Viadeo Raises $32M To E...

Paris-based business social networking site Viadeo may have put a planned IPO into a holding pattern last year, but it is not having any trouble raising capital elsewhere as it forges ahead with its international expansion. Today, it has announced that it has picked up funding worth $32 million — one of the largest recent tech investments in Europe and the biggest ever for a social network in the region. Investors in this round included government-backed funds the French Sovereign Wealth Fund and the Fonds Stratégique d’Investissement ; institutional shareholders Idinvest and Ventech; and several new investors such as Allianz, Jefferies, and Middle Eastern private funds. This most recent round of funding, Viadeo’s fourth, takes the total amount invested in the company to $50.2 million. Viadeo says the investment will be used to grow its business in Europe and China. In the latter market, it operates as Tianji and claims to be the biggest professional social network in the country, with 10 million members — nearly one quarter of all of Viadeo’s 45 million registered users. Following through on that success in China, Viadeo says funds will also be used to expand operations in more emerging markets such as Latin America, India, Africa and Russia. In Russia, the company established a JV with Finnish publisher  Sanoma Oyj in December 2011 to create a more localized version of the site for the Russian market. Viadeo describes itself as the world’s second-largest social network for business people. Indeed, LinkedIn is still far ahead of it, with 150 million users as of February 2012 . But while LinkedIn can claim that it has users are spread across 200 different countries and territories, Viadeo says its unique selling point is that it takes more of a local approach than its rivals. That has seen, for example, Viadeo’s Chinese site attract a much younger demographic than the rest of its footprint, with the average age of a Tianji user being only 30. “We have always been laser-focused on our ‘multi-local’ approach, which goes beyond simple translation and focuses on catering to, and understanding, the business and cultural needs of each market,” said Dan Serfaty, CEO, Viadeo. “This approach has awarded us tremendous growth and success in both European and emerging markets.” Considering that both LinkedIn and Viadeo offer a similar range of services within the app — the opportunity to network, enhance reputation and visibility, chatter about business with others, and so on — it will be interesting to see whether this more “laser local” approach will draw more users to Viadeo over the promise of bigger scale from LinkedIn. So far, the signs for expansion have been promising. Viadeo says that each month it adds 1 million new members, creates 10 million new connections and facilitates 100 million profile views. The company also says it achieved profitability back in September 2009.

LinkedIn Adds Ability t...

On Facebook, you follow a brand because you like it, but do you follow companies you like on LinkedIn? The B2B social network sure hopes so and they’re working to make those follow connections more meaningful. This week, LinkedIn began rolling out two new products for marketers. The first is called Targeted Updates. This is the ability to send updates to only a specific portion of your follower list. New product announcements to buyers, software updates to users, job announcements to college grads who don’t already work for your company, etc. To go along with this, they’ve launching Follower Statistics, a self-service look at who is sharing and engaging with your content. Right now, these services are only available to the chose few, ( Sound familiar? ) but soon (?) they’ll be rolled out to the masses. Both of these sound like pretty useful services, but I do wonder how many people would actually use them. Perhaps I’m in the minority, but I use LinkedIn to follow people I am or have been associated with. I don’t think of it as a place to follow companies that interest me. Maybe I should. Maybe I’m missing out on some important information here. Then again, I don’t think I’m the demographic LinkedIn is aimed at. If I ran a company that produced custom widgets, then it would be handy to follow all the companies I’d like to sell to in hopes that they’d follow me back. Then I could send their buyers updates whenever I have a widget sale, right? But is that how it really works? I’m genuinely curious. How do you use LinkedIn? Is it a valuable part of your business routine? Do you use it to network? Do you use it to market your goods? Or is it just another social media time-waster that you could easily do without.

Amazon, eBay Among Late...

The Pinterest-ing of the web continues at Amazon and eBay. Ryan Spoon pointed out that the massive online retailers recently added tiny Pinterest buttons to their deck of social media sharing options on product pages. And why not? With Pinterest being the fast-growing social network, these buttons give users easy ways to share while at the same time allowing the retailers to cash-in on the pinning craze. The two site’s implementations are very similar. Both use Pinterest’s tiny social sharing button, which act as expected, triggering a popup for easy pinning. See Amazon’s here on the right column under the buying options boxes. The move works nicely with Pinterest’s focus on products. Pinterest is arguably more relevant for retailers than blogs or new outlets. But watch out, spammers will no doubt utilize the button paired affiliate links. As paidContent notes , the only thing missing is a Pinterest Android app for even more Amazon integration.

Facebook Sues Yahoo Wit...

In 2006, former Yahoo employee Thyagarajapuram S. Ramakrishnan was working for Facebook when he filed a patent for the news feed. Today in a sweet piece of irony, Facebook is using that same patent to sue Yahoo . Facebook claims that Yahoo’s Flickr Photostream and Activity Feeds infringe on “Generating a Feed of Stories Personalized for Members of a Social Network”. This U.S. Patent 7,827,208 for “generating dynamic relationship-based content personalized for members of a web-based social network [with] weighting by affinity” and nine others could help Facebook escape a costly settlement over the original patent lawsuit Yahoo’s filed against it last month. See kids, trolling doesn’t always pay. Ramakrishnan, then working for Facebook, teamed up with Andrew Bosworth (Director of Engineering), Chris Cox (VP of Product), Ruchi Sanghvi (news feed product manager, now at Dropbox), Adam D’Angelo (Former CTO, now at Quora) to file the news feed patent on August 11th, 2006. A month later, the feature launched causing mass protest by the Facebook user base. Soon, though, the highly relevant content feed sorted via the ’208 patent technology became a popular and defining feature of the social network. It wasn’t until over two years after the Facebook news feed launch that both Yahoo’s Flickr and Profiles added similar feeds of the recent activity of one’s contacts. The copying was so obvious that Facebook made its news feed patent the first of the 10 patents exhibited in its infringement counter-claim against Yahoo. So, either Yahoo didn’t do its homework, or it must have expected Ramakrishnan’s ’208 patent to come back and bite it in the ass. The patent could help Facebook negotiate its way out paying huge amounts of cash or stock to license the 10 patents Yahoo is suing it with. A legal stalemate would actually turn out to be a huge fail for Yahoo. It’s received a ton of hate from entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and the public for trolling Facebook with vague patents rather than actually innovating. Other former employees have chastised it for “ weaponizing” their inventions . The whole debacle could make recruiting tough, and retaining employees tougher for Yahoo. So by going on the offensive while vulnerable itself, Yahoo may have ensured that when its employees have brilliant ideas, they’ll already be working for somebody else. [Image Credit: 20th Century Fox ]

Facebook The Patent Buy...

Facebook, according to reports, is buying up a boatload of patents from IBM — 750 in all — that will help the company shore up against potential legal attacks from Yahoo and other companies claiming the huge social network infringes on their intellectual property. But for the past couple of years, Facebook has already been taking steps to build up its patent portfolio through the acquisition of patents from a host of other players, from large IT companies, to a patent troll and a defunct social network. And a few surprises. Of the 60 patents that Facebook now owns that are listed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, there are 15 from Facebook itself; and nine patents from HP, 11 originally from Philips Electronics (but sold to IPG and then sold by IPG to Facebook), three from UK telecoms operator BT, nine from patent holder Walker Digital, one from Divan Industries, one from Applied Industries and 11 from Friendster — the pioneering social network that died a Facebook death and eventually got sold to a Malaysian company that turned it into a gaming network . The patents cover a wide range of areas. Some are very much in the wheelhouse of what we know as Facebook today — managing social relationships, newsfeeds and contacts, for example. Some are about technical processes that happen behind the scenes. And some seem to cover functions that Facebook doesn’t really offer today. One relates to playlists for music or other media (“Method and apparatus for priority-based jukebox queuing”, patent number 6421651). Others seem to have a distinct e-commerce bent (“Systems and methods wherein a buyer purchases products in a plurality of product categories”, 7188080; “Method, computer product and apparatus for facilitating the provision of opinions to a shopper from a panel of peers”, 7526440). The U.S. Patent Office also lists another 140 patent applications that have yet to be either approved or formally rejected. Many of these have been initiated by Facebook itself. But there are also some that Facebook has picked up while they are still pending. These include four more patents originally owned by Friendster, one more e-commerce patent from Walker — and, surprisingly, one from the energy and services giant Halliburton, related to data centers (“Cooling computing devices in a data center with ambient air cooled using heat from the computing devices”). Digging into some of the back-and-forth around pending applications gives a glimpse as to why it’s so important for Facebook to acquire patents rather than try to build up the portfolio itself. (One, for example, filed by Facebook for “Facilitating Interaction Among Users of a Social Network,” was originally filed in July 2010, and just last week had a “non-final rejection” of all of its claims. Facebook can still modify and resubmit.) It can take years to get a patent approved, and in the case of social media and gaming the process can take even longer, typically up to six to eight years or more from the time the application gets filed. Meanwhile, the potentials for lawsuits appear to be building up. “Facebook is really the new kid on the block and they need to gird and prepare themselves with IP because the bigger kids have it,” a patent lawyer explained to me. “They have definitely been very proactive, though. Someone at that company understands that the key to a good defense is a good offense.” So is 60 the definitive number of patents that Facebook owns today? Not necessarily: this is the number listed by the U.S. Patent Office but the patent lawyer tells us that there could be more that it has simply not registered. “There’s no requirement to record every patent with the USPTO,” he said. “It’s only something you do if and when you want to enforce it.” Although he does point out that it’s generally good practice not to stockpile patents.