Under The Covers At Kat...

Last October, Kleiner Perkins launched the sFund , a $250 million initiative designed to make strategic investments in entrepreneurs building social services and apps. The partners contributing to the fund include Facebook, Amazon, Zynga, Comcast, and more. The first startup to receive investment from the sFund was Cafebots , which received $5 million in series A from Kleiner shortly thereafter. At the time of the announcement, Cafebots was in stealth mode and was tight-lipped about just what kind of social service it was building. My colleague MG Siegler did, however, learn that the startup was hoping to expose users to a new, yet referential acronym: “FRM”, or “friend relationship management”. Of course, not everyone is familiar with CRM (customer relationship management) and some might miss this tongue-in-cheek reference. Today, we’ve had the chance to learn a little more about the Kleiner-backed startup ahead of its impending launch in June, and how it’s moving past “FRM” to embrace a more accessible descriptor of its business: “personal crowd control”. The company has also changed its name from Cafebots to Katango. Why Katango? Your guess is as good as mine. But probably because it has “tango” in the title. Duh. So what will “personal crowd control” mean for future Katango users? Katango wants to simplify your online social life. Tired of my equivocal description yet? During Katango’s development, the team embarked on a bit of market research, reaching out to over 9K people using Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and other social communication services to find out what was missing from the social experience. As you might expect, people love social services (the numbers don’t lie), but consistently identified two particular pain points in today’s social service experience: Firstly, users don’t want to share every part of their life with every single person they happen to be connected to, whether on Twitter, Facebook, etc. Second, sending particular information to a specific group of contacts or friends takes time and usually involves creating a group email, or group text, etc. In other words, it’s a hassle. Kantango VP of Product Yee Lee (who is also a former early PayPal employee) used the example of a photo he snapped of his young son in an amusing pose; he wanted to send this photo to his immediate family and certain friends he knew would appreciate it on Facebook, but there aren’t any tools to parse contacts in order to share with just the right people. Obviously, the examples of are many. I run across this problem every day. Today, social platforms are a fire hose of information, but we need them to be more laser-focused. Facebook has ramped up their privacy settings (after some cajoling) and allows you to share certain parts of your profile with everyone, or friends of friends, or just your friends. You can customize, too, but it’s still a blanket solution. I don’t want all of my wall posts to only be shared with certain friends, and I don’t want to customize my settings for each post. Thus, the Katango team, which includes Co-founder and Professor of Computer Science at Stanford Yoav Shoham and two of his recently graduated PhD students Mike Munie and Thuc Vu , spent the better part of two years honing algorithms that would tackle this problem by allowing the user to view relevant subsets of a contact list within social sharing platforms, and then send selected content just to those relevant groups. For example, a Katango user will be able to connect his or her Facebook profile to Katango, which will then organize Facebook friends into high school friends, college friends, former professional colleagues, and so on, allowing the user to share the information with specific groups. Shoham equated what the startup is building to “Plaxo 3.0″, and says that Katango plans to integrate with as many social platforms as possible — this won’t just be a Facebook tool. I had a chance for a quick demo of Katango’s service, and so far, it looks great. The UX and UI are simple and easy to navigate, and the sorting algorithms were very accurate. I’ll wait until I see a final product before I drop the gavel of judgement, but I can tell you that from what I’m seeing, this could be a tool one might incorporate into the everyday social sharing experience. CrunchBase Information CafeBots Katango Yoav Shoham Yee Lee Information provided by CrunchBase

(Exclusive) YouTube’s N...

YouTube is now showing approximately 3 billion videos a day. A growing proportion of those are shown with ads—more than 2 billion a week —and YouTube as a business is expected to pass $1 billion in revenue next year. But when it comes to making money, some videos do better than others. Professionally-produce videos attract the most ad dollars. These include videos from TV networks and major media companies, which is the low-hanging fruit, but also increasingly from Web-only video networks and studios such as Blip.tv , Maker Studios , and Revision3 . A big part of YouTube’s strategy is to encourage and promote these native Web networks. It bought one of the biggest ones, Next New Networks, and that team is now training other video producers how to replicate their results. For YouTube, it is all about scale, and networks of loosely aligned online video producers scale better than individual shows and viral-video phenoms. In fact, there is a brand new department inside YouTube called Networks that reports to global head of content Dean Gilbert . The purpose of the department is encourage the formation of these outside networks which then use YouTube as their distribution channel. YouTube can then help sell advertising targeted at these more professional networks of Web series and shows, and that scales better than supporting individual YouTube producers. YouTube will keep doing that, of course, but you can see the beginnings of an organization that will help to further professionalize the Web video industry. In this view, each network is like a channel, and YouTube is the new cable system or MSO (multiple system operator). The ABCs and Food Networks are welcome on YouTube, but Networks is very much an attempt to grow native channels on the Web. If YouTube gives them enough support and makes it profitable enough for the Web-only networks, they in turn will be able to pay more for native Web shows and series, and one day the best talent might even skip TV altogether. But first, baby steps. CrunchBase Information YouTube Information provided by CrunchBase

More Than Half of Smart...

Prosper Mobile Insights asked 100 smartphone users to describe their relationship with their phone. More than half of them said it was their life and that’s both cool and scary at the same time. The survey was conducted in May and it involved slightly more men than women. When asked which features they couldn’t live without 21.6% said texting, 16.7% said internet and 15.7% said email. Surfing with the Smartphone One of the most surprising data points in this survey is that 55.9% of users prefer using their smartphone over their computer when accessing the web. What exactly are they using it for? Here’s the breakdown. When asked about the experience of taking a survey on their smartphone, the response was very positive. Users said it was easy, if not easier than using a computer and some said they’d be willing to fill out more surveys if they could do them on their phones. The point here is that the smartphone is now the entertainment of choice while waiting in line, eating lunch or killing time between appointments. What you as a marketer needs to do, is find a way to deliver your message as a short, entertaining burst and you’ll have the eyeballs of smartphone users everywhere. Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!

Twitter buys keyword ma...

Twitter has acquired keyword bid management platform AdGrok, the companies said May 31. AdGrok employees have joined Twitter's revenue engineering team, with plans to discontinue AdGrok's Google AdWords management product on June 30.

Twitter Follows The Twe...

There’s a button war going on around us. Google, Digg, Yahoo, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn — they’ve all been angling to get their buttons in prime real estate on big websites. But two players loom larger in the space than anyone else: Facebook and Twitter. And Twitter just escalated the war a bit today. Twitter has just unveiled the Follow Button. This follows their Tweet Button which is already in use on thousands of websites across the web. While the Tweet Button was great for sharing individual pieces of content, the Follow Button is meant to establish more social connections on the service. In this regard, it’s sort of like the Facebook Like Button, which people place on their websites to get other Facebook users to tie themselves to brands remotely. Of course, the Like Button also acts a bit like the Tweet Button as well (that is, you can share individual pieces of content from it too). Confused yet? Twitter’s dual-button concept is actually pretty simple. The Tweet Button is to share stuff. The Follow Button is to establish connections with other Twitter users remotely. So if we were to add a Follow Button to the sidebar on TechCrunch, with one click, you could follow our account . This is something Twitter has tried to do a bit with the Tweet Button pop-up (you can have it show the affiliated site account, for example), but this is a lot easier to understand. Though it also seems like this is a part of what they were doing with @anywhere — whatever happened to that anyway? And again, it’s all a part of Twitter’s movement towards a stronger social graph with more connections. This will also help with discovery since Twitter is launching the Follow Button on over 50 high-profile sites including places like our sister sites AOL.com, About.me, and Huffington Post. And big sites like IMDb, MTV.com, Lady Gaga’s site, Jennifer Lopez’s site, and others. You can find out more and make your own Follow Button here . CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase