Published on: 2012-02-09 01:59:18

Some people always see the good in people and some people always see the bad … Gawker just published a post with what at first seems to be some pretty damning evidence against Path founder Dave Morin, publishing an email where he assured writer Ryan Tate that Path wasn’t storing user data. While today’s headlines would lead one to believe that the statement was a lie, Morin (who is a friend) tells me that the exchange is misleading out of context. He was actually talking about Path 1.0 in the email, which lacked the “Add Friends” feature and therefore did not store any data. The “Add Friends” data storage was added in Path’s second iteration, so he was technically telling the truth at the time. Again, Path 1.0 did not store data — it was a completely different product back then. I’m waiting for an official statement from Morin, in the meantime, here is the [old] Gawker email. [Gawker: Is it correct that Path uses iPhone address book data? Thanks for any guidance!] Hey Ryan, Thanks for the good question. Path is created to share personal moments with your close friends and family. From the end user’s point of view, access to your iPhone contacts makes sharing with your closest friends and family convenient. Like many apps (i.e. Skype and Kik ) — Path allows you to access your friends’ and family’s contact information from your own iPhone contacts in order to find them on the network. One of our core principles here is that you must have contact information for someone in order to find them on Path. Usually, you have contact information for your close friends. Path does not retain or store any of your information in any way. That help? Dave [Emphasis added.] Update: And here is the official statement from Morin … Our email exchange from November 15, 2010 was absolutely accurate.  That was the day Path launched and we were not storing any address book information at that time, as I clearly stated in my email.  We introduced FriendRank in March 2011 and that is when we began retaining contact information with the intent to maximize the Path experience, specifically by: 1) showing users a list of friends on Path 2) suggesting friends users might want to connect to 3) telling users when any of their contacts joined Path Image  via Joi Ito/Flickr

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FYI. Dave Morin Didn’t Lie To Gawker About Path Storing User Data

This is a good post called Sprint Sold 1.8 Million iPhones Last Quarter, 40 Percent To New Customers:

Published on: 2012-02-08 12:21:51

Sprint Nextel this morning released its earnings for the fourth quarter of 2011 as well as the full-year results. The company reported a net loss of $1.3 billion for the quarter, and $2.9 billion for the whole of 2011. The company reported total net subscriber additions of 1.6 million during the quarter, the best quarterly result in six years and bringing total subscribers to the highest level in Sprint’s history. Now serving roughly 55 million customers, the company said it is seeing “strong iPhone sales”, selling 1.8 million of the popular smartphone in Q4, of which 40 percent was to new customers. However, the iPhone launch also had a negative impact on its balance sheet, due to increased equipment net subsidies and sales expenses, the company said. From the press release: Strong revenue growth and cost management partially offset the impact of increased equipment net subsidies and sales expense associated with the successful launch of the iPhone. Forty percent of Sprint’s 1.8 million iPhone sales in the fourth quarter were to new customers. Based on internal estimates, including incremental costs associated with iPhone sales, the combined impact of iPhone and Network Vision costs reduced fourth quarter Adjusted OIBDA margin, which was 10.8 percent, by approximately 8.8 percentage points. Based on internal estimates, Sprint Nextel says the combined impact of iPhone and Network Vision costs reduced fourth quarter Adjusted OIBDA of $842 million by approximately $684 million. In case you were wondering: OIBDA is operating income (or loss) before depreciation and amortization. Adjusted OIBDA excludes severance, exit costs, and other special items.

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Sprint Sold 1.8 Million iPhones Last Quarter, 40 Percent To New Customers

Published on: 2012-02-06 05:50:55

I thought you would like this article I found for this blog. Read it here – In The Future, The Business Founder Will Not Be Ignored

Editor’s note: Adam Rodnitzky is a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Favo.rs . He programmed his first startup using ColdFusion in 1999. Rodnitzky is based in San Francisco, and you can follow him on Twitter  @rodtwitzky . The entrepreneurial world loves nothing like a good meme. One of the more recent ones making the rounds from Palo Alto to Paris is that a startup simply can’t get off the ground without a technical founder. Investors, entrepreneurs and tech journalists alike will tell you that if you’re not a whiz kid fresh out of Stanford’s CS program, you are essentially not fundable — entrepreneura non grata. Well, I am here to tell you that they are right. For now. Soon, however, I believe we’ll see a marked shift in who holds the cards in the startup world. First, let’s flesh out the current argument a bit more. It starts like this: to be successful, a startup requires a founder with a deep technical skillset. This is so a functioning beta can be built that attracts users and demonstrates traction. In some cases, the driver of new user acquisition may in fact be a unique new technology itself (example: Sphero or Lark ). Users and traction attract investors. Investors inject capital that then accelerates growth. A fast growing startup can eventually be a target for an acquisition or IPO, which completes our argument that a strong technical founder leads to a higher likelihood of startup success. Oh, and if the startup doesn’t grow fast enough? Then the core engineering team forms the foundation for the new exit: the acq-hire. So, for the moment, the technical founder is in the spotlight. So much so, in fact, that they can often be funded without the presence of their natural counterpart: what we call the idea person, the product visionary, the business founder. But, soon enough, the business founder’s time will come. Here’s why. If Moore taught us anything about technology, it’s that it advances at an exponential rate. And that includes the tools that we use to build it too. It’s not a stretch to deduce that there will soon come a time when new development tools and environments eliminate some or all of the technical hurdles required to properly execute a startup in preparation for traction and funding. After all, those technical hurdles are already obscenely low compared to where they were even a decade ago. During the Web 1.0 era of the late ’90s and early ’00s, massive teams of engineers were required to build even a basic content-driven startup, one that could now be built by a single engineer today. Actually, that’s not entirely true. A rich content-driven startup can be created by zero engineers today. Thanks, WordPress ! But who cares about a content-driven startup, you say? Good question. Let’s ignore how the Cheezburger Network , TechCrunch and Groupon all started, and focus on apps instead. A decade ago, your app would have been built using the LAMP stack , Perl or Java. If you were serious (and you raised a ton of capital), you might have even dropped MySQL and used an Oracle database instead (which meant hiring an extremely expensive and extremely crotchety Oracle DB admin). Today? You’ll build a better app in less time and with fewer people using Python with Django or Ruby on Rails. Easier, but still not the domain of the business founder. But this, too, will change. The same leap that took us from LAMP to RoR will happen again, reducing the amount of people, skill and time required to build a robust web or mobile app. I have no doubt that – at this very moment – there is a talented engineering team busily building modular, drag-and-drop development environments so that those without their skill sets can develop with nearly the same ease that they can. In a way, they may be coding themselves into irrelevance. In this future state, where the technical hurdles required to build a robust app are virtually eliminated, we’ll experience even more app overload then we do today. When that happens, what separates the winning startups from those that lose will primarily reside within the domain of the business founder’s traditional areas of expertise: optimizing the user experience, executing innovative marketing, and hacking traffic and traction. Of course, it’s not all doom and gloom for the technical co-founder in the future. For one, many of the most successful technical founders also happen to be great business founders (Drew Houston from DropBox , for instance). And smart business founders will always recognize the benefit of teaming up with an awesome technical partner as well. After all, when any tech-focused startup proves traction and viability, then it needs to ensure that its technical foundation can scale efficiently and reliably to support rapid growth. Then again, if my theory proves to be correct, finding that technical co-founder shouldn’t be nearly as hard in the future as it is now. So take note of the business founders’ plight today. See how they are slighted by the Valley’s tastemakers. Feel their frustration as potential technical co-founders ignore their ideas and instead execute their own. Encourage them as they clumsily try and learn Python the hard way . Most importantly, however, start to pay attention to them. If the past decade is any indication of what the next one will be like, then it won’t be long before the business founder has the advantage that today’s technical founders enjoy. And, when that time comes, they’ll refuse to be ignored. Image excerpt from Leadership Freak

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In The Future, The Business Founder Will Not Be Ignored

This is an interesting post called Andreessen Horowitz-Backed Nicira Pulls The Curtains Back On Disruptive Network Virtualization Platform:

Published on: 2012-02-06 05:00:25

The enterprise is moving towards simplicity, and this extends to the data center. Nicira , a stealthy virtualization startup with backing from big-name investors, is pulling the curtains back on its disruptive platform that hopes to change the way server and storage virtualization is done. And Nicira is revealing that it has raised with $50 million in funding to date from Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners and New Enterprise Associates, as well as individual investors including VMware co-founder Diane Greene and Benchmark Capital cofounder Andy Rachleff. Nicira’s NVP is a software-based system that creates a distributed virtual network infrastructure in cloud data centers that is completely decoupled and independent from physical network hardware. Nicira says that it is shifting the intelligence and control of the network away from hardware and into software, simplifying the virtualization process. NVP’s platform forms a thin software layer that treats the physical network as an IP backplane. This approach allows the creation of virtual networks that have the same properties and services as physical networks, such as security and QoS policies, L2 reachability, and higher-level service capabilities. According to the company, organizations can provision and deploy services in minutes rather than weeks or months, and you don’t need to change any of your existing hardware or software infrastructure. All enterprises need is IP connectivity. Nicira says that virtualized data centers face limits to what applications they can support and where the workloads can be placed. These limitations result in restricted workload mobility, and leave data centers under utilized. Stephen Mullaney, Chief Executive Officer of Nicira, explained to us that the network hasn’t evolved for the cloud-based data center, and the existing solutions are inflexible and complex. “The solution is to virtualize and create virtual networks that are decoupled from physical networks. The network is transitioning from hardware to software just like every other business. Software is eating the world,” he says. The NVP platform is compatible with any data center network hardware. It can be deployed on any existing network, and it allows for future changes to the network hardware without disruption to the operations of the virtual network platform. The software is delivered through a usage-based, monthly subscription-pricing model, which scales per virtual network port. Customers only pay for what they use, and pricing scales accordingly. The company, which has nabbed a number of executives from Cisco, already counts AT&T, eBay, Fidelity Investments, NTT and Rackspace as customers.

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Excerpt from: Andreessen Horowitz-Backed Nicira Pulls The Curtains Back On Disruptive Network Virtualization Platform

Published on: 2012-02-04 03:54:13

Those of us who have been following the social gaming industry already know that Zynga makes up a big portion of Facebook’s revenues. But lots of public investors only seem to have gotten the memo on Wednesday evening, when Facebook’s S-1 filing revealed that the developer accounts for 12% of its total revenues , or $445 million. In the two days since, Zynga’s stock has gone up more than 26%, to close at $13.39 this evening. This is far more than most analysts had previously projected. The ones who began covering Zynga after its December IPO had pegged its stock well under ten bucks. When analysts at banks who underwrote Zynga entered the fray a couple weeks ago, they were unsurprisingly more bullish . Following the end of the quiet period, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan and Barclays Capital, along with analysts from banks not involved in the IPO, all put their target price above Zynga’s public opening amount of $10. This drove the Street’s average target price up to $11.08, as you can see from the StreetInsider table below. Existing industry research, namely the Inside Virtual Goods report from my previous company, Inside Network , had indicated as of last fall that virtual goods revenue from Facebook applications reached $500 million last year . Facebook’s prospectus more than confirmed this on Wednesday, revealing that a strong fourth quarter had actually put the number a little higher, at $557 million. There are other data points you can use to try to figure out Zynga’s position with that number. AppData traffic shows that it has a dominant traffic position on Facebook’s platform. It gets 90% of its revenue from Facebook, but first Facebook collects 30% of its virtual goods transaction sales, per terms that have been in effect since midway through last year. And, Zynga has since at least 2009 used Facebook ads as a main way to bring in new and returning users. The problem is how to add this up. The Wall Street Journal’s Rolfe Winkler explains the confusion in how to calculate the results: Different assumptions lead to different estimates for Zynga’s fourth-quarter “bookings,” which is the preferred method for measuring Zynga’s top line. Macquarie analyst Ben Schachter’s quick-and-dirty analysis says Facebook’s disclosure implies $268 million for Zynga’s bookings for the fourth quarter, short of the $302 million analysts are expecting. Baird Equity Research analyst Colin Sebastian digs deeper, making more assumptions, and comes out with a number of $315 million. Both analyses included many caveats. Heavy trading volumes indicate high volatility among investors. Zynga will do its first ever earnings call on February 14th. Get ready for some new estimates.

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Investors Drive $ZNGA Up 26% In Two Days Following Facebook IPO Filing

Check out this informative article written by TechCrunch. It provides great digital marketing information. To see all new blog posts featuring great marketing info, click here

Published on: 2012-02-02 20:34:59

Parenting is already an extremely hard job, let alone the myriad issues tired parents find in trying to track down the best local babysitter and daycare services, schools, and more. Meanwhile, the brain-melting technology that we see employed every day focuses mainly on photo sharing, friend finding, and money managing, but parents are often left holding the short end of the stick. This is according to Dr. Carol Peebles, a co-founder of WeSprout , a graduate of the first batch of startups from healthtech-focused accelerator, Rock Health . Dr. Peebles, a neuroscientist in pediatrics at UCSF, spends much of her residency coaching parents through the different phases of their children’s development and has found that, while doctors are always eager to help, it’s parents themselves that are often the best coaches for other parents. So, in founding WeSprout, Dr. Peebles wanted to ensure that parents have their child’s medical history whenever they need it, can use that information to find the answers they need, both medical and non-medical — and the current services aren’t solving the issues surrounding this need. The co-founder says that parenting sites today are, for the most part, noisy, cluttered, and hard to use. Combining her medical expertise with the product experience of her co-founder (and fiancee) M. Jackson Wilkinson (formerly the head of UX at Posterous) as well as Keith Muth, who worked with Jackson at Viget Labs, WeSprout has been incubating and iterating at Rock Health, and is emerging into the public sphere this week. WeSprout’s goal, beyond giving parents the tools to make better choices for their children, is to find the sweet spot between personal health records and community; in other words, a service that provides a reason to keep your children’s health records up to date, and a community that becomes a multi-purpose tool by leveraging those records. WeSprout wants to make it easy for parents to track their children’s health by way of easy recording of health information, be it medical issues, immunization records, developmental milestones, height, weight, and so on. While those familiar with the space may see some similarities with venture-backed (and TechCrunch Disrupt alumni) like MotherKnows , or another Disrupt alumni like Avado , or AboutOne , Wilkinson tell us that these sites can all be complementary, catering to different parts of the space. And even so, he says, relevance in parenting communities is sorely lacking, and there’s no real reason to keep a stand-alone health record up to date, so that bridge between the two — community and health records — is the secret sauce. WeSprout wants to be a community that takes privacy seriously, while helping parents actually find information that they’ll find useful. No more aimless sifting through the endless content sources on the interwebs for relevant parenting data. It’s not about experts, Wilkinson says, it’s about facilitating parent-to-parent communication, providing advice from the people who are going through the same thing as you. Thus, for WeSprout, it’s about bridging the gap not only between community and health records, but between people and data. When I asked the co-founder about the so-called “health graph,” he said that it’s going to be a big part of where the startup goes next, and the WeSprout team wants to be involved in that data exchange — in pediatrics — going forward. The most relevant Q&A networks provide multiple perspectives from peers and people who are going through the same experiences as you, thus lending the network a P2P credibility and relevancy, which makes them sustainable. WeSprout aims to be both crowdsourced and datasourced in an effort to make its parent-to-parent network more credible and relevant, with parents being a big part of it, and the information shared about their children being the other. Most EMR platforms focus on adults and parents, who clearly have different needs than their children, so WeSprout is focusing not only on the pediatric context, but also on making record-keeping and data entry as simple as possible. Having a strong UX background, the team is trying to reduce the clutter in what is traditionally a friction-saturated activity. And best of all? It’s free. Which means that, in terms of monetizing, WeSprout will launch a premium offering in several weeks that will enable its users to go beyond tracking and simply community, and extend into sharing records, with loved ones, doctors, create groups, and even take advantage of some scrapbooking. (This is where we may see WeSprout begin to move into AboutOne’s territory.) For those TechCrunch readers looking to get early access to WeSprout, head over to the landing page here , where you can get access to the invite-only launch. Just sign in. Once inside the product, readers can invite as many people as they’d like. The team will open all doors by the end of the week. For more, check out WeSprout at home here , and learn more about Rock Health’s most recent batch here .

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Part Health Tracker, Part Q&A Community, WeSprout Looks To Bring Sanity To Parenting

Check out this informative post written by TechCrunch. It provides great digital marketing information. To see all new blog posts featuring great marketing info, click here

Published on: 2012-02-02 14:33:35

Mobile ad startup Mojiva is the latest startup to start throwing around the word “billion” in its press releases. The company says it now reaches one billion unique devices each month. Of those devices, about 224 million are in the United States, Mojiva says. The United Kingdom, Germany, and Italy, account for 33 million, 10.6 million, and 8.7 million devices, respectively. Overall, Mojiva says it’s serving 45 billion ad requests in 190 countries.(When mobile ad network Millennial Media filed for an IPO last month, it said it reached 200 million unique users worldwide and claimed 40 billion ad impressions per month.) Mojiva CEO Dave Gwozdz said via email that 2011 was a big year for the company. The network saw “roughly 350% growth … in many different areas,” including revenue, ads served, and publishers in the network, he said — and the company’s ad serving business, Mocean Mobile, grew even more quickly. Plus, Mojiva raised a $25 million round in July. When asked about 2012, Gwozdz said that the mobile ad industry as a whole will need to start providing better analytics and optimization, as well as more standards around ad serving counts and ad sizes. As for Mojiva itself, not surprisingly Gwozdz said that it will continue to focus on providing opportunities for its advertisers and publishers. More specifically, he said the company will be trying to expand in China.

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Mobile Ad Network Mojiva Reaches 1 Billion Devices

Published on: 2012-02-01 05:30:29

Long passed the days when we had to wonder why we should care about search results for our (brand) names. Google reputation management is a well-known phrase to anyone making a living online. Hence, you are most likely to know that in order to maintain stable presence in branded search results, one should be working continuously. If you are blogging a lot and care about your brand name and what people see when they are searching Google for your name, here are exactly three things you need to do once to improve your Google search results branding: 1. Verify the Authorship of Your Articles A few months ago Google got really serious about giving more credit to great content authors. As a result, you can see the author’s headshot right within relevant search results. Since then, claiming your content authorship has been step #1 in branding your search results. Luckily, following the community feedback, Google has made that a fairly simple task: 1. “Reciprocal” Links Method This method is about interlinking your Google Plus profile with your articles: Your articles & Your author page both link to your Google Plus profile Your Google Profile Links back to your Author page. Step 1 : Link your author page to your Google Plus profile. This tool will help you generate a pretty button for that. Alternatively, you can text-link using rel=author added right to end of the profile URL address: Google Step 2: Link your Google Plus Profile back to your Author’s pages from within “Contributing to” section. This tool will help identify if you have done everything right. This is what you should see after step 1 and step 2 are both passed: Hard to remember? Here’s an easy checklist for you: Link to: From Rel= Your Google Plus Profile Each of your articles + your author page “author” Link generator Your Author Page Your Google Plus profile “contributor-to” Verification 2. eMail-Based Method If you contribute in many places and don’t feel like linking to your Google Plus profile, consider an email verification process. Step 1: Create a separate email account to feature on all your guest posts (this can be name@yourdomain.com or anything. Mind that there is likely to be much junk mail after you publicize your address on your articles) Step 2: Add your email address to your Google Plus profile Step 3: Link to that email address whenever you guest post. Step 4: Link to all domains you are contributing to in “Contributing to” section of your Google Plus Profile (same section as in the first method) How to add a new email address to your Google Plus profile? It’s very easy: in “editing” mode scroll down a bit and click on a “Work” section. Select “email” from the drop-down and add your email address you want to verify (note that you’ll need to click a link inside the email sent to that email address for verification purposes): 2. Create a Master Feed of Your Contributions If you have built some popularity, you are most likely to be frequently invited to guest post . Or you contribute to a few blogs, or you maintain a (paid) columns in a number of online publications… In all the above cases, it’s a very wise idea to aggregate all your content in one RSS feed to promote all your contributions on auto-pilot and to showcase your work around the web. I have done a very detailed post on creating your master RSS feed for all your contributor accounts . In short, here’s a quick to-do list on creating the feed as well as sharing it on the web: STEPS HOW Step 1: Identify your author RSS feeds In many cases, you can find your author RSS feed here: http://www.blogdomain.com/author/ author-name /feed/ Yahoo! Pipes “Fetch Feed” tool Step 2: Create Feeds where you don’t have one Identify repetitive HTML mark-up of your author pages to extract links to your individual posts and to create an RSS feed of your author page Feed43 (optionally, premium) Step 3: Combine all your RSS feeds in one Create one master feed of all your author RSS feeds by uniting them in one Yahoo! Pipes (“Fetch feed”, “Truncate”, “Union” & “Sort by” modules). Here’s my pipe, feel free to clone it! RSSMix (easier but less customized) Step 4: Publicize your master RSS feed on your blog (blogs) You can share your master feed in a WordPress widget (WordPress has a default widget for that) or embed in a page. RSS include (paid) RSS Just Better WordPress plugin (free) You are done! Now, your guest posts and contributions are shared on an autopilot (which means more social shares, exposure, links and consequently better rankings for all your articles around the web!). Here’s my master feed embed in a page that serves as my guest post portfolio (as an example): 3. Claim Your Brand Name in Major Social Networks While this one is absolutely obvious, plenty of people are really too late to claim their brand names across social networks. While Google Plus is attempting to kill nicknames , we still have other huge players we can’t ignore. Here’s another quick to-do for you (together with important notes to remember): Social Network What to Claim What to Remember Twitter Username (the one you specify when registering an account or logging in) Twitter TOS don’t allow users to hold usernames just in order to claim them. You may want to keep it (at least somewhat active) and update it now and then Facebook Username (in the URL path): There can be a lot of Ann Smarties on Facebook but only one is able to have facebook.com/annsmarty profile address. Google loves short URLs with keywords, so if you want *your* profile to be #1 for your name search, claim it now! It can’t be later changed Fan page username (URL path) The page should have at least 25 fans; it cannot be changed as well. Gmail Username (username@gmail.com) You are most likely to be already too late to this party LinkedIn Username (Public profile URL path) Do not use spaces, symbols, or special characters The best thing about all the above exercises is that you need to only do them once – so they are really worth a one-time effort! Post image: If you don’t remember me The views and opinions expressed in this post are not necessarily those of Marketing Pilgrim. About the author Ann Smarty is a professional blogger and guest blogger. She owns My Blog Guest , the free community that connects bloggers to guest authors. She also maintains a few other smaller start-ups (including the most recent tool for guest post and link tracking). Ann is also an SEO ninja at Jim Boykin’s Internet Marketing Ninjas . Join the Marketing Pilgrim Facebook Community

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3 Must-Take Steps to Brand Search Results for Your Name

This is a new article called CardSpring Raises $10 Million To Connect Payments To The Web:

Published on: 2012-01-31 17:00:33

We measure every last click when it comes to the Web, but there remains a gulf between online and the real world. Yet the online world increasingly drives behavior offline, especially when it comes to purchasing habits. How many times have you researched something online or on your mobile phone before buying it? Yet when you go to a store to buy it, everything you did online might as well disappear as far as the merchant is concerned. It doesn’t have to be that way. The last mile in local commerce is really only the last few inches between the credit card in your outstretched hand and the card swipe at the register. That terminal is the gateway to the payment network, which today isn’t really connected to the Internet for most practical purposes. The payment networks is archaic and operates based on its own closed standards. But what if it was as easy to connect to the payment network as it is to develop an application on the Web? That is the question a group of former Netscape engineers and executives are trying to answer with a new startup called  CardSpring  launching in private beta today. Cardspring is creating an application platform that will allow Web and mobile developers to write applications for credit cards and other types of payments. Cardspring attaches itself to the payment network in a secure fashion on one side, and on the other it presents itself as a platform for developers to create payment apps via Web-standard APIs. It is a bridge between the two networks. These applications could include things like electronic coupons, loyalty cards, virtual currencies, or yet-to-be-imagined commerce apps. For example, you could get a $10 off coupon online, enter your credit card number, and then when you go to a store and pay with that card, the payment network would recognize the card and give you the $10 credit. Or you could swipe your card and it could email you the receipt. Or it could check in for you. Swiping the card would trigger an application. What you see is a piece of plastic. What the network sees is an application. If this sounds a little bit like what Groupon, LivingSocial , Foursquare , Square or Google are trying to do, it is because they’ve all been trying to crack this nut in different ways. They all want to  close the redemption loop  between digital offers and in-store payments. “Groupon threaded the needle with coupons,” says CEO  Eckart Walther , but in his eyes daily deals are no more than a “wonderful one-off solution—We are literally inside the payment network.” Walther once ran Netscape’s platform group. He later went to TellMe Networks, Yahoo search, LiveOps, and ended up as an EIR at Accel . The company’s CTO is Jeff Winner , who was the head crypto guy at Netscape. He is helped come up with SSL (the standard security layer in the browser), among other things. Cardspring already raised $10 million from Accel and Greylock in a Series A (Andrew Braccia from Accel and James Slavet from Greylock are the partners on the deal). Other investors include SV Angel (which is a big believer in the Online2Offline trend), Morado Ventures, Felicis Ventures, and Maynard Webb’s investment vehicle, WIN. Groupon isn’t the only attempt at a one-off solution. Foursquare links its merchant specials to  American Express card purchases , but not every card. Google Wallet is trying to put payment apps into your phone.  It’s too fragmented. “Every day, a mini-platform is trying to launch.” he says. Instead, CardSpring is attacking the problem just like you’d expect a bunch of Netscape engineers would: at the network level. “What if we could bring the browser platform to the payment network?’ asks Walther. Try to wrap your brain around that for a second. Your plastic credit card can trigger different applications—coupons, loyalty rewards, reminders, check-ins, you name it. All of it is secure and based on permissions you allowed each application to have (in return for some benefit). “One of the Internet’s fundamental challenges is its inability to effectively capture the economic value it creates for business in the physical world,” notes Braccia. “CardSpring’s platform enables offline stores to easily measure the impact of the web on their business.” There is a huge need for this type of payments platform. Groupon could use it to finally track redemptions of its coupons without having to ship iPads with special software to bars and restaurants. Foursquare could tie it into its specials and actually capture the purchase data and then show that to merchants in their dashboards. So could LivingSocial. And that’s just for starters. Imagine cost-per-action ads where the action is an in-store purchase. The possibilities are endless. Not only that, but any website or mobile app that takes credit card information will now have the opportunity to append data to those purchases, and to read and write data to the payment network. It is not just about moving money, but moving payment-related data. In the end, the data may turn out to be more valuable. The difficult part will be to convince consumers to hand over their credit card numbers in order for these applications to work. To the extent that the initial websites and apps already hold consumers’ credit card information, like Groupon or LivingSocial do, that shouldn’t be an issue. But when unknown sites or businesses start asking for that information, it might not be as forthcoming. Still, there is a lot of low-hanging fruit here and Cardspring brings a clever approach to a difficult problem. It is not asking much of consumers or merchants. They do not need any new technology or fancy NFC-powered phones or terminals. All they need is their credit card. The network will do the rest.

Published on: 2012-01-30 22:25:12

How did Facebook become worth so much money that it could  file for the biggest IPO in tech history ? By building a highly defensible product, platform, and advertising business on top of brilliant talent and valuable data. It now has several competitive advantages that protect it from disruption and could give it a long life as the primary online identity provider. Here are the 5 components that make Facebook a smart long-term bet for investors, regardless of its exact IPO pricing. Network Effect Displacing Facebook as the mainstream online social network would be next to impossible. It brought authenticated identity to the internet –a crucial utility that compelled users to join. No other service may be able to add on top of Facebook something as valuable as what Facebook added to Myspace, friendster, and other services where you didn’t have to be yourself. Facebook’s ingenius distribution strategy, detailed in The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick , allowed the service to capitalize on this value-add and spread to the farthest reaches of the globe . Eventually the network effect took hold, with Facebook’s ever-growing user base making it ever-more valuable and attractive to new users. And now inertia has set in. Users have invested considerable time into Facebook building their profiles, walls, interest graphs, and most importantly, their social graphs. As Facebook handles a wide range of use cases and a critical mass of any person’s friends already using it, a competing social network can’t just be as good or better, it would need to be massive improvement to lead users astray. The insulation to competition provided by the network effect makes it a safe long-term bet for investors. The News Feed’s EdgeRank Algorithm For five years, Facebook has been collecting data and refining its EdgeRank algorithm , which determines what of all the content your friends share ends up in your news feed, and how prominently. By using Likes, comments, and shares to determine what’s most relevant, Facebook had developed arguably the best automated content curation engine in the world. The news feed also gets to draw on the web’s largest database of photos , and the friend tags they feature which helped Facebook go viral. For new users without tons of data points, Facebook can still predict what they might be interested in seeing. For existing users, especially veterans of the site that actively use its feedback mechanisms, the news feed consistently surfaces relevant content. EdgeRank creates that the highly addicting experience that drives Facebook’s enormous time on site, return visit rate, and engagement. Even if Twitter or Google+ had all the content of Facebook, it could take them years to develop an algorithm that produces such a relevant feed. Talent Mark Zuckerberg sees the future. His product vision allows Facebook to release features that users grow into rather than out of. Zuckerberg has integrated progressive home brewed ideas as well as those that  couldn’t reach their full potential when launched elsewhere. He has pushed the service to constantly reinvent itself, allowing it to stay cool and relevant 8 years after launch. Zuck’s dedication to making the world a better place through interconnection and openness has also attracted other visionaries. COO Sheryl Sandberg ‘s efficiency has made the company very profitable, and her willingness to experiment means Facebook will continue to revolutionize advertising through behavioral targeting and social content-infused ads. VP of Product Chris Cox has led Facebook’s social design movement, where 1st and 3rd party products are made to leverage Facebook’s data and community from the start, rather than bolting them on. With the promise of changing the world and a lean, fun-loving company culture, Facebook has been pulling top engineering, product, and business talent away from larger companies like Google that are saddled with product bloat and bureaucracy. It’s also been aggressively acquiring disruptive startups such as Paul Bucheit and Brett Taylor’s FriendFeed , Blake Ross’ Parakey , Sam Lessin’s Drop.io , and Josh Williams’ Gowalla . The rockstar product designers and executives ensures innovation will continue to flow from within Facebook. The IPO will provide Facebook more cash for acquisitions and give its talent the liquidity they deserve . Though there’s always the chance they could cash out and leave, the ability to sell a little stock and upgrade their lifestyle might keep employees happy enough to stick around. The Apps and Games Platform Facebook has created a gaming platform proven to offer viral growth. While the service has curtailed some of loudest viral channels, organic growth opportunities remain and on-site advertising for games has produced high returns on investment for companies like Zynga. Facebook has fostered an enormous community of developers that pay while populating the site with engaging apps and content, and that won’t ever disappear overnight. Facebook games are often infinite building simulations or twitch puzzlers, have long session lengths, and let users make vanity purchases so they can show off while simultaneously hooking them deeper into a game. They readily produce “whales”, or people who spend orders of magnitude more than the average player. Mobile is emerging as a lucrative platform for Apple and Google, and Facebook is just getting started there, but it does have an enormous install base to work from . By attracting developers early with free growth , clamping down once they had invested, and then taxing them 30% through its virtual currency Credits, Facebook has turned its games platform into a consistent money maker . Now some developers are experimenting with digital media sales and rentals , pay-per-view , as well as offering virtual currency microincentives , showing potential for platform monetization beyond games. Ad Targeting Age, gender, current city, hometown, employers, education, friends, interests, and now in-app activity and ecommerce habits. When users share this data with friends, they’re also sharing with Facebook. This gives Facebook possibly the most accurate and robust set of ad targeting data in the world. With both an self-serve tool and ad reps handling premium accounts, Facebook can provide effective advertising solutions to both local business and international brands. Facebook has developed eye-catching ads by combining this targeting with  social-content infused ad creative . Viewers see the names and faces of friends who Like an advertised brand. Interactions between their friends and brands, such as Likes, app usage, and checkins, can become the ads themselves through Sponsored Stories. These trump, and are increasingly pulling spend away from more cookie-cutter display and search ads targeted through cookies and keywords. Facebook has only begun to monetize through ads. The sidebars where ads primarily appear have been kept small and unobtrusive. Facebook is now mixing ads back into the web version of the news feed , where they’re sure to be seen between organic social content. Facebook has yet to show ads to its hundreds of millions of daily mobile users, but Sponsored Stories could show up there soon too. Finally, it could one day create an ad network that allows other sites to pay to show logged-in Facebook users the same highly targeted social ads they see on Facebook.com.

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Here is the original:
The 5 Reasons Why Facebook Is Worth So Much Money