @Uber last night.

January 1, 2012 6:08 pm via webReply RetweetFavorite

@peternudo

Peter Nudo

While I’m glad I’m home safely, the $107 charge for my @Uber to drive 1.5 miles last night seems insanely excessive. :(

January 1, 2012 10:46 am via Tweetbot for iPhone ReplyRetweetFavorite

@Aubs

Aubrey Sabala

A total of 97 complaints have been logged since Saturday night about surge pricing, Uber says. That does not include the 15 users the company believes may not have gotten the surge-pricing notifications through their apps when requesting cars. The company declined to say exactly how many customers requested cars via Uber on Saturday night, but founder and CEO Travis Kalanick says the total number of rides was in the five figures. Overall, he says, the evening was a success despite the complaints.

The company is reversing charges for some unhappy customers on a “case by case basis,” Kalanick says.

Uber, which launched in 2010, currently dispatches car services in seven cities, including San Francisco, New York, Washington, D.C. and Paris.

Uber doesn’t dispatch its own cars, but acts as a marketplace through which users can connect with drivers. Kalanick says the surge pricing is to ensure there are drivers available for Uber customers, since those drivers could theoretically make money elsewhere during holidays and other high-demand days.

Since Uber doesn’t dispatch taxi cabs, rates are generally higher than regular cab rides to begin with. Users get a direct-dial option for calling the driver as he or she approaches them, and the cars that arrive are usually high-end town cars. Uber rides also include a base fare of between $7 and $8 depending on the city, and the tip is automatically factored into the final price per ride.

The company has been known to put surge pricing into effect on nights when it anticipates demand to outpace the supply of car services available. The company did this on New Year’s Eve last year, and also on Halloween. When prices are about to surge, Uber sends a mass email out to its users, puts up a blog post detailing the pricing changes, and, barring technical issues, users should also get notifications through the app during times that surge pricing is in effect.

Dynamic pricing — especially when it comes to the travel industry — is not a new concept. Kalanick says Uber faces a unique challenge when it comes to changing expectations that come with decades of fixed pricing in car transportation.

“If you look at a club that charges a $20 cover on a normal night and then charges $100 on New Year’s Eve — that’s just what happens,” he told me. “But with Uber, we understand there are some people who feel the pain of that transition and we take some responsibility for making it as smooth a transition as possible.”

He said the company will still put variable pricing into effect during holidays in the future, and is currently considering whether to do the same during weekend nights.