San Francisco-based Federated Media Publishing said it has bought Lijit Networks, a smaller online advertising analytics and tools firm.

The price for the Boulder, Colo., start-up — which was founded in 2006 — was undisclosed, but it has received just under $29 million in venture funding from firms such as Foundry Group. Federated said Lijit would continue to operate independently, “but in conjunction.”

In an interview yesterday, Federated CEO Deanna Brown said the buy was to round out offerings for its clients and to better compete in a world where most of the online ads go to the top five players.

“I am excited we can give both publishers and advertisers more tools for engagement and monetization,” she said.

Federated, which lost big social-media news site Mashable earlier this year, also benefits from increased scale and inventory of sites.

Lijit CEO Todd Vernon, who will become EVP of technology at Federated, said that it was ever more important for ad-focused firms on the Web to “deliver the entire stack.”

“Lijit has a core competency in the media business, and combined with FM’s best-in-class sales force, we can offer everything needed to do effective online campaigns,” he said.

Here’s the official press release:

Federated Media Publishing To Acquire Lijit Networks

Combined Entity Will Power More than 77,000 Independent Publishers Across the Web Via Comprehensive Advertising, Analytics and Reader Engagement Tools

SAN FRANCISCO, October 4, 2011 – Federated Media Publishing, which powers the best of the Independent Web, today announced the acquisition of Lijit Networks, Inc. Lijit is a leading provider of advertising services, audience analytics and reader engagement tools for online publishers of all sizes. The combined entity will reach nearly 300 million global unique visitors according to Quantcast.

Lijit, headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, will continue to operate independently but in conjunction with the rest of Federated Media Publishing. Lijit CEO Todd Vernon and COO Walter Knapp will take on corresponding EVP of Technology and SVP of Platform Revenue responsibilities at Federated Media Publishing and will report directly to Federated Media Publishing’s CEO, Deanna Brown. Additionally, Lijit board member Seth Levine from Foundry Group will join the Federated Media Publishing board of directors, effective immediately.

With the addition of Lijit Networks’ existing publisher relationships, Federated Media Publishing will now reach more than 77,000 online publishers and nearly 15,000 expert communities, making it one of the largest companies to power publishing on the Independent Web. The acquisition vastly expands the combined company’s inventory of sites, offering premium advertisers improved scale and reach.

Publishers Will Profit and Flourish

Lijit helps publishers more thoughtfully interact with and better understand their audience by providing analytics and engagement tools that build deeper relationships, lengthen time on site and increase page views. These robust and actionable audience analytics and reader engagement tools leverage intent, behavior and demographics to help publishers of all sizes increase revenue and better engage their readers.

Additionally, the combined advertising services provided by FM and Lijit will give publishers of all sizes a revenue stream that complements existing sales efforts and helps grow and monetize their website businesses, no matter what the size.

Advertisers Can More Easily Analyze and Engage

The combination of Federated Media Publishing’s premium online advertising and conversational marketing programs and Lijit’s proprietary data collection tools will empower advertisers to better understand user intent, contextual relevance and demographic information. And by leveraging the combined entity’s extensive publisher relationships, advertisers will have unprecedented scale on the Independent Web.

Introducing Programmatic Buying to the Independent Web

Programmatic buying is one of the fastest growing trends in digital media and the introduction of Lijit’s robust RTB exchange will equip media buyers with one of the largest platforms available. Over the next few months, Federated Media Publishing and Lijit will develop a series of private exchanges that will highlight leading independent publishers. These exchanges will allow brands to engage active, passionate consumers found in highly conversational online communities and publications, while delivering premium CPM rates via FM’s conversational marketing programs.

Quote

“The Lijit Networks team is just as passionate and committed to powering publishers as we are at Federated Media Publishing and that was a crucial element to this decision,” said Deanna Brown, chief executive officer, Federated Media Publishing. “Our combined relationships, proprietary tools and conversational marketing services will be invaluable to publishers and advertisers alike.”

“Federated Media invented how to leverage authentic voices and engaged conversations that exist in the Independent Web,” said Todd Vernon, founder and CEO of Lijit Networks. “The combination of the two companies is a game changer in the industry that unlocks new opportunities for both companies and our combined publisher network.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111004/federated-media-buys-lijit-networks/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110504/cafemom-launches-daily-deals-and-plans-hispanic-moms-site/ http://allthingsd.com/20110504/cafemom-launches-daily-deals-and-plans-hispanic-moms-site/#comments Wed, 04 May 2011 12:27:36 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=43534

CafeMom, a social-networking and community site aimed at mothers, is expanding its offerings to daily deals, as well as announcing an anticipated launch of a site aimed at Hispanic moms.

The deals effort has just been launched under the killer URL of Mom.com and will first be available in the Northern New Jersey area.

The sales force, which will presumably compete with armies of sales people from social buying phenoms such as Groupon and LivingSocial, will be made up of local moms in these markets.

The “Mamas Latinas” site–which is still unnamed–will be run by former People en Español publisher Lucia Ballas-Traynor, who has just been hired by CafeMom.

In an interview yesterday, its co-founders Michael Sanchez and Andrew Shue said the New York-based CafeMom was aiming at another major growth spurt.

Said Shue of the effort so far: “It’s just two dads trying to create the definitive mom’s site.”

There is a lot of competition in the space, such as iVillage, which is more broadly aimed at the lucrative women’s space.

But CafeMom had attracted attention too and had considered a number of acquisition offers last year, before deciding to expand its service on its own.

Last summer, in fact, Yahoo and several other companies expressed interest in the possibility of acquiring CafeMom.

After considering a variety of offers, said Sanchez, who is CEO of CafeMom, “We think we have a unique opportunity to grow ourselves and not for someone else.”

The company has been knocking around for a long time in Internet terms, morphing from a sister company owned by CMI Marketing called ClubMom back in the Web 1.0 days.

CMI, which was also founded by Shue and Sanchez, finally got two big fundings in 2008 totaling $24 million, from venture firms such as Highland Capital Partners and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

Moving from what was essentially a glorified bulletin board for moms, it has added content and other social-networking tools and games.

For example, it recently launched a blog and content platform named “The Stir.”

Shue and Sanchez said the main CafeMom site now has 7.6 million million unique monthly visitors on its main site and almost 21 million on its overall network of affiliated sites.

The pair said that CafeMom is profitable, with 100 employees. It now has revenue of about $36 million annually.

Here’s the official press release about the Hispanic moms site:

CafeMom, the #1 site for moms with more than 7MM monthly visitors, to launch new website for Hispanic Moms

Outgoing publisher of PEOPLE en Español announced as co-founder.

New York, New York May 4, 2011–CafeMom announced its plans to launch a web destination catering to Hispanic moms in the coming months, to be co-founded by Lucia Ballas-Traynor, a Hispanic marketing veteran and the just-departed publisher of PEOPLE en Español. As part of its market research, CafeMom conducted a major national study of Hispanic moms, across the acculturation spectrum, and found that 92% of Hispanic moms believe there is not currently a website that clearly serves their needs.

“There is currently a huge gap online in serving Hispanic moms,” said CafeMom CEO, Michael Sanchez. “By 2014 one in four moms online will be Hispanic, and advertisers are increasingly looking for ways to reach this key segment. The site represents a tremendous opportunity, both to add value to millions of moms’ lives and to deliver unique integration possibilities to the brands that are most committed to the Hispanic market.”

CafeMom conducted a nationally-representative study of Hispanic moms fielded in both English and Spanish with a well-respected third party research vendor. The study showed Hispanic moms are underserved online, and are also eager to connect with each other. 79% of Hispanic moms said they wanted to connect with other Moms who share their culture, heritage, and life experiences.

Co-founder Lucia Ballas-Traynor brings her 25 years experience in Hispanic media, and has been at the helm of leading Hispanic media brands such as Univision’s Galavision, MTV Tr3s and most recently People en Español, the largest selling Hispanic magazine in the U.S.

“Our plan is to leverage CafeMom’s expertise in community, content, and strategic programs for leading brands and combine it with a world class leadership team that has a deep understanding of Hispanic moms and media,” said Sanchez. “As part of this effort, we are excited to bring Lucia on to the team. She has a proven track record in delivering for consumers and advertisers alike.”

“I’m thrilled to be working with CafeMom on this,” says Ballas-Traynor. “CafeMom is uniquely positioned to deliver this opportunity as an authority on moms. I’m confident that we can create something that will add real value to the lives of millions of Hispanic moms.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110504/cafemom-launches-daily-deals-and-plans-hispanic-moms-site/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110502/yahoo-nabs-jai-singh-from-aols-huffpo/ http://allthingsd.com/20110502/yahoo-nabs-jai-singh-from-aols-huffpo/#comments Tue, 03 May 2011 02:28:22 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=43430

According to sources close to the situation, Yahoo has grabbed one of Huffington Post’s top editors, Jai Singh, to become its editor-in chief.

The move is a big one in the online editorial arena. Before moving to the HuffPo as managing editor in 2009, which is now the key content unit of AOL, Singh ran CNET Networks.

UPDATE: Yahoo confirmed the hiring in a press release below.

A Huffington Post spokesman said:

“This is about geography–Jai made clear his desire to move back to California, where his family is located. He moved from California to work with us and, unfortunately, this job requires his being in the newsroom in New York. We loved working with him, wish him well with his new job, and look forward to staying in touch.”

Sources said Yahoo sent out an internal memo earlier tonight outlining the move, which is a whole new role at Yahoo. It’s below–natch!–from Yahoo Media head Mickie Rosen.

Hi Americas!

As we discussed at last week’s All Hands, we will continue to strengthen and grow Yahoo!’s position as the premier digital media company by expanding our original content, bringing unique voice to each property, turning Yahoo! into the place for big events, and helping to drive best-in-class tools and practices in social, SEO and publishing tools and operations.

In just the past few days since we were together, we set new records with our coverage of the Royal Wedding. And with last night’s news of Osama bin Laden’s death, we will likely create new ones. This proves the point that consumers turn to Yahoo! to be entertained and informed. We are the place consumers turn to when news happens.

With this context, I am thrilled to announce that Jai Singh will be joining Yahoo! as the Editor-in-Chief of the Yahoo! Media Network. Jai joins from AOL, where he was managing editor of the Huffington Post Media Group, responsible for the day-to-day editorial operations of all AOL content.

Prior to AOL, Jai was the Managing Editor of the Huffington Post where he developed its voice, doubled its number of vertical sections, and helped grow unique users by six-fold. Prior to the Huffington Post, Jai created CNET News.com in 1996, which quickly became a leading authority in technology news. As the editor-in-chief and senior vice president, he was in charge of all editorial and built a news staff that won scores of national journalism awards.

Jai will start May 31st. Below is the press release announcing his appointment.

Go Yahoo!

Best,

Mickie

And here’s the official press release about Singh, which is oddly buried in news of Yahoo’s performance in its Royal Wedding coverage:

Yahoo! Sets Records With The Royal Wedding;
Drives Largest Traffic Day for Single Event

Names Jai Singh Editor-in-Chief of Yahoo! Media Network

SUNNYVALE, Calif., May 2, 2011–Yahoo! Inc. drove its largest traffic numbers for a single event last week when the world turned to the company for coverage of the Royal Wedding. Over a 24-hour period on Friday, April 29, 2011, Yahoo! drove more traffic and video to its coverage of the wedding than any previous event.

Preliminary internal data shows that Yahoo! sites serving Royal Wedding content drove 400 million page views on Friday, slightly higher than the traffic levels experienced following the Japan earthquake. Yahoo! delivered Royal Wedding content at a record-breaking 50,000 requests per second on Friday, seven times the average daily peak of approximately 7,500, and video traffic was 21% higher than the previous record. In comparison, there were approximately 33,000 requests-per-second following the Japan earthquake and today, at press time, peak requests-per-second was 40,000 for content related to the death of Osama bin Laden. Yahoo! also drove approximately 30 million unique users, 27 million video streams and 2.6 million live video streams over the 24-hour period on Friday.

In the last three months, coverage of the Royal Wedding and the Academy Awards has demonstrated that Yahoo! is where global consumers come to be entertained with rich content no other online company offers. Similarly, when news breaks, Yahoo! is the world’s trusted source for in-depth coverage, from the ongoing crisis in Japan to the death of Osama bin Laden. Yahoo! is the number one online site, reaching 180 million unique users and maintains a portfolio of 10 number one sites in the U.S., including Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Finance, omg!, Yahoo! Shopping, Yahoo! Real Estate and Yahoo! TV (data: comScore March 2011). Yahoo! attracts more than 680 million users globally.

In effort to extend and accelerate the company’s leadership positions and further develop a unique and distinct voice across its brands, Yahoo! today announced that it has appointed Jai Singh, editor-in-chief for the Yahoo! Media Network.

As editor-in-chief, Singh will help transform the company as it increases its original content creation, build the unique voice and programming of Yahoo!’s leading properties, and help drive best-in-class tools and practices–such as publishing platforms, aggressive social and SEO distribution–and programming across all platforms. Singh will be a key member of the Yahoo! Media Network leadership team led by Mickie Rosen, senior vice president of Yahoo! Media Network. Based in Sunnyvale, Calif., Singh starts May 31 and will be spending significant time with editorial teams based in Santa Monica, Calif., and New York City.

“Jai’s appointment comes on the heels of one of the most event-filled news weeks in Yahoo! history, which underscores the importance of our editorial operations,” said Rosen. “Jai is one of the most advanced and respected editorial thinkers in digital media today, and a great addition to our editorial bench strength. It’s clear that when news breaks, the world turns to Yahoo!. Shaping our unique voice, and establishing industry best practices for the next generation of publishing will further Yahoo!’s success as the premier digital media company.”

Singh was most recently managing editor of the Huffington Post Media Group where he was in charge of all day-to-day news management and editorial operations. His responsibilities spanned across both Huffington Post editorial as well as AOL, including AOL content sites. In the two years Singh was at the Huffington Post, the site saw unprecedented growth–the number of sections more than doubled to 24, as did the number of editorial staff, and unique visitors grew nearly six fold, according to Comscore. Besides running the editorial operations, Singh helped drive product development in close partnership with the technology team. Singh was also the main point-of-contact and worked closely with Sales, Sales Development and Business Development.

Prior to the Huffington Post, Singh created CNET News.com in 1996, which quickly became a leading authority in technology news at the height of the Internet boom. At CNET.com, as the editor-in-chief and senior vice president, Singh was in charge of all editorial, including news and product reviews, as well as product development. Singh built a news staff that won scores of national journalism awards at atime when mainstream media were still skeptical of the Internet as a source of credible information.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110502/yahoo-nabs-jai-singh-from-aols-huffpo/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20110216/starting-a-blog-and-sleep-versus-shut-down/ http://allthingsd.com/20110216/starting-a-blog-and-sleep-versus-shut-down/#comments Wed, 16 Feb 2011 23:20:02 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://mailbox.allthingsd.com/?p=851 Q:

I’ll be starting a two-year assignment with the Peace Corps in the near future. I would like to start a blog where I can record my daily activities for my friends and family to read. Do you have any suggestions?

A:

There are numerous free blogging services that offer templates, simple tools and a free address your friends and family can use to view your reports. Two that I have used and can suggest are Blogger, owned by Google, at blogger.com; and the independent WordPress, at wordpress.com.

Q:

In terms of battery life, does it make any practical difference if I leave my common programs on my MacBook Pro running when dormant versus shutting them down when I’m not using them and then firing them up as needed?

A:

I asked Apple about this, and the company said an open, but idle, application on a Mac notebook generally won’t use any or many processor resources, which means almost no impact on battery life, even if it performs periodic background actions like fetching mail.

Exceptions would be programs that do heavy-duty things in the background, like rendering videos. The company strongly advises making sure the laptop is in sleep mode when not in use, and keeping the screen at the lowest brightness level that works for you.

Also, you can check how much demand a program is placing on the processor by running the Activity Monitor, located in the Utilities folder in Applications.

Q:

Why would a GSM phone run in 3G-mode only on AT&T and not on T-Mobile?

A:

It’s true that both carriers use the same basic technology, called GSM. But, in some cases, phones (like the AT&T iPhone) are locked so that, unless you do serious hacking, you can use them on only one of the two networks.

In other cases, it might have to do with the frequencies used by a carrier. T-Mobile and AT&T use different frequencies for their 3G networks, and a phone might simply be built to support only the 3G frequencies used by one of the carriers and not the other.

You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox and my other columns at the new All Things Digital website, http://walt.allthingsd.com. Email mossberg@wsj.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110216/starting-a-blog-and-sleep-versus-shut-down/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110216/assistly-extends-customer-service-to-facebook-walls/ http://allthingsd.com/20110216/assistly-extends-customer-service-to-facebook-walls/#comments Wed, 16 Feb 2011 18:08:59 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=3669 When something breaks, we users ask for help wherever we think we can find someone responsible. Or maybe we just stand up on our social media soapbox and whine.

Either way, Assistly helps companies deal with our problems by providing a Web-based customer service and support platform that combines more traditional methods like email, chat and phone with Twitter and, as of today, Facebook. The idea is to make support more efficient and coordinated.

So now, if you post about your problems on the Facebook walls of Assistly customers like 37signals, Vimeo, Rdio, Grooveshark and even Twitter, you might get a quicker and better-delegated response from employees there. (Though the new Assistly Facebook option just rolled out today, so they may not be using it yet.)

There are many (so, so many) social media management tools, but Assistly is more competitive with customer support providers like Zendesk. (Both Zendesk and Assistly already offer Twitter support, but Assistly is first to offer Facebook. Twitter itself uses Zendesk for customer support via email and Assistly for customer support via tweet.)

Assistly CEO Alex Bard and members of his team have been working on customer support software dating back to 1996 with eShare Technologies, followed by eAssist Global Solutions, founded in 1999. More recently they made the Goowy widget analytics platform that was bought by AOL in 2008. Their current company has raised about $5 million from investors True Ventures and Social Leverage.

For its own customers, Assistly starts at $39 per month per full-time user, but it also has an hourly rate so companies can spread the responsibility for customer support across all their employees.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110216/assistly-extends-customer-service-to-facebook-walls/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20110216/will-secretary-of-state-clintons-internet-freedom-agenda-finally-get-traction/ http://allthingsd.com/20110216/will-secretary-of-state-clintons-internet-freedom-agenda-finally-get-traction/#comments Wed, 16 Feb 2011 15:09:55 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=40854

Yesterday, in a major policy speech in Washington, D.C., Secretary of State Hillary Clinton jumped on the Internet bandwagon again, unveiling a $25 million government investment for entrepreneurs to allow dissidents to thwart “thugs, hackers and censors.”

Since that’s about the amount a third-string social photo-sharing site gets while walking down University Avenue in Palo Alto, Calif., from venture capitalists with bags of money to spend, let me just say the money is, well, underwhelming.

Luckily, Clinton’s speech–the latest chapter of the Obama administration’s “Internet Freedom Agenda”–was much better.

In fact, it was a sobering look at the situation, replete with all its conflicts and compromises, including some related to the State Department of late (hello, WikiLeaks!).

While more of a gimmick, Clinton outlined what she called a “venture capital-style approach” to stopping governments from closing down digital communications platforms.

In Egypt, that has included the whole dang Internet after times got tough and protesters tweeted too much.

Even still, said Clinton, such efforts–however effective now–were ultimately useless.

“Those who clamp down on Internet freedom may be able to hold back the full expression of their people’s yearnings for a while, but not forever,” she said.

Still, even though Facebook and Twitter have been lauded as critical tools in the reform protests in the Mideast, those Luddite strongmen did manage to put up a very good fight in shutting them down.

But Clinton advocated pressing on. Along with the seed funding for firewall-piercing and evading technologies, she also announced the creation of a new coordinator for cyber issues and the fact that the State Department had just begun to tweet in Arabic and Farsi and would soon be doing so in Chinese, Hindi and Russian.

All very nice steps, but the overall arrival of the long-promised global “strategy for cyberspace,” which has gotten bogged down in politics, is still to come.

In fact, a GOP-fueled criticism of the State Department was also released yesterday, designed to muck up Clinton’s speech, about how another $30 million in digital investments was being spent or, more precisely, being spent badly.

Clinton answered critics:

“Some have criticized us for not pouring funding into a single technology–but there is no silver bullet in the struggle against Internet repression. There’s no ‘app’ for that.”

Well, actually, since there is an app that turns your Apple iPhone into a hand massager, there certainly should be.

Speaking of that, Clinton was deft at dealing with the obvious delta between pressing for Internet freedom, even as U.S. government lawyers were whacking away at WikiLeaks–and, by association, Twitter itself.

Clinton noted the release of a mass of classified State Department documents “began with an act of theft,” arguing that this was the real issue.

She went on to further argue:

“I said that the WikiLeaks incident began with a theft, just as if it had been executed by smuggling papers in a briefcase. The fact that WikiLeaks used the Internet is not the reason we criticized its actions. WikiLeaks does not challenge our commitment to Internet freedom.”

Actually, the issue is that the Internet, once it really gets going, doesn’t really want to be controlled by anyone.

Kind of like humanity.

Or as Clinton so correctly noted about the various protests taking place abroad:

“In each case, people protested because of deep frustrations with the political and economic conditions of their lives. They stood and marched and chanted and the authorities tracked and blocked and arrested them. The Internet did not do any of those things; people did.”

In any case, judge for yourself: Here’s the video of the speech at George Washington University from the State Department’s Web site, as well as the full text below:

Thank you all very much and good afternoon. It is a pleasure, once again, to be back on the campus of the George Washington University, a place that I have spent quite a bit of time in all different settings over the last now nearly 20 years. I’d like especially to thank President Knapp and Provost Lerman, because this is a great opportunity for me to address such a significant issue, and one which deserves the attention of citizens, governments, and I know is drawing that attention. And perhaps today in my remarks, we can begin a much more vigorous debate that will respond to the needs that we have been watching in real time on our television sets.

A few minutes after midnight on January 28th, the Internet went dark across Egypt. During the previous four days, hundreds of thousands of Egyptians had marched to demand a new government. And the world, on TVs, laptops, cell phones, and smart phones, had followed every single step. Pictures and videos from Egypt flooded the web. On Facebook and Twitter, journalists posted on-the-spot reports. Protestors coordinated their next moves. And citizens of all stripes shared their hopes and fears about this pivotal moment in the history of their country.

Millions worldwide answered in real time, “You are not alone and we are with you.” Then the government pulled the plug. Cell phone service was cut off, TV satellite signals were jammed, and Internet access was blocked for nearly the entire population. The government did not want the people to communicate with each other and it did not want the press to communicate with the public. It certainly did not want the world to watch.

The events in Egypt recalled another protest movement 18 months earlier in Iran, when thousands marched after disputed elections. Their protestors also used websites to organize. A video taken by cell phone showed a young woman named Neda killed by a member of the paramilitary forces, and within hours, that video was being watched by people everywhere.

The Iranian authorities used technology as well. The Revolutionary Guard stalked members of the Green Movement by tracking their online profiles. And like Egypt, for a time, the government shut down the internet and mobile networks altogether. After the authorities raided homes, attacked university dorms, made mass arrests, tortured and fired shots into crowds, the protests ended.

In Egypt, however, the story ended differently. The protests continued despite the internet shutdown. People organized marches through flyers and word of mouth and used dial-up modems and fax machines to communicate with the world. After five days, the government relented and Egypt came back online. The authorities then sought to use the Internet to control the protests by ordering mobile companies to send out pro-government text messages, and by arresting bloggers and those who organized the protests online. But 18 days after the protests began, the government failed and the president resigned.

What happened in Egypt and what happened in Iran, which this week is once again using violence against protestors seeking basic freedoms, was about a great deal more than the internet. In each case, people protested because of deep frustrations with the political and economic conditions of their lives. They stood and marched and chanted and the authorities tracked and blocked and arrested them. The Internet did not do any of those things; people did. In both of these countries, the ways that citizens and the authorities used the Internet reflected the power of connection technologies on the one hand as an accelerant of political, social, and economic change, and on the other hand as a means to stifle or extinguish that change.

There is a debate currently underway in some circles about whether the Internet is a force for liberation or repression. But I think that debate is largely beside the point. Egypt isn’t inspiring people because they communicated using Twitter. It is inspiring because people came together and persisted in demanding a better future. Iran isn’t awful because the authorities used Facebook to shadow and capture members of the opposition. Iran is awful because it is a government that routinely violates the rights of its people.

So it is our values that cause these actions to inspire or outrage us, our sense of human dignity, the rights that flow from it, and the principles that ground it. And it is these values that ought to drive us to think about the road ahead. Two billion people are now online, nearly a third of humankind. We hail from every corner of the world, live under every form of government, and subscribe to every system of beliefs. And increasingly, we are turning to the Internet to conduct important aspects of our lives.

The Internet has become the public space of the 21st century–the world’s town square, classroom, marketplace, coffeehouse, and nightclub. We all shape and are shaped by what happens there, all 2 billion of us and counting. And that presents a challenge. To maintain an Internet that delivers the greatest possible benefits to the world, we need to have a serious conversation about the principles that will guide us, what rules exist and should not exist and why, what behaviors should be encouraged or discouraged and how.

The goal is not to tell people how to use the Internet any more than we ought to tell people how to use any public square, whether it’s Tahrir Square or Times Square. The value of these spaces derives from the variety of activities people can pursue in them, from holding a rally to selling their vegetables, to having a private conversation. These spaces provide an open platform, and so does the Internet. It does not serve any particular agenda, and it never should. But if people around the world are going come together every day online and have a safe and productive experience, we need a shared vision to guide us.

One year ago, I offered a starting point for that vision by calling for a global commitment to Internet freedom, to protect human rights online as we do offline. The rights of individuals to express their views freely, petition their leaders, worship according to their beliefs–these rights are universal, whether they are exercised in a public square or on an individual blog. The freedoms to assemble and associate also apply in cyberspace. In our time, people are as likely to come together to pursue common interests online as in a church or a labor hall.

Together, the freedoms of expression, assembly, and association online comprise what I’ve called the freedom to connect. The United States supports this freedom for people everywhere, and we have called on other nations to do the same. Because we want people to have the chance to exercise this freedom. We also support expanding the number of people who have access to the Internet. And because the Internet must work evenly and reliably for it to have value, we support the multi-stakeholder system that governs the internet today, which has consistently kept it up and running through all manner of interruptions across networks, borders, and regions.

In the year since my speech, people worldwide have continued to use the Internet to solve shared problems and expose public corruption, from the people in Russia who tracked wildfires online and organized a volunteer firefighting squad, to the children in Syria who used Facebook to reveal abuse by their teachers, to the Internet campaign in China that helps parents find their missing children.

At the same time, the Internet continues to be restrained in a myriad of ways. In China, the government censors content and redirects search requests to error pages. In Burma, independent news sites have been taken down with distributed denial of service attacks. In Cuba, the government is trying to create a national intranet, while not allowing their citizens to access the global internet. In Vietnam, bloggers who criticize the government are arrested and abused. In Iran, the authorities block opposition and media websites, target social media, and steal identifying information about their own people in order to hunt them down.

These actions reflect a landscape that is complex and combustible, and sure to become more so in the coming years as billions of more people connect to the Internet. The choices we make today will determine what the Internet looks like in the future. Businesses have to choose whether and how to enter markets where internet freedom is limited. People have to choose how to act online, what information to share and with whom, which ideas to voice and how to voice them. Governments have to choose to live up to their commitments to protect free expression, assembly, and association.

For the United States, the choice is clear. On the spectrum of Internet freedom, we place ourselves on the side of openness. Now, we recognize that an open Internet comes with challenges. It calls for ground rules to protect against wrongdoing and harm. And Internet freedom raises tensions, like all freedoms do. But we believe the benefits far exceed the costs.

And today, I’d like to discuss several of the challenges we must confront as we seek to protect and defend a free and open Internet. Now, I’m the first to say that neither I nor the United States Government has all the answers. We’re not sure we have all the questions. But we are committed to asking the questions, to helping lead a conversation, and to defending not just universal principles but the interests of our people and our partners.

The first challenge is achieving both liberty and security. Liberty and security are often presented as equal and opposite; the more you have of one, the less you have of the other. In fact, I believe they make it each other possible. Without security, liberty is fragile. Without liberty, security is oppressive. The challenge is finding the proper measure: enough security to enable our freedoms, but not so much or so little as to endanger them.

Finding this proper measure for the Internet is critical because the qualities that make the internet a force for unprecedented progress–its openness, its leveling effect, its reach and speed–also enable wrongdoing on an unprecedented scale. Terrorists and extremist groups use the Internet to recruit members, and plot and carry out attacks. Human traffickers use the Internet to find and lure new victims into modern-day slavery. Child pornographers use the Internet to exploit children. Hackers break into financial institutions, cell phone networks, and personal email accounts.

So we need successful strategies for combating these threats and more without constricting the openness that is the Internet’s greatest attribute. The United States is aggressively tracking and deterring criminals and terrorists online. We are investing in our nation’s cyber-security, both to prevent cyber-incidents and to lessen their impact. We are cooperating with other countries to fight transnational crime in cyberspace. The United States Government invests in helping other nations build their own law enforcement capacity. We have also ratified the Budapest Cybercrime Convention, which sets out the steps countries must take to ensure that the internet is not misused by criminals and terrorists while still protecting the liberties of our own citizens.

In our vigorous effort to prevent attacks or apprehend criminals, we retain a commitment to human rights and fundamental freedoms. The United States is determined to stop terrorism and criminal activity online and offline, and in both spheres we are committed to pursuing these goals in accordance with our laws and values.

Now, others have taken a different approach. Security is often invoked as a justification for harsh crackdowns on freedom. Now, this tactic is not new to the digital age, but it has new resonance as the internet has given governments new capacities for tracking and punishing human rights advocates and political dissidents. Governments that arrest bloggers, pry into the peaceful activities of their citizens, and limit their access to the Internet may claim to be seeking security. In fact, they may even mean it as they define it. But they are taking the wrong path. Those who clamp down on Internet freedom may be able to hold back the full expression of their people’s yearnings for a while, but not forever.

The second challenge is protecting both transparency and confidentiality. The Internet’s strong culture of transparency derives from its power to make information of all kinds available instantly. But in addition to being a public space, the Internet is also a channel for private communications. And for that to continue, there must be protection for confidential communication online. Think of all the ways in which people and organizations rely on confidential communications to do their jobs. Businesses hold confidential conversations when they’re developing new products to stay ahead of their competitors. Journalists keep the details of some sources confidential to protect them from exposure or retribution. And governments also rely on confidential communication online as well as offline. The existence of connection technologies may make it harder to maintain confidentiality, but it does not alter the need for it.

Now, I know that government confidentiality has been a topic of debate during the past few months because of WikiLeaks, but it’s been a false debate in many ways. Fundamentally, the WikiLeaks incident began with an act of theft. Government documents were stolen, just the same as if they had been smuggled out in a briefcase. Some have suggested that this theft was justified because governments have a responsibility to conduct all of our work out in the open in the full view of our citizens. I respectfully disagree. The United States could neither provide for our citizens’ security nor promote the cause of human rights and democracy around the world if we had to make public every step of our efforts. Confidential communication gives our government the opportunity to do work that could not be done otherwise.

Consider our work with former Soviet states to secure loose nuclear material. By keeping the details confidential, we make it less likely that terrorists or criminals will find the nuclear material and steal it for their own purposes. Or consider the content of the documents that WikiLeaks made public. Without commenting on the authenticity of any particular documents, we can observe that many of the cables released by WikiLeaks relate to human rights work carried on around the world. Our diplomats closely collaborate with activists, journalists, and citizens to challenge the misdeeds of oppressive governments. It is dangerous work. By publishing diplomatic cables, WikiLeaks exposed people to even greater risk.

For operations like these, confidentiality is essential, especially in the Internet age when dangerous information can be sent around the world with the click of a keystroke. But of course, governments also have a duty to be transparent. We govern with the consent of the people, and that consent must be informed to be meaningful. So we must be judicious about when we close off our work to the public, and we must review our standards frequently to make sure they are rigorous. In the United States, we have laws designed to ensure that the government makes its work open to the people, and the Obama Administration has also launched an unprecedented initiative to put government data online, to encourage citizen participation, and to generally increase the openness of government.

The U.S. Government’s ability to protect America, to secure the liberties of our people, and to support the rights and freedoms of others around the world depends on maintaining a balance between what’s public and what should and must remain out of the public domain. The scale should and will always be tipped in favor of openness, but tipping the scale over completely serves no one’s interests. Let me be clear. I said that the WikiLeaks incident began with a theft, just as if it had been executed by smuggling papers in a briefcase. The fact that WikiLeaks used the Internet is not the reason we criticized its actions. WikiLeaks does not challenge our commitment to Internet freedom.

And one final word on this matter: There were reports in the days following these leaks that the United States Government intervened to coerce private companies to deny service to WikiLeaks. That is not the case. Now, some politicians and pundits publicly called for companies to disassociate from WikiLeaks, while others criticized them for doing so. Public officials are part of our country’s public debates, but there is a line between expressing views and coercing conduct. Business decisions that private companies may have taken to enforce their own values or policies regarding WikiLeaks were not at the direction of the Obama Administration.

A third challenge is protecting free expression while fostering tolerance and civility. I don’t need to tell this audience that the Internet is home to every kind of speech–false, offensive, incendiary, innovative, truthful, and beautiful.

The multitude of opinions and ideas that crowd the Internet is both a result of its openness and a reflection of our human diversity. Online, everyone has a voice. And the Universal Declaration of Human Rights protects the freedom of expression for all. But what we say has consequences. Hateful or defamatory words can inflame hostilities, deepen divisions, and provoke violence. On the Internet, this power is heightened. Intolerant speech is often amplified and impossible to retract. Of course, the Internet also provides a unique space for people to bridge their differences and build trust and understanding.

Some take the view that, to encourage tolerance, some hateful ideas must be silenced by governments. We believe that efforts to curb the content of speech rarely succeed and often become an excuse to violate freedom of expression. Instead, as it has historically been proven time and time again, the better answer to offensive speech is more speech. People can and should speak out against intolerance and hatred. By exposing ideas to debate, those with merit tend to be strengthened, while weak and false ideas tend to fade away; perhaps not instantly, but eventually.

Now, this approach does not immediately discredit every hateful idea or convince every bigot to reverse his thinking. But we have determined as a society that it is far more effective than any other alternative approach. Deleting writing, blocking content, arresting speakers–these actions suppress words, but they do not touch the underlying ideas. They simply drive people with those ideas to the fringes, where their convictions can deepen, unchallenged.

Last summer, Hannah Rosenthal, the U.S. Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, made a trip to Dachau and Auschwitz with a delegation of American imams and Muslim leaders. Many of them had previously denied the Holocaust, and none of them had ever denounced Holocaust denial. But by visiting the concentration camps, they displayed a willingness to consider a different view. And the trip had a real impact. They prayed together, and they signed messages of peace, and many of those messages in the visitors books were written in Arabic. At the end of the trip, they read a statement that they wrote and signed together condemning without reservation Holocaust denial and all other forms of anti-Semitism.

The marketplace of ideas worked. Now, these leaders had not been arrested for their previous stance or ordered to remain silent. Their mosques were not shut down. The state did not compel them with force. Others appealed to them with facts. And their speech was dealt with through the speech of others.

The United States does restrict certain kinds of speech in accordance with the rule of law and our international obligations. We have rules about libel and slander, defamation, and speech that incites imminent violence. But we enforce these rules transparently, and citizens have the right to appeal how they are applied. And we don’t restrict speech even if the majority of people find it offensive. History, after all, is full of examples of ideas that were banned for reasons that we now see as wrong. People were punished for denying the divine right of kings, or suggesting that people should be treated equally regardless of race, gender, or religion. These restrictions might have reflected the dominant view at the time, and variations on these restrictions are still in force in places around the world.

But when it comes to online speech, the United States has chosen not to depart from our time-tested principles. We urge our people to speak with civility, to recognize the power and reach that their words can have online. We’ve seen in our own country tragic examples of how online bullying can have terrible consequences. Those of us in government should lead by example, in the tone we set and the ideas we champion. But leadership also means empowering people to make their own choices, rather than intervening and taking those choices away. We protect free speech with the force of law, and we appeal to the force of reason to win out over hate.

Now, these three large principles are not always easy to advance at once. They raise tensions, and they pose challenges. But we do not have to choose among them. Liberty and security, transparency and confidentiality, freedom of expression and tolerance–these all make up the foundation of a free, open, and secure society as well as a free, open, and secure internet where universal human rights are respected, and which provides a space for greater progress and prosperity over the long run.

Now, some countries are trying a different approach, abridging rights online and working to erect permanent walls between different activities–economic exchanges, political discussions, religious expressions, and social interactions. They want to keep what they like and suppress what they don’t. But this is no easy task. Search engines connect businesses to new customers, and they also attract users because they deliver and organize news and information. Social networking sites aren’t only places where friends share photos; they also share political views and build support for social causes or reach out to professional contacts to collaborate on new business opportunities.

Walls that divide the Internet, that block political content, or ban broad categories of expression, or allow certain forms of peaceful assembly but prohibit others, or intimidate people from expressing their ideas are far easier to erect than to maintain. Not just because people using human ingenuity find ways around them and through them but because there isn’t an economic Internet and a social Internet and a political Internet; there’s just the Internet. And maintaining barriers that attempt to change this reality entails a variety of costs–moral, political, and economic. Countries may be able to absorb these costs for a time, but we believe they are unsustainable in the long run. There are opportunity costs for trying to be open for business but closed for free expression–costs to a nation’s education system, its political stability, its social mobility, and its economic potential.

When countries curtail Internet freedom, they place limits on their economic future. Their young people don’t have full access to the conversations and debates happening in the world or exposure to the kind of free inquiry that spurs people to question old ways of doing and invent new ones. And barring criticism of officials makes governments more susceptible to corruption, which create economic distortions with long-term effects. Freedom of thought and the level playing field made possible by the rule of law are part of what fuels innovation economies.

So it;s not surprising that the European-American Business Council, a group of more than 70 companies, made a strong public support statement last week for Internet freedom. If you invest in countries with aggressive censorship and surveillance policies, your website could be shut down without warning, your servers hacked by the government, your designs stolen, or your staff threatened with arrest or expulsion for failing to comply with a politically motivated order. The risks to your bottom line and to your integrity will at some point outweigh the potential rewards, especially if there are market opportunities elsewhere.

Now, some have pointed to a few countries, particularly China, that appears to stand out as an exception, a place where Internet censorship is high and economic growth is strong. Clearly, many businesses are willing to endure restrictive internet policies to gain access to those markets, and in the short term, even perhaps in the medium term, those governments may succeed in maintaining a segmented internet. But those restrictions will have long-term costs that threaten one day to become a noose that restrains growth and development.

There are political costs as well. Consider Tunisia, where online economic activity was an important part of the country’s ties with Europe while online censorship was on par with China and Iran, the effort to divide the economic internet from the “everything else” Internet in Tunisia could not be sustained. People, especially young people, found ways to use connection technologies to organize and share grievances, which, as we know, helped fuel a movement that led to revolutionary change. In Syria, too, the government is trying to negotiate a non-negotiable contradiction. Just last week, it lifted a ban on Facebook and YouTube for the first time in three years, and yesterday they convicted a teenage girl of espionage and sentenced her to five years in prison for the political opinions she expressed on her blog.

This, too, is unsustainable. The demand for access to platforms of expression cannot be satisfied when using them lands you in prison. We believe that governments who have erected barriers to Internet freedom, whether they’re technical filters or censorship regimes or attacks on those who exercise their rights to expression and assembly online, will eventually find themselves boxed in. They will face a dictator’s dilemma and will have to choose between letting the walls fall or paying the price to keep them standing, which means both doubling down on a losing hand by resorting to greater oppression and enduring the escalating opportunity cost of missing out on the ideas that have been blocked and people who have been disappeared.

I urge countries everywhere instead to join us in the bet we have made, a bet that an open internet will lead to stronger, more prosperous countries. At its core, it’s an extension of the bet that the United States has been making for more than 200 years, that open societies give rise to the most lasting progress, that the rule of law is the firmest foundation for justice and peace, and that innovation thrives where ideas of all kinds are aired and explored. This is not a bet on computers or mobile phones. It’s a bet on people. We’re confident that together with those partners in government and people around the world who are making the same bet by hewing to universal rights that underpin open societies, we’ll preserve the internet as an open space for all. And that will pay long-term gains for our shared progress and prosperity. The United States will continue to promote an Internet where people’s rights are protected and that it is open to innovation, interoperable all over the world, secure enough to hold people’s trust, and reliable enough to support their work.

In the past year, we have welcomed the emergence of a global coalition of countries, businesses, civil society groups, and digital activists seeking to advance these goals. We have found strong partners in several governments worldwide, and we’ve been encouraged by the work of the Global Network Initiative, which brings together companies, academics, and NGOs to work together to solve the challenges we are facing, like how to handle government requests for censorship or how to decide whether to sell technologies that could be used to violate rights or how to handle privacy issues in the context of cloud computing. We need strong corporate partners that have made principled, meaningful commitments to internet freedom as we work together to advance this common cause.

We realize that in order to be meaningful, online freedoms must carry over into real-world activism. That’s why we are working through our Civil Society 2.0 initiative to connect NGOs and advocates with technology and training that will magnify their impact. We are also committed to continuing our conversation with people everywhere around the world. Last week, you may have heard, we launched Twitter feeds in Arabic and Farsi, adding to the ones we already have in French and Spanish. We’ll start similar ones in Chinese, Russian, and Hindi. This is enabling us to have real-time, two-way conversations with people wherever there is a connection that governments do not block.

Our commitment to internet freedom is a commitment to the rights of people, and we are matching that with our actions. Monitoring and responding to threats to internet freedom has become part of the daily work of our diplomats and development experts. They are working to advance internet freedom on the ground at our embassies and missions around the world. The United States continues to help people in oppressive internet environments get around filters, stay one step ahead of the censors, the hackers, and the thugs who beat them up or imprison them for what they say online.

While the rights we seek to protect and support are clear, the various ways that these rights are violated are increasingly complex. I know some have criticized us for not pouring funding into a single technology, but we believe there is no silver bullet in the struggle against internet repression. There’s no app for that. Start working, those of you out there. And accordingly, we are taking a comprehensive and innovative approach, one that matches our diplomacy with technology, secure distribution networks for tools, and direct support for those on the front lines.

In the last three years, we have awarded more than $20 million in competitive grants through an open process, including interagency evaluation by technical and policy experts to support a burgeoning group of technologists and activists working at the cutting edge of the fight against internet repression. This year, we will award more than $25 million in additional funding. We are taking a venture capital-style approach, supporting a portfolio of technologies, tools, and training, and adapting as more users shift to mobile devices. We have our ear to the ground, talking to digital activists about where they need help, and our diversified approach means we’re able to adapt the range of threats that they face. We support multiple tools, so if repressive governments figure out how to target one, others are available. And we invest in the cutting edge because we know that repressive governments are constantly innovating their methods of oppression and we intend to stay ahead of them.

Likewise, we are leading the push to strengthen cyber security and online innovation, building capacity in developing countries, championing open and interoperable standards and enhancing international cooperation to respond to cyber threats. Deputy Secretary of Defense Lynn gave a speech on this issue just yesterday. All these efforts build on a decade of work to sustain an Internet that is open, secure, and reliable. And in the coming year, the Administration will complete an international strategy for cyberspace, charting the course to continue this work into the future.

This is a foreign policy priority for us, one that will only increase in importance in the coming years. That’s why I’ve created the Office of the Coordinator for Cyber Issues, to enhance our work on cyber security and other issues and facilitate cooperation across the State Department and with other government agencies. I’ve named Christopher Painter, formerly senior director for cyber security at the National Security Council and a leader in the field for 20 years, to head this new office.

The dramatic increase in internet users during the past 10 years has been remarkable to witness. But that was just the opening act. In the next 20 years, nearly 5 billion people will join the network. It is those users who will decide the future.

So we are playing for the long game. Unlike much of what happens online, progress on this front will be measured in years, not seconds. The course we chart today will determine whether those who follow us will get the chance to experience the freedom, security, and prosperity of an open Internet.

As we look ahead, let us remember that Internet freedom isn’t about any one particular activity online. It’s about ensuring that the Internet remains a space where activities of all kinds can take place, from grand, ground-breaking, historic campaigns to the small, ordinary acts that people engage in every day.

We want to keep the Iternet open for the protestor using social media to organize a march in Egypt; the college student emailing her family photos of her semester abroad; the lawyer in Vietnam blogging to expose corruption; the teenager in the United States who is bullied and finds words of support online; for the small business owner in Kenya using mobile banking to manage her profits; the philosopher in China reading academic journals for her dissertation; the scientist in Brazil sharing data in real time with colleagues overseas; and the billions and billions of interactions with the Internet every single day as people communicate with loved ones, follow the news, do their jobs, and participate in the debates shaping their world.

Internet freedom is about defending the space in which all these things occur so that it remains not just for the students here today, but your successors and all who come after you. This is one of the grand challenges of our time. We are engaged in a vigorous effort against those who we have always stood against, who wish to stifle and repress, to come forward with their version of reality and to accept none other. We enlist your help on behalf of this struggle. It’s a struggle for human rights, it’s a struggle for human freedom, and it’s a struggle for human dignity.

Thank you all very much.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110216/will-secretary-of-state-clintons-internet-freedom-agenda-finally-get-traction/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110214/ubermedia-raises-17-5-million-from-accel-index-and-steve-case/ http://allthingsd.com/20110214/ubermedia-raises-17-5-million-from-accel-index-and-steve-case/#comments Mon, 14 Feb 2011 17:04:37 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=40732 UberMedia, which just bought TweetDeck for $30 million in equity last week, has raised $17.5 million, in a round led by Accel Partners.

The valuation for the Pasadena, Calif., start-up founded by well-known entrepreneur Bill Gross (pictured here)–which was actually struck some month ago–is $40 million.

Accel’s Jim Breyer will join the board of UberMedia, maker of social media reading and posting tools, which is currently largely aimed at the Twitter ecosystem.

“We are hoping to work very closely with Twitter, which is certainly our goal, as well as other social media platforms like Facebook,” said Breyer in an interview with BoomTown this morning, answering a question about previous tensions between Twitter and UberMedia. “There will be a lot of efforts to monetize Twitter and there is no silver bullet.”

Index Ventures and Steve Case’s Revolution Ventures also participated in the round.

The company did not reveal the amount raised, nor the valuation for UberMedia.

But many like him are trying to find a way to monetize the huge microblogging platform–including Twitter–and take advantage of its enormous scale.

Gross founded the start-up last spring.

Armed with $3.5 million in venture funding from a group of leading investors, including Index, Revolution, betaworks, First Round Capital and angel investors such as Mahalo’s Jason Calacanis and BuzzMachine’s Jeff Jarvis.

Started in Gross’s Idealab start-up incubator and called TweetUp (and then PostUp), it was initially cast as a keyword-based bidding marketplace akin to Overture/Goto.com, the first paid search system he created a decade ago.

TweetUp also offered an organic search service to surface the best tweets. This put it at odds on several fronts with Twitter, which began to aggressively move to take over key parts of its business that had largely been left to third-party developers.

That still remains UberMedia’s essential goal, and Breyer hopes that the new investment will show Twitter that UberMedia hopes to work in harmony with it, as other developers have done successfully with Facebook. (Accel and Breyer himself are big investors in the social networking giant, so he should know.)

“Like Twitter, we want to drive the customer experience,” he said, pointing out successes such as the Zynga gaming service. “This is a lot like Facebook several years ago and cooperation worked out well for everyone.”

Here’s the official press release:

Accel Partners Leads Investment Round in UberMedia, Jim Breyer Joins Board of Directors

PASADENA, Calif.–February 14, 2011–UberMedia, the leading independent provider of applications for reading and posting to Twitter and other social media platforms, today announced that it completed a financing round led by Jim Breyer of Accel Ventures. Existing investors Steve Case of Revolution Ventures and Danny Rimer of Index Ventures also participated.

“At UberMedia, our goal is to enhance the Twitter experience with functionality in our clients and to be the best partner with Twitter in growing and enhancing their ecosystem,” said Bill Gross, Founder and CEO. “In particular, the addition of Jim Breyer to our board will really enable us to succeed at this mission. His experience on the boards of Wal-Mart, Facebook, Marvel Entertainment, Dell and so many other high-profile consumer brands will be particularly helpful.”

“We’ve been watching closely Bill’s efforts at UberMedia to build upon the ground-breaking communications platform created by Twitter,” said Jim Breyer of Accel Partners. “We see a tremendous business in the kinds of innovations in user experience being developed at UberMedia. The result of these efforts will be an expansion in the number and variety of people engaged with Twitter as well as a method for advertisers to reach consumers in highly targeted and relevant ways.”

And here are two video interview I did with Gross last April when the company was founded:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110214/ubermedia-raises-17-5-million-from-accel-index-and-steve-case/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110214/cooliris-raises-9-6m-gets-social-with-mobile-photo-sharing-app/ http://allthingsd.com/20110214/cooliris-raises-9-6m-gets-social-with-mobile-photo-sharing-app/#comments Mon, 14 Feb 2011 10:00:10 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=3547 Cooliris, which makes tools to help people consume media on the Web and various devices, is changing focus with a new flagship product that’s about sharing photos rather than browsing through them.

The company has a not-too-shabby 35 million downloads to date of its Wall product, and is the default media gallery for Google’s Android. But now it’s venturing out into the oh-so-hot mobile media-sharing space (see: Instagram, Path, Picplz) with a photo app called LiveShare–for iPhone, Android, Windows Phone 7 and the Web–that’s focused on groups.

Cooliris is also announcing today that it’s raised $9.6 million in Series C funding from investors including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (which also recently backed Path), Deutsche Telekom’s T-Venture, DAG Ventures and the Westly Group. The five-year-old Palo Alto-based company has now raised a total of $28.6 million and employs 45 people.

Cooliris’s new LiveShare app helps users create photo streams for a particular event or group of people. Everyone who is invited to a stream can share photos, taken on a phone or elsewhere. Cooliris CEO Soujanya Bhumkar said that he thinks this “hyperpersonalized” approach fits with how people think about sharing: With respect to the four aspects of space, time, interests and relationships.

What does that actually mean? While Path pushes users to identify their closest 50 friends for intimate sharing of personal photos and videos, LiveShare gives users the option of sharing with whoever is appropriate for any context.

There are many alternatives to LiveShare, especially for Apple’s iOS platform. Will users want to install yet another app because of its particular set of nifty features and the flexibility of its sharing options? Perhaps not, but people seem to increasingly utilize tools to segment their online identities, so LiveShare could become part of that trend.

There’s also competition from the social Web giant Facebook, which provides a similar way to filter its Web site based on designated friend groups (though it has not disclosed how popular the product is with users). LiveShare, like many social apps, gets its friend network information from users plugging into Facebook.

But Cooliris isn’t starting from scratch with this product. For instance, the company is making use of its existing relationship with Google, so LiveShare will be incorporated into Android’s Gallery. But with nearly $30 million raised, expectations for LiveShare will be very, very high.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110214/cooliris-raises-9-6m-gets-social-with-mobile-photo-sharing-app/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110210/yahoos-got-a-digital-newstand/ http://allthingsd.com/20110210/yahoos-got-a-digital-newstand/#comments Thu, 10 Feb 2011 17:23:57 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=57572 Chief Product Officer Blake Irving defines Yahoo as “the premier digital media company in content and context.” That’s a far shorter answer than the one he provided for the “what is Yahoo” question last year. A bit more cogent too. And it sets the stage for the company’s latest push into mobile content, Livestand, which it announced moments ago.

Designed to offer consumers content based on their interests, Livestand is a sort of personalized digital newsstand for tablets. It will feature content from Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! News, Flickr and celebrity gossip site OMG, and it will customize that content according to user preference as well as time of day. “Tablets are great for a laid-back experience, but most magazine content remains trapped online,” Irving said this morning . “But consumers don’t want a digitized magazine. They want rich media, they want connections beyond just commenting.”

Which is what Yahoo is trying to give them in Livestand. The platform will be integrated with Yahoo! Finance as well as Yahoo! Mail, and it will support content sharing and commenting. “We see this as the next generation of Yahoo and we’re putting the full force of Yahoo behind it,” Irving said.

The hope here, of course, is that this will play well with advertisers dissapointed by shallow digital experiences. “You don’t exactly curl up with your PC, the way you do with a magazine,” said Irving. “With Livestand, brands can finally match the intimacy that magazines once brought to their audiences.” That means offering them ads that adapt and respond to user interaction and the tools to create “a TV-like ad experience.”

Yahoo Livestand will debut on iOS and Android in the first half of 2011. No word yet on subscription pricing.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110210/yahoos-got-a-digital-newstand/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110209/bing-overlord-satya-nadella-promoted-to-president-of-server-and-tools-at-microsoft/ http://allthingsd.com/20110209/bing-overlord-satya-nadella-promoted-to-president-of-server-and-tools-at-microsoft/#comments Wed, 09 Feb 2011 16:24:56 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=40569

Satya Nadella (pictured here), the Microsoft exec who has been in charge of its Bing search effort, has been promoted to president of its Server and Tools Business.

He replaces Bob Muglia, a longtime exec who was ousted recently in CEO Steve Ballmer’s effort to shake things up at the company and stress the company’s technical expertise.

A 19-year Microsoft veteran, Nadella has most recently led the engineering efforts as an SVP in the Online Services Division, which includes Bing, the MSN portal and online advertising efforts.

“Nadella brings deep engineering and online services knowledge to $15 billion business,” said a Microsoft press release just issued.

In related news, Amitabh Srivastava, the SVP in the Server and Cloud Division who runs its Windows Azure cloud and Windows Server efforts, will leave the company. He was considered a leading internal candidate for the top job in the Server and Tools Business that Nadella got.

Both internal and external execs were eyed for the job, but it’s likely Nadella got it because of his early career in the server arena at Microsoft, as well as his experience running one of the biggest and most complex cloud efforts on the Web at Bing.

Indeed, though his efforts were costly and perhaps even futile, Nadella has had some success in innovating search for Microsoft with Bing, including delivering a well-regarded and quickly evolving product and improving market share.

He also was key in striking Microsoft’s advertising and search partnership with Yahoo.

He will have his hands full running the Server and Tools Business, which is critical to the company’s future and its cloud computing aspirations.

Microsoft said Nadella will be in charge of strategy, engineering, marketing and product development for Microsoft’s server, tools and cloud platform efforts.

“This includes developing the technology road map and vision to drive adoption of the company’s products, tools and services, and delivering the company’s next generation of cloud solutions for business customers,” Microsoft said.

Delivering such cloudtastic results will be a tall order, of course.

According to a recent post by New Enterprise’s Arik Hesseldahl:

“The Server and Tools Business is at $14.9 billion in annual revenue (fiscal 2010) Microsoft’s third largest division behind the Windows/Windows Live Division and and the Microsoft Business Division, both of which reported revenues north of $18 billion in 2010. On Muglia’s watch sales at STB grew more than 12 percent, and its operating margins went from 31 percent in 2008 to 37 percent in 2010. However, STB is nowhere near as profitable as the other two divisions: Business Division reported operating margins of 63 percent in 2010 while Windows saw 70 percent. Ballmer says in his memo that he’s eager to see stronger growth from STB.”

Here is the official press release, but more to come:

Microsoft Appoints Satya Nadella as President of Server and Tools Business

Nadella brings deep engineering and online services knowledge to $15 billion business.

REDMOND, Wash.–Feb. 9, 2011–Microsoft Corp. today promoted Senior Vice President Satya Nadella to president of Microsoft’s Server and Tools Business.

“We’re already making strong traction across our Server and Tools Business by embracing cloud services,” said Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer. “Satya has deep experience in both our server business and online services, which will help accelerate our momentum while setting the course to deliver the cloud computing scenarios of the future.”

As president of the Server and Tools Business, Nadella will oversee the overall strategy, engineering, marketing and product development for Microsoft’s server, tools and cloud platform efforts. This includes developing the technology road map and vision to drive adoption of the company’s products, tools and services, and delivering the company’s next generation of cloud solutions for business customers.

“Our server and tools business is one of the fastest growing and most profitable businesses at Microsoft,” Nadella said. “I see great opportunity for Microsoft to grow the business and also lead the way in the transformation of enterprise IT. I’m excited to work with such a high-caliber team to chart the path for our continued success today and growth in the future.”

Nadella, 43, has been with the company for 19 years and most recently led the engineering efforts in the Online Services Division, which includes overseeing the technical strategy for one of the largest cloud infrastructures in the world, spanning the company’s Search, Portal and Advertising platforms.

Nadella joined the Online Services Division in April 2007, and was instrumental in leading the technical efforts for several critical milestones such as the launch of Bing, new releases of MSN, and the integration of Yahoo! across Bing and adCenter. Under his leadership, the Online Services Division has also built a strong engineering organization by attracting some of the most experienced technical minds from within Microsoft and across the industry.

Before joining the Online Services Division, Nadella led Microsoft Business Solutions, which focuses on the Microsoft Dynamics line of enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management products, and spent several years leading engineering efforts in Microsoft’s Server Group.

As announced in January 2011, Bob Muglia, previously president of the Server and Tools Business, will leave the company this summer. Muglia will work with Nadella as he transitions to his new role leading the Server and Tools Business.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110209/bing-overlord-satya-nadella-promoted-to-president-of-server-and-tools-at-microsoft/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110207/exclusive-web-app-publisher-conduit-expands-into-mobile/ http://allthingsd.com/20110207/exclusive-web-app-publisher-conduit-expands-into-mobile/#comments Mon, 07 Feb 2011 11:00:10 +0000 Ina Fried http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/?p=3588 Conduit, a start-up whose tools enable publishers to easily create Web apps from their content, plans to announce this week that its tools can now also be used to create programs for the iPhone and Android.

Conduit president Adam Boyden said in an interview that small publishers and even plenty of larger ones are having trouble keeping pace as the number of mobile platforms grows.

“it gets really complex really quickly,” Boyden said, noting that publishers need not only to develop their apps, but also keep them fresh and updated, and find ways to promote them. Given how similar that is to the Web app business–and the growing power of HTML5 and Web apps in general–Boyden said he sees a huge opportunity in mobile. Conduit’s apps, Boyden said, will meet the standards to be included in Apple’s App Store and Google’s Android Market.

Less clear, though, is how the company will make money. It plans to make development of the Web apps free, but will look to find ways to generate revenue as apps are successful.

“We are going to examine and experiment with lots of different models,” Boyden said. “We will work out a model where we can get remunerated in a way that makes sense for everyone.”

Currently, Conduit makes its money through its eponymous Web app site and as a big maker of custom toolbars. The company made some headlines last year when it switched from Google to Bing. About half of Conduit’s revenue comes from toolbars, with the other half coming from the Web app part of the business. The 200-person company is profitable, Boyden said.

Although the company has a lot of big-name publishers on the Web side, including companies like Univision and Major League Baseball, it is starting with a more modest list on the mobile side. Soccer team Liverpool and game makers Bigpoint and Exent are among its early mobile customers.

The company will be in Barcelona next week (as will Mobilized) for the big Mobile World Congress trade show, where it hopes to formally kick off the mobile push.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110207/exclusive-web-app-publisher-conduit-expands-into-mobile/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110125/facebook-testing-social-commerce-feature-buy-with-friends/ http://allthingsd.com/20110125/facebook-testing-social-commerce-feature-buy-with-friends/#comments Tue, 25 Jan 2011 22:35:56 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=2761 Facebook is testing a new feature called Buy With Friends to give users social incentives to increase their purchases of virtual goods from games on its platform, said Deb Liu, Facebook commerce product marketing manager, at the Inside Social Apps conference in San Francisco today.

The program will encourage users to purchase virtual goods that their friends have already bought.

Speaking to an audience of application developers who are concerned about Facebook’s move to require developers to use its Facebook Credits virtual currency system, Liu mentioned Buy With Friends as an example of a program Facebook is providing that will help developers make more money.

Liu said Buy With Friends gives developers tools to help users share their in-game purchases. In testing so far, she said “more than 50 percent of users elected to share a purchase.” As an example, after a friend has made and shared a purchase, a player might see a message that says, “Your friend has unlocked this deal for you–get 40 percent off this special monster food,” Liu said.

I’ve argued in the past that much of what we call “social commerce” isn’t very social yet, but this seems like an example of a product that actually deserves that label.

Facebook is also offering incentives, including promotion and premium ad targeting, to developers who use Facebook Credits as their in-game currency.

Facebook Credits are used by some 150 developers, but many of them elect to also use their own branded currency so as not to be locked into the Facebook system. This introduces a silly amount of complexity, with users often having to convert their real-world money into Facebook Credits into in-game currency, all at different exchange rates.

Liu also said that Facebook is testing a feature that improves users’ ability to purchase additional credits without leaving the game environment.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110125/facebook-testing-social-commerce-feature-buy-with-friends/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110124/people-like-ipad-magazine-ads-says-ipad-magazine-company/ http://allthingsd.com/20110124/people-like-ipad-magazine-ads-says-ipad-magazine-company/#comments Mon, 24 Jan 2011 13:30:46 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=28493 Have you bought an ad in an iPad magazine in the last year? Then you’re in luck! Because people who read iPad magazines like looking at the ads in those apps, and they’re more likely to buy stuff from the people who pay for them.

So says Adobe. Which, of course, is in the iPad magazine business, via publishing tools it provides for companies like Condé Nast.

No need to belabor the link. But if you want, you can read a study that supports Adobe’s argument, conducted by a professor at the University of Connecticut’s Communications department, using the inaugural edition of Condé Nast’s Wired iPad app. Here’s a chart!

And really, there’s nothing wrong–or at least nothing new–about a company promoting research that supports its sales pitch. Happens all the time.

The problem the research doesn’t address, and which Adobe can’t really do much about, is that so far iPad magazine apps simply haven’t been that popular. Which means that advertisers who sponsor them aren’t getting their message in front of enough eyeballs, receptive or no.

Maybe that will change if the publishers and Apple can work out their subscription logjam. Or maybe Google, supported by a gazillion new Android tablets, will help make these things a hit.

It’s early days, still. I can say that with confidence, and I don’t even have a Ph.D.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110124/people-like-ipad-magazine-ads-says-ipad-magazine-company/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110118/microsoft-and-hp-show-off-the-fruits-of-their-partnership/ http://allthingsd.com/20110118/microsoft-and-hp-show-off-the-fruits-of-their-partnership/#comments Wed, 19 Jan 2011 05:00:51 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=1919 About a year ago, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft announced a three-year, $250 million deal to team up around cloud computing. It was a strange announcement chock-full of buzzwords. They said they would “collaborate on an engineering roadmap for data management machines; converged, prepackaged application solutions; comprehensive virtualization offerings; and integrated management tools.” Know what any of that means?

Today’s the day we all find out. The two are showing the first fruits of their combined quarter billion dollars worth of labor. The pair announced they have built four enterprise-focused appliances that they say will combine applications, infrastructure and productivity tools into a single unified system. The first half of this quartet is being announced today, with more to follow.

One is the HP Business Decision Appliance, which is intended to run business intelligence applications. The appliance, they say, greatly reduces the time and effort for companies to deploy and manage business intelligence, which is a fancy way of saying you’re analyzing the data from the operation of your business, and looking for patterns or trends that might not otherwise be apparent. It’s optimized to run for Microsoft’s SQL server database software and its SharePoint collboration software, and takes less than an hour to install, they promise.

The second is the HP Business Data Warehouse Appliance, a data store designed for small- and mid-size companies that they say delivers performance that’s suitable for a big enterprise, but doesn’t require an administrator to run it. It’s a smaller version of the HP Enterprise Data Warehouse Appliance, which the two first previewed in November and is available now.

Next up is a messaging appliance geared toward making it easy to install Microsoft Exchange 2010, the server piece of Outlook, Microsoft’s all-purpose email, calendar and contact software that’s so widely used in companies around the world. Its formal name is the HP E5000 Messaging System for Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, and the two companies say it’s the industry’s first self-contained server for enterprise-class messaging that can be deployed in only a few hours. It comes pre-configured and with “best practices” designed in. The mailboxes are large, centrally archived and available to any device. It will be available in March.

What’s after that? HP and Microsoft are also working on something they call the HP Database Consolidation Appliance, which can bring hundreds of databases into a single appliance. This one will run SQL server and Microsoft’s Hyper-V Cloud.

It’s all about making IT projects easy to deploy, says Mark Potter, HP’s senior vice president and general manager for industry standard servers and software. “It can take anywhere from one to 18 months to roll out a sophisticated service to end users,” Potter told me in an interview yesterday. “About 32 percent of all IT projects are rated a success. It takes our customers a lot of time, planning and risk. We’re trying to bring a solution to the market that does for business applications what Microsoft Office did for desktop productivity.”

Why spend so much to team up? Microsoft and HP think that by 2015 there’s a combined market worth $55 billion for business intelligence, data warehousing, messaging and online transactions, making that quarter billion potentially worth it. Now they just have to prove these appliances can sell.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110118/microsoft-and-hp-show-off-the-fruits-of-their-partnership/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110117/i-can-has-30m-lolcats-become-funny-business/ http://allthingsd.com/20110117/i-can-has-30m-lolcats-become-funny-business/#comments Tue, 18 Jan 2011 05:00:58 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=2412 Would the thought of investing $30 million in a set of WordPress blogs and tools for captioning pictures of cats make you laugh out loud? That’s what Foundry Group, Madrona Venture Group, Avalon Ventures and SoftBank Capital have done, putting together the first institutional funding for Cheezburger, the LOLcat and Fail Blog publisher.

Cheezburger was founded in 2007 by Ben Huh, who raised $2.25 million from angel investors at the time to buy the blog “I Can Has Cheezburger.” Huh has run the company as a lean, profitable operation since then, with 50 employees based in Seattle.

“This is a company that’s borne of no one’s expectations, and we’re totally fine with that,” Huh said in an interview Monday, admitting that, yes, “it’s a cat-picture Web site.”

Huh said Cheezburger had fended off multiple funding offers throughout the years, but finally decided to call back some VCs this fall. “If you’re going to do something, you might as well do it well,” he explained.

Today the ad-supported Cheezburger network of humor sites has 375 million page views and 110 million video views per month, with its 16.5 million visitors uploading 500,000 pictures and videos.

“We’re not here to flip,” said Huh, explaining that the company will use its $30 million to ensure it creates a long-term viable business. He said Cheezburger would open up 18 new job listings Tuesday alongside the funding announcement. Huh said his goal is to build “the Disney of the 21st century.”

Image via I Can Has Cheezburger user jasmine.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110117/i-can-has-30m-lolcats-become-funny-business/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110114/happy-10th-birthday-wikipedia-whats-next-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20110114/happy-10th-birthday-wikipedia-whats-next-video/#comments Fri, 14 Jan 2011 18:04:34 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=2383 Wikipedia now seems like an enduring institution on the Web, but the site was only founded 10 years ago, tomorrow.

Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, says it is just recently that the site has gotten itself on sustainable financial footing, and has become widely accepted as a useful, quality resource.

We stopped by the nonprofit’s San Francisco headquarters, which is located amidst a sea of tech companies in the city’s SOMA district, on the eve of the big anniversary, which Wikipedia is celebrating with a set of relatively mellow user meet-ups around the world.

Gardner spoke about the evolution of Wikimedia as an organization, and set out its goals for the coming years. We videoed the part of the interview where she sets the scene for the 10th anniversary.

Wikipedia is coming off a successful grassroots fundraiser, where it was able to raise $16 million from users, in part due to founder Jimmy Wales’s face greeting users every time they visited the site until the end of the campaign. That’s double the amount raised in a similar campaign the year before.

And over the last 18 months, Wikimedia orchestrated a wide-scale community discussion of its strategy, aided by collaboration expert Eugene Eric Kim, which resulted in a set of goals to take the organization and its many volunteers forward.

Wikipedia now has cumulative 380 million edits, resulting in 17.8 million articles in 250 languages by eight million user accounts, of which about 100,000 edit at least five times per month. It has 52 people in its San Francisco headquarters, which Gardner took over in 2007.

The nonprofit’s three-part mandate is to increase Wikipedia participation, quality and reach. Its big focus for the coming year will be reach, according to Gardner, specifically targeting poorer areas of the world where Wikipedia has so far proved to be less popular.

The idea, said Gardner, is that if people in these places have the tools and exposure to contribute to Wikipedia, the resulting content will be better representative of the world, as well as more comprehensive.

“You can’t blame editors for not being representative,” said Gardner. “The way to solve this is not to make them feel bad.”

A major implementation of the initiative will be opening a Wikimedia office in India in the next couple of months. Gardner had just recently returned from a trip to India when we spoke.

Meanwhile, Wikimedia’s product team is also working to redo its registration and discussion tools, and future projects include a better system for understanding user reputations.

The company has also started a campus ambassador program at colleges, which Gardner said is promising in part due to the folks who have turned out so far. Unlike with Wikipedia, where 87 percent of contributors are men, the campus ambassador volunteers were 50 percent women.

Another college effort is a program with 25 public policy classes to improve the Wikipedia pages on a particular subject matter.

And on the infrastructure front, Wikimedia is finally moving its data center out of the hurricane zone in Florida to a dedicated space in Virginia. The nonprofit is also looking to cache the site from more locations (it currently does so in Amsterdam) so it can be more quickly accessible in more parts of the world.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110114/happy-10th-birthday-wikipedia-whats-next-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110110/head-of-microsofts-servers-and-business-unit-leaving-this-summer/ http://allthingsd.com/20110110/head-of-microsofts-servers-and-business-unit-leaving-this-summer/#comments Mon, 10 Jan 2011 17:45:04 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=1551 Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced today in an email to employees that Bob Muglia, the company’s head of its Servers and Tools Business Bob Muglia will be leaving this summer. No replacement has been named. And I’m told by a source familiar that Muglia is not leaving for another job.

Muglia is a 22-year Microsoft veteran who joined from Rolm in 1988 and was the first product manager for SQL Server. The news comes as Microsoft announced a preview of its next generation Enterprise Resource Planning, Dynamics AX 6. I’m told there’s no connection between the timing of the two.

Muglia would be the third division head to leave Microsoft in recent memory. The others are Stephen Elop who left to run Nokia last year, and Robbie Bach, who ran Microsoft’s entertainment division.

Muglia only been elevated to the job two years ago, nearly to the day. The Server and Tools Business is at $14.9 billion in annual revenue (fiscal 2010) Microsoft’s third largest division behind the Windows/Windows Live Division and and the Microsoft Business Division, both of which reported revenues north of $18 billion in 2010. On Muglia’s watch sales at STB grew more than 12 percent, and its operating margins went from 31 percent in 2008 to 37 percent in 2010. However, STB is nowhere near as profitable as the other two divisions: Business Division reported operating margins of 63 percent in 2010 while Windows saw 70 percent. Ballmer says in his memo that he’s eager to see stronger growth from STB.

Muglia is described by people I’ve talked to as a capable, well-respected manager who has over the years weathered the various corporate storms that have hit him, and usually come out on top. In 2002 for instance, he was replaced as the head of Microsoft’s .Net initiative. Reports at the time said he had requested the change out of frustration with the business model. By 2003 he was running the Windows Server Division and in 2005 was tapped to run STB as a senior vice president. He’s also been the key executive on Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform.

Ballmer’s memo to Microsoft employees is below.

From: Steve Ballmer
Sent: Monday, January 10, 2011
To: Microsoft – All Employees
Subject: STB – Building on Success, Moving Forward

There are very few $15B businesses in the software industry, and Microsoft is the only company that has built three of them. While Windows and Office are household words, our Server and Tools Business has quietly and steadily grown to be the unquestioned leader in server computing. We have driven the industry forward and established the foundation for an entire generation of business applications. We have overcome significant competitive challenges. Over the past twenty years, the outstanding leadership from everyone involved in STB has made it a $15B business today.

We are now ready to build on our success and move forward into the era of cloud computing. Once again, Microsoft and our STB team are defining the future of business computing. In October, we completed an incredibly successful PDC where we detailed the future of the cloud, outlining Platform as a Service and demonstrating the rapid advancement of Windows Azure.

The best time to think about change is when you are in a position of strength, and that’s where we are today with STB – leading the server business, successful with our developer tools, and poised to lead the rapidly emerging cloud future. Bob Muglia and I have been talking about the overall business and what is needed to accelerate our growth. In this context, I have decided that now is the time to put new leadership in place for STB. This is simply recognition that all businesses go through cycles and need new and different talent to manage through those cycles. Bob has been a phenomenal partner throughout this process, and he and his leadership team have the right strategy in place.

In conjunction with this leadership change, Bob has decided to leave Microsoft this summer. He will continue to actively run STB as I conduct an internal and external search for the new leader. Bob will onboard the new leader and will also complete additional projects for me.

Bob has been a founder and leader of our server business from its earliest inception. He has led our Developer, Office, and Mobile Devices Divisions, and key parts of Windows NT and our Online Services business. I’ve worked with him in many capacities over the years and I’ve always appreciated his customer focus, technical depth, people leadership skills, and his positive energy. I want to thank Bob for his hard work, many accomplishments, and his focus on putting Microsoft first for 23 years.

We enter this new decade with STB providing the platform for today’s business solutions, and uniquely well-positioned to drive the future of cloud computing. I believe STB will continue to lead the industry with outstanding products and services for our customers and exceptional results for our business.

Thanks,
Steve

---

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110110/head-of-microsofts-servers-and-business-unit-leaving-this-summer/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20101221/fashion-community-strutting-user-generated-trends-down-the-cat-walk/ http://allthingsd.com/20101221/fashion-community-strutting-user-generated-trends-down-the-cat-walk/#comments Wed, 22 Dec 2010 02:58:14 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=919 Fashionistas may roll their eyes at the effort, but Polyvore is trying to make designing and merchandising apparel more data driven–and presumably less arbitrary.

To do so, the online fashion community will be crunching user-generated data to roll out analytical tools for designers and retailers. Think Quantcast or Compete, but for the fashion industry.

The beta tool, called Style Analytics, will be free and openly available to anyone on Polyvore’s Web site. It’s expected to launch officially tomorrow afternoon.

The data points are coming from its community of users, who create virtual outfits–or what they call “collages” of clothing–by mixing and matching shirts, pants, dresses, shoes, skirts and accessories from around the Web.

Jess Lee, Polyvore’s co-founder and head of product management, said it will show what’s trending, so brands can make better decisions. Specifically, it shows how consumers associate your brand, for instance, with Abercrombie & Fitch or Juicy Couture.

“The fashion industry, from designing to merchandising and marketing is inefficient and not data driven,” she said. “Our goal is to open it up and make it more democratic and more data driven.”

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company has raised about $8.7 million in venture capital since 2007. Each month, its two million registered users create one million collages that generate 140 million page views.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101221/fashion-community-strutting-user-generated-trends-down-the-cat-walk/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101221/microsoft-weve-sold-1-5-million-windows-phones-if-you-must-know/ http://allthingsd.com/20101221/microsoft-weve-sold-1-5-million-windows-phones-if-you-must-know/#comments Tue, 21 Dec 2010 16:20:38 +0000 Ina Fried http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/?p=1202 Redmond decided to finally come clean on Windows Phone 7 sales, announcing on Tuesday that its partners have sold 1.5 million units since its new phones hit the market six weeks ago.

“We know we have tough competition, and this is a completely new product,” Vice President Achim Berg said in an article on the company’s press Web site. “We’re in the race–it’s not a sprint but we are certainly gaining momentum and we’re in it for the long run.”

Until now, Microsoft had said that it was “happy” with sales, but had refused to say how many devices had sold. AT&T and T-Mobile had also declined to say how many models had sold since U.S. sales started Nov. 8. Windows Phone 7 models went on sale in Europe in late October.

Berg repeated that the sales have met Microsoft’s expectations.

“Yes, and I think our expectations are realistic for a new platform,” he said, noting that the company is essentially starting over with Windows Phone 7. He also cautioned against comparing it to the competition. “It’s a bit of apples and oranges comparison; our numbers are similar to the performance of other first generation mobile platforms,” Berg said. “We introduced a new platform with Windows Phone 7, and when you do that it takes time to educate partners and consumers on what you’re delivering, and drive awareness and interest in your new offering. We’re comfortable with where we are, and we are here for the long run; Windows Phone 7 is just the beginning.”

Microsoft is expected to announce an update for Windows Phone 7 in January that will add a copy-and-paste function as well as support for CDMA carriers. That will allow Verizon and Sprint to offer Windows Phone 7 models. Both carriers have said they will, but Microsoft made the decision to delay CDMA support until next year in order to meet its goal of having the initial version out by this year’s holiday season.

Berg also noted it plans to have phones at a variety of price points next year. Nearly all of the models that went on sale in the U.S. were priced at $199, although there has been some significant discounting.

IDC analyst Al Hilwa said in a note that he is particularly impressed by the speed with which Windows Phone 7 applications have hit the market.

“The Windows Phone 7 Marketplace reaching 4,000 apps two months after launch has to be one of the most rapid ramp-ups in recent times,” he said in a note to reporters. “Of course with both iPhone and Android app stores being much bigger, Microsoft still has its work cut out for it. However, reaching this milestone faster than Android which took from Oct 2008 to March 2009 to reach about the same level, it is not bad!”

Hilwa also said that Microsoft hasn’t done bad in having 10 phones on the market in 30 countries.

“Windows Phone 7 has changed the conversation and I would not be surprised if Microsoft had the third largest app portfolio in the industry by the middle of next year,” he said, pointing to the company’s strong set of developer tools.

Update: It is worth noting that the 1.5 million units represent “sell in”–that is, the phones that device makers like Samsung and HTC have sold to carriers, not the number of phones actually purchased by consumers. We’ll have to wait a bit to hear about those “sell through” numbers.

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