New York Hardware Buffs...

Earlier this morning, our own John Biggs was joined on stage by a handful of New York-based makers who have made a name for themselves by building physical things (or in one case, building something that builds other things). Biggs kicked off the panel with a simple question: — can we bring manufacturing back? Bre Pettis, CEO of Makerbot Industries , has two shifts of workers putting together all of his Makerbots in Brooklyn, and had a bit of advice for hardware creators looking to shift production to China. He recommended that until makers need to produce runs of 50,000-100,000 units, they’re much better off keeping the production process in the United States. It helps to keep makers intimate with their tech, not to mention makes it easier for them to handle any unexpected issues faster. The process of launching a product was tackled too — interestingly enough, Amol Sarva of Peek fame revealed that if he had to take his email gadget to market now instead of a few years ago, he would’ve gone a completely different route. Instead of going big and pushing to get his devices on store shelves around the country, he instead would have gone with the grassroots approach — making a few devices and trying to build buzz around them. Another recurring theme of the panel was the notion that makers should embrace niches. “There may not be mass market ideas, and that’s OK,” said Peter Semmelhack of Bug Labs . He noted that people can put hardware and devices together that aren’t meant to reach millions and millions of people (they could even use a Makerbot if the production run size was modest enough), and these small markets were still worth going after. Plus, you can never really tell just how niche some niches are. Duncan Frazier of Bit Banger Labs knows that all too well — he and his team developed a sleep mask that aims to help its users lucid dream, and put together a Kickstarter campaign for it. They expected they would have to make a few hundred units at most, but the niche was much bigger than they thought. By the time their campaign was over, they had exceeded their $35,000 funding request by orders of magnitude. The discussion then turned to the question of whether or not we could build something akin to a sprawling Foxconn campus in somewhere like Iowa . “Here in the U.S., as a culture, we’re not really focused on [manufacturing],” Pettis noted. “Our children are the only priority lower than manufacturing.” There was little question that using Chinese facilities for manufacturing has its advantages — namely sheer output — but some were curious as to how long that would remain the case. Pettis pointed out that wages in China have doubled over the last year, a trend that (if continued) may eventually lead to a shift away from relying on China. The panel ended on a slightly more inspirational note, with each of makers chiming in with advice for young upstarts who want to start making things. On this, everyone seemed to agree — the best approach is to just go out there and start going it. Ayah Bdeir, CEO of littleBits , specifically pointed out that a young person who had $50 and an Internet connection had no shortage of places to turn for inspiration — Instructables and Hack A Day, for instance. “You learn by making,” she said. Pettis recommended that wannabe makers should just “jump in” to the process, and if they eventually decide to go the Kickstarter route, Frazier emphasized the importance of a solid video because that’s the only place the product exists as far as the users are concerned.

Social Media Marketer V...

TechCrunch has discovered and confirmed that software giant Oracle has bought social marketing platform  Vitrue  for $300 million. [ Update : A press release has confirmed the buy at an undisclosed price, though we know it to be $300 million.] As if Oracle didn’t offer enough products and services already, the acquisition will give it a strong Facebook marketing platform to offer its enterprise clients. Vitrue had taken $33 million in funding over the years and grown to become one of the most popular solutions for big companies trying to win Facebook fans and push out marketing messages to the news feed. Vitrue, according to a source, was on course for revenues of just under $100 million this year, although we have other sources disputing it may have been that high. TC understands there were a lot of potential acquirers interested. Several bidders approached the company but Oracle was the most aggressive. Oracle is no stranger to massive acquisitions. It bought talent management solution Taleo in February for $1.9 billion . Beyond Facebook, Vitrue helps marketers manage their presences on Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram , and other platforms. One of the hallmarks of Vitrue has been it’s ability to rapidly integrate with new partners like Klout to give it talking points for dissuading clients from going to competitors.  Vitrue is “nearly profitable” and was projected to reach profitability in this fiscal year, said our source. TechCrunch understands that Reggie Bradford, the CEO, will “very much remain part of the equation” when Vitrue becomes part of Oracle. His exact title is to come. The purchase  continues the trend of large, old-world Internet marketing companies buying their way into social after being slow to adopt. Adobe bought social advertising provider Efficient Frontier for $400 million in November 2011, just a few months after Efficient Frontier had bought Facebook marketer and application developer Context Optional for a reported $50 million. With time, social has proven too important to ignore. Rather than scrambling to build something and trying to pull brands away from established social marketers, Oracle will instantly gain a massive list of notable clients along with Vitrue. Oracle will also inherit Vitrue’s ongoing battle with competitors like Buddy Media, Wildfire, Involver, ThisMoment, and more for social marketing supremacy.

The onset of 21st Centu...

The onset of 21st Century has paved way for the improvement in our technology. Along with this, services through the internet has also boomed. Businesses are one of the benefactors of these advances. It is no surprise that more business owners today use the internet to advertise their services. shopping center directory

Update: Someone Is Aski...

One idea  floated when Ross Levinsohn took the reins as the interim CEO of Yahoo is that he might represent a kinder, gentler phase in the Internet company’s contentious patent fight against Facebook. There was even a suggestion that the two sides might even be able to settle. Today, some news that could point to a different approach — at least for now. Some documents have emerged at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that indicate someone, just yesterday, requested for the USPTO to re-examine a patent owned by Facebook concerning news feeds, and to declare it invalid. This happens to be one of the same patents that Facebook has named in its counter-suit against Yahoo , and one patent expert believes that the re-examination request, which questions the validity of the patent, could be coming from Yahoo. To be clear, the documents do not anywhere mention Yahoo by name. They have been filed by Gregory Hunt, from the law firm Jenkins, Wilson, Taylor and Hunt. One patent lawyer tells me that typically these requests are made by companies that are getting sued by the patent holders, as a defensive move to neutralize the suit. At the time of writing, the only company that is getting sued by Facebook over patent infringement is Yahoo. Update : Yahoo tells us that is has not filed any requests for re-examination. Even if the re-examination request has not come from Yahoo, it could represent a problem for Facebook, if it gets approved, because this is one of the patents in its countersuit. The circumstances of the filing are, in typical legal/patent fashion, pretty confusing but here is the gist: According to the documents we have embedded below, Hunt’s client is questioning patent number 7,669,123, which is a patent for “dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network.” The patent is registered by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, along with several others (it’s embedded below, too). The re-examination filing from yesterday says that this patent should be rendered invalid because it is based on another patent that is still the subject of an application — not yet approved — which was filed before the one that was approved. That patent is number WO 2007/0052285 and was filed some months before the 7,669,123 application. Patent number 7,669,123 was named, along with 10 in all, by Facebook in its counter-suit against Yahoo, which it filed in response to Yahoo suing Facebook over several social-media-related patents. It is not clear whether these other patents will also get questioned by Hunt’s clients. Why the secrecy of who is behind the suit? It’s not clear but our patent expert offers this explanation: “I think they wanted to avoid the side effects of naming themselves so they’ve picked the anonymous route. This is what we used to do in the old days.” We have reached out to Facebook and Yahoo for their responses to this and will update this story as we learn more. The full whack of patent documents is embedded here: View this document on Scribd

Video: YouTube’s 7th Bi...

May 21st 2012 marks the 7th Birthday of YouTube, and to celebrate they’ve compiled a video showcasing everything that has made them great to this very day, including a host of great statistics about what happens on YouTube. Thanks Alicia. Here’s just a few YouTube stats for 2012: There are over 4 Billion Videos viewed Related Digital Buzz Posts: Twitter: 5th Anniversary Celebration Video/Stats Infographic: Instagram Statistics 2012 Infographic: 24 Hours on the Internet