Unless Specific Media hits a home run with the new streaming music service it’s raising $50 million to pivot Myspace into, its bargain basement buy of the social network for just $35 million in 2011 could be a disaster. Slides attained by Business Insider shows Myspace will lose $43 million in 2012 on revenue of just $15 million. Yet somehow it thinks the notoriously tough music biz will save it.

The pitch deck outlines how Specific Media, now known as Interactive Media Holding, thinks it can turn Myspace around by morphing it into a Spotify and Pandora competitor. It’s betting it can win because of the Myspace brand association with music and the fact that 50% of its streaming plays today come from unassigned artists it won’t have to pay royalties to.

It would have to win big because Myspace is hemorrhaging money. News Corp took a nasty hit buying Myspace for $580 million in 2005 when it was still growing fast. But Myspace’s core tech was rotten, and its lack of the real-world social graph let Facebook quickly usurp it. Myspace sunk like a stone, and News Corp ended up selling it to Specific Media for a lousy $35 million last summer.

That might sound cheap but it came with a lot of baggage. Myspace now has 700 employees it has to pay, leading it to lose $20 million in 2011 on revenue of $9 million. Traffic has increased a bit since a redesign at the end of 2010. It managed 28 million monthly uniques by August 2012, up from 23 million in December 2011. But with $15 million in expected revenue and an EBITDA net loss of $43 million in 2012, the streaming music service it’s raising money for would have to rake in cash for Interactive to salvage the acquisition.

Sadly, I don’t think that will happen. If you want to bring the world affordable music, sure, go ahead and launch a streaming service. But if you’re trying to make money, you might be singing out of key. Even if it gets to escape significant royalty fees by streaming unsigned music, the jams you do have to pay the record labels for are pricey. The equation only works at massive scale with a huge ads sales team and lots of paying subscribers.

If the model wasn’t weak enough, Myspace would have to compete with the well-established Pandora and Spotify, which are becoming household names for personalized Internet radio and on-demand streaming music respectively. And they’re both losing money! Pandora had a net loss of $20 million in Q1 2012, and Spotify, despite all the label-backing, could lose $40 million in 2012. Plus there’s Apple’s iTunes and the radio service it’s rumored to launch.

And for a final piece of pessimism, there’s no way that Myspace could keep unsigned music accounting for 50% of its plays if it scales. The indie music fan base just isn’t that large. A fair amount of these too-cool-for-pop music cats are either already using Myspace, or are allegiant to blogs like Pitchfork that provide bleeding edge music discovery and curate out the crap.

This all makes the projections in Myspace’s pitch deck nearly laughable. It thinks it will lose just $25 million next year, be making $10 million by 2014, and printing $33 million on $140 million in revenue by 2015. I’m not counting Myspace out. There’s potential for it in spaces like meeting new people or customized content feeds, but streaming music? That’s pretty hazy.

Let’s face it. If you were a 23-year old Myspace-loving music discovery junkie in the site’s heyday, you’re 30 now, and probably aren’t desperately seeking the latest buzz bands like you used to.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/social/~3/upgKk_PSdRM/

SeedCamp alumni, SocialBro, which offers a web app for the management and analysis of Twitter communities, has scored €500k (approx. $638k) from a syndicate of angel investors from the UK and Spain. The round was led by “serial tech angel investor”, Stephen Bullock, and Chris Underhill, who has a background in digital marketing. Both Bullock and Underhill will join the SocialBro’s Board.

The UK/Spain-based company says it will use the new capital to establish a London-based marketing operation (I’m told that SocialBro’s CEO is currently based at Google Campus in London), recruitment of a marketing and business development team, further development of the SocialBro cloud service, and to help forge partnerships with “key players” in Social Media.

Aimed at Social Media and marketing professionals, the SocialBro app lets users analyze the characteristics of their Twitter communities (things like key influencers, location, language, frequency of Tweets etc.), manage these contacts on an individual basis or via specific search criteria and, ultimately, use this intel to drive marketing strategy. Its feature set is quite comprehensive, so it’s hard to pin down in a single sentence, but one way to think of SocialBro is a mixture of Twitter follower analytics and a social CRM.

On the partnerships-front, SocialBro has recently integrated with HootSuite, the power-user Twitter client aimed at social media managers and brands, along with the social influence platform, Kred. This follows existing partnerships with the European Klout-competitor, PeerIndex, and the time-shifting Twitter app, Buffer, which lets users line up tweets for the most optimum time of exposure.

In terms of users/customers — the cloud version of SocialBro is a paid-for service only, while the desktop app was initially free — the startup claims “over 140,000 users from 70 countries” since its launch in May 2010. These span “professional” Twitter users, corporates and agencies, such as CBS, NASCAR, Coca-Cola, T-Mobile and Publicis. No word on how many of these are paying customers or monthly revenue (price plans are based on criteria such as number of followers).

SocialBro graduated from the pan-European startup accelerator, SeedCamp, in December 2011, from which it received seed funding.

• SOCIALBRO
• SEEDCAMP

SocialBro is an advanced management and analytics tool for Twitter.

SocialBro is a Seedcamp Company

→ Learn more

Seedcamp is an organization to jumpstart the entrepreneurial community in Europe by putting the next generation of developers and entrepreneurs in front of a network of company builders; including seed investors, serial entrepreneurs, product experts, HR specialists, marketers, lawyers, recruiters, journalists and venture capitalists.

Seedcamp acts as a micro seed fund to invest in startup companies. Seedcamp invests all throughout the year, during Mini Seedcamp events that are held all over Europe. During its flagship event Seedcamp Week, which takes…

→ Learn more

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/social/~3/hJJ8a1QyioU/

Gnip is an interesting company. It might not be extremely sexy or one that gets a lot of attention in mainstream press, let alone tech blogs. But it’s one that provides data from social services for a cost. For example, Gnip is a partner with Twitter in sharing its firehose of data for customers who want to know what people are saying about their brand or company.

Other partnerships have come Gnip’s way, like the one with Tumblr. The way it started out was just like it did with Twitter, a firehose. But Tumblr has more structured data than Twitter does, as it’s more of a network of blogs. Today, Gnip announced that it is now providing the data in a more structured way for companies that want to find out what’s hot and fresh, as well as the sentiment about their brand in real-time.

Gnip has partners that take this structured data and place it into a nice little dashboard that can be accessed by these folks. I spoke to Gnip COO Chris Moody about what this partnership means for its legions of customers, 90 percent of which are Fortune 500 companies:

I think Tumblr is one of the most exciting sources of social data that is just now being tapped and its value is just now being realized. The level of interest and amount of adoption of the data is really exciting.

We talked a bit about why Gnip was going to the next level with its Tumblr partnership and it’s quite simple, Moody states: “When we originally launched a product earlier this year we went after the biggest immediate need from Tumblr data, which was effectively a firehose, and that’s great. There’s people doing advance analytics and are easiest served with a full firehose. The reality is that the volume that Tumblr is producing in the tens of millions of posts a day, that’s incredibly hard to just ingest and make sense of.”

It’s the customers that really make Gnip go. They are hungry for more data, and they’re turning to Moody’s company for it. Being able to filter through this massive firehose easier makes life better for everyone involved:

At its core, our filtering lets you filter real-time content on a variety of levels. Let me know when Coke is mentioned. But it goes far beyond keywords. You can track URLS, track activity on certain Tumblrs.

Whether a company wants to track mentions of their brands, a specific URL or just get information about the latest trend-du-jour, Tumblr’s data can provide a ridiculous amount of insight. There are others doing this type of work, but Moody clearly believes that Gnip is in the driver’s seat and is dedicated to providing its customers with the best experience possible:

We’re the dominant market leader in the enterprise space. When you own the market, you are naturally invested to focus on what your customers are asking for. We don’t spend a lot of time dreaming up things. We spend time asking questions. We knew there was huge demand for Tumblr data, and the firehose was the fastest way to do this. Does it meet their needs? Do they have more needs? Yes. This is great, but we needed something more accessible.

On serving up over 100 billion activities per month, up from 30 billion this time last year, to customers, Moody had this to say: “These numbers are staggering. Numbers recently published by others in our space are a fraction of our numbers. This is our fifth year, and we’re just getting started…”

Game, Set, Match. It’s all about data these days, and Gnip is on it.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

• GNIP
• CHRIS MOODY
• TUMBLR

Gnip is a social media API aggregation tool. They offer data from Twitter, Facebook, and dozens more social media sources (up to 10 million activities per day) all through one single API. Results are available in both original and activity streams formats.

Dubbed the “Grand Central Station for the Social Web” shortly after the company was founded in 2008, Gnip was among the first companies to offer social media API aggregation. Gnip is based in Boulder, Colorado.

→ Learn more

Chris is President COO at Gnip where he is responsible for company operations including sales, marketing, finance, and business development. Prior to joining Gnip, Chris was Founder and President of Aquent On Demand, a leading provider of technology solutions for creative and marketing organizations.

Chris also served as Aquent’s Chief Operating Officer with responsibility for the day-to-day management of more than 700 employees across 70 offices in 17 countries. Before joining Aquent, Chris served in senior…

→ Learn more

Tumblr is a re-envisioning of tumblelogging, a subset of blogging that uses quick, mixed-media posts. The service hopes to do for the tumblelog what services like LiveJournal and Blogger did for the blog. The difference is that its extreme simplicity will make luring users a far easier task than acquiring users for traditional weblogging. Anytime a user sees something interesting online, they can click a quick “Share on Tumblr” bookmarklet that then tumbles the snippet directly. The result is…

→ Learn more

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/social/~3/40G7BnuwM5g/

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg are discussing a potential partnership, according to a report in The Sunday Telegraph.

The story is based on anonymous sources who seem primarily to be “Yahoo insiders.” It’s vague on the details of the partnership, perhaps because those details are still being worked out, but “board members expect the talks to lead to much more substantial collaboration based around web-based search.”

If the two companies did reach a deal, how significant would it be? The Telegraph argues that this could “reorder the hierarchy of the world’s biggest technology companies,” giving Yahoo a big selling point in its efforts to win over both web searchers and engineers, while also making Facebook more useful for its members.

That might just be wishful thinking on Yahoo’s part — the social network’s partnership with Microsoft doesn’t seem to have provided a significant lift to Bing. On the other hand, this could provide Facebook an opportunity to take a different approach to search integration.

If nothing else, these discussions suggest that the relationship between Facebook and Yahoo have thawed after their patent dispute earlier this year, which was settled in July.

I’ve emailed Facebook and Yahoo for comment and will update if I hear back.

• FACEBOOK
• YAHOO!

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users.

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks.

The original…

→ Learn more

Yahoo was founded in 1994 by Stanford Ph.D. students David Filo and Jerry Yang. It has since evolved into a major internet brand with search, content verticals, and other web services.

Yahoo! Inc. (Yahoo!), incorporated in 1995, is a global Internet brand. To users, the Company provides owned and operated online properties and services (Yahoo! Properties, Offerings, or Owned and Operated sites). Yahoo! also extends its marketing platform and access to Internet users beyond Yahoo! Properties through its distribution network…

→ Learn more

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/social/~3/Ks9C7tHAZqY/

When you’re dealing with 1 billion people’s personal info, security is critical. But Facebook didn’t want to sacrifice speed. That’s why it spent the last two years making infrastructure improvements so that its transition of all its users to HTTPS which starts this week will “slow down connections only slightly.” People will be able to opt-out of HTTPS for maximum speed if that’s how they roll.

Facebook has long employed HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) to protect users when they submit their username and password to login. HTTPS prevents man-in-the-middle attacks and eavesdropping.

In January 2011, though, it started allowing people to opt in to have all their Facebook browsing encrypted in HTTPS. At the time it warned “Encrypted pages take longer to load, so you may notice that Facebook is slower using HTTPS.”

Still, Facebook said that “We hope to offer HTTPS as a default whenever you are using Facebook sometime in the future.” Flash forward nearly two years to today, and its ready to fulfill that burning desire for security. A Facebook Developer Blog post from a few days ago announced “this week, we’re starting to roll out HTTPS for all North America users and will be soon rolling out to the rest of the world.”

I immediately wondered if that would make loading the news feed or peeping photos more sluggish. So I spoke with Facebook’s security policy manager Frederic Wolens to see if this would be the case, and here’s what he told me.

“It is far from a simple task to build out this capability for the more than a billion people that use the site and retain the stability speed we expect, but we are making progress daily towards this end. This may slow down connections only slightly, but we have deployed significant performance enhancements to our load balancing infrastructure to mitigate most of the impact of moving to HTTPS, and will be continuing this work as we deploy this feature.”

So yes, there will be a slight slow down, but Facebook’s HTTPS is going to be a lot faster than it could have been thanks to engineers who rolled up their sleeves. For reference, Google moved Gmail to HTTPS in January 2010.

People who aren’t too concerned with their security might not be too excited about getting switched to HTTPS. And if they insist their connection is secure and wants to browse Facebook as fast as possible, the company confirmed to me that they’ll have the option to opt out of HTTPS through their Account Security settings.

But protecting people who use the default settings is why this is an admirable decision by Facebook. It’s priority is security. It might not be as sexy as blazing speed, but a hacked user is an unhappy user. Lots of people access Facebook from public wi-fi and public computers. Persistent HTTPS makes sure they’re not getting snooped on.

Facebook could have kept HTTPS as opt in. Faster browsing leads to less frustration, longer session lengths, and more ad views. Unfortunately, the people who are the least security savvy and therefore most vulnerable are probably the least likely to voluntarily enable HTTPS.

Personal info-driven business models like Facebook’s are built on trust. It needs users to feel secure enough to keep donating their data, and that’s why this little green lock could turn into greenbacks over time.

• FACEBOOK

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users.

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks.

The original…

→ Learn more

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/social/~3/pSPVm1WUj-s/

Today Facebook addressed the controversy surrounding the news feed and a reduction in reach for some Pages. It outlined the four main factors that determine if a post shows up in the news feed, and insisted Page reach didn’t decrease overall. However a news feed algorithm change did start reducing reach for Pages that get complaints and that successfully cut total complaints by a double digit percentage.

Facebook’s news feed product manager Will Cathcart told a room of reporters at Facebook’s headquarters this morning that “The problem we face with the news feed is that people come to Facebook everyday, but people don’t have enough time to check out absolutely everything that’s going on.”

So to determine if any given Page post shows up in the news feed, Facebook looks at four main factors:

1. If you interacted with an author’s posts before: If you Like every post by a Page that Facebook shows you, it will show you more from that Page.
2. Other people’s reactions to a specific post: If everyone else on Facebook shown a post ignores it or complains, it’s less likely to show you that post.
3. Your interaction with posts of the same type in the past: If you always Like photos, there’s a better chance you’ll see a photo posted by a Page.
4. If that specific post has received complaints by other users who have seen it, or the Page who posted it has received lots complaints in the past, you’ll be less likely to see that post. This factor became a lot more prevalent starting in September 2012.

Cathcart used a Star Wars-themed example to explain how these work. Let’s say Darth Vader posts that he and Luke Skywalker have confirmed that they are father and son. To determine if Yoda saw this post in his news feed, Facebook would look at: whether Yoda had Liked or interacted with posts by Vader in the past, if Leia and Han Solo Liked the relationship post by Vader when Facebook showed it to them, whether Yoda tended to interact with relationship change posts in the past, and whether anyone else had complained about Vader or this particular post by the Sith Lord.

Facebook often makes changes to its news feed sorting algorithm, commonly referred to as EdgeRank, which is similar to how Google revises PageRank. Facebook says it adjusts the way in which it weights these factors to try to increase engagement and general satisfaction. Maybe reach decreases on some Pages, but people interact more with the news feed overall, according to Cathcart.

Facebook made a major revision in September. Users can click a drop-down arrow next to any news feed post to complain by reporting it as spam or hiding it, saying they don’t want to see more posts similar to it. Cathcart says “we started penalizing things that had an above average rate of complaints, and rewarding things that had a below average rate of complaints. Facebook believes the change was a success because engagement went up and “complaints went down in the double-digit percentage.”

However, Cathcart confirms that while the adjustment “had a varied impact across Pages, the median reach of Page content was relatively unchanged after the algorithm change. But that will impact different pages differently depending on who those pages are connected to and what other things those people are connected to.

There are conflicting reports about the actual impact on average reach, though. Some like PageLever say it stayed stable, but others like We Are Social and SocialBakers say that average Page reach decreased by as much as 50 percent. This really hurt some businesses that relied on purchases or ad impressions from traffic driven to their site by their Facebook Page posts. Some businesses scorned by the algorithm change wrongly jumped to the conclusion that Facebook had purposefully decreased their reach to coerce them to buy its Promoted Post ads — which ask Pages to pay to boost the reach of a particular post.

But here’s the real deal. Those analytics providers are only looking at a relatively small number of Pages, typically fewer than 1,000. Facebook’s product marketing director for ads Matt Idema tells me that what those studies show “all depends on what set of pages you’re looking at and how many pages you’re looking at. We’re looking at all the Pages. The median reach did not decrease.” But what about average reach? Idema shut that down saying that, as for the difference between median and average reach, “I’m pretty sure they’re indistinguishable.”

So basically, if an analytics company’s clients had their Page reach decrease significantly, then that company’s clients may be more likely to receive complaints. Just to be sure, I double checked with Facebook and they confirmed that average Page reach did not decrease. So why all the hubbub? Because Pages whose reach increased or stayed the same aren’t making waves, but those that had their reach decrease are being very vocal.

The social network wants the news feed to be the tastiest content omelet around, and that means it has to break a few eggs. But it wants to give users access to whatever they want to see. Cathcart cited Facebook’s Games feed, which lets gamers see only posts about games that could help them win. Facebook just launched a dedicated Pages feed last week to let people see a feed of their favorite businesses and organizations with their friends filtered out. Idema said that it plans to do more of this. I’d say a dedicated shopping or journalism feed could be in the works. Yep, a news news feed.

Facebook has never been so up front about the fact that it makes major revisions to the news feed sorting algorithm as it was today. Even though it’s seeking to create a better user experience and confirmed it does not make changes to sell more ads, some businesses got hurt. This is the unfortunate reality of relying on a centralized marketing channel like Facebook opposed to an open channel like email. Facebook giveth, and Facebook taketh away.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/social/~3/K1o0XlMpVuo/

Yesterday, I spent some time with the folks who bring games to life on Facebook. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, there are a lot of people who like to hang out on the social network and play turn-based games. Sure, it can get annoying, with all of the notifications and requests, but Facebook is apparently trying to do something more than annoy you. Actually, it’s quite the opposite.

Recently, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that games weren’t doing as well as he’d like on the platform, but all hands are on deck to change that.

What Facebook thinks is that everyone is a “gamer” given the right people are involved with the right game. Be it a word game or an in-depth one like Zynga’s Ville’s that make me want to kick someone’s pig, The idea of turning everyone into a gamer isn’t new, Nintendo has been doing this for years and years. In fact, my Mom and Stepdad are pretty darn good at Wii Bowling. Really good, actually. More than 251M people are playing games on Facebook each month, which is a 10% growth since last year. Currently there are 130 games with more than 1M monthly active players each. Take that, consoles.

During a game developer’s meetup in its headquarters in Menlo Park, Facebook discussed some of the latest and greatest stats and trends that will help incentivize and excite folks to crank out new types of games, in different genres, to get Facebook’s social juice. It was quite an impressive turnout, and after the talks, I got to sit down with a few very key members of the Games team.

Going into Facebook, I let them know that I’m not a gamer. I don’t really have the time or the attention span to play FarmVille. In fact, I find it quite annoying. Knowing that, a lot of the questions that I asked had to do with how Facebook can turn people who don’t consider themselves into gamers as people who casually play a social game now and then.

Clearly, this is something Facebook is working very hard on.

Sean Ryan, Director of Games Partnerships at Facebook, used to work at Sega, News Corp Games and started a few small companies focusing on virtual world categories of games. The man has done this his whole career, and we talked about how Facebook is adopting that legacy approach to games as well as starting over with its own new fresh approach.

We play a lot of games

Yes, the Facebook Games team is definitely ingrained in the gaming culture, playing tons of games in many different genres. The team is distributed, Ryan tells me, holding these sessions with developers in Moscow, Tel Aviv, Singapore and Dublin. They get around.

How do you get a gig working with Facebook Games? Simple, Ryan explains:

The key thing is do you love to play games? The metric we follow is that people play 10 different games each week to see what’s new and hot. Different people are matched up with genres based on their interests. It’s fun but they’re not always good games, they “different” games. We’re not here to tell developers how to build the games, but we help them with how to fit in the social layers and put in monetization. Also to get feedback on how we can improve our platform.

Facebook has shifted from being a wild west for games to a more structured source for things that might interest you. One big way was with the App Center, a place where people can go to browse games, read reviews and find out which ones their friends are playing. For me, those are the only games I end up trying…the ones they vouch for, and don’t obsessively play. I asked Ryan about the App Center, and Facebook’s reasoning for it:

App center came from our core game developers. Our users don’t like to share as much in their feed, so we thought about how can people help developers’ games get found? Strategy games and hardcore games fit a very small niche, people that know what they’re looking for, but we needed to help them on how discover them better. App Center has high quality referrals, basic block and tackle stuff. We want to enable all types of games.

All types of games, he mentions. That means that Zynga shouldn’t own the social network gaming penetration like it has for the past few years. I personally find all of Zynga’s games to be annoying and similar to that of a shady casino. The company isn’t shy about trying to hook you for life until all you do is water your virtual flowers. But there are other games. The games that excite me are ones I can collaboratively tinker around with when I have a few moments, within groups of my friends.

That’s why Facebook recently announced a new feature for developers to integrate into games, the ability to set up and maintain Facebook Groups for all different sorts of genres. Ryan explains:

Games with friends are great for groups, raids and such. The classic Warcraft clans have 150 people in them, we look at the platform in that way. The team is spending a lot of time on unity right now, how we can be better ourselves as partners for developers, and make sure that they have a greater integration with all Facebook channels. Thats what we spend a lot of time on as well as playing a lot of games

How to keep away from App Center gaming

Gaming an app store is nothing new, just ask Apple. The company has had to deal with people literally building companies that focus on helping apps drive up the charts “artificially” through incentivized download programs for consumers. It’s annoying and it’s something that Apple needs to fix.

The way around making the experience better for Facebook users is providing and surfacing real, awesome context around why they might like a certain game:

We do our best with putting social context on everything that we do. We have the rating system that is something that’s not easily gamed. Great indie games and great big games are finding an audience. As long as you speak authentically with the audience, things will work out. Engagement is essential.

Working side-by-side with game developers

The way to get game developers to adopt new features is to keep them in the loop at all times and not drop new things in their lap with minimal instructions or obnoxiously long documentation. Facebook tries to avoid this by keeping in contact with developers all of the time. In fact, the entire team makes itself available whenever they’re around to answer a question.

The Product Manager of Games at Facebook, Gareth Davis, gave me a bit of insight on how he works with those developers, having been one himself since an early age, then going on to EA, and developing titles for Sega. He shared:

I’ve worked in games for most of my career, the only time I wasn’t when I was in movies. I started out as a game developer, taught myself how to code when I was a kid, and then developed a game as a teenager. It was a game called “Suspicious Cargo: Out of luck in outer space.” Gremlin published it in Europe. I got hooked on the industry, relocated to Silicon Valley, where games grew up and worked for a bunch of companies here, and I even worked with the guy who built Tetris. Pretty much every Summer I had as a kid was lost in a game. I played Tetris on a Gameboy all day every day.

Davis has been at Facebook for 4 1/2 years, and for a while he was the “Games team.” He truly wants developers to be able to take their time and make something fun, with small or large teams involved, and then find a way to make money from it so that they can do it again. Only a game developer could think in that way, and that’s Davis.

Facebook changes the gaming industry by injecting social functionality into it, and Davis was there from day 1:

In ’08/’09 a new industry was created, people were really excited about it. We had a ton of new games. It became a big industry and ecosystem with millions of players, and it was an incredible experience. Having been in the shoes of the game developers, staying up late and putting your heart and soul into a creative a product, to empathize with game developers, bringing games to the masses like this is a dream come true.

It’s not just Davis anymore, as he told me that Facebook has a “small team with large impact” all over the world working with all teams at the company, as well as those game developers that work so hard. His primary focus is to see what’s working for games, gather feedback and then continually iterate on the platform to make sure that everyone gets to see the same success:

We work very very fast and ship things every week and in some cases every day. Because we’re a web service we can iterate quickly using the feedback from our partners. In terms of adoption, every developer will look at the feature-set out there, some make sense for some games and some don’t. If you have a game with clans and alliances it’s a no-brainer to integrate groups. These groups are being created already, but how do we link it into the game and drive people to the game? That’s why we built it.

How can Facebook keep moving so quickly without losing the attention and adoption from its more than one billion users? Davis says that the majority of the users, especially ones that play games, are used to the change and that he feels like Facebook does a good job of making it a really great experience and not a pain when something new pops up:

Everything is a living-breathing product that we’re iterating on, and a ton of discovery on Facebook comes through people. We’ve had all of these channels in the system since day one, that’s why we can get audiences of tens of millions playing a game. App Center, for example, is just an additional way to do that. If you’re looking for a game to play, this is a place to go where you can discover them.

But how can the entire world be gamers if they’re not?

As I stated, I’m not a gamer. I don’t consider myself who can even say that playing games is a hobby. But I will admit that spending a few minutes, or hours, sometimes on a new game is rewarding and fun. Sure, I work really hard and I’m an edge case, but I know a lot of other people in the same boat.

Davis suggests:

The big thing that Facebook introduced to the world is that everybody likes to play games but most people don’t consider themselves a gamer. The beauty of many Facebook games, you ask them if they’re playing a game, and they say no I’m just hanging out and talking and having fun. A lot of games on Facebook have made that experience prominent.

Hanging out and having fun. On Facebook. Sounds like something that a lot of people do. Are you playing a game while you’re hanging out? You might be, but you might not consider yourself a gamer. That’s ok. We all like to have fun. Will i start playing a ton of games? Probably not, but I might hang out in a group chat while others do. And who knows, maybe I’ll stop being so shy and go play with them.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

• GARETH DAVIS
• SEAN RYAN

Gareth Davis is a Platform Manager at Facebook, where he oversees games for Facebook Platform. Prior to Facebook, Gareth spent many years in the game industry, producing titles for leading game publishers Sega and Electronic Arts. He also led software development at Pixar Animation Studios for five years, working on the award winning and commercial blockbuster films, “The Incredibles,” “Cars” and “Ratatouille.” He has a Bachelors degree in Artificial Intelligence and lives in the North Beach district of San…

→ Learn more

Sean Ryan is the Director of Gaming Partnerships at Facebook. Prior to Facebook, he was the EVP and GM of Games at News Corp.

Ryan assumed an executive role at News Corp. shortly after it acquired Irata Labs, a social gaming developer.

Ryan is well known in the gaming and monetization space. He was acting CEO of Live Journal and also CEO of Meez, a virtual world and also Listen.com.

→ Learn more

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/social/~3/yKW7s__N-vA/

Ask any founders or CEO how they feel about the process of searching for office space for their companies, and the majority of them will shake their heads. Some may even lash out. There is a prevailing sense that searching for office space is, if not horrible, at least somewhat broken. Part of the reason for this is that the industry itself, writ large, remains offline. If you want to find great space, you have to go to a broker. Brokers have long horded their “proprietary data” keeping it offline as a result, but visit a handful of them and there’s a good chance you’ll find some overlap in their listings result.

Deciding to create a solution, Jason Freedman co-founded 42Floors, which launched in May after after graduating from Y Combinator’s Winter 2012 class. Simply put, 42Floors aims to make the process of renting office space and commercial real estate easier by aggregating listings data from landlords and sellers, adding photography and then allowing users to search by indexing rentals, coworking spaces, sublets and executive suites.

Based in the Bay Area, since launch, 42Floors has focused its efforts on the San Francisco commercial market, resolved to expand only once it had gained a robust data set and hit critical mass in its home market. That being said, the office space search engine is now ready to expand, announcing today that it is now live in New York City, after months spent forging partnerships with landlords and commercial real estate brokers in Manhattan.

According to Freedman, the company’s strategy continues to be reinventing and bringing commercial real estate information and listings online, one city at a time. Learning from its experience in San Francisco, 42Floors quadrupled its capacity for its New York launch beforehand — a process it will repeat as it begins orchestrating its expansion to Boston, Seattle, Chicago and so on.

To support its launch in NYC, 42Floors announced today that it raised a $5 million series A round earlier this year, which was first reported back in September. But the company is now pulling back the curtain on its investors — all 35 of them — an impressive roster of angels, VCs and real estate players, which includes Thrive Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Chris Dixon, SecondMarket founder Barry Silbert and 500 Startups’ Dave McClure — to name a few.

This the startup’s second round of funding, as it raised a $400K seed round after graduating from Y Combinator from YC, SV Angel and Start Fund and brings its total to just under $5.5 million. As a result of the funding, Kushner Companies CEO Jared Kushner and Bessemer Partner Jeremy Levine will be joining the startup’s board of directors.

Having 35 experienced early-stage investors endorse your product is validating, so what is it about 42Floors that investors are getting excited about? After all, it’s not as if the company is alone in commercial real estate, with others like Cityfeet, CoStar/Loopnet, Easy Street Showcase and Property Shark playing in this space. First off, a commercial real estate and office space search engine falls right in the wheelhouse for startups and small businesses.

Why? This is a no-brainer for those looking for space, but right now there’s still a significant, unfilled need: Most brokers are focused on closing high-priced listings because that’s where they make most of their money. So, the tendency is to ignore the smaller units. The problem, as Sarah wrote in March, is that 80 percent of commercial real estate transactions are under 5K-square feet.

Because this size and price range generally appeals to startups and young businesses, that’s where the company has devoted its energy. The other useful feature of 42Floors’ listings is that they include photos. While that is becoming more of a standard practice among apartment and home search listings and search engines, commercial real estate is still a blank canvas. So, much the same way Airbnb has done for its rentals, 42Floors sends people out to scout listings and snap photos to add visuals to one-dimensional listings.

The other key is that, while a listings and search engine may be useful for the one or two times a year when you’re looking for new space, 42Floors wants its platform to be a relevant destination for businesses year-round. The company’s core users are startup CEOs, founders and office managers, Freedman says, so in order to add value beyond moving day, 42Floors launched “Showroom” earlier this year — a marketplace that aims to aggregate all the things businesses may want after they sign a lease and begin their move.

The site offers a collection of office furniture, a way to connect with interior designers and wellness programs, kitchen accessories and so on. For now, it’s basically a lead-gen aggregator, sending users to the sites where they can buy those items, but, down the road, the team hopes to turn Showroom into a full-service eCommerce destination.

The real challenge, though, as we discussed in our recent coverage of HomeLight, is the dependency on brokers (or agents) in the real estate search process. This dependency is even greater in commercial real estate.

So, because most brokers have kept commercial listing information offline, 42Floors has set out to partner with brokerage firms to bring that info online and help brokers begin to build a virtual presence. Freedman says that, at this point, brokers don’t really have a direct marketing channel, so working cooperatively with them has enabled them to post listings from brokerage firms in return for getting better access to potential clients (and marketing) than they would otherwise.

While that’s good for the industry and the end user, the challenge is maintaining a balance and focusing on providing more accurate and in-depth information than the competition. Giving brokers a direct marketing channel has the potential to turn a great resource into a phishing service, even if bringing all this information online and providing more visibility into brokers and listings helps expose the crappy firms and brokers.

By either creating a system that helps connect businesses with the best commercial real estate brokers or creating a one-stop service that helps reduce that dependency is where additional information is needed. 42Floors can continue to grow (and Freedman tells us that the starutp has been seeing 20 percent month-over-month growth since March and has helped 450 companies find space) if it is able to partner with the most firms in a given market and provide the most information (and detailed info, i.e. photos) on space in that market, though going up against LoopNet/CoStar will be a steep hill to climb, especially as they tend to defend their market aggressively. [See this comment on Sarah's post.]

The more 42Floors beefs up its matchmaking, design on its profiles, works on sending referrals in an integrated, not spammy way and keeps the other side happy by rewarding the best brokers out there, the more opportunity there will be. Freedman also said that he thinks one of the bigger mistakes startups tackling this space have made in the past is monetizing too early. 42Floors has been free to use up to this point and will continue to be for the foreseeable future, but referral fees will likely be part of the future equation. Not to mention that they’ll eventually be moving into retail, as Freedman says that, ideally, the company would love to become the Kayak of commercial real estate.

But, in the near-term, they’ll be focusing on pushing out a suite of mobile apps both for those looking for apartments and brokers and honing in on the next market.

For more, check out 42Floors at home here.

• 42FLOORS

42Floors makes office space rentals and commercial real estate listings easier to search by indexing business places for rent, coworking spaces, office sublets, and executive suites.

→ Learn more

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/social/~3/FNYNmrzcwa4/

Twitter does a lot of things well, but it hasn’t really nailed context yet — or search. After you first join the service, it takes a significant amount of following and unfollowing before you settle on a stream (or Twitter hose, as some call it) that works for you. Search, too, is noisy and generally unhelpful. In May, Twitter started to test some personalization features to start making better suggestions in terms of who to follow, etc., and it continues to improve search and “Discover.”

In the meantime, a newly-launched platform called Twtrland wants to give you a simple way to figure out whether or not you should follow, along with a new way to search the Twitter graph.

The company has been around for over a year now, slowly building a database of Twitter info to deepen profiles and start building out social discovery features. Today, the site’s presentation is much improved as is the ease of use. Going forward, the founders plan to focus on expanding networks and adding more nuanced search.

The free-to-use platform is pretty straightforward. The site essentially pulls together all the info they can find on individual users in the Twitterverse and creates a profile for them that’s broken down into behavior patterns, famous words, top followers, links, replies, pictures and check-ins.

As you see if you search for your own profile, at the top you’ll find your tweets-per-day average, along with the average number of re-tweets and replies you receive per-100-tweets. Next to that, there’s a pie chart that offers a breakdown of how often your tweets are pure text, re-tweets, include links, are replies, and so on. Search for a person and you get a Pinterest-like cascade of results.

That’s fine, but what’s more useful is the tree of context that you can find within a few clicks of your profile. If you want to know how many top Twitter users from Canada follow you or how many 20 to 40 year-old celebrities follow you? Twtrland allows you to break down each category and dive into that data.

It’s not exactly clear how it’s determining “celebrities” or “Top Twitter Users,” although it does seem to take into account the number of followers they have, activity and context. On its site, TwitterLand doesn’t share much: “We have our own magic formula for deciding who is a top follower. Be aware that this list is based on users which have been generated atleast once on twtrland, and are in the first 5000 followers of the searched user.”

As to how it will monetize? Expect to see premium profiles as part of the startup’s future equation.

The site also offers a good way to get a sense of who’s following your business, who follows celebrities or figures in the media you admire. All in all, it’s a useful complement to other Twitter analytics tools and one of the deeper ways to get an overview of the people and places worth following in TwitterTown — and it doesn’t even come with a Klout score.

Twtrland here.

• TWTRLAND

Profiling the social web. http://twtrland.com

→ Learn more

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/social/~3/wXLvW9H7S9I/

Airbnb took a while to roll out its international businesses — for example, officially launching Airbnb.co.uk only in February 2012, despite being around since 2008. But in a sign of how Airbnb is focused on its wider business expansion, today the company began to promote its Neighborhoods feature, announced just four days ago, across some (but not all) of Europe. Neighborhoods offers travellers local online guides to help them decide where to stay, and it gives Airbnb an entry into offering services that span the “life” of a trip, beyond just being the place where people go to book accommodation.

When you go to Airbnb’s localized home pages for the UK, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, and Russia, you get links to the new Neighborhoods feature. In most markets, Airbnb has chosen to promote it in the local language:

However, Germany, with Berlin one of the first featured Neighborhoods, gets the U.S.-English “neighborhoods.”

I guess “Nachbarschaften” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

The homepage rollout, it seems, is partly focused on countries that have cities featured in the initial list of Neighborhoods.

So, since Italy, Spain and Russia do not, the change might be for two reasons. Either these are already big markets for Airbnb in terms of booking customers who travel internationally; or it could be because Airbnb is planning to add cities like Barcelona, Madrid, Milan, Rome, Moscow and St Petersburg to the list of Neighborhoods soon.

Other local country sites in Europe — for example, The Netherlands, Sweden and Norway – are still getting the old homepage, which looks like the old U.S. home page, including a link at the bottom for Hurricane Sandy relief efforts.

So not so local across the board after all.

Separately, the site also experienced some downtime today, noted by a couple of our readers and others:

airbnb run out of air today and the server went down, in this day and time why don’t you go into the cloud airbnb

—
sirnitti (@synitti) November 17, 2012

hey @airbnb – just a quick heads – i was not able to access the site via mobile. safari error was too many redirects and chrome just spins.

—
Hasan Luongo (@MistOne) November 17, 2012

An Airbnb spokesperson says that this was just due to some scheduled maintenance.

• AIRBNB

Founded in August 2008 and based in San Francisco, California, Airbnb is a trusted community marketplace for people to list, discover, and book unique spaces around the world – online or from a mobile phone. Whether an apartment for a night, a castle for a week, or a villa for month, Airbnb connects people to unique travel experiences, at any price point, in more that 26,000 cities and 192 countries. And with world-class customer service and a growing community…

→ Learn more

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/social/~3/q-jBK3UDcQo/