But Sittig is now back at the mother ship, having rejoined in January with the title “product architect,” as Kim-Mai Cutler at Inside Facebook reported Friday.

This comes at a time when Facebook has more than 2,000 employees, plans to move to a corporate campus within the next year and says an IPO is likely in 2012. It’s a lot different from when Sittig first joined in 2005.

Sittig had been away from the company only six months before accepting an offer to return. He told NetworkEffect that he felt the outside world lacked the “scale and ambition” of Facebook. Plus, he was lured by some of Facebook’s recent hires: Sam Lessin and Justin Shaffer, brought in through the acquisitions of their companies Drop.io and Hot Potato, respectively (both of which occurred while Sittig was away).

Here’s Sittig’s explanation:

I left Facebook last June because I’d been there for five years and wanted to see what else I could apply myself to. I didn’t expect at the time that I’d head back.

I spent my time off advising companies and looking for new ideas. But for each idea I wanted to build myself, I kept realizing that Facebook was the only place with the scale and ambition where I could build my ideas successfully.

So that, combined with the steady influx of talented people like Sam Lessin and Justin Shaffer, convinced me to say yes when I was approached with an offer to rejoin.

Prior to Facebook, Sittig worked at Napster, after it bought the Mac client Macster that he had helped develop. He studied philosophy at UC Berkeley. Sittig has made angel investments in companies such as Hearsay, which makes corporate social media management tools.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Netflix’s dramatic growth in user base and market cap have had a lot to do with the company anticipating market changes and making audacious bets, but it has been relatively plodding and hesitant about getting social.

Netflix explained in the shareholder letter (PDF) accompanying its quarterly earnings report that its Facebook integration will accompany an effort to split household accounts into multiple personal accounts.

In part because of the company’s history as a DVD mailing service, a Netflix account is affiliated with a particular address. That’s also the way traditional television providers measure their market: In terms of households.

But online video, Netflix notes, “is more naturally individual, since it is watched on personal screens like phones, tablets, and laptops, as well as on shared large screen televisions.”

In addition to helping identify discrete people within a household, Facebook integration would presumably allow Netflix to help users do things like share their personal viewing history in their newsfeed and recommend videos to friends. Understanding social networks could improve Netflix’s famously honed recommendation algorithm. It might also be an opportunity for Netflix to create social viewing experiences.

Currently, Netflix lacks much in the way of social features; it had yanked a previous effort to offer social sharing last year after saying that relatively few subscribers used it.

However, the company has recently staffed up for a renewed social effort.

Mike Hart, previously Netflix’s director of engineering for APIs, is now director of engineering for social. Hart told Fast Company in November that Netflix sees social as an international user acquisition strategy and an opportunity to avoid disruption by a competitor that is more social.

Netflix also appears to view personal accounts as an opportunity to charge more money. The company said in the shareholder letter that later this year it will start offering new account options that include multiple simultaneous streams. (So, for instance, you could stream TV episodes in the bedroom on your iPad while your spouse watches a movie in the living room through the Roku.) The streaming-only plan Netflix recently launched costs $7.99 (which some industry watchers say is too cheap) and allows just one stream at a time.

Netflix noted in the letter that its new grand internal vision is to target the number of active mobile phones in an area, rather than the number of households (though that might be a bit ambitious in places where it’s common for people to have more than one phone!).

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Tonight, an hour-long special on the topic will air at 9 pm ET on Bloomberg TV (and will be streamed live on Bloomberg’s Web site), featuring Yuri Milner, CEO of Digital Sky Technologies and one of the key investors who helped put together that deal. Unfortunately, while Bloomberg’s press release listed Milner as a “guest,” it neglected to mention that he won’t be an actual live guest (as initially reported here). Instead, clips from a Milner interview last year will be interspersed with current commentary from writers David Kirkpatrick, Paul Kedrosky and Bill Cohan, and marketing professor Scott Galloway.

Goldman has reportedly given its clients limited information and only until the end of the week to pony up a minimum of $2 million to invest in Facebook. One Goldman customer told Reuters he felt like he was being expected to invest on “blind faith.”

BoomTown’s Kara Swisher yesterday described the Goldman-Facebook deal as “sneaky,” “elite” and “opaque.”

Here’s the promo for the Bloomberg program:

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

The catch here is that the capability, which will be offered on Apple’s iPad as well as tablets running Google’s Android, will only work inside subscribers’ homes.

So you still can’t watch a live episode of “Two and a Half Men” on your iPad in the airport, but you will be able to watch it in your kitchen, while your better half watches “Frontline” in the living room. Or whatever.

It’s worth noting that Verizon announced its own version of this feature (with the same limitations), for its FiOS TV subscribers last summer, but has yet to roll it out.

Comcast will be demoing the feature later today at a Citigroup investors conference, but won’t be providing details about timing, or if there will be any programming restrictions on what you can watch on your tablet.

It’s possible there could be some holdouts, but the cable giant ought to be able to offer just about everything, since there’s no issue with carriage rights or ad loads, etc.–tablet watchers will be watching whatever’s already on live TV.

The killer feature, of course, would be the ability to do this on-the-go, but we’re not there yet, and it may take awhile to get there. Mobile rights for video–especially live video–are a whole different ball game.

Meantime, though, Comcast is offering a half-step–as previously promised, it will let traveling iPad users start to watch a selection of on-demand content, via its Xfinity TV app.

Comcast says it will offer some 3,000 TV shows and movies that iPad users can watch on-demand, over any network–AT&T’s 3G, or Time Warner Cable’s broadband, or whatever. Once that feature is up and running, which should be shortly, we’ll be able to compare that catalog to the ones that Netflix and Hulu Plus are offering for $7.99 a month.

And that’s the big picture here: Comcast and the other big cable providers, which continue to insist that cord-cutting isn’t real, want to make sure that it doesn’t become a reality, by offering their subscribers access to as much stuff, in as many places, as they can. It’s going to take years to find out whether that works or not, but best to start experimenting ASAP.

Beyond the directory-style LinkedIn, that could mean facilitating professional profiles on social sites, pushing job postings through networks, introducing contacts, soliciting referrals and sharing resources.

Part of the reason this idea has been so resonant with Web entrepreneurs–and investors too–is the trouble they’re having with hiring qualified people to work at their own companies.

(Unlike in other parts of the world right now, unemployment rates are not as much of a problem among techies.)

Assetmap, a pre-launch San Francisco-based start-up, for example, wants to help companies and nonprofits understand what assets they may have at their disposal through their networks.

These connections already exist, but they’re often unexploited, according to Assetmap co-founder Nathaniel Whittemore, who let me in on a bit of what he’s doing.

Whittemore told NetworkEffect the failings of sites like LinkedIn include “forcing a distinction between personal and professional that is becoming less and less obvious and failing to recognize that the one-to-one friend-based social graph isn’t the only graph that has value for business.”

Whittemore and co-founder Danny Moldovan hail from the world of social entrepreneurship. Former Northwestern classmates, they had both been at the fast-growing activism platform Change.org.

They have teamed with Jayson Vantuyl, co-founder of Engine Yard, the Ruby on Rails hosting service. At the moment, they are funded by friends and family while looking for outside capital, and plan to launch this spring.

There are many early companies in this space with fancier pedigrees.

Top Prospect, a social recruiting site that rewards users with $10,000 or more for helping friends find jobs, was funded by Andreessen Horowitz, Spark Capital, Ron Conway, David Goldberg, Dustin Moskovitz, Rick Thompson, Chamath Palihapitiya and other angels.

Also based in San Francisco, Top Prospect was founded by Rotem Perelmuter, who formerly sold an online radio service to MTV Networks during the dot-com boom (and more recently ran a hedge fund). The site is currently in open beta.

Delicious founder Joshua Schachter’s Tasty Labs, which has gotten money from Union Square Ventures, hasn’t said much about what it is doing, but is also working on something similar to the idea of an asset map.

Elsewhere, BranchOut, which bills itself as offering “your professional profile on Facebook,” raised $6 million from Accel Partners, Floodgate, Norwest Venture Partners and many angels.

And Hashable, a network for introductions, raised $4 million, also from Union Square Ventures.

And Namesake, from Ad.ly and Newroo co-founders Brian Norgard and Daniel Gould, offers a pretty site for “opportunity routing,” with features such as a real-time stream and chat.

It goes on–other young start-ups in the space include Sumazi, Pursuit, Identified and Gild. (You knew this would happen: Gild turns the social recruiting concept into an online game.)

It wouldn’t really make sense to combine social and professional networks by starting from scratch, so these sites are built on top of existing networks like LinkedIn and particularly Facebook. If you want to try them out, be prepared to cough up those Facebook Connect credentials a whole bunch of times.

(Cute explainer graphics above from Assetmap, Top Prospect and Identified, respectively.)

Apple has approved developer mSpot‘s music app, which does what Apple hasn’t done yet but may well do at some point: It takes your music from your PC, moves it to a server and lets you pull down tunes to your iPhone whenever you want.

Or at least in the immediate future. Given that mSpot has yet to reach any licensing deals with music labels or publishers, I’m not sure how long the service can keep going. But we can get back to that in a minute.

First the details: MSpot lets you synch up to two gigabytes of music from your hard drive to its servers, and then stream it via another PC’s browser, or download it to your phone via 3G.

Because mSpot compresses your files, those two gigs will translate into a lot more music on your phone (at a much lower fidelity) than they do on your computer. But if you want more storage you can get another 40 gigs for $3.99 a month.

This is roughly the same idea that both Apple and Google have discussed with the music industry for much of 2010, but neither of those two heavyweights has the licenses it needs to launch. How can mSpot pull it off?

Good question. The answer is that mSpot CEO Daren Tsui argues that he doesn’t need a license, for a variety of reasons.

I’ll spare you the technical details, but common sense supports his position–why shouldn’t you be able to move your music from one machine to another? And the law, via the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, may be on his side as well.

But so far the big labels have argued that the big guys do need licenses to offer cloud services (short version–they say that moving music to the cloud and back constitutes a new use). And Tsui has in fact been trying to get an agreement with the labels for much of this year.

He’s already had this service running on Google’s Android platform since late June without a legal problem, so that can give him some confidence that the labels won’t take him to court. But that’s not a guarantee.

For starters, the labels are already suing Michael Robertson’s MP3tunes, which uses a similar concept. And it’s not uncommon for the labels to negotiate with music start-ups, then move on to lawsuits if things hit an impasse.

And if Tsui does strike a deal, that means he needs to start paying the labels. How’s he going to do that and keep offering the service for free? By offering new paid options and cutting the music guys in on a piece of that revenue, he says.

So we’ll see! Note that Spotify, which has a lot of buzz, 700,000 paying users and some deep-pocketed investors, has yet to get its music service licensed in the U.S.

And mSpot is a much smaller fry. The Android app has a million downloads so far and some 500,000 registered users. And the 6-year-old company raised $2.3 million in 2005, and that’s it. But Tsui says mSpot is profitable on revenue from other media services it sells.

Here’s hoping he gets to spend that money building cool stuff, not hiring lawyers.

But I’ll be very surprised if it is music related–like a new music subscription service, or even one that lets you stream music you already own to multiple devices.

(UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal says that Apple has finally signed the Beatles to an iTunes deal to be announced “soon”. Which makes tomorrow’s announcement a much easier guess.)

It’s easy to understand why Apple might head in that direction: Generally, because it seems inevitable and because Google has been talking about doing something similar. And specifically, because Apple has that shiny new North Carolina data center to play with.

But the music industry sources I’ve talked to so far today don’t know of any new deals between Apple and the big music labels. So that would rule out a new subscription service, which would definitely require a new rights deal.

And that also makes it very unlikely that Apple does the next best thing: Letting users upload their iTunes catalog to the cloud, and letting them access it anywhere they want.

Does Apple have to get a special deal with the labels in order to do that? Not necessarily. Some start-ups are offering similar services, without a deal (though one of them, MP3tunes, is getting sued).

And you can make a common-sense argument that simply storing someone’s data, then letting them access it again, shouldn’t require a deal. But the labels argue that it does.

So unless Apple wants to make them go ballistic–and freak out the movie and TV studios, the folks that Steve Jobs really wants to court–it’s hard to see Apple announcing a service without signed paperwork.

Okay. So what are they announcing? Again–got me. Hoping to find out before tomorrow, but if not I’ll be watching at 10 am Eastern like the rest of you.

Here are the three data points that the search giant showed off during its earnings call this afternoon. All of them “begin with the letter B,” as product SVP Google Jonathan Rosenberg noted, and all of them come with caveats:

• $2.5 billion: Non-text display ad revenue run rate. That number includes ads from its DoubleClick unit as well as YouTube.
• 2 billion: YouTube monetized views per week.
• $1 billion: Mobile annualized revenue run rate.

All of those seem big–and they are! But they’re also deliberately fuzzy enough that it’s hard to tell exactly what they mean.

For instance: As Henry Blodget notes, those display-ad dollars are gross revenue, which means that Google only keeps a portion of them. And while that two billion YouTube views number is up from a billion a year ago, it’s proportionally the same: A year ago YouTube said it was monetizing a billion views a week while serving up a billion views a day; now the video site says two billion views a week and two billion a day.

Meanwhile Google officials, who routinely announce that YouTube is close to profitability, refused to tell analysts whether YouTube is actually profitable.

No matter! The point of b-as-in-big numbers was to impress Wall Street with Google’s ability to create new revenue streams beyond its core search ads. And the data, along with the company’s impressive Q3 performance, seems to have worked: Shares are up nine percent in after-hours trading.

——————

EARLIER

There’s the beat Wall Street was looking for. Google reports earnings of $7.67 a share and net revenues of $5.48 billion. The consensus was for $6.67 and $5.25 billion. GAAP EPS was $6.72.

Google (GOOG) has been plowing money into capital expenditures and people–it now has 23,300 employees, up from 21,800  months ago, a 6.8 percent increase–but it has been able to keep operating income quite healthy, anyway. Adjusted operating income was $2.93 billion, well above the $2.77 billion consensus.

GOOG is up considerably, now seven percent, in after-hours trading. Robot cars for all!

You can listen to (and watch) Google’s 4:30 pm ET earnings call by clicking on this YouTube link. I’ll add updates from the earnings call occasionally starting here:

As in recent quarters, CEO Eric Schmidt is sitting this one out.

CFO Patrick Pichette starts off. Aha! Teases that “we may have” Schmidt available for the first 30 minutes of Q&A before he gets on a GooglePlane.

300 of those new 1,500 employees came from acquisitions.

Discussion of “long-term” growth–”the next 5 to 10 years.” “Simply put, we’re on this growth agenda at full throttle…investing heavily in people and in product.”

There’s a “war for talent” in our industry, which is “out of synch” with the broader economy. Currently exploring how to attract and retain people. Winners and losers determined by this battle.

Re: Product investment, which you’ll hear about from product SVP Jonathan Rosenberg. He’s going to tell you about some numbers, but don’t expect to hear an update on these–they’re merely “proof points” about Google’s success.

Here’s Rosenberg, teasing new previously unreleased numbers.

Here they come. Starting with search and Google Instant:

Impact has been “very minimal” on revenue and “quite expensive” from a resource perspective.

But! “We launched it because we could.”

As search gets better, ads have to keep pace. Great momentum with AdWords.

New ad formats appear on more than 10 percent of query. Some formats show clickthrough rates as much as 10 percent on some, up 30 percent in others.

Big numbers, “which all begin with the letter B.”

$2.5 billion: Non-text display ad revenue run rate. That includes DoubleClick, YouTube.

2 billion: YouTube monetized views per week

$1 billion: Mobile annualized run rate

Mobile search queries up 5 times in the last few years.

Back to Pichette, to tamp down numbers.

In some cases, there is overlap with numbers. For instance, with AdMob, numbers counted in both display and mobile.

Time for Q&A, Schmidt is now on the line.

Schmidt says query growth is pushing click growth, and so are new ad formats. Ads are more compelling, etc.

Pichette notes that AdX numbers are included in the $2.5B display total.

Q: Please talk about YouTube. Of the two billion monetized views, what percent is that of total views? And are you profitable yet?

Pichette: Re: Profitability, “We have not made any comments on it.” [Except of course when they do, over and over.]

Rosenberg: Note that we’ve said we do two billion views per day–that will give you context.

Sorry, missed a Q.

Schmidt says growth of Android is “well past what I had ever hoped for.”

90,000 apps on Android “and growing very fast.”

Question about “proprietary benefits” of Android.

Schmidt: Android is the “largest single platform play” in mobile today.

We’re growing it by giving software away. How does that help us? Well, for starters, people who use Android search two times more than anyone else. Obvious benefit for us there, and search is more lucrative for us there as well, and that makes Android “hugely profitable.”

And we can add other value-added services to Android, but that’s not the focus right now.

Questions on cost: Cost per employee has declined. Can you continue that? And on mobile, will you stay with the “indirect monetization” Android strategy?

Pichette: Wouldn’t read anything into the cost-per-employee numbers. But we’re continuing to be frugal and generous.

Ad boss Nikesh Arora: We’re excited about the revenue model we have. We have no reason to change the model we have with Android.

Schmidt: And display will become a very big component of mobile.

Q: On display, can you break out YouTube and AdX numbers? And what do you think of competitive Android marketplaces?

Pichette: No breakout of numbers. [Duh.]

Schmidt: Goal of the app store is to make money for developers. Not a revenue goal for Google. More stores are a “win for everybody.”

Question about CPC on mobile devices. Rosenberg: They’re lower than desktop, because there aren’t many practical ways to consumate transaction. But on the iPad, activity looks a little bit more like it does on a PC, because there’s more room to enter credit card numbers, etc.

Q: Please discuss cannibalization between smartphone and PC–are iPad and tablet searches incremental or cannibalization? And can you give us color on international 26 percent growth?

Rosenberg: We don’t see cannibalization. We see mobile as complimentary to desktop. Different use patterns–mobile search is on weekends, during lunchtime, etc.

Arora: Generally, trend positive across the board. U.K. a bit weaker, but some of that is FX. Southern Europe way better than Northern. Asian markets robust.

Q: Competitors make $300 profit per handset sold over the lifetime of a device.You’re approaching this with a different model, but do you think that’s an upper limit on that number?

Schmidt: Our model is that handset makers and manufacturers make a lot of money from the phone, and we make money from advertising. So can’t compare the two, and premature for us to guess what we can do. “It should be highly lucrative” and a “very very strong revenue stream compared to a PC.”

Q: On social search. How do you “capture the signal” without access to the data feeds, as you have with Twitter.

Schmidt: “There are some ways we can do that” now, and we’re working on new ways.

Sorry, stepped out. Back now.

Q: TAC rate seems to be lowest since IPO. Sustainable? Growth has been driven by volume, not price. Sustainable, and/or will pricing increase going forward?

Pichette: MySpace deal is now over. That saved us a bunch of money. And mix of our partners will effect our TAC. That’s about it.

Rosenberg: Can’t answer volume/price question without “being forward-looking.” [Heh]

Q: Microsoft/Facebook deal was exclusive. But do you think you’ll see exclusive data deals? And what about Groupon, etc.? Can you compete there?

A: Value of exclusive data is “swamped” by “vastness” of the Web. So no concern there.

Schmidt: Always a concern that large chunks of data are not accessible to search engines….long pause… up to the content owner to decide how much to expose. We believe the world is better off if more information is searchable. “We fundamentally believe that.”

Rosenberg: Daily deals are very exciting. “A lot of small companies doing a fabulous job there.” We participate a little bit via sitelinks. But no question “that’s a very exciting and hot space.”

Q: When will Google Instant be on the BlackBerry or iPhone? What’s Android activation rate? And why not let advertisers bid directly on mobile inventory?

Rosenberg: Instant availability on other platforms “relatively soon”–probably this fall.

Not updating Android activation numbers.

Q: Given that non-core search is more material, do you think you’ll keep allocating resources with your 70-10-10 model? And when do you anticipate mobile overtaking desktop?

Schmidt: On mobile vs. display: Even if we knew I don’t think we’d talk about it.

On core vs. emergent: We talk about this all the time. Depends. Android is very small, and growing fast, so they get all the resources they need. We end up still at 70-10-10, but that’s not really a formula for us.

Pichette: What really matters the most to us is as Eric says, “When you see a hockey stick, pour gasoline on that fire.”

Q: Big-picture data question: What does Google think about leveraging user data to better target ads (see Facebook, Yahoo, etc.)–particularly with search data and display?

Schmidt: “We have a pretty strong opinion that we’re not going to do very much of it.” We’re intensely serious about privacy.

So “we’re not going to do the kinds of things that we could do with it… without your explicit permission. And in many cases we probably won’t do it forever.”

A question on display, which I’ve missed but will have to return to.

Pichette wraps things up. Today’s data points “are not about giving you information” for coming quarters, but to give you confidence that we’re building long-term businesses.

Call ends.

Mark Mahaney’s cheat sheet will help you decipher the numbers:

Netflix (NFLX) wouldn’t release details about the pact, and hasn’t put out a press release announcing it, as it had with earlier deals with Time Warner’s (TWX) Warner Bros, GE’s (GE) Universal and News Corp.’s (NWS) 20th Century Fox.

But spokesman Steve Swasey confirmed that Netflix and Sony have reached another “28-day” arrangement, similar to the ones Netflix has reached with the other three studios.

Swasey wouldn’t release other details, but we can guess that the deal follows the pattern established with the precedent Netflix set in its January deal with Warner: Netflix agrees not to rent Sony’s (SNE) movies for the first 28 days after they go on sale. In return, it will pay the studio a reduced fee when it does rent the discs, and will get more movies to offer via its growing Web streaming service.

This seems like a win-win for the both sides: The studios get to wring every last penny out of their DVD business, and Netflix gets to build up the business it really cares about–delivering movies to your home via the Web.

But analyst Rich Greenfield, who wrote about the Sony deal in a note published Tuesday (registration required), says these deals have only been good for Netflix: Its costs have gone down, and its subscriber base has increased, but the studios have continued to see their DVD sales slip. “Clear victory for Netflix,” he writes.

His logic:

“* The studios have essentially played right into Netflix Founder and CEO Reed Hasting’s plan to reduce DVD costs to fund his company’s aggressive digital media rights acquisition plan.
* Netflix is rapidly bringing down its physical [cost of goods sold] by reaching delayed release window deals with studios and using fresher digital content to shift consumer behavior to streaming, reducing the number of DVDs utilized per customer per month (lowering its mailing costs).
* We suspect the Netflix window needed to be substantially longer than 28 days to justify the price reduction the studios have given Netflix – meaning a six month window might have impacted Netflix subscriber trends, whereas 28 days simply has not. Unfortunately studios were more focused on bolstering sell-through, which is largely complete within the first month of a DVD’s release, rather than damaging the long-term prospects of Netflix.
* Netflix continues to aggressively purchase digital movie rights having recently acquired rights to Relativity Media content and EPIX content, with Starz content increasingly important for Netflix to renew (at far higher costs) when their current agreement ends in 12 months.

Why exclude Windows users? That’s not clear. Perhaps it has something to do with the Live HTTP Streaming standard Apple will use to deliver the broadcast. Perhaps the company is conducting a limited test of widescale HTML 5 video streaming. Another theory: Apple (AAPL) wants to test out the server capacity at its new North Carolina data center.

Either way, it’s hard to view this as a purposeful snub to Windows users. This isn’t exactly an event that they’d likely be clamoring to see–though I’m sure we’ll hear shouts of outrage. Presumably most folks that would drop everything on a workday morning to watch video of an Apple press event are already using Apple hardware.

It looks like this promotional video for Flipboard, the high-profile and very slick new iPad app launched yesterday, was shot in its Palo Alto, Calif., HQ.

Because the service is a bit of a conceptual leap in digesting social networking, this video might help explain the excitement among tech bloggers and others about its debut.

Flipboard has dubbed itself a “social magazine,” attempting to make the social networking universe and the real-time Web more accessible, consumable and, perhaps most importantly, visually arresting via a rich app on the popular Apple (AAPL) device.

As I wrote yesterday:

“Essentially, Flipboard pulls information from sites such as Twitter and Facebook data streams and then reassembles it in an easy-to-navigate, personalized format in a mobile tablet touchscreen environment. In this social magazine, there are pull quotes, photos, videos, status updates and even the first paragraphs of content linked out to. There is also the ability to comment and share, as if one were on Twitter or Facebook.”

The innovative Flipboard emerged from stealth mode last night. It was co-founded by longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur Mike McCue and former Apple iPhone engineer Evan Doll in January and has grabbed a large $10.5 million funding from top tech power players.

Here’s the video, which–except for the unusually sleepy demoer for the free app–pretty much explains it all, as well as the interview I did with McCue about the company:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100721/heres-flipboards-video-so-you-can-understand-what-the-heck-it-does/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100720/meet-flipboard-mike-mccue-talks-about-stealth-social-magazine-start-up-that-just-nabbed-10-5-million/ http://allthingsd.com/20100720/meet-flipboard-mike-mccue-talks-about-stealth-social-magazine-start-up-that-just-nabbed-10-5-million/#comments Wed, 21 Jul 2010 03:56:38 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=30973

Today, BoomTown gassed up the MINI and headed down to see one of the more innovative new start-ups I have encountered of late.

That would be a new social magazine concept called Flipboard, which is attempting to make the social networking universe more accessible, consumable and, perhaps most importantly, visually arresting via a rich app on the Apple (AAPL) iPad.

Essentially, Flipboard pulls information from sites such as Twitter and Facebook data streams and then reassembles it in an easy-to-navigate, personalized format in a mobile tablet touchscreen environment.

In this social magazine, there are pull quotes, photos, videos, status updates and even the first paragraphs of content linked out to. There is also the ability to comment and share, as if one were on Twitter or Facebook.

Co-founded by longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur Mike McCue and former Apple iPhone engineer Evan Doll in January, Flipboard decloaked itself tonight, announcing both a $10.5 million funding from top Silicon Valley power players and also the acquisition of Ellerdale, a relevancy search engine for the real-time Web.

The funders include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Index Ventures and a spate of high-profile investors, such as Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moscovitz, angel investor Ron Conway, actor Ashton Kutcher and the investment company of former News Corp. (NWS) exec Peter Chernin.

Flipboard currently has about 20 employees at its downtown Palo Alto, Calif., HQ.

“Flipboard is a social magazine filled with all the the things your friends are sharing,” said McCue, who co-founded Tellme, the speech recognition service acquired by Microsoft (MSFT). “We’re trying to bring the timeless principles of print to social media.”

(You can read The Mossberg Solution’s Katherine Boehret’s review of Flipboard here.)

McCue left Tellme a year ago and was casting about for a new start-up when he settled on creating a new way to digest and present the noisy flood of information being spewed 24/7 by social networks.

Kleiner Perkins partner John Doerr, who backed Tellme, said he was immediately intrigued by the idea.

“It is at once intimate and alive and beautiful,” he said in an interview with me earlier today. “This is the next wave of social media and redefines what magazine is…and I think it will be one of the defining apps on the iPad.”

Right now, the Flipboard app is free and the business plan is advertising and some possible subscription scenarios.

Ellen Pao, also of Kleiner and a member of Flipboard’s board, said she hoped publishers, whose Web sites are reconfigured from tweets and other social links by the app, will welcome the new distribution format.

“Traditional publishing is facing a crossroads and this imagines it from the ground up,” she said. “I hope it paves the way.”

We’ll see about old media reactions, which has been decidedly mixed to aggregation apps like this.

The New York Times (NYT), for example, attacked rather than embraced another terrific news reading iPad app called Pulse, accusing it of misusing its content.

It was a stupid move against inexorable concepts such as Pulse and Flipboard, which are beginning to make sense of the changing digital information landscape.

Here’s the video interview with McCue, followed by the official press releases about Flipboard:

FLIPBOARD LAUNCHES WORLD’S FIRST SOCIAL MAGAZINE

INSPIRED BY THE BEAUTY OF PRINT AND DESIGNED FOR iPAD, FLIPBOARD TRANSFORMS THE SOCIAL MEDIA EXPERIENCE

Raises $10.5MM From Legendary Investors KPCB and Index Ventures and Media Innovators Including Jack Dorsey, Dustin Moskovitz, Ashton Kutcher and The Chernin Group

Acquires Ellerdale, Names Arthur van Hoff CTO

FORTUNE BRAINSTORM TECH–ASPEN, COLORADO – JULY 21, 2010–Founded by Mike McCue, former CEO of Tellme, and Evan Doll, former senior iPhone engineer at Apple®, Flipboard™ began a quest today to transform how people discover and share content by combining the beauty and ease of print with the power of social media. Flipboard also announced the immediate availability of it’s Flipboard App for iPad™, a social magazine that brings to life the stories, photos, news and updates being shared across Twitter and Facebook. Flipboard’s first public demo will happen at the FORTUNE Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, Colorado at 4:40pm MDT tomorrow.

“With over 1 billion posts shared every day, social networks are quickly becoming the primary way people discover and share content on the Web. The result is a huge influx of incoming messages and links people must sort through across multiple web sites just to stay up to date,” said Mike McCue, Flipboard’s CEO. “We believe the timeless principles of print can make social media less noisy, more visually compelling and ultimately more mainstream.”

Designed from the ground up for iPad, Flipboard creates a magazine out of a user’s social content. Simply launch Flipboard and “flip” open the cover to get started. From the Table of Contents readers can view their sections and personalize the magazine.

The Facebook and Twitter sections let readers quickly flip through the latest stories, photos and updates from friends and trusted sources. Because Flipboard renders links and images right in the magazine, readers no longer have to scan long lists of posts and click on link after link – instead they instantly see all the stories, comments and images, making it faster and more entertaining to discover, view and share social content.

Flipboard also lets readers easily create sections around topics or people they care about. Choose from Flipboard’s suggested sections on topics such as sports, news, tech and style, with content hand-curated from popular and interesting Twitter feeds. Or, create an entirely new section by searching by topic, person or Twitter lists to make Flipboard even more personal.

The Flipboard App is available for free at www.flipboard.com or from the App Store on iPad or at www.itunes.com/appstore/.

ACQUISITION OF ELLERDALE
As part of it’s quest to fundamentally improve the social media experience, Flipboard also announced the acquisition of Ellerdale (see press release: “Flipboard Acquires Ellerdale”). Ellerdale’s advanced semantic analysis of large, real-time data streams will enable Flipboard to extract, categorize and feature highly relevant and hot trending content from across a variety of social networks. Flipboard will also retain the world-class engineering team at Ellerdale, including Arthur van Hoff, a leading Silicon Valley technologist who played a major role in the creation of Java. Arthur will become Flipboard’s Chief Technology Officer and spearhead the company’s technology strategy.

INVESTORS
Flipboard is backed by legendary investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Index Ventures. Other key investors also include Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, The Chernin Group founded by Peter Chernin, Ron Conway, Alfred Lin, Peter Currie, Quincy Smith, and Ashton Kutcher. The company has raised $10.5 million in a Series A venture capital round.

FLIPBOARD ACQUIRES ELLERDALE TO BOOST CONTENT RELEVANCY IN NEW SOCIAL MAGAZINE

Arthur van Hoff Joins Flipboard as Chief Technology Officer

PALO ALTO, Calif.–July 21, 2010–Flipboard today announced it has acquired Ellerdale, the real-time Web intelligence company. The acquisition concurs with the launch of Flipboard, a social magazine designed for Apple’s iPad, which provides a faster and more engaging way to discover, view, and share what matters on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

Ellerdale, founded in 2008, has developed a Web Intelligence technology that applies semantic analysis to large, real-time data streams to extract relevant and valuable information. To date, Ellerdale has indexed over 6 billion messages from around the social Web and currently processes nearly 70 million messages per day. This technology and data set will be become the relevancy engine for the next release of Flipboard, enhancing the reader’s experience by always surfacing the most important and personally interesting information from Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.

Designed from the ground up for the iPad, Flipboard creates a magazine out of a user’s social content. With Ellerdale’s technology, future versions of Flipboard will be able to extract, categorize and feature highly relevant and hot trending content from across a variety of social networks.

“Ellerdale has developed an impressive solution for understanding the ever-increasing stream of social data coming at us every day,” said Mike McCue, CEO and co-founder of Flipboard. “This technology will add deep relevancy for our readers, enabling us to present social content in a way that is not only more beautiful, but also more meaningful. It’s a great combination.”

Arthur van Hoff, co-founder of Ellerdale, is joining Flipboard as the company’s new chief technology officer. Van Hoff, who played a major role in the development of the Java programming language at Sun Microsystems, and was founder of six high-tech companies, including Marimba, Strangeberry and Zing, will spearhead Flipboard’s technology strategy.

“Combining the two companies creates a situation in which one plus one equals three, bringing together Flipboard’s innovative front-end with Ellerdale’s powerful real-time relevancy engine on the back-end,” said Arthur van Hoff, co-founder of Ellerdale and Flipboard’s new chief technology officer. “Our technology will play a key role in providing readers with the content that matters most to them.”

Mike McCue and Evan Doll founded Flipboard earlier this year and received $10.5M in funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Index Ventures. The founding team members come from Apple, Netflix, Tellme/Microsoft, Aardvark and Adobe. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100720/meet-flipboard-mike-mccue-talks-about-stealth-social-magazine-start-up-that-just-nabbed-10-5-million/feed/ 7 http://allthingsd.com/20100707/youtube-steps-closer-to-your-tv-with-leanback/ http://allthingsd.com/20100707/youtube-steps-closer-to-your-tv-with-leanback/#comments Wed, 07 Jul 2010 23:00:35 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=21377 Love YouTube but hate the burden of pressing a key to play a video? Then this is for you: YouTube’s “Leanback” feature is now available.

Leanback is really supposed to help Google accomplish two connected tasks: Keep users on the site for longer stretches, and convince them that the site is something they’d like to look at on their TV.

So it’s really two products in one: The first is a stream of videos that are personalized for each user and that play automatically–tantalizingly, Google (GOOG) says the service can link up with Facebook, so you can see the same clips your online pals are watching. The second product is a user interface that requires minimum input from a keyboard and that works well on big screens.

The big screen part is important given the upcoming Google TV push, where Google would like to insert itself into your living room set. I assume that moving YouTube videos to TVs can be a tricky thing to pull off given licensing restrictions–see Hulu, Hulu Plus, Boxee, Popbox, et al.–but a YouTube rep tells me the only thing that won’t work on Leanback are captioned videos. So we’ll see.

I haven’t played with it myself, so for now I’m relying on YouTube’s description of the service. Here’s YouTube product guy Hunter Walk describing it at Google’s I/O event in May:

And here’s YouTube’s more polished description, released today:

For now, at least, Leanback exists in a separate corner of the site, at youtube.com/leanback. But Google plans on integrating it into its Google TV product when that rolls out this fall. And if it works anywhere near as well as advertised, it could be very interesting.

Meanwhile, it’s product rollout day at YouTube: Earlier this afternoon it showed off a new mobile site, designed, apparently, to replace the YouTube app on Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone and iPads. It’s particularly good for bicycle kicks, it seems:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100707/youtube-steps-closer-to-your-tv-with-leanback/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100707/youtube-steps-closer-to-your-tv-with-leanback-2/ http://allthingsd.com/20100707/youtube-steps-closer-to-your-tv-with-leanback-2/#comments Wed, 07 Jul 2010 23:00:35 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=21377 Love YouTube but hate the burden of pressing a key to play a video? Then this is for you: YouTube’s “Leanback” feature is now available.

Leanback is really supposed to help Google accomplish two connected tasks: Keep users on the site for longer stretches, and convince them that the site is something they’d like to look at on their TV.

So it’s really two products in one: The first is a stream of videos that are personalized for each user and that play automatically–tantalizingly, Google (GOOG) says the service can link up with Facebook, so you can see the same clips your online pals are watching. The second product is a user interface that requires minimum input from a keyboard and that works well on big screens.

The big screen part is important given the upcoming Google TV push, where Google would like to insert itself into your living room set. I assume that moving YouTube videos to TVs can be a tricky thing to pull off given licensing restrictions–see Hulu, Hulu Plus, Boxee, Popbox, et al.–but a YouTube rep tells me the only thing that won’t work on Leanback are captioned videos. So we’ll see.

I haven’t played with it myself, so for now I’m relying on YouTube’s description of the service. Here’s YouTube product guy Hunter Walk describing it at Google’s I/O event in May:

And here’s YouTube’s more polished description, released today:

For now, at least, Leanback exists in a separate corner of the site, at youtube.com/leanback. But Google plans on integrating it into its Google TV product when that rolls out this fall. And if it works anywhere near as well as advertised, it could be very interesting.

Meanwhile, it’s product rollout day at YouTube: Earlier this afternoon it showed off a new mobile site, designed, apparently, to replace the YouTube app on Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone and iPads. It’s particularly good for bicycle kicks, it seems:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100707/youtube-steps-closer-to-your-tv-with-leanback-2/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20100628/mspot-launches-cloud-based-music-ahead-of-google-apple/ http://allthingsd.com/20100628/mspot-launches-cloud-based-music-ahead-of-google-apple/#comments Mon, 28 Jun 2010 13:00:05 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=21091 What if you could move your music collection to the cloud so that you could listen to it anywhere, on whatever device you wanted, whenever you wanted?

You may be able to get that via Google (GOOG) and Apple (AAPL) one day, and both companies have talked about the idea with the music industry. But in the meantime, mobile entertainment start-up mSpot says it can offer the same thing.

The basic idea: You can take any music you own, as long as it’s in an unencrypted file format, and move it to mSpot’s servers, then play it back on different devices–your PC, your phone–on demand. The service is free for the first two gigabytes of music you upload, and mSpot charges for more storage: An additional 10 gigabytes (the equivalent of 8,000 songs) costs $2.99, and 100 gigs (80,000 songs) goes for $13.99.

One big caveat: The service, which Google showed off at its developer conference last month, supports only Android handsets. So this won’t get your music to your iPhone, at least for now.

Another big caveat: MSpot doesn’t have licenses with any of the big music labels. CEO Daren Tsui says his company doesn’t need agreements with the labels to let users stream music they own from the cloud, but Big Music disagrees. So unless they can reach an agreement, Tsui and mSpot could find themselves fending off a lawsuit like the one EMI filed against Michael Robertson’s MP3Tunes, which offers a similar service.

However, mSpot’s biggest challenge probably won’t come from the labels, but from competitors. Tsui is basically offering the “iTunes in the cloud” scenario that people would like to see from Apple, but without Apple’s cooperation. If Apple gets around to offering its own version, that would make it awfully difficult.

And Google seems even more interested in launching its own version of the same service, but without mSpot’s help. At the same Google I/O conference where mSpot launched in private beta, Google announced it had acquired Simplify Media, which makes software designed to stream music to mobile phones–news that took the mSpot people by surprise.

But those are future-tense moves, and mSpot is open to the public this morning. Will that be enough of a head start?

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100628/mspot-launches-cloud-based-music-ahead-of-google-apple/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100611/exclusive-twitters-next-money-maker-promoted-trends/ http://allthingsd.com/20100611/exclusive-twitters-next-money-maker-promoted-trends/#comments Fri, 11 Jun 2010 18:33:46 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=20429
UPDATE: The new ad unit is now up and running (via Jason Calacanis).
————
Twitter is beginning to roll out its ad platform, which allows advertisers to insert messages into users’ streams. But the microblogging service already has an idea for a new product: Selling some of the real estate dedicated to its “trending” feature, where it highlights topics Twitter users are chattering about.

Twitter is describing the product to advertisers as “Promoted Trends,” an extension of the “Promoted Tweets” program announced in April. The messaging service has been talking about it in vague terms and has yet to test it.

But the basic gist seems to be this: Advertisers will be able to insert their own terms into the list of trends Twitter displays on users’ homepages (see image below; click to enlarge) and on its login page. Clicking on a term would call up a Twitter search results page, which would feature the associated advertiser’s “promoted tweet” at the top of the results.

Advertisers who have heard Twitter talk about the product say the service imagines charging “tens of thousands of dollars” a day for exclusive placement rights.

If Twitter moves forward with the plan, it’s going to need to iron out some details: For instance, will every one of Twitter’s 190 million users see the same promoted trend? Or will the service figure out how to filter them?

Just as important: Can Twitter ensure that its trending topics aren’t cluttered with spam? The service has been trying to tackle this by tweaking the algorithm it uses to generate trending topics, which is why there’s a lot less Justin Bieber in its results than there used to be. But it can still stand some work–can anyone tell me what “CALA BOCA GALAVO” is, and why I should care?

In any case, it’s early. Here’s Twitter’s position, conveyed via PR boss Sean Garrett:

As we have always said, we plan to test different advertising and promotional models in these early stages of our monetization efforts for both user and brand value. As part of this effort, we will likely test trends clearly marked as “promoted” for an undefined period of time. Assuming that we do, during this test, there will only be one visible at a time.

All of this makes plenty of sense. Twitter spent a long time trying not to become a media company, but it is certainly headed that way now: Twitter attracts users’ attention with content and then rents out access to those users’ eyeballs. So if you’re going with that model, no reason not to go all the way.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100611/exclusive-twitters-next-money-maker-promoted-trends/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100601/thumbplays-mobile-music-service-hits-the-iphone/ http://allthingsd.com/20100601/thumbplays-mobile-music-service-hits-the-iphone/#comments Tue, 01 Jun 2010 14:49:35 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=20114 Another paid option for mobile music: Thumbplay, which offers an all-you-can-eat subscription service that already works on Research in Motion’s (RIMM) BlackBerry and Google’s (GOOG) Android handsets, has rolled out a version that works with Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone.

Same terms and conditions apply: You can stream all the music you want to your phone for $9.95 and buy individual songs for downloading. That $9.95 price tag seems to be the new going rate for mobile subscription services: Rhapsody recently priced its offering at that level, and MOG will do the same once its mobile option rolls out.

One relatively important distinction between Thumbplay’s BlackBerry option and the one it offers for Android and iPhone: The former offers an offline/caching mode, which means you can stream a certain number of tunes, store them on your handset, and listen to them when you’re on an plane, in the subway, etc.

Thumbplay doesn’t explain why that option isn’t available for Android and iPhone, but promises it’s “coming soon.”

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