So it’s a good time to get some perspective on what he learned during the experience, and how he deals with the Web at his newish job at Turner’s TBS.

In some ways, O’Brien told fellow Time Warner employee Piers Morgan at the cable industry’s annual convention yesterday, things haven’t changed that much: In an ideal world, he’d like people to watch his show live, when it airs.

But he also knows it doesn’t work that way, at all. And he’s okay with that, and he’s learned to embrace YouTube, Tumblr, Twitter, etc.:

When I got started in the business in ’93, the obsesssion was: Never give anything away. Don’t tell anybody … you want it to be a surprise when they watch the show. You want to tease them, but get them to watch the show.

And what we have found is true is that this is a different generation. It works differently now. You can show them exactly what Will Ferrell did [on O'Brien's show], and get it out there, so there’s no “surprise” …

The days of, “I only want people to experience me at 11, on TBS” — those days are over. The audience is too fragmented, they’re too distracted, and a whole generation is growing up that doesn’t watch television that way.

You can watch the entire 22-minute interview, which moves along quite quickly, below. Thanks to the NCTA for the video.

But now, both Mr. Karp, a 25-year-old New Yorker, and his company are heading into a risky new phase: Making the site profitable. For the first time, he is making plans to sell advertising and sponsorships to Tumblr’s network of bloggers and their followers.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

It has been relatively quiet there in the Utah desert ever since, which is odd, because it had been such a chatty company, throwing parties to kill old outdated identities, holding complicated math contests to guess its new name, things like that.

Now it’s about to get noisy again. Effective today, you’re going to start hearing a lot more from Domo and from its employees, and not because its new product is ready. Not quite. (James tells me the company will be talking about it this summer.)

No, starting today, all employees — everyone in the company — will be required as a condition of employment to get seriously engaged on social media in all its various forms in order to make Domo part of the wider conversations taking place on Twitter and Facebook and Foursquare and Pinterest and the rest. It’s called the #Domosocial experiment, and will last eight weeks. James puts it thusly in a post on the company blog:

“The program is designed to get everyone here engaged with and learning from consumer and social technologies. The goal is to help us develop a better product, understand the viral nature of web offerings more effectively, assist in getting the Domo brand out there, enable better customer conversations and see what impact it all has on our business.”

Part of the intent, James told me, is a matter of geography and culture. Being based in Utah, Domo employees are probably better than their equal numbers at other Utah start-ups when it comes to being facile with the ebb and flow of the daily global conversation that takes place on all the social spaces. But they’re probably not as familiar with it all as their rivals in Silicon Valley.

James has seen this sort of thing before. He started Omniture in Utah in 1996 and by 2009 sold it to Adobe for $1.8 billion. “With Domo, I wanted to ensure that we are every bit as adept at understanding and leveraging social as any other bleeding-edge startup,” he wrote.

But on top of that, he’s turning the effort into a live case study to see just how much of a difference it makes in Domo’s business prospects, if any. The company will track important metrics and share them with the world. “We’ll track how things change week after week. The good, the bad and the ugly, it’s all going to be public,” he told me.

Though not about everything. There’s a list of “don’ts.” Don’t tweet about deals in the pipeline, don’t debate with or quarrel with the boss on Facebook. Don’t post about meetings or leak financial information.

What do employees stand to benefit? The best among them will be getting cash rewards for their performance, extra days off, that sort of thing.

What does he expect? He’s been exploring social media pretty seriously for the last six months, and occasionally now gets stopped in the local mall by people who recognize him. “You start having influence in ways you didn’t before,” James told me. He learned with a 10-page article he shared on Twitter, where he has about 12,000 followers, that he experienced a 15 percent click-through rate. “The influence will increase dramatically,” he told me. Also, Domo’s development team will have their eyes opened to the finer points of what works and what doesn’t with social features that are under development at Domo. “We don’t want to re-invent what Facebook and Twitter did, but if you’re not intimately familiar with how those things work, then how can you learn from their mistakes?”

Yahoo turned in better-than-expected earnings today in its first quarter, and — as usual — I will be liveblogging the call with CEO Scott Thompson.

Yahoo beat Wall Street estimates in its first-quarter earnings report earlier today, with revenues of $1.08 billion and earnings of 23 cents. That’s a gain of 28 percent from a year ago in net earnings and 38 percent per diluted shares.

Earlier:
2:03 pm: We begin with a new investor relations dude, who has replaced Marta Nichols. She is now CEO Scott Thompson’s new chief of staff.

His name is Joon and he seems much more festive than Marta, who was very, very serious.

I could not be more thrilled.

Thompson comes on quickly enough and he is also pretty jaunty.

Yahoo has been “moving very fast” on a range of things. And how — this guy seems to eat Ritalin for breakfast.

But there is still a long way to go, he notes.

“I am not satisfied with the pace of top-line growth,” said Thompson, who added he would not be until Yahoo was keeping up with others like Google, which turned in a much stronger report last week.

He can’t get no satisfaction — but he will!

Thompson said one problem was still its ongoing search and advertising partnership with Microsoft. It’s still rocky in terms of monetization and more.

2:09 pm: But first, it is CFO Tim Morse’s turn to re-read the results that were just released.

I am not actually listening until he gets to the part about Thompson giving more deets soon.

Morse is teeing this up by noting that Yahoo is adding more to its bag of tricks beyond search and display, such as commerce.

This will take investments, which are core to success.

Thompson is back: “This business can and will grow going forward.”

I am holding him to that one!

He starts first by talking about Yahoo’s content business, which remains strong, but he points out the obvious: Engagement is off.

In other words, the kids love Facebook. Also Instagram. Also Tumblr.

That’s why Thompson says he told the staff of Yahoo to rethink it all when he arrived in January.

The conclusion:

“Yahoo has been doing way too much for too long and has only been doing a few thing well.”

As in, jack of all trades, master of none.

“We have to be clearer going forward about what we won’t do,” said Thompson.

2:22 pm: He goes over some specifics.

Shutting down 50 properties — Thompson does not say which, though.

Consolidating platforms.

Dedicating key teams to innovation.

Something else about being nimbler.

Data. Also data. Did I say data?

Research and development only for Yahoo-owned and -operated properties.

That is six points, which will be underscored by better execution.

Thompson has been talking about the “complex processes” that was once called peanut butter by one former exec.

Peanut butter is sticky and that’s the point.

2:26 pm: Oops, when talking about layoffs, Thompson says “PayPal” and not “people.” He used to run the eBay payments unit.

Thompson moves to the board changes — five new members and the jacking of five from previous year.

He then defends his decision to sue Facebook over patent infringement. “Facebook must do the same or change its practices,” he sad.

Thompson adds the company is in “active” talks with its Asian partners, Softbank of Japan and Alibaba of China.

And some news! Talks related to its Japanese assets have a gap in valuation, so Yahoo is focusing on the Chinese ones.

And in summation:

“We don’t have to reinvent who we are, but we do need to reinvent our experiences … We have to move and think like a growth company.”

That would be nice.

2:32 pm: Time for Q&A, in which I like to see exactly how wimpy Wall Street analysts can be in asking tough questions.

The first is asking about some strategery specifics, including whether it can get the cool $1 billion AOL just got from Microsoft.

Thompson talks about the new commerce unit, which will be co-led by someone who worked with him at PayPal. It’s not really new, since Yahoo is in that arena already.

Morse answers on intellectual property issues, noting Yahoo is happy to license its family jewels. Most tech companies use these patents as a defense, but no longer.

The next question is on morale of sales force. I can answer that! Not good!

But Morse says there is progress.

Bygones.

Morse also notes that Yahoo still has search revenue per share guarantee from Microsoft, but that he hopes it will get better before that deal runs out.

Back to Thompson. He wants better results to advertising customers.

He keeps saying “at or above the market rate.” Yahoo’s growth has been lackluster, so this would be a key victory if Thompson could pull it off.

2:39 pm: A question about mobile, which has been one of Yahoo’s most embarrassing holes of all.

Besides Facebook, the kids love those smartphones. You would not know it from Yahoo’s shoddy products.

“We need to get good real fast in mobile … and we’re not there today,” said Thompson. Actually, Yahoo was not there yesterday, either.

Note to Scott: Real fast is a good idea.

There is a question about its advertising platforms, a back-handed way of asking if it is for sale. It is.

Thompson notes that there has been a lot of evaluating, but that “we have not come to a conclusion.”

2:42 pm: A question about its revenues from its Asian assets. China’s Alibaba — which is not run by Yahoo — is doing great.

It’s kind of like being the dude who bought Apple some years ago and is now rich through no effort of his own.

Thompson addresses a question about dividends, which Apple just gave out. Yahoo will be sticking with stock buybacks, so everyone can put away those Porsche catalogs.

I am briefly distracted during some accounting questions by the new Apple ads with Zooey Deschanel. She is so adorkable, it makes me slightly queasy.

Back to Thompson, who is non-answering a question about possible acquisitions. He’s not talking, but I am sure he will be buying if he gets a transaction with Alibaba done finally.

Given the long and convoluted and always aborted deals over the years, this would be cause for much celebration if Thompson pulls it off.

(And, if he does, I pledge to buy him dinner in Boston at the restaurant of his choice!)

2:52 pm: A question of what the heck Thompson actually means when is he talking about using Yahoo’s data.

There are apparently three main places.

Personalization, which is uniquely related content, which gives him a chance to egregiously tout Boston sports teams.

Contextual advertising, which means ads you want.

And data and analysis to advertisers that will help them do a better targeting job. Oh, joy.

A search question, which I have decided to ignore, since I feel search is simply not Yahoo’s business any longer and should be sold off.

But what do I know?

Morse keeps yammering away on “better experiences for our users” by its search team.

Hey, it’s called Google. Then, Bing. And only then, Yahoo.

2:58 pm: Last question, which I missed while I was focusing on search ranting.

And with that, it’s back to the future for Yahoo. Hopefully.

The feed will include all of Tumblr’s public data, and is intended to help with brand monitoring, analytics and other projects.

Tumblr’s firehose is similar to Twitter’s, which Gnip also sells access to, along with 40 other social media sources. Tumblr now has more than 50 million blogs that post more than 70 million times per day. By contrast, Twitter sees about 350 million tweets per day.

Without taking anything away from Twitter, Tumblr VP of Product Derek Gottfrid told me, “The richness of data that we have is more than 140 characters. We support seven different post types, and the half-life of a Tumblr post extends much more than a tweet.”

Gnip COO Chris Moody added that Tumblr is less news-driven than Twitter, with lots of content related to products and images.

For now, Gnip has an exclusive on enterprise use of Tumblr data, both companies said, but that doesn’t apply to other potential uses of the data, like display advertising or consumer access. Gottfrid said Tumblr is also working on upcoming products for its own users that consume and analyze the firehose of data.

(Image courtesy Minnesota National Guard on Picasa)

But not everyone is on Facebook (really!), and Spotify would like many more users. This should help: Spotify is rolling out a feature that will let the rest of the Web integrate the service, via a “play button” widget, onto their pages.

So everyone from the Huffington Post to Rolling Stone to your average Tumblr user — Tumblr is incorporating the feature right into its main dashboard, and you can see a sample of a Tumblr page at the bottom of this post — can incorporate free tunes onto their sites. And Spotify gets a whole new set of promotional partners.

In theory, that’s an unlimited set of partners, since Spotify will let anyone who knows how to embed HTML add the widgets, by heading to this page. So if this works correctly, you should see something very special right here:

The integrations echo the Spotify/Facebook partnership, where the widget works as a remote control for the Spotify software. But, just like the Spotify/Facebook link, it won’t do you any good if you don’t have the Spotify software on your machine.

So if you’ve already got Spotify up and running on your PC before you hit the “play” button on the song above (and you really should! It’s excellent.), then the music will start playing immediately. If not, you’ll have to go click a couple of buttons to open up the software, or even more to download the software.

Things would be a whole lot easier if you could just click a button and get Spotify streamed directly from the Web, and Spotify might end up there one day. For now, it can’t, because of both technical and biz-dev reasons.

But a few million people have already downloaded Spotify in the last nine months, and this move will help the company round up some more. It’s probably not nearly enough to make it a full-blown mainstream service, but they can take it one step at a time.

credit: Win McNamee, Getty Images News

For context, the conversation started with me asking about opt-in versus opt-out product releases — which means, do you first ask your customers whether they want to use something new, or do you give it to them and let them decide if it’s useful or not. Opt-out has been the preferred choice of many companies, perhaps most notably Facebook, because it cuts out the friction of requiring additional permission.

Liz Gannes: What do you anticipate being the FTC stance around opt-in going forward? Is it reasonable to interpret the framework as pushing the industry towards opt-in policies?

FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz: We’ve laid out some areas where we think opt-in is more appropriate. With financial information, in healthcare, when dealing with vulnerable populations like children. And if cable or phone companies want to do something analogous to deep-packet inspection, there should be opt-in.

I think we’re pretty balanced. You want to have better privacy notices, give consumers more choice, and give opt-out on tracking. When you’re talking about more sensitive populations, you might want to flip that and make it an opt-in.

We also think when you engage in best practices, what we hear from companies is consumers trust the Internet more, and they want to do more commerce.

How do you expect newer companies, for instance growing social media players like Tumblr or Pinterest, to interface with the FTC? How can they proactively avoid investigations and settlements like what you had with Google and Facebook?

We think our report strikes the right balance between privacy and innovation. I think if you’re a new company, make sure you’ve seen our cases. A large number are about making privacy commitments and not honoring them. So if you commit to something, follow through.

Leibowitz, by the way, will be appearing at our D10 conference in May.

The bare facts are these, according to this lengthy analysis by Bloomberg News: Since 1953, the U.S. has imported more energy-producing resources than it has exported. The main reason is that the U.S. doesn’t have a lot of domestic oil production and has always relied on imports from other countries, many of them countries in the troubled Middle East. In a political context, the phrase “energy independence” is usually associated with pie-in-the-sky notions of being free from the odious burden of foreign policy entanglements in that region.

But now, Bloomberg says, the idea is no longer so pie-in-the-sky: Last year, the U.S. produced about 81 percent of its energy, up from a recent low of 70 percent in 2005. What gives? A boost in domestic oil production, more efficient cars, stricter mileage standards, ethanol in our gasoline and a significant surge in U.S. production of natural gas. In fact, if this keeps up, the U.S. is on track to be the biggest energy producer in the world within eight years.

Does that sound like something of an opportunity? You’d better believe it. Insight Venture Partners, the New York-based venture capital and private equity firm that has in the past invested in tech properties like Twitter, Tumblr, LivingSocial and FlipBoard, is leading a massive $165 million investment in a Texas-based oil and gas database company called Drilling Info.

Essentially, what the company does is provide a lot of incredibly specialized information about where energy resources like gas and oil wells are located, what its characteristics are, how long a site is likely to be productive, and so on. The database is offered via the cloud as a software-as-service product. “It really focuses on giving energy companies the data they need to make smarter decisions about where and how they spend their production resources,” Deven Parekh, managing director at Insight, told me. The database tracks information like depletion curves — a measure of how long a well can continue producing oil — and environmental information, seismic data and so on.

Offering it as an SAAS product just makes it easier to manage and maintain. Once upon a time, database companies would send out CDs with software and data updates. Using the cloud makes it easier to keep the data current, and to save on costs.

Parekh told me that Drilling Info has about 3,000 customers in the U.S. and worldwide; and while he wouldn’t disclose its annual revenue, he said it’s in the tens of millions each year. Its customers produce about 90 percent of the oil and gas produced in the U.S. A lot of its demand is coming from companies working on so-called “unconventional exploration” for oil and gas resources, and there’s also significant international interest, too. For example, there are more companies working on methods for getting hard-to-reach oil in shale reserves.

Parekh says the moment has come for some serious investment in energy production technologies. “Everyone pays attention to all the innovation going on at Apple and Google, but what they tend not to appreciate is how much innovation is taking place in the energy industry,” he said. “We don’t talk about it every day, but there’s so much going on.”

Battery Ventures and Eastern Advisors Private Fund are also investing, and at least part of the funding round is going toward earlier shareholders. The capital will be used to expand its customer footprint, but also to possibly make some acquisitions.

Note: Initially the headline on this story said it was Index Ventures, not Insight, making the investment. I’ve since corrected it, though the initial erroneous headline is still making the rounds on Twitter. Sorry about that.

The Foursquare Portal

But remote collaboration isn’t a given. Tumblr, even as it scales up its team to deal with massive growth, is loyal to New York. Founder and CEO David Karp recently said that half of his recent hires have relocated from the West Coast to work at Tumblr.

Foursquare is trying yet another approach. Eight months ago, the New York City-based company opened a second office in San Francisco. That’s not terribly unusual for a company of Foursquare’s age and size, as the greater Silicon Valley area is a good place to meet with venture capitalists and recruit top coders who like hip location apps and big data.

What’s not so normal is the way Foursquare has set up its operations. The San Francisco office has 20 people, most of them engineers, out of 100 total Foursquare employees. Rather than tackling specific projects from a specific location, Foursquare engineering teams are split between the two offices.

As part of this effort, Foursquare recently appointed Benjy Weinberger its San Francisco Engineering Site Lead. Weinberger is not exactly a manager, he told AllThingsD, though along with his personal engineering work on Foursquare infrastructure he’s also focused on making local hires.

Previously, Weinberger was at Google for eight years, where he helped establish the search company’s Tel Aviv office, and briefly joined Twitter before coming to Foursquare last year to work on infrastructure.

So how does this bicoastal thing work? Through a fancy always-on Cisco videoconference system that Foursquare folks refer to as “The Portal,” the company holds stand-up meetings and constantly ambiently keeps in touch. It’s  common to see people walking around the office carrying iPads, using FaceTime to include collaborators from across the country, Weinberger said.

Foursquare's San Francisco engineering site lead Benjy Weinberger

Employees at all levels of the company are encouraged to fly to the other coast and experience how the other half lives, he added. Not all products have team members in both offices — the iOS team, for example, happens to all be in New York — but many do.

Asked whether it wouldn’t be more effective to focus the relatively small San Francisco office together as a team on specific projects, Weinberger replied, “Code doesn’t care where it’s written.”

Weinberger — who’s rather un-scruffy for a start-up guy, and writes screenplays in his spare time — said “The Portal” works great. He said the only problem is nobody’s figured out a way to transport a burrito through the system (presumably, from San Francisco to New York; I can’t imagine the other direction would be worth the effort).

Weinberger said he aims to more than double the San Francisco office team size before the end of the year. Foursquare Head of Talent Morgan Missen added she was particularly pleased that the SF office will soon bring in its first female engineers. Three such women, actually, are due to start in the coming weeks, she said.

The hardest thing so far about Foursquare’s bicoastal set-up is merging the pockets of casual communication and collaboration that happen when people are in the same place, Weinberger said.

Or as Missen described it, with a bit of wistfulness: People in the San Francisco office and New York office don’t always know each other’s inside jokes.

On another level, however, I understand the motivation. When it comes to delivering audio-visual content to a wide audience, the Internet has lowered the barriers to entry so far that anyone with even the dinkiest camera can become a major broadcaster. The television industry may face a crisis of overhead when a large number of scrappy upstarts deliver comparable value with almost no fixed costs. Also, there are some aspects of the television business that the Internet simply does better, specifically when it comes to reaching an audience.

So there is the scent of blood in the water, and out of the resulting frenzy a few lessons have appeared. Here are four of them.

There doesn’t have to be a difference between a “channel” and a “show.”

You probably have a clear understanding about what a television channel is. Comedy Central is a channel. Your local CBS affiliate is a channel. A channel is the thing you tune in to at a specific time to watch a particular show. A channel runs a lot of shows on it. Time Warner Cable offers 900 channels. This seems like too many. Bruce Springsteen wrote “57 channels and nothing on.” That sounds so quaint now.

But if you have a conversation about YouTube channels with this concept of a “channel” in your head you may experience some cognitive dissonance. There are “tens of millions” of channels on YouTube. One company, Machinima, operates 3,380 of them. That’s literally 100 times as many channels as are owned by NBC Universal, and it’s not enough. YouTube just launched 100 more channels with premium content. YouTube must be using the word “channel” differently. Except they’re not.

Both a YouTube channel and a television channel deliver a stream of content from a transmitting device to a receiving one. Viewers tune in to a television channel by selecting its number; they reach a YouTube channel via its URL. The main difference is that the cost of creating a television channel from scratch is incredibly high, while on YouTube it’s pretty close to zero. Unlike television, a YouTube channel can turn a profit with very little programming. The comedian Ray William Johnson, for example, has one of the most lucrative channels on YouTube. It plays one show. That show adds 12 minutes of new programming per week.

If a channel online costs next to nothing, and you can build one around a single show, then why do television shows need television channels at all? Every once in a while there’s a lot of fuss about getting cable channels à la carte. But who cares about that when you can have à la carte programming?

I like to think about this in the context of “The Daily Show.” On cable, you’re limited to 30 minutes of “The Daily Show” per day, and you have to tune in at 11 pm or set your DVR to watch it. There could easily just be a “Daily Show” channel, with all the extra programming that Comedy Central now reserves for the Web site, plus spinoffs for the various “Daily Show” correspondents. More content means more places to sell advertising, which means more profit. One challenge, of course, would be getting the audience to modify its behavior, but new technology seems to be inspiring this already.

Programming can now be delivered to your television set through a remote control.

Let’s define “remote control” as a handheld piece of electronics that tells your television set what to do while you’re sitting on the couch. Smartphones and tablets fit into this category, and before you argue that this definition is too broad, I submit that an iPhone is no less a remote control than it is a camera. It commands your television set far more profoundly than your traditional remote control. At least, if you have an Apple TV. Which you should.

The Apple TV comes with a technology called AirPlay, which allows you to throw videos wirelessly from your phone or tablet to your television set. Got a movie sitting in iTunes on your computer? You can watch it on TV via AirPlay. Find a video you want to watch embedded on a Web site you read? If AirPlay is available, a little button will pop up and you can stream the video to your TV. Need some good recommendations? Try one of the many “discovery” apps out there, like Shelby.tv or ShowYou or VHX. They skim your Twitter and Facebook feeds looking for videos your friends have posted. And you can throw those to your TV.

There are apps for ESPN and Discovery Channel and PBS and other traditional channels that allow you watch their shows, on demand, on your TV, via AirPlay. There are also a growing number of apps for channels that have never been included in a traditional cable provider’s lineup. The Wall Street Journal’s news channel, WSJ Live, is one of them. Time Warner Cable doesn’t carry it, but my iPad does.

I should note that WSJ Live is also available in the main Apple TV library, so you don’t actually need to use AirPlay to watch it. But the fact that you can illustrates my point. The remote control has become a very personal device, one that you carry around with you all day long, one that you use to store and index your favorite media. A viewer is just as likely to watch a channel she’s added to her home screen as anything available in the cable menu. The programming of her choice routes through her remote control.

Marketing and distribution are often the same thing.

Last month, IFC released the entire first episode of the second season of “Portlandia” online a week before its airdate. They used an embeddable video player, so that any online publication could feature the episode on its Web site. Individual sketches from the show were also made available in the same way. IFC didn’t just tease the show or talk it up, they let people actually see it for themselves. The result was an 81 percent increase in viewership among 18-49 year olds when the show returned to the network.

There are few examples of this sort of thing happening before the Internet. A movie poster hanging in a theater where that movie is playing, perhaps, or a DVD insert in a magazine ad. But this is something the Internet does really well. A single sentence can promote a film and deliver it to your computer at the same time. Allow me to demonstrate: “This video is amazing.”

That, of course, is the lifeblood of online publishing. Here’s something that resonated with me, I’m recommending it to you, my audience. They call it “curating” now. Somehow that word got separated from “blogging” recently, and I’m not entirely sure how or why. I think Tumblr and Pinterest had something to do with it. But curating, which is a thing bloggers do, is a distinct talent. It’s highly respected in other manifestations, such as museum curators or fashion buyers or television programmers. It was curators who spread that “Portlandia” preview around. And when you factor in the marketing power they brought to that show, and you consider how much a network pays to advertise a program in general, there’s only one conclusion to draw. Online curators are the most undervalued talent in the television industry.

A few of those new YouTube channels seem to recognize the power of the curatorial voice. Vice, Pitchfork, SB Nation and the Bleacher Report all received funding to create new YouTube programming. Presumably their editors will create shows that they’d want to watch themselves, and with that level of personal investment, they’d vouch for those shows to their readers.

Television is no longer that different from publishing.

Just last week, the Gawker Media site Kotaku announced a programming schedule similar to that of a television network. This strategy was conceived well over a year ago, and is designed to sell audience size to advertisers, the way television does, rather than pageviews, which have been dropping in value for years.

This is only the latest example of conceptual overlap. Video embedding took off after the launch of YouTube, turning online publications into versions of The Daily Prophet, that newspaper from Harry Potter with the magical moving pictures on the front page. Some Internet video hosting and streaming services are built on content management systems designed for online publishing. When you upload a video to Blip, the last thing you click to make it go live is “publish.” Awl Music, the music video channel launched by The Awl in January, is run entirely on Tumblr. You can watch it on a television set connected to Google TV.

Both traditional and online publishers are producing original video series with increasing frequency. Reuters, Slate and The Wall Street Journal all have news and documentary programming on the new YouTube channel lineup. The New York Times and New York Magazine have been doing their own video programming for years. It’s only a matter of time before some of these compete with the cable news channels.

Eric Spiegelman produces the Web series “Old Jews Telling Jokes,” which is about to launch its fifth season. He helped bring the hit Japanese television show “Retro Game Master” to Kotaku.com, and he helped launch AwlMusic.tv in partnership with TheAwl.com.

The joke now is what’s the first tech company that we acquire. I hear AOL’s going pretty cheap.

– David Karp, founder of Tumblr, to the Guardian’s Josh Halliday

Some initial reactions to the proposal, which was pre-announced at the DLD conference in Munich and then published on Wednesday, were harshly critical.

Writer Jeff Jarvis was armed and ready to rebut European Commissioner Viviane Reding’s opening address on “the right to be forgotten” at DLD, having criticized her data protection stance in his new book “Public Parts.”

“I very much fear Reding’s ‘right to be forgotten’ and its impact [on] free speech and the right to know,” Jarvis wrote.

A European Microsoft executive was also quick with the skepticism. “We have been pushing for harmonisation of privacy laws for several years, but we are concerned that these proposals may be too prescriptive,” Ron Zink, who is Microsoft Europe’s chief operating officer and associate general counsel, told the Financial Times.

Analysts and industry groups called Reding’s ideas “draconian,” “prescriptive,” “onerous” and expensive.

But now that Reding has formally proposed her legislation, Web companies seemed more measured in their response. Though they didn’t endorse the bill, they seemed willing to work with it. Of course, they’d prefer to avoid walking into fines of up to two percent of their revenue.

In statements emailed to AllThingsD, Google asked for a “simple” solution, while Facebook continued to talk up its positive impact on European jobs.

Said Google: “We support simplifying privacy rules in Europe to both protect consumers online and stimulate economic growth. It is possible to have simple rules that do both. We look forward to debating the proposals over the coming months.”

A Google executive at a conference in Brussels further questioned how, exactly, third-party sites could be responsible for deleting all instances of data online after it had been posted.

Here’s Facebook’s extended statement:

The revision of Europe’s Data Protection framework is an important opportunity to develop regulation that both protects privacy and supports the creation and growth of modern services over the global Internet. We welcome the move towards more harmonization of Data Protection laws in the EU which will help create legal certainty and confidence for companies to operate.

We agree with the recent statements made by Commissioner Reding that the new regulation should foster growth and job creation. Services like Facebook already contribute significantly to economic activity in the EU and can be a major driver of growth and new jobs in the future.

We will continue to work closely with politicians and regulators in the EU in order to share our experience and expertise and contribute to achieving sound privacy regulation and a thriving digital sector.

Reputation.com CEO Michael Fertik, whose company offers what could be seen as “the right to be forgotten” as a paid service to customers, said he didn’t necessarily support Reding’s proposal but he disapproved of industry hysteria around regulation of the Internet.

“I think that light regulation is often a stimulant to innovation,” Fertik said.

“Right now the absence of law supports the incumbents of the Internet, which are advertising businesses,” he added. “But what’s bad for Facebook today may be good for a thousand companies tomorrow. The biggest promise of the right to be forgotten is it’s going to enhance the trust of the Internet, which could be a boon to e-commerce.”

As for some other major Web companies in the business of identity and user-generated content, Twitter declined to comment on EU data protection policy, while Tumblr — which had been especially active in fighting SOPA — did not respond to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, U.S. lawmakers on Thursday expressed concerns about Google’s new unified privacy policy.

In its early days, the service didn’t have the “steep social network growth” you might expect, because it was about a core community of creators, Karp said. The company originally set out to build novel tools that offered an escape from the restrictive templates of Facebook and Twitter.

When the site really took off was when the curators — people who primarily respond to other Tumblr users’ content by “reblogging” it on their own pages — came on board.

Today, creators are probably 10 percent of Tumblr, and curators are 90 percent, Karp estimated.

And further, the average post on Tumblr is reblogged nine times, he said.

That can mean a single post gets the amplification of nine separate blogs, nine RSS feeds, nine blogs’ page views and followers, and nine bloggers’ syndication on Facebook and Twitter. “So your content has a huge footprint,” Karp said.

What’s next for Tumblr, which just raised a bunch of money and brought in some senior management? Well, monetization, for one thing. Karp said Tumblr is pursuing “novel approaches to revenue,” including selling blog themes.

At 15 billion page views per month across more than 41 million blogs, “with that many page views we could throw AdSense up there tomorrow and be profitable,” Karp said. But that’s not what he wants to do.

Karp said Tumblr is also working to “try and filter our network in ways that are more appealing to a global market.”

He added that Tumblr takes pride in being a New York-based company, and in hiring people with experience building things on the Web, rather than degrees from schools like Stanford. Half of Tumblr’s recent hires have relocated to New York to work for the company, most of them from the West Coast, Karp said.

(Image courtesy of DLD)

Here to rectify that is Charlie O’Donnell, who is rounding up investors for Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, which he’s describing as “the first venture capital fund to be based out of Brooklyn.” (Google points to a Brooklyn Ventures, whose logo alludes to the borough’s famous bridge. But the company appears to be Dutch, just like Brooklyn’s early residents.)

O’Donnell is a former principal at First Round Capital; his resume also includes a stint as an analyst at Union Square Ventures, as well as at Path 101, an unsuccessful “career discovery” start-up.

He says he’s closed a first funding round, but won’t identify his backers or say how much they’ve put in; people familiar with O’Donnell’s plan say he’s trying to raise a total of $7 million to $10 million.

You could argue that focusing on a single slice of New York is a bit narrow, but O’Donnell’s kickoff announcement explains that he “will generally invest in the Greater Brooklyn Area.” So even if you’re based in Hoboken or Yonkers, pitch away.

Bigger picture: A slew of zippy start-ups have cropped up in New York over the past five years or so, including some that have quickly made money for their investors (see: Invite, GroupMe, etc.) and some that haven’t exited yet but may eventually do so at a very big price if things go right (see: Tumblr, Foursquare, perhaps AppNexus, etc.). So it’s easy to see why some people would be willing to make a bet or two on the city.

(Image courtesy of Wikipedia)

But there is hope for future generations who want to see what people of 2012 were posting on the Internet: Scribr, a brand-new company based in Santa Clara, Calif., is building a service to help users’ social Web content survive, long after even mighty Facebook’s servers have stopped spinning.

Scribr provides a way of collecting all the stuff a user has shared via the social Web, so that a few years or decades from now all those tweets, check-ins and Facebook photos will still be around for perusal.

Like any other API-driven Web service, users start by logging in to Scribr, connecting their various social accounts, and waiting for the service to ingest all the data they’ve ever posted to Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo’s Flickr, Tumblr and Foursquare.

Once finished, Scribr lets users order a physical book of their collected postings, printed on demand by Lulu, one of the Web’s larger on-demand printing concerns.

Though a chronological book of online life may seem like a pretty simple thing to collect, Scribr co-founder Adam Henson explained that getting a book with that many tiny parts to make sense takes a fair amount of secret-coding sauce.

Henson used the example of users posting a picture to several services with a single click as the sort of obstacle Scribr had to overcome before its first book rolled off the press.

“We don’t just de-duplicate [similar posts across several services],” Henson said. “We roll those up into a single, more rich piece of content.”

Scribr boasts another brilliantly obvious feature to get users adding content to their books: Auto-journaling via email.

Users can sign up to receive daily emails, which arrive with a subject line like, “How was your Thursday?”

After a user replies to that email, Scribr adds that content to all the other posts and photos it has accumulated for publishing.

Henson said Scribr’s next move is to clean up the code base and add a few more social services to the list, all ahead of opening to a larger beta community by the end of January.

The project, which has been bootstrapped by the three co-founders for the last year, has roots in the “quantified self” movement, whose practitioners gather and retain all kinds of data about their lives — from steps taken to text messages sent, and just about everything in between.

But Henson’s aspirations for Scribr are much more about bringing the benefit of gathering life’s data to the millions of people who aren’t into life-logging.

Henson explained:

“We want it to be as easy as possible for the masses to do this, because most people just aren’t good at taking the time to write a journal.”

Like many of the very new businesses written about on AllThingsD, Scribr has all kinds of obstacles to overcome before it is ready for mainstream use. The Web site and printed book still have a beta level of polish, and the market for these books, from which Scribr plans to make its money, is still unproven.

Right now, users pick the date range, and their printed book is essentially a chronology of their social Web lives during that period. But Henson said Scribr is already getting requests for printed products that its system is capable of making but that its founders never conceived of.

“We’ve already had one request from a group of Civil War reenactors who want to make a sort of yearbook from several of their members’ Facebook accounts, and another from a guy who wants to make a book out of his recently deceased father’s Facebook account,” Henson said.

These possibilities are only a few of the things that come to mind for a service that can bring together all kinds of posts and personal media and drop them into an organized and more indelible format.

There is something admittedly reassuring about a tangible product.

“At the end of the day, I’m really glad I have that book on my shelf,” Henson said.

Scribr is betting that someday, when Twitter or — gasp — Facebook go the way of Yahoo’s now-defunct GeoCities, other users will be glad to have that book, too.

Henson chatted with me about the future of Scribr, and in this video he shows off the beta version of a Scribr book. Enjoy:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120106/start-up-scribr-wants-to-help-your-twitter-feed-survive-the-coming-web-pocalypse/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20111229/sequoia-grabs-googler-to-head-new-comms-role-to-help-entrepreneurs/ http://allthingsd.com/20111229/sequoia-grabs-googler-to-head-new-comms-role-to-help-entrepreneurs/#comments Thu, 29 Dec 2011 20:22:26 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=158098

The move to beef up communications expertise at the prominent Silicon Valley venture firm continues: Sequoia Capital has hired Andrew Kovacs, a well-regarded senior manager from Google, for a new job to help its portfolio companies with public relations and other related issues, sources said.

Google’s top flack Rachel Whetstone told staff about the move this past week, sources said, which will take place in mid-January.

Kovacs (pictured here, looking very GQ), who has been at the search giant for five years, has most recently headed PR for its apps unit.

His appointment comes after competing firms, including Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins, bolstered talent to the comms areas of their firms, in order to better service the companies they invest in.

This is especially important to early-stage start-ups and their often young entrepreneurs, who usually have little experience with the media or with marketing. But such expertise is increasingly important in the crowded and ever-noisier tech sector, as companies try to rise above the fray.

Sequoia already has a longtime marketing partner, Mark Dempster, to whom Kovacs will be reporting, serving the firm’s companies in the U.S. and Israel. Kovacs will not be working on PR for Sequoia itself.

Some of Sequoia’s better-known start-ups include Dropbox, Tumblr and Eventbrite.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111229/sequoia-grabs-googler-to-head-new-comms-role-to-help-entrepreneurs/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111215/tumblr-had-42-hours-of-downtime-in-2011-and-thats-an-improvement/ http://allthingsd.com/20111215/tumblr-had-42-hours-of-downtime-in-2011-and-thats-an-improvement/#comments Thu, 15 Dec 2011 19:43:05 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=154216 Tumblr, the fast-growing blogging social network, goes down a lot. How much? It had 42 hours of downtime in 2011, by far the most among major blogging hosts, according to Pingdom.

However, that’s a significant improvement from 2010. Tumblr had more downtime in two months in 2010 than in the first 11 months of 2011, Pingdom said. This year the longest Tumblr outage was three hours, compared to almost 24 hours last year.

To be fair, that unreliability probably stems from Tumblr’s quick growth. It now has 37 million blogs, up from 11 million a year ago.

Meanwhile, Pingdom’s measurements found that Blogger was by far the most reliable blog host. It had uptime of 99.998 percent in 2011, which Pingdom gushed was “highly impressive” and way better than might be expected for such a large Web site.

That strikes me as off, given that Blogger had an outage of more than 20 hours in May, which it attributed to data corruption. I’ve asked Pingdom for clarification.

Pingdom said TypePad and WordPress also had more than 99.9 percent uptime this year, while Posterous was just under that.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111215/tumblr-had-42-hours-of-downtime-in-2011-and-thats-an-improvement/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111215/foursquares-crowley-declares-bygones-and-maybe-more-with-google/ http://allthingsd.com/20111215/foursquares-crowley-declares-bygones-and-maybe-more-with-google/#comments Thu, 15 Dec 2011 16:06:51 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=153810

Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley sold his company, Dodgeball, to Google in 2007, but he left two years later complaining about the lack of resources devoted to his start-up by the search giant.

Crowley called the experience the “perfect storm of bad timing.”

But that sentiment has apparently shifted considerably. Now, Crowley looks back on his Google tenure as valuable — and said that he’s feeling a lot friendlier toward Google these days.

“You know when people leave a job and they say they didn’t know what they came away with after two years? That’s how I felt when I first left Google,” Crowley said in an interview with AllThingsD. “But I’ve been able to spend time with the folks at Google and reconnect with people there. And now when things come up at Foursquare, [they're] all the challenges and issues I realize I already encountered at Google.”

Could that mean even closer relations in the future?

Crowley declined to elaborate on the substance of his talks with Google, which, in some cases, are with business development teams.

But what about the possibility of another acquisition?

“I wouldn’t disqualify anything,” he said. “The thing that’s important to us is doing the things we want to do, which could be partnering with someone, or it could be continuing to grow the product independently.”

While that’s appropriately vague enough, what is clear is that where Foursquare goes from here is a big question going forward.

Most especially, while it still remains the cool kid at the check-in party, especially as more competitors are checking out — is the party dying down?

Foursquare now claims 15 million users, adding the last five million in just the last six months, a fact it often points to as a sign of success rather than to its aggregate number of downloads.

As a basis for comparison, the popular mobile photo-sharing app Instagram recently touted it had attracted between 14 and 15 million users, amassed in just over a year.

There is no doubt, though, that Foursquare started with a similar bang. Based in New York, the start-up first launched in 2009 as a mobile social networking site that tapped into the inherent GPS capabilities of smartphones.

It was not that unlike the idea behind Dodgeball. But this time, Crowley, along with Naveen Selvadurai, created a fast-growing mobile app that allowed users to broadcast to their friends where they were, while also earning badges and mayoral bragging rights for visiting certain locations.

It took off from there, with Crowley and Foursquare featured in splashy magazine takeouts and even in an ad for the Gap, portrayed as the toast of New York’s entrepreneur scene.

By the spring of 2010, the hot company was reported to be weighing offers from both Yahoo and Facebook, which shortly afterward introduced its own check-in function called Places.

Neither of those deals happened, and this past summer, the company raised $50 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and others.

That move sent a clear message: We’ll grow ourselves, thanks very much.

Still, despite the cash, Crowley is careful to note that he realizes that times have changed in the location space.

While he said he believes that social media is moving away from the idea of just one news feed, the growing popularity of apps such as Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram and Path imply that consumers have an appetite for multiple apps.

And while data shows that consumers are becoming increasingly aware of geolocation services, it also indicates that the location-based craze hasn’t really caught on yet.

Crowley said he doesn’t put much stock in the most recent Forrester Research report on location-based services. He noted that three years ago Twitter was known as the online network for broadcasting what people had for lunch, before it became recognized as a game-changing technology tool.

That said, a handful of other location-focused companies — Hot Potato, SimpleGeo and early Foursquare competitor Gowalla, as well as Pelago, which was bought by Groupon — have all been absorbed by bigger tech companies in the past 18 months, their value less than expected by eager investors. Instead, they were bought mainly for their entrepreneurial and engineering talent rather than their product or user base.

That’s left Foursquare standing tall, but largely alone.

Crowley said that if the company had to focus on one area right now, it would be nearby discovery, fed by the database that’s been built up over the past two and a half years. He even went as far as to say there’s been a de-emphasis on the flagship “check-in” feature, citing evidence that more people are using the app to get tips without actually checking in.

Within the app, which is available on iOS, BlackBerry and Android, users can also follow friends, get tips on local venues and make to-do lists. Its most recent feature, Radar, pings users when they’re near venues they’ve indicated they want to check out, or in this case, check into.

And, with regard to Foursquare’s other high-profile feature — badge-earning — Crowley likened the whole element to the movie “The Karate Kid.”

“It’s like Mr. Miyagi having Daniel paint the fence, and later he realizes he’s been practicing karate,” Crowley said. “Badges are an important onboarding tool, but from the beginning we’ve said the important thing was data, and now we’ve gotten our users to leave all of these data signals.”

Crowley hinted at more differentiating products coming down the pipeline, and said he wouldn’t be surprised to see more consolidation and sharing among social networking apps, as well as more acquisitions within the industry.

With more than 800 million active users in Facebook’s network, Foursquare might become even more interesting to Google, which has jumped into the social networking space with Google+. Now Foursquare and Google share a common rival in Facebook, which may also help them make up their past differences.

Whether Foursquare could be the buyer, or one of those acquisitions, remains to be seen.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111215/foursquares-crowley-declares-bygones-and-maybe-more-with-google/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20111205/longtime-google-policy-guy-andrew-mclaughlin-headed-to-tumblr/ http://allthingsd.com/20111205/longtime-google-policy-guy-andrew-mclaughlin-headed-to-tumblr/#comments Mon, 05 Dec 2011 19:03:21 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=150391 Andrew McLaughlin, who led global public policy at Google for five years and was deputy CTO in the Obama administration, joined Tumblr today as executive vice president. He told AllThingD he will focus on the blogging social network’s growth, internationalization, community and monetization.

Since leaving the White House, McLaughlin served as executive director at Civic Commons — a nonprofit dedicated to apps for local government — and taught a class at Stanford Law School.

McLaughlin was a key voice in Google’s internal debates about its operations in China five years ago, which is a huge issue for social media companies.

You can find McLaughlin’s Tumblr, where he posts a few photos a month, here.

New York-based Tumblr runs 36.5 million blogs and has a staff of about 60.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111205/longtime-google-policy-guy-andrew-mclaughlin-headed-to-tumblr/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111027/snip-it-is-a-bookmarking-site-for-you-to-share-your-opinions/ http://allthingsd.com/20111027/snip-it-is-a-bookmarking-site-for-you-to-share-your-opinions/#comments Thu, 27 Oct 2011 16:03:16 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=137369 Snip.it founder Ramy Adeeb is an Egyptian living in San Francisco who built his company’s bookmarking tool after experiencing his home country’s revolution from afar earlier this year, when all his friends were interested in hearing his perspective on what was happening in Egypt.

Snip.it is functionally very similar to a bookmarking service like Delicious, allowing users to share pages through a browser bookmarklet and group them in thematic connections. Other users can then subscribe to those collections.

Start-ups like Tumblr and Pinterest thrive in part because users can express themselves through content that other people have posted. Often it’s far easier to pin or reblog a photo or quote than to compose a blog post or a pithy tweet. Snip.it hopes to extend that kind of activity to sharing news stories and other content accompanied by a line or two of opinion from the poster.

Snip.it launches an invitation-only beta today and should be open to the public in about a month. At this point it requires a Facebook account to register.

The company is funded by Khosla Ventures (where Adeeb was formerly a principal), True Ventures, Charles River Ventures and SV Angel.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111027/snip-it-is-a-bookmarking-site-for-you-to-share-your-opinions/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111024/obama-starts-a-tumblr/ http://allthingsd.com/20111024/obama-starts-a-tumblr/#comments Mon, 24 Oct 2011 20:25:46 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=136206 While Republicans say they’re now armed and ready to use Twitter in the 2012 election, President Barack Obama has jumped to the next social platform: Tumblr.

Obama’s Tumblr launched today with a couple of casual posts that are clearly not written by the president himself. An anonymous staffer writes that the Obama reelection campaign plans to use Tumblr as “a huge collaborative storytelling effort.” That will be done using Tumblr’s popular reblogging feature to pull in content from other Tumblrs, as well as direct user submissions.

The best part is a meek plea for decency, so rarely found in political discussions online.

There will be trolls among you: this we know. We ask only that you remember that we’re people — fairly nice ones — and that your mother would want you to be polite.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111024/obama-starts-a-tumblr/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110926/another-85-million-for-tumblr/ http://allthingsd.com/20110926/another-85-million-for-tumblr/#comments Mon, 26 Sep 2011 11:55:54 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=124678 Tumblr, the booming blogging platform that has yet to spend much time generating revenue, now has even more time before it has to get down to business. The four-year-old company has raised an $85 million round led by Greylock Partners and Insight Venture Partners, along with new money from Peter Chernin and Richard Branson. Earlier investors Spark Capital, Union Square Ventures and Sequoia Capital re-upped as well.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110926/another-85-million-for-tumblr/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110915/why-betaworks-broke-up-the-band/ http://allthingsd.com/20110915/why-betaworks-broke-up-the-band/#comments Fri, 16 Sep 2011 02:08:58 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=121423 Inside baseball for people who pay attention to early round start-up investing and/or the clubby New York tech scene: Andy Weissman, one of the co-founders of the Betaworks holding company/incubator/startup-maker, is leaving for Union Square Ventures, the high-profile VC firm.

Here’s USV principal’s Fred Wilson’s comment, via email: “Union Square Ventures is very fortunate to be able to add Andy Weissman to our partnership and we think he is a perfect fit for the entrepreneurs we want to work with and the sectors we want to participate in.” (More below.)

That will cause a small ripple in startupland, because Weissman was the one steering Betaworks’ investment portfolio. His partner John Borthwick handled the operational parts of the business, which has founded and/or nurtured startups like Summize, TweetDeck, Chartbeat and Bitly.

With Weissman’s departure, Betaworks’s focus will change. “Though we will continue to do seed stage investments, our primary focus will be on building the core capabilities of the companies that we acquire and grow in-house,” Borthwick said told his employees via email today. Betabeat first reported the news.

What Borthwick didn’t explain in his email is that he and Weissman had previously planned on raising a “sidecar fund” that would essentially split Betaworks into two businesses: An operating company run by Borthwick and an early-stage VC shop run by Weissman.

But that plan was discarded this summer, at least in part because of opposition from Betaworks’ investors, who include RRE Ventures, Intel, AOL and the New York Times. Investors argued that they had put money into a company where investing was only a component of the plan, not a full-time occupation; by raising a new investment fund, they argued, Betaworks would essentially be competing against some of its backers.

People familiar with the company say that the plan’s collapse didn’t lead directly to Weissman’s departure. But the backstory does provide context to his move to become a full-time venture capitalist.

When Weissman lands at Union Square, he’ll have plenty of money to work with. The firm, which has made a series of lucrative bets in high-profile Web 2.0 start-ups including Twitter, Zynga, Foursquare and Tumblr, is in the midst of raising a new $150-$200 million fund.

Four-year-old Betaworks, which now has more than 80 employees, ought to have plenty of money to work with, too. In addition to the $28 million it has raised to date, the company has also been able to turn some of its investments into cash via secondary market sales.

Most notably, it has recently sold Twitter shares it acquired in 2008, when the company bought search engine Summize. That alone should provide a nice cushion for Betaworks if it needs it: Twitter’s value has shot up from $100 million to $8.4 billion over the last three years.

And speaking of ripples, here’s one I’m guessing Weissman may enjoy:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110915/why-betaworks-broke-up-the-band/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110812/vizualize-me-aims-to-shake-up-the-resume-with-data-beautification/ http://allthingsd.com/20110812/vizualize-me-aims-to-shake-up-the-resume-with-data-beautification/#comments Fri, 12 Aug 2011 17:02:45 +0000 Drake Martinet http://allthingsd.com/?p=109210 Everyone knows that resumes are antiquated.

So, Vizualize.me, an infant company based in Toronto, is trying to dig through piles of personal data and reinvent the resume for our modern data-driven world.

Why this unenviable task?

“People aren’t even really reading [resumes] anymore,” said Vizualize.me CEO and founder Eugene Woo. “They’ve gotten too long, and they just aren’t useful.”

In other words, resumes are due for a good shake-up.

Vizualize.me has built a Web app that ingests a user’s work history and then spits out a design-y timeline, with details about each experience layered in.

Data like this is often messy, so, rather than trying to get users to manually enter their work history, Vizualize.me just connects to LinkedIn, pulls out the already-structured data, and converts it into the visualization.

The end result is something between an About.me profile page and a project manager’s colorful Gantt chart.

It’s a neat concept to lay out collected work history on a single digital page. And the result isn’t bad-looking either, even if it has some of the roughness that is unavoidable in a bootstrapped beta release.

Still not sure what you might use it for? Apparently you’re in good company.

Woo isn’t sure, either. “We’ve gotten a lot of interest from recruiters who want to sift through many resumes quickly,” he said. “But most of our users want to use the visualization as part of their own resume.”

Although a business model seems a ways off, Vizualize.me will likely be able to grow its user base thanks to the Internet’s penchant for navel-gazing.

And gaze it does. To date, there are about 175,000 users in line for a beta invite.

But, like anything else that looks simple and elegant, creating robust visualizations of resume data is actually pretty hard, according to Woo.

That’s because they require precision, and users are sensitive to things like unseemly gaps in work history that might force them to talk about that ugly two-year addiction to World of Warcraft.

Woo also seems to have his work cut out for him technologically as well. He hopes to add many more visualization styles, or “themes,” to borrow a term from microblogging site Tumblr. But he says that themes for data visualizations are much harder than just making a Tumblr theme.

Said Woo: “Ours have to be coded to work and not just look good.”

Assuming the product improves, Vizualize.me, and data visualization products like it seem to have a pretty good growth potential.

Because one thing is clear, our piles of personal data aren’t getting any smaller.

Here’s Woo talking about all that and more:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110812/vizualize-me-aims-to-shake-up-the-resume-with-data-beautification/feed/ 2