AllThingsD » SXSW

Pre-$200 Million Valuation: Flipboard's Mike McCue at SXSW (The Full Onstage Video)

Kara Swisher — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 18:30:38 +0000

In March, BoomTown travelled hipster-Texas-style for the South by Southwest festival in Austin.

I was there to check out the geek-packed scene, but also to interview Flipboard’s Mike McCue in an onstage interview there.

The Silicon Valley start-up, which makes an innovative and highly designed social media reading app for the Apple iPad (iPhone and Google’s Android mobile operating system to come), recently raised $50 million in new funding, giving it a $200 million valuation.

This interview with McCue took place before that, but it’s still a wide-ranging map to where the much-touted Flipboard is headed.

Here’s the video:

[ See post to watch video ]

Gogii Hires Ex-Myspace Exec to Make Group Texting Pay Off

Tricia Duryee — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 16:00:59 +0000

Gogii, a company that makes a popular group text messaging app called textPlus, has hired Chandra Hill to head up its monetization plans as it weighs paid vs. ad-supported features.

Text messaging applications, which offer the ability to send messages to a group of people via a single phone number, were in the spotlight at SXSW. Companies such as Gogii, KIK, Beluga, GroupMe and Fast Society were the talk of the town since they provided easy ways for large groups of people to socialize and get in touch quickly.

Following the event, GroupMe provided its first hint at what its business model would be when it opened up its mobile group chat to brands, which would be highlighted in a “Featured Groups” section.

Now, Gogii is beefing up its monetizing efforts.

Hill, who will have the title of VP of monetization and publishing, was most recently VP of mobile monetization at Myspace.

She will oversee all company revenue, which includes in-app purchases, advertising and a new publishing unit, said Gogii CEO Scott Lahman. “I can’t think of anyone better who can hit the ground running. She’s been doing this for years at Fox and at Myspace. This is almost the exact same role.”

Gogii’s textPlus application has 7.7 million monthly active users and recently set a record for sending 35 million messages in one day.

While Hill is just joining the Los Angeles-based startup, the company has been monetizing with advertising from the beginning. ”We hit seven-figure revenue-quarters last year, and that’s continued to grow. We are well past the testing stage. Advertising campaigns were up 300 percent in the first quarter compared to the same period last year.”

Mostly, the app relies on splash ads–which are like a homepage takeover–which the user sees immediately after opening the application. Lahman said users on average open the application 10 to 15 times a day, and that the ads have a click-through rate in the high single digits. There are also banner ads from within the applications, which are seen by its nearly eight million monthly active users.

Lahman said they made the decision to monetize with advertising because it allowed them to grow the business much faster than if they charged for it. A paid version of the application, which has no advertising, allows the user to pick the area code for the phone number they use. He said six to 10 percent of its users choose to upgrade. The app costs $4.99 and is available on iPhone and Android.

“The advertisers love it. We are the text client for a lot of our customers–that’s why they use it so much to send so many messages.”

Gogii uses a mix of its own direct sales force in addition to farming out some inventory to mobile ad networks, like Google’s AdMob, Jumptap and Greystripe. Returning advertisers include Disney, Fox, Target, Ford, Paramount, CBS, Unilever, JCPenney, MTV, Coca-Cola and Zynga.

The new publishing business, which Hill will oversee, will experiment with a sort of white-label service, which will allow a brand to completely take over the application for a specific brand or event.

Lahman said in March, 25 percent of the company’s revenues were coming from paid features inside the application. It’s his goal to hit 50 percent by the end of the year. “That will come against a growing advertising business–that’s not cannibalizing it,” he said.

Ten Entrepreneurship Rules for Building Massive Companies

Reid Hoffman — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 23:17:47 +0000

Last week I gave a talk at South by Southwest, and in it I shared my top 10 rules for entrepreneurship. They are borne from my experiences starting companies and partnering with great entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley as an angel and a venture capitalist. I hope they prove to be useful to you. If you are an entrepreneur and have other rules you live by and want to share with others, please post your thoughts in the comments field.

Rule #1: Look for disruptive change.
If you’re about to start on a new venture, ask yourself: What is becoming possible or necessary that wasn’t possible before? Is a new product or service able to take over an existing market or create a new market? When I co-founded LinkedIn the tech industry was in a deep depression. I looked at all the opportunities created by the Internet and had the idea that eventually everyone would need a professional profile online. The disruption was that people were able to directly reach the best candidates rather than hoping for responses from a listing in the paper or an ad on a Web site.

Rule #2: Aim big.
Regardless of whether a start-up is targeting a big idea or a small one, it will still require the same amount of blood, sweat and tears—so aim big! What is “big?” It is a new product or service that creates or dominates a significant market.

Rule #3: Build a network to magnify your company.
People tend to think that behind every great start-up is a single entrepreneur with a whiz-bang idea. The reality is great companies are built by a number of people with talent who are surrounded by amplifying networks. The most successful entrepreneurs bring in advisors, investors, collaborators and early customer relationships.

Rule #4: Plan for good luck and bad luck.
You should always assume you will have both good luck and bad luck with your new company. Good luck is not as simple as “it worked out.” Rather, this is when you discover a great opportunity and can quickly shift to go after it. Bad luck is what happens when your first idea doesn’t work. It doesn’t mean failure; it means you need to pursue plan B.

Rule #5: Maintain flexible persistence.
Very often entrepreneurs are given conflicting advice: “Be persistent! Stay committed to your vision!” or “Pivot on key data! Know when to change!” The challenge is to follow them both, but know which advice is most appropriate for which situation. You must know how to maintain flexible persistence.

Rule #6: Launch early enough that you are embarrassed by your first product release.
With my first startup, Socialnet.com, it took us nine months to launch the first product. That was a disastrous mistake. We wanted to have all the detailed functionality right away, including social controls to people could decide to connect or not with the people in their networks. We wanted everyone to “Ooh” and “Aaah” about how terrific the product was. We wasted a bunch of time and it put us months behind on more important problems that needed to be solved, such as how to get our product in the hands of millions of people. From that I learned, if you are not embarrassed by your first release, you’ve launched too late!

Rule #7: Aspire, but don’t drink your own Kool-Aid.
Target excellence, but be very careful about blind trust or belief in your theories. It is important to launch as early as you can in order to learn how your customers use your product or service. It is equally important to identify metrics that tell you if your aspirations and vision are on target. You should also get feedback from your network in order to iterate or pivot on the target, the product and/or the service. In other words, maintain your aspiration but always look for good perspective on how you are doing. It is very easy for creative innovators to get caught up in their own story rather than learning where they should be headed.

Rule #8: Having a great product is important but having great product distribution is more important.
I meet a lot of entrepreneurs who think the best product is the most important thing and that the best product should always win. What a lot of people fail to realize is that without great distribution, the product dies. How will you get your product in the hands of millions or hundreds of millions of people?

Rule #9: Pay close attention to culture and hires from the very beginning.
Your first hires set your culture, so make them good ones. These first people hire the next people and so on. The old wisdom was that you needed people with a decade more of experience in your start-up. The things a smart person learned a decade ago won’t help you now – you’re doing things that have never been done before, and the world and the competitive landscape are changing at hyper speeds. What you really need are people who can learn fast.

Rule #10: Rules of entrepreneurship are guidelines, not laws of nature.
Do not pay too much attention to rules set by other people. Entrepreneurs are inventors. They are successful when they make something work for the very first time. Sometimes in order to make something work, you will drive over the guardrail of one of these rules. Entrepreneurs sometimes just make new rules.

Reid Hoffman is Co-Founder and Chairman at LinkedIn and a partner at Greylock Partners. He is a member of the founding team at PayPal and has been an angel investor and adviser to dozens of organizations including Facebook, Zynga, Flickr and Last.FM. He currently serves on the boards of LinkedIn, Zynga, Shopkick, Kiva.org and Mozilla. His complete profile can be found at www.linkedin.com/in/reidhoffman.

What Connect.me–the Sign-up Page That Got 50K Users in a Day–Actually Does (Video)

Liz Gannes — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 17:42:27 +0000

A certain type of social Web user is virtually rabid for the new hotness. Connect.me’s page had all the right hooks: A cute and simple domain name and design, the enticing header “Reserve your username and get early access,” and rewards for getting connections from your social network to sign up as well.

And it worked. 50,000 users signed up in a day earlier this month, each of them giving the site credentials for one or more of their Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn accounts.

The viral frenzy earned a quick backlash of criticism, most notably from the Sophos Naked Security blog, which warned of the potential for identity theft and cybercrime from an outfit that didn’t even have the decency to tell would-be users what it planned to do.

But in fact, the San Francisco-based Connect.me team is an earnest group of online data portability and personal identity nerds. The two founders met while collaborating on XDI, “a data structure for context graphs.” Co-founder Drummond Reed was previously the director of three separate non-profit open identity foundations and consortiums.

But Reed and his fellow user-centric identity advocates have mostly been at the fringes of the social Web, with corporate outfits like Facebook Connect overpowering efforts to spread more distributed and independent alternatives.

Reed said in an interview with NetworkEffect that he feels it’s time to turn all this work into a commercial project that gets something done. We ducked into a relatively quiet room out of the South By Southwest hubbub to shoot a video about his company.

[ See post to watch video ]

So what is Connect.me? Reed describes it as a personal network, rather than a social network, where users control the information they want to share with a vendor. So instead of a brand creating a page on Facebook and getting people to “like” it within that corporate-owned context, the brand and user could have a peer-to-peer relationship. And brands may pay a premium to access these voluntary users. Connect.me has raised $300,000 in angel funding and plans to launch in May.

The problem–ironic considering the viral success of Connect.me’s sign-up page in comparison to other companies’ social networks–will be how to grow a sort of anti-social alternative in the face of massively social competition. If you lose the social part of an online network, you lose the carrot that gets people to participate in the first place: their friends.

Further, how can Connect.me communicate its concepts to users in a way that resonates and seems accessible and useful? Reed said he’s hopeful that media attention to users’ loss of online privacy–like the Wall Street Journal’s “What They Know” series about tracking technology–will bring the masses in his direction.

But for the moment, Reed is using geeky descriptors like “a trust framework around the way we exchange personal data.” In fact, the company’s platform is to be branded the Respect Trust Framework.

On the other hand, the one thing we can say for certain about Connect.me is it has an aptitude for getting the word out.

Is There a Second Act for Kevin Rose?

Liz Gannes — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 22:52:42 +0000

Digg founder Kevin Rose is starting a new company. Rose had told NetworkEffect at South by Southwest that he was working on a new start-up. Rose told me that it’s been 6.5 years since Digg started, and he is now ready for something new.

TechCrunch reported today that he had resigned and was closing a $1 million round in funding for the venture.

But, so far, no one’s saying what it is.

Let’s hope it turns out better than Digg has.

Because although Rose has had luck as a Web celebrity, calling yourself a “Digg founder” ain’t what it used to be, especially since his stint last year as interim CEO presided over a hugely unpopular launch that the company has been extracting itself from ever since.

Rose said he currently serves on Digg’s board. Sources said he didn’t actually “resign” from Digg, though, but rather pulled back after handing over the CEO role to outside hire Matt Williams. Last year, Rose called serving as interim Digg CEO a “nightmare” that “I would never wish on my worst enemy.”

While Rose would clearly rather be in the spotlight for his own success, he has been able to string together an impressive portfolio for an angel investor, with companies like Ngmoco, Twitter and Zynga. In addition to continuing to appear on Diggnation, Rose also recently launched a video show and newsletter called Foundation.

Update: Williams commented,

When I took over as CEO of Digg 6 months ago, Kevin’s role changed to that of Founder and Board member and nothing has changed since then. Thanks for all the positive comments we’ve been seeing, we’re excited about our direction as well.

Survey Says: The iPhone Still Dominant Platform for Mobile Social Apps

Liz Gannes — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 18:35:04 +0000

Social juggernaut Facebook has shifted its mobile development to HTML5 from apps so that it can have maximum impact across fragmented mobile platforms for itself and for developers who build on the Facebook platform. (Facebook CTO Bret Taylor announced the strategy in January.)

But upstart apps don’t seem to be following Facebook’s lead. For the moment, developers prefer native apps with their homepage shortcuts and notifications over the futuristic HTML5. Many of the new mobile social apps I’ve seen launch on iPhone alone. Some, especially those who want deeper integration with a phone’s mobile operating system, go to Android. And as they get further along, support for multiple mobile platforms and tablet devices is a natural step.

I rounded up the mobile social apps that pitched me on their launches at SXSW this year. This isn’t narrowed down to those debuting for the first time ever, but as best I could, I culled it down to those with significant new functionality for the show.

Of my sample of 24 mobile social apps, 10 were iPhone-only. These 10 tend to be the newest of the bunch–like Ditto, Yobongo and Foodstream–who have dedicated their small teams’ development resources to getting it right on a single platform.

One of them, Instagram, comes from a small company that had made its first trial app, Burbn, in HTML5, but then shifted development entirely over to the iPhone, where it has had much more success with distribution.

Another six have presences on both iPhone and Android, including SCVNGR’s new LevelUp deals program, Fast Society and Tonchidot Domo. And six support BlackBerry.

But there was only one mobile Web app and one Facebook app. And there was only one company, the mobile sync provider Rseven, that launched apps on multiple mobile platforms and excluded iOS. Rseven has explained that this is because the iPhone doesn’t have an API for call history and messages, which are essential elements of its “life-caching” tool.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Inside the Recommendation Engines of StumbleUpon, YouTube, Pandora and Hotpot

Liz Gannes — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 11:00:58 +0000

When recommendations are done well, they lead to more engaged and satisfied users. But that’s hard to quantify or make obvious. Pandora, for instance, can go for a seemingly long time without major feature changes, when behind the scenes “there’s an army of people making changes to playlist infrastructure,” according to Pandora CTO Tom Conrad.

In some ways, discovery is the opposite of search. About 50 percent of searches on YouTube are “broad,” according to YouTube Director of Product Management Hunter Walk, by which he said he means users are seeking an experience rather than a particular video. So YouTube’s intent with recommendations is less about one right answer and more about a cluster of answers, or eventually, a narrative.

One way to measure the success of recommendations is to ask users to rate them directly, which is a major component of Pandora’s and StumbleUpon’s systems. Pandora, for example, has eight billion thumbs-up and thumbs-down actions in its index. StumbleUpon has an 80 to 85 percent thumbs-up percentage, said StumbleUpon CEO Garrett Camp. Users look at a page they have stumbled upon for an average of about eight seconds, and a median of 20 seconds, he said.

The social graph is only a small part of good recommendation engines, Conrad, Walk and Camp agreed on a SXSW panel about content discovery. Rather, a recommendation engine is a mix of art and science hinged on refining small changes over time and understanding how users respond to them.

I moderated the panel, so I’m sure I missed writing down all sorts of interesting tidbits, but I wanted to share some of the insights and stories.

In addition to the plaid-shirted trio of Conrad, Walk and Camp–speaking on music, video and Web page recommendations, respectively–we added Google Hotpot product manager Lior Ron to the panel after bumping into him in the hallway. (Hotpot is Google’s newly launched personalized local recommendations site.)

Walk warned to be careful with analytics, saying that positive stats about recommendation performance don’t necessarily correlate with a good user experience. As YouTube has improved its recommendation algorithm, it has negatively impacted the number of video playbacks it gets.

That’s because better recommendations reduce the number of times people start watching and then skip a video, Walk said. Yet the company has almost tripled session length in the last few years as it has reduced these skips, and recommendations have helped improve the overall experience.

One of the most significant improvements YouTube has made to its recommendation technology, Walk said, was in messaging and presentation. When the company started explicitly stating why it was recommending a video–for example, you should watch this Britney Spears clip because you just finished Justin Bieber’s latest post–satisfaction improved.

As Walk explained, “If it was wrong they didn’t blame us; They blamed themselves.”

Ron said there’s plenty of room for companies to play with recommendations, and that he’d welcome more Netflix Prize-like approaches that might introduce significant improvements. “We’re not living in a world with millions of recommendations and we need to turn it down,” he explained.

But often discovery is about that one right thing at the one right time. Conrad said Pandora’s goal for recommendations is to take the smallest possible signal and provide the best possible personalized results. The Internet radio company A/B tests everything it rolls out to thoroughly measure the impact on user experience.

Pandora has experimented with social–for instance implementing Facebook’s instant personalization feature–but it’s just one signal of many. Conrad said the company quickly realized that it shouldn’t have assumed friends had the same taste in music.

(I can vouch for this awkwardness, having loaded up Pandora while logged into Facebook and gotten a recommendation for a curated Celine Dion channel.)

Camp said that for his purposes, the social graph is too much of a closed loop, taking away from the serendipitous recommendations that StumbleUpon works hard to deliver. The company reserves five percent of its stream for entirely new stuff, he said.

StumbleUpon also doesn’t try to hard to figure out what’s on a Web page in its index, because its point of the service is to deliver a variety, rather than a homogenous stream, of content.

YouTube would like to add features that show “what your friends haven’t watched,” said Walk, so users can have the satisfaction of discovering something rather new, rather than the disappointment of learning after sharing a viral video that they’re the last to know about it.

Ron disagreed to some extent, at least for his domain area of restaurants and other local establishments. Knowing where your friends have gone is one of the more important signals, he said, especially knowing where your friends have gone recently.

One more funny anecdote: Pandora users tend to create channels for Christmas music at that time of year. But the company ran into a problem because there was an indie band named “Christmas.” It was worried that users looking for cheery carols would get an unexpected and dissatisfying stream of random indie music.

But before Pandora could introduce a fix, users took care of the problem by thumbing down those selections, effectively filtering out the Pandora spam (accidental or otherwise) of the band named Christmas.

Images grabbed from the panelists’ profiles on their company sites.

Viral Video: "Conan O'Brien Can't Stop" (at SXSW)

Kara Swisher — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 08:43:33 +0000

Conan O’Brien has been all over the South by Southwest festival this week, hawking a new documentary about his time wandering in the late-night talk television wilderness after he left “The Tonight Show” last year.

That included a lively live interview with Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg on Saturday, as well as a series of appearances related to “Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop.”

His hysterical journey, of course, was deftly played out by O’Brien all over the Internet, which was definitely on “Team Coco.”

The documentary, which will be distributed in the U.S. in a multi-platform deal with AT&T, follows O’Brien on his “Legally Prohibited From Being Funny on Television” tour.

Here’s a clip from the film:

Video: GroupMe Dudes Talk Group Messaging Phenom (and Drink Beer at the Same Time)

Kara Swisher — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 22:01:45 +0000

If you had to pick the hotsy-totsy start-up to win the media darling of South by Southwest award for 2011–following in the precious footsteps of Foursquare and Twitter from years past–it would probably have to be GroupMe.

The group messaging/conference call/location/photo sharing service has, as these things tend to, garnered a lot of heat since its debut less than a year ago.

That has, of course, also meant the requisite big venture funding–$11.5 million in total–for the New York-based GroupMe, including from SV Angel, betaworks, First Round Capital, Lerer Ventures, General Catalyst Partners and Khosla Ventures.

And, no surprise, the dead-simple idea now has many start-up rivals, all vying to use combine mobile, texting, social, location, groups and smartphones into some unholy megatrend.

Still, GroupMe has built a slick little offering, which is likely to get scooped up by some bigger entity (or perhaps just copied, which is the sincerest form of flattery in tech).

Until then, its Co-founders Jared Hecht and Steve Martocci are enjoying their day in the sun–quite literally, at their free grilled-cheese-and-beer giveaway at SXSW this weekend in Austin, Texas.

Here is my video interview with their-future-is-so-bright-they-have-to-wear-shades pair:

[ See post to watch video ]

Video: BoomTown Versus Texas Hipsters and Cheddar Cheese Cats at SXSW

Kara Swisher — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 19:18:17 +0000

As it turned out, BoomTown did not succumb to hipster poisoning on my sojourn this past weekend to Austin, Texas and the famous South by Southwest festival.

The annual gathering, which has interactive, music and film elements, started last week and is still going strong–fueled, as far as I can tell, by beer, blogging, empanadas and excessive start-up hype.

Actually, it was a good time had by me, despite assertions from some longtime attendees that SXSW had somehow jumped the shark.

I personally saw no shark-jumping, but there certainly were a lot of free t-shirts and fake tattoos.

Here is a video of a variety of scenes from the weekend, from all over SXSW, from our very own All Things Digital party (I now can retire, since I had a drink named after me) to encountering a giant cheddar cheese sculpture of cats.

Yes, it was that kind of SXSW.

Enjoy:

[ See post to watch video ]

Report From Austin: The Social Fragmentation of SXSW

Liz Gannes — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 22:59:33 +0000

Austin’s annual South By Southwest Interactive conference is bigger and glitzier than ever. Physically and virtually–even though it seems more fragmented this year.

But that’s not to say that it’s not full of lines and crowds as usual at SXSW.

Organizers of event, which started Friday and runs through Tuesday, said they expect a 30 to 40 percent increase in attendance from 2010′s 14,000 attendees.

SXSW has in recent years acquired a reputation as an ideal environment for launching social technology products, because it’s such a concentrated hotbed of socializing by people with smartphones.

But, honestly, it’s such a concentrated hotbed of socializing, these apps seem barely necessary.

Just walk around the streets and you’ll find relevant people and friends. In fact, schedule planning and friend finding are so fragmented across all these different apps, they’re almost superfluous.

On the plus side for attendees (and opportunistic locals), the various check-in and group messaging apps are so eager to get brand recognition that they’re offering free rides to downtown Austin from the airport (Fast Society), free grilled cheese sandwiches (GroupMe), free tickets to see Big Boi (Foursquare) and free beer (everyone).

This could just be me trying to rationalizing a Zen attitude for my own personal aimless wandering, but I think there’s a larger theme about the fragmentation of SXSW as both a business and social event.

Physically, this year there are more conference locations than ever, with panels and speeches across the river and down at a conference center near University of Texas Austin. (Plus the regenerating line around the block at Apple’s pop-up iPad 2 store, which is a sort of satellite event of its own.)

There’s also no one 2011 focal point that everyone’s buzzing about, like last year’s interview with Twitter’s then-CEO Evan Williams. The introductory keynote on Saturday by SCVNGR’s Seth Priebatsch about how a game layer can improve the world was entertaining, but hardly filled the room.

This sort of destabilization has unintended benefits. For instance, this morning a panel on social TV with participants from Twitter, Next New Networks and “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon” attracted an audience far beyond the capacity of its allotted room. Would-be audience members–including experts on the topic from NBC and the New York Times–who had trekked way across town first thing in the morning set up their own ad-hoc panel next door. (Here’s a write-up and the #rebeltv hashtag conversation.)

Embedded below is a gallery of some moments from the first days of SXSW Interactive 2011, including a mobile photobooth for Instagram pictures called Instaprint, Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley playing an actual game of Foursquare and Ditto CEO Jyri Engeström at the rocking steampunk/burlesque launch party co-hosted by his venture firm.

Pro Tip: How To Stop SXSW Twitter Overload In Its Tracks

Peter Kafka — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 15:32:16 +0000

There’s a lot of cool stuff happening in Austin at the South by Southwest conference this week, and All Things Digital will have three (3!) people on the ground to tell you about it. On the other hand, there’s going to be lots of stuff coming out there that isn’t so cool or interesting, and you may find breathless reports of such clogging your Twitter feed. One binary solution: TweetDeck’s filter function, which allows you to block any Tweet with “SXSW” (or any other term you want) from your feed. Not an endorsement! Just an option.

SXSW Gets Its Own Apple Store

Liz Gannes — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 07:00:24 +0000

It’s getting to the point where the streets of San Francisco may be as noticeably empty over the next few days as over Labor Day during Burning Man. Just about everyone in the world of Web technology will soon descend on Austin for SXSW Interactive and our annual allotment of barbeque and margaritas. Many of us were already preparing to make the five-mile trek out of downtown Austin to the nearest Apple Store for the iPad 2 release at 5 p.m. on Friday, just as the conference is beginning.

But the trek won’t be necessary anymore, it seems. Local outlets are reporting that Apple is preparing to open a pop-up shop for the next two weeks at 6th and Congress in downtown Austin. That’s a mere stroll from the SXSW epicenter.

Plans for the store apparently came together in just the last couple days, with an Apple rep scouting the location on Monday and workers sprucing it up and carting in signage on Wednesday. The grand opening is set for Friday.

A swarm of early-adopting iPad 2 buyers is a sure bet; really, the only question is who will be mayor of the pop-up store on Foursquare.

(Here’s Walt Mossberg’s iPad 2 review.)

Meanwhile, AT&T is again boosting Austin coverage for the conference, after failing miserably to withstand the iPhone swarm two years ago and recovering admirably with temporary cell sites in 2010. No word on whether new iPhone and iPad carrier Verizon is doing the same.

As for our plans at AllThingsD, Kara Swisher, Katie Boehret and I will be in Austin this weekend. Kara’s putting Flipboard on the hot seat on Saturday, and I’m doing a panel on personalized recommendations with StumbleUpon, YouTube and Pandora on Sunday.

If y’all happen to take a second to look up from your iPhone apps between checking in, filtering snapshots and mapping parties, perhaps we’ll see you in person.

Streetview capture of the Apple Store pop-up location via Austinist.

Viral Video: "Attack the Block" and BoomTown Debut at SXSW

Kara Swisher — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 08:15:42 +0000

Like many a geek–and after a decade away–I’m headed to South by Southwest later this week.

To get in the mood for the well-known multimedia festival in Austin, here’s one of the films making its debut this coming weekend.

It’s called “Attack the Block,” and is about a teen gang fighting an alien invasion. Plus, it has the best tag line ever: “Inner City Versus Outer Space.”

Which is just about how I am feeling about SXSW!

In any case, despite my lack of hipster cred, I will be there for a party hosted by WordPress with drinks by The Wall Street Journal Digital Network and All Things Digital on Friday, as well as to interview Flipboard Co-founder and CEO Mike McCue on Saturday in an afternoon session with the subtitle: “Game-Changer or Passing Fad?”

NetworkEffect’s Liz Gannes and The Digital Solution’s Katherine Boehret will also be at SXSW, so expect plenty of coverage from Texas.

Until then, enjoy this movie trailer, y’all:

The Next Web Frontier: Finding New Offline Friends

Liz Gannes — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 14:00:37 +0000

Can the Internet help us meet people offline? Not like a dating site that’s cordoned off from the rest of the Web, but in more of a good-conversation-at-a-dinner-party kind of way? That’s a premise that multiple start-ups are currently exploring.

One, called Yobongo, intended to launch tomorrow, offers a mobile app with proximity-based chat rooms (or, to use the hip start-up term of the moment, “group messaging”). Another, called Grubwithus, arranges family-style meals at restaurants.

Yobongo co-founders Caleb Elston and David Kasper, formerly of the Web video start-up Justin.tv, have built their iPhone app with serendipitous conversations in mind.

Only 12 or so people can join any one Yobongo room at the time; users are highly encouraged to share their real names; and there are no topics or room directory.

Each time users open the app, they are placed in a room containing people nearest to their physical location and, if possible, people they have talked to on Yobongo before.

The San Francisco-based company is hoping for quick growth at the geeky petri dish of SXSW. It does have one feature that seems perfectly tuned for the Austin party-hopping crowd–iPhone notifications for when a Yobongo conversation is heating up nearby.

Elston said he thinks the mobile, social, geo-located experience can give chat rooms a makeover the same way apps like Instagram are breathing new life into photo sharing.

“Often the best times are small, impromptu groups of people,” Elston said. “It’s the sitting-around-the-campfire type of experience.”

Meanwhile, Grubwithus is one of leading contenders from the latest Y Combinator start-up accelerator class, according to recommendations from its classmates. The company arranges family-style meals with restaurants and signs up participants to book and pay in advance, usually at a discounted price.

It’s kind of like an ad hoc Meetup with food. Or Groupon where a group of restaurant coupon buyers dines together.

As attendees commit to a certain dinner, their names and pictures show up on a dedicated Grubwithus meal page. Those who sign up early get a small discount for taking a bigger risk on who their dining companions will be.

Grubwithus co-founder Eddy Lu said that in San Francisco and Chicago, where the site is already operating, 75 percent of sign-ups come from individuals rather than couples or groups.

Some Grubwithus meals are posed around a topic or celebrity diner, while others are more random. Lu said like-minded people tend to flock to the same meals based on the price.

Grubwithus, obviously, takes a cut of each dinner fee, and also sees itself as a marketing channel for restaurants. It is testing a feature to help users set up their own dinner party invitations and menus, kind of like OpenTable for groups. Lu said the company intends to start fundraising later this month.

Shocking Bieber Upset: Oil Spill Tops Twitter's 2010 Trends

Liz Gannes — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 08:00:33 +0000

Although World Cup tweeting caused record high volume and infrastructure demands on Twitter, the most-discussed topic on Twitter in 2010 was actually the Gulf oil spill, said the San Francisco-based company tonight. The South Africa-hosted World Cup came in at No. 2.

(Of course, Twitter hasn’t revealed the secret formulas that helped it aggregate, tabulate and rank these topics.)

In the Twitterverse, after the BP oil spill and soccer, the next most popular topic of conversation in 2010 was the movie “Inception,” followed by the Haiti earthquake and the vuvuzela. The iPad, Android, Justin Bieber, Harry Potter and Pulpo Paul round out the top 10. It’s an odd list, indeed.

The person most discussed on Twitter in 2010 was obviously he of the dedicated servers, Mr. Bieber. (It’s somewhat shocking that world events and tech gadgets were able to keep the teen phenom out of the overall top spot.) Beating out her royal highness Lady Gaga, the No. 2 person on Twitter was Brazilian president-elect Dilma Rousseff (pictured).

Here’s the full 2010 list, courtesy of Twitter, followed by 2009′s list for comparison.

2010 Twitter Trends

Overall Top Trends:
1. Gulf Oil Spill
2. FIFA World Cup
3. Inception
4. Haiti Earthquake
5. Vuvuzela
6. Apple iPad
7. Google Android
8. Justin Bieber
9. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
10. Pulpo Paul

News Events:
1. Gulf Oil Spill
2. Haiti Earthquake
3. Pakistan Floods
4. Koreas Conflict
5. Chilean Miners Rescue

People:
1. Justin Bieber
2. Dilma Rousseff
3. Lady Gaga
4. Julian Assange
5. Mel Gibson

Movies:
1. Inception
2. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
3. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
4. Despicable Me
5. Karate Kid

Television:
1. MTV Video Music Awards
2. Pretty Little Liars
3. True Blood
4. Walking Dead
5. Grammy Awards

Technology:
1. Apple iPad
2. Google Android
3. Apple iOS
4. Apple iPhone
5. Call of Duty: Black Ops

World Cup:
1. FIFA World Cup
2. Vuvuzela
3. Pulpo Paul
4. Dunga
5. Diego Maradona

Sports:
1. LeBron James
2. Wimbledon
3. Manchester United
4. Brock Lesnar
5. Celtics

Hash Tags:
1. #rememberwhen
2. #slapyourself
3. #confessiontime (hash tag started by Usher)
4. #thingsimiss
5. #ohjustlikeme

2009 Twitter Trends

News Events:
1. #iranelection
2. Swine Flu
3. Gaza
4. Iran
5. Tehran
6. #swineflu
7. AIG
8. #uksnow
9. Earth Hour
10. #inaug09

People:
1. Michael Jackson
2. Susan Boyle
3. Adam Lambert
4. Kobe (Bryant)
5. Chris Brown
6. Chuck Norris
7. Joe Wilson
8. Tiger Woods
9. Christian Bale
10. A-Rod (Alex Rodriguez)

Movies:
1. Harry Potter
2. New Moon
3. District 9
4. Paranormal Activity
5. Star Trek
6. True Blood
7. Transformers 2
8. Watchmen
9. Slumdog Millionaire
10. G.I. Joe

TV Shows:
1. American Idol
2. Glee
3. Teen Choice Awards
4. SNL (Saturday Night Live)
5. Dollhouse
6. Grey’s Anatomy
7. VMAS (Video Music Awards)
8. #bsg (Battlestar Galatica)
9. BET Awards
10. Lost

Sports (Teams, Events, Leagues):
1. Super Bowl
2. Lakers
3. Wimbledon
4. Cavs (Cleveland Cavaliers)
5. Superbowl
6. Chelsea
7. NFL
8. UFC 100
9. Yankees
10. Liverpool

Technology:
1. Google Wave
2. Snow Leopard
3. Tweetdeck
4. Windows 7
5. CES
6. Palm Pre
7. Google Latitude
8. #E3
9. #amazonfail
10. Macworld

Hash Tags:
1. #musicmonday
2. #iranelection
3. #sxsw
4. #swineflu
5. #nevertrust
6. #mm
7. #rememberwhen
8. #3drunkwords
9. #unacceptable
10. #iwish

Viral Video: Biz Stone Gets Couric-ed

Kara Swisher — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 15:21:43 +0000

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone appeared yesterday on CBS (CBS) anchor Katie Couric’s weekly online “webshow” on CBSNews.com, which was streamed live.

Viewers could submit questions via, of course, Twitter @katiecouric.

On the show, Stone answered questions about a wide range of topics, including the microblogging service’s tipping point (a bar swarm at SXSW), understanding promoted tweets (don’t try), whether it is correct to say “twittered” or “tweeted” (or, as much funnier TV anchor Jon Stewart puts it, “twatted”), using Twitter effectively (apparently, Couric employs a Twitter temper), and why Twitter turned down the $500 million acquisition offer from social networking giant Facebook (we’re a real live company!).

I am not sure what was up with Couric’s smart-teacher glasses and the whole interviewing-remotely-via-a-television thing, but Stone did well.

Here’s the video of the full show, at close to 40 minutes, which is well worth the time:

Watch CBS News Videos Online

Looking to Capitalize on the Boom in Mobile Apps

Sarmad Ali — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 15:15:07 +0000

Filling a niche created by the surge in smart-phones, a recently launched site called TheyMakeApps hopes to be the central marketplace for one of the tech world’s hot commodities–mobile app developers.

App downloads are expected to exceed 4.5 billion world-wide in 2010, up from an estimated 2.5 billion last year, according to recent data from Gartner Inc. (IT). For TheyMakeApps, an online app-developer directory, this surge could mean more business. The site, which was launched in December and won the business category award at this month’s South by Southwest interactive festival, already lists an estimated 900 app developers.

At TheyMakeApps, developers can create their listings and upload a few samples of their apps for free after creating a profile on the site. They also can choose to upgrade their profile for $89 a month. For this price, they get more exposure on the site and can display more information about their apps than those who go with the free option.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Five Tech Investors Reflect on SXSW

Tomio Geron — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 18:00:56 +0000

Ever since Twitter Inc. broke on the scene at the annual South By Southwest festival three years ago, the techie crowds have multiplied at the Austin conference better known for its film and music. Foursquare Inc., another hot start-up, made noise last year when it launched there. Now that the tech portion of the festival has wrapped up, we asked several investors this week to reflect on the event. Most of them still found the conference useful, particularly to meet people from a variety of technology backgrounds from across the country, even if the events were more crowded than ever.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Locating Latest Mobile Craze, Tweetsii Debuts at SXSW

Tomio Geron — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 21:42:06 +0000

The idea for Gypsii came while Dan Harple was commuting the way most people do in Amsterdam–riding a bicycle. Harple, a serial entrepreneur, was looking on his mobile phone for nearby restaurants, but he couldn’t find good results. “I was riding my bike around searching and I’d get Web sites,” Harple said. “But I’m on my bike and I want to know where I am, and what’s here right now.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Have Start-Up, Will Travel: "Start-Up Bus" Yields Winners at SXSW

Tomio Geron — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 17:00:35 +0000

A start-up can be built anywhere–even at the back of a bus, near the bathroom.

A group of 25 entrepreneurs took a bus last week from San Francisco to Austin, Texas, with a zany plan–to break up into groups and build start-ups in 48 hours to pitch to investors at South By Southwest, the tech and music showcase.

Despite fighting motion sickness, a spotty Wi-Fi connection and sleep deprivation, the six teams turned out finished ideas from scratch, and two were names winners by a panel of investor judges.

One winner was DateBrowsr.com, a site that aggregates photos from a range of dating Web sites to give people quick access to what they want to see most when seeking a potential date–what people look like. The idea for the site came about almost as a joke, but the group decided it could work.

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Big at the SXSW Interactive Fest: Location, Location, Location

Jennifer Valentino-DeVries — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 22:00:11 +0000

The South by Southwest Interactive festival starts today in Austin, and it looks as though the buzz is all about location-based services.

Twitter, which got a lot of attention at SXSW three years ago, officially added an option to its site that allows users to share their location in their tweets. In a posting on its blog, the site said “a recent burst of interest in location sharing” prompted it to add the feature.

Users can opt in to enable the sharing service and can decide whether to attach their location on a tweet-by-tweet basis. They also can choose whether to provide exact coordinates or just a neighborhood or town name. It’s an ideal feature to add in time for SXSW, which is spread over venues throughout a large area of Austin and also includes important music and film portions.

But the real attention is focused on two services that have been in the location-sharing business longer than Twitter–Foursquare and Gowalla. These two applications let users share where they are and compete to earn virtual prizes based on how often and where they “check in” to the app.

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Silicon Valley Start-Up Whisperer (And Twitter Investor, Natch) Sacca Speaks!

Kara Swisher — Mon, 04 May 2009 12:28:49 +0000

Since leaving Google (GOOG) several years ago, where he last worked on wireless spectrum issues, it’s hard to say exactly what role the digital jumping bean who is Chris Sacca plays.

He’s not an entrepreneur, although he seems to know all of them in Web 2.0 world and advises 18 start-ups. He’s no longer a big-company exec, although he was one and knows a lot of them too. He’s not a venture capitalist, although he is involved in a private equity firm and invests in a lot of the start-ups he advises, like the red-hot Twitter, and knows those guys too.

Of course, Sacca blogs and tweets a LOT, even as he travels incessantly to Ethiopia, Dubai, and various places where Bono might be hanging.

(Thus, don’t miss this very funny mocking of Sacca’s tweets under the name fakesacca, reportedly done by Googler Dick Costolo, with pitch-perfect tweets like: “Wow, not sure what city i’m in. The food says London, the prices say Tokyo, and the women say Los Angeles. I’m going w/ Hong Kong,” “Going over my SXSW talk on ‘why I should have equity in your startup.’ Getting inspired just proofreading it” and, my personal favorite, “If you’re pole-dancing & heli-skiing & in the ny times w/in 12hr of each other, something has either gone horribly wrong or horribly RIGHT!”)

With all this dabbling Sacca does, BoomTown has decided to dub the Silicon Valley gadfly: The Start-Up Whisperer.

Here is my video interview with him, about those start-ups like Twitter and about what’s next in tech innovation, all while a lovely piano player at San Francisco’s Zuni restaurant tinkled in the background:

[ See post to watch video ]

What Happened at South By Southwest? A Google Guy Explains.

Peter Kafka — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 13:40:32 +0000

Confession: A whole lot of what happens at South By Southwest is above and beyond the capacity of your humble correspondent to understand or explain.

Luckily, we have a professional willing to interpret the goings-on, free of charge. Meet Kevin Marks, whose business card describes him as “developer advocate” at Google (GOOG).

Marks, who has previously put in time at Apple (AAPL) and Technorati as an engineer, now has a job that seems to involve being an, um, advocate on behalf of his employer, specifically for its OpenSocial program. I think of OpenSocial as the “everyone but Facebook” social-network alliance, and Marks didn’t disabuse of me that notion in our chat on Sunday.

But he did add some layers of nuance, and he was game when I asked him to tell me what the theme of the conference has been so far. In a word: Twitter.

The longer version is here:

[ See post to watch video ]

Meet Someone Who Still Wants to Invest in Start-Ups: Founders Fund's Dave McClure

Peter Kafka — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 23:09:15 +0000

It’s a whole lot harder for the start-ups buzzing around South by Southwest to find someone to back them than it was a year ago. A decimated Dow makes it a lot harder for people to take fliers on even the most promising start-ups.

But there are still investors willing to place some bets, even on the most nascent companies. Via the angel-investing program he’s running for the Founders Fund,
Dave McClure is one of those guys.

Founders is a VC fund run by Valley bigshots like Peter Thiel, most of whom made a lot of money when they sold PayPal to eBay (EBAY) many moons ago. Last year, they brought on McClure to handle smaller investments than they would normally make.

Founders Fund, which already owns a piece of Facebook, has already made bets on the burgeoning Facebook app ecosystem via the “fbFund,” so McClure is particularly interested in those types of companies. Which explains why I found him at the Facebook “Developer Garage”–a Facebook-sponsored mini-convention held on the outskirts of SXSW.

But McClure chatted with me about non-Facebook investments as well, and why it’s easier to find interesting deals now that he isn’t competing with amateur angels who made their money at Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO).

[ See post to watch video ]

Bonus footage: Want to see what I look liked during this interview? I don’t recommend it, because grooming standards got a little relaxed over the weekend. But for diehards, here’s a (sped-up) version of our chat, from a different angle, via The Interwebs, which filmed me filming McClure. Down the rabbit hole we go: