Screenshot of Foodie (click to enlarge)

Glam Media, the online media company that produces content and serves ads for a primarily female audience, on Thursday is launching a new website Foodie.com, its first foray into the culinary space. Social networking features will be built into the new Foodie website, making it the first site from Glam that deeply incorporates the technology acquired when it bought Ning in late 2011.

A launch with great expectations

In an interview this week, Glam CEO Samir Arora said he expects Foodie to very soon become one of his company’s top most highly trafficked sites. “One year ago, we discovered that our top ad category in revenue during the first quarter of 2011 was food. We didn’t even have a dedicated food category at that time,” Arora said. “That really drove us to sequence Foodie as an important launch.” Glam expects Foodie.com to attract 10 million monthly uniques soon after it debuts — a very impressive draw by most standards.

At launch, Foodie will feature content from prominent chefs, restauranteurs, established food critics and bloggers, and ads from companies including Betty Crocker and Dannon Activia. The real key news about the site, though, is that readers of Foodie will be able to fill out complete social profiles to let them interact with each other and Foodie’s content creators and brands. Glam describes Foodie.com like this: “A full social network for consumers to directly discover, connect and follow top foodies.”

Still an appetite for social media

But will people really want to create yet another social media profile? Glam certainly thinks so. According to CEO Arora, that’s because sites like Facebook are just too general to help us connect with our individual interests like food. The people with whom you’re friends on Facebook may not be the same people with whom you’re interested in sharing recipes. “When I connected my Facebook graph to my Yelp account, I found that I have nothing in common with my friends in terms of our restaurant tastes,” he said.

It’s a fair point — as popular as general social networking sites have become, people still go to specialized content producing sites on the web. Facebook’s Timeline and Open Graph is trying to turn Facebook into a central place where people can customize their ideal web experience content and all, but perhaps people will still want to keep separate online niches where they deal with people who align with them along very specific interests. Foodie.com wants to be the place people go to read and connect with like-minded people about all things culinary.

Food may be just the beginning

Arora said this push toward social was always the direction in which Glam planned to go, and that the Ning acquisition which closed in December accelerated the process. “Otherwise, if we had to build it ourselves, we’d probably take five years.” If Foodie is the success it’s expected by the company to be, other verticals in Glam’s portfolio could go the social route as well.

It’s an ambitious move to make, but Glam already has such a massive audience — 220 million unique visitors a month, 90 million of them in the United States — that if anyone besides Facebook is going to turn itself into a totally social content web destination, it’s them.

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Netvibes, the San Francisco–based company that allows people and brands to create personalized RSS and social media feed dashboards, announced on Wednesday evening it has been acquired by French enterprise software firm Dassault Systèmes. Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed.

Netvibes CEO Freddy Mini

The deal makes sense on a few levels, as Netvibes’ engineering team is based in France (CEO Freddy Mini splits his time between France and California.) The company has also been around for a while — since 2005 — and in that time has grown from being a personal RSS feed dashboard to a profitable enterprise web analytics service. Even though there have been a few management changes and strategy pivots along the way, Netvibes’ tenacity and very smart shift toward enterprise products surely helped position it as an attractive acquisition candidate.

As far as the near future goes, it seems that many things for Netvibes will remain the same. A rep for the company said in an email:

Our brand, business, products and team all stay. Our free product will remain free and available to our millions of users. What will change is that Netvibes can innovate even faster.

At the same time, Dassault, which is best known for making 3-D computer-aided design and project life cycle management software used by large corporations for industrial projects (Boeing uses Dassault tools to design its jets, for example), seems on the surface like a fairly unexpected match for a social web–focused company like Netvibes. It will be interesting to see how Netvibes’ tools are integrated into Dassault’s product lineup in the longer run.

Feature image of Netvibes CEO Freddy Mini courtesy of Flickr user snackfight

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook on Wednesday updated its S-1 document to the Securities and Exchange commission for its planned initial public offering, and it’s a veritable data dump of new information about the social networking company. The good news is, we’re digging through it so you don’t have to. Here are some of the more interesting tidbits disclosed in this latest regulatory filing:

• The rent is really dang high.You think you spend a lot of money on rent? According to the new filing, Facebook’s new Menlo Park, Calif. campus is costing the company well over $1 million per month for the next 14 years (the 15 year lease began in February 2011.) The company’s monthly rent will actually go up as time goes on, from $1.175 million/month now to $1.9 million/month in 2025, because ostensibly Facebook’s revenue will grow at the same time. The company is, however, getting a million square feet of space for that money, so in context it’s not that ridiculous.
  

  Graph representing Facebook's property rent (click to enlarge)

• Facebook controls even more of its data center strategy than you think. A couple years ago, rumors started buzzing about how a Delaware-based company called Vitesse was behind the planning of Facebook’s Prineville, Oregon data center. In 2011 Facebook eventually came clean with the details of all the ins and outs of the massive data center as part of its Open Compute Project, and now it’s totally clear that from day one it has been completely in charge of the effort: Vitesse is actually a wholly-owned subsidiary of Facebook, according to the newly filed S-1 documents.
• Facebook wears the pants when it comes to Zynga. The updated filings included tons of information about Facebook’s relationship with Zynga, the social gaming giant. Even though Zynga has been asserting its own independence from Facebook, the details of the contract between the two companies shows that Zynga can never quite become a standalone business if it wants to maintain ties with the social media king. These clauses are especially key:
  

  “All Zynga Users must have a valid (e.g. real; not suspended) FB account. Zynga will require all Zynga Users to connect their Zynga account to their FB account. In addition, Zynga will require all Zynga Users to be logged-in to their FB account with an active session to use or access any Covered Zynga Game, Zynga Mobile Game or any Zynga Property” [except in limited situations.]

  and

  “Zynga Users who are not Facebook Users must create a FB account.”

  and

  “Zynga may not prompt any users on the Facebook Site to create, log-in with, register for or otherwise use Zynga Credentials on the Facebook Site.”

• Zuck, Sheryl Sandberg, and the other execs have it pretty good. Of course, you already knew this. But the new S-1 shines a bit more light on the compensation packages of Facebook’s executive team. Mark Zuckerberg’s base salary for 2012 is $500,000 (which was shown in the initial S-1) and the new filing shows he is eligible for a semi-annual bonus of 45 percent of that salary based on his performance; COO Sheryl Sandberg’s salary is $300,000 and she is also up for the 45 percent twice yearly bonus. They each get 21 days paid vacation annually (this is on par with the rest of Facebook’s employees.)

We’ll continue to pore over the documents and will update this story with any more gems we come across. And keep checking in at GigaOM for our full Facebook IPO coverage.

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Path CEO Dave Morin

Path, the mobile app for cataloging your daily activities and sharing them with a relatively small circle of contacts, came under serious fire on Tuesday when it was discovered that Path’s iPhone app imports all of its users’ address book data onto Path’s own servers without notification or asking permission. Not surprisingly, many people saw this as a major breach of user trust.

Path CEO Dave Morin quickly responded to the fallout, telling app developer Arun Thampi, the blogger who first discovered the address book upload activity, that the data was only used to help users find their friends and “nothing more.” Even so, he also said that the Android app has the address book upload as an opt-in feature, and released a new version of Path for iPhone that does the same. The question still remained, though: What about all the address book data that has is already in Path’s hands?

According to Path, you can now consider it completely gone. In a company blog post Wednesday, Morin explicitly apologized for Path ever having such a feature and said that all the address book data that has already been uploaded will be erased from Path’s servers. The blog post, entitled “We are sorry,” reads in part:

“Through the feedback we’ve received from all of you, we now understand that the way we had designed our ‘Add Friends’ feature was wrong. We are deeply sorry if you were uncomfortable with how our application used your phone contacts.

…We believe you should have control when it comes to sharing your personal information. We also believe that actions speak louder than words. So, as a clear signal of our commitment to your privacy, we’ve deleted the entire collection of user uploaded contact information from our servers. Your trust matters to us and we want you to feel completely in control of your information on Path.”

It’s a very smart move by Morin and the Path team. Perceived privacy breaches can be hugely damaging to web companies, and especially so for a company like Path, which bills itself as a more private version of Facebook. Path is already on its second life of sorts (its first iteration as a pure photo sharing app did not take off so well) so it’s important for the company to value the users it has attracted. Path has not behaved perfectly, but its response to the outcry has been quick, sensitive and strong. The big test now is whether that will be enough from the users’ perspective.

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Financial terms of the deal haven’t been disclosed, but it looks like an acqui-hire more than anything else. Blockboard, which was previously known as BlockChalk, raised $1 million in a seed funding round back in May 2010, and since then the service does not appear to have generated any revenue. The four-person Blockboard team will be joining Klout, and according to the companies the Blockboard product will live on post-deal.

Klout announced the deal in a blog post Tuesday, writing:

“Blockboard has built an amazing local-mobile app that connects neighbors to build stronger communities through technology… With their experience, Blockboard brings an awareness of how social media can be meaningfully woven into the fabric of a local community, as well as a killer mobile app development team.”

Klout kept a relatively low profile for a couple months after some privacy-related snafus last year, so the announcement of the Blockboard acquisition serves as a public relations re-entry of sorts. It looks like Klout is not giving up any time soon, and it will be interesting to see how the company develops on the mobile and local fronts going forward.

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Eventup screenshot (click to enlarge)

If you’ve ever planned a wedding or a big party, you know that finding and booking a venue is one of the biggest headaches of the process. First you have to find places that fit your requirements, then you have to reach out individually to each one to learn about pricing and, the key thing, availability. The whole thing takes a lot of time and leads to a lot of dead ends, and it’s a big reason why people hire expensive party planners.

Enter a new startup called Eventup. Eventup, which launched to the public Tuesday out of Los Angeles-based technology studio Science Inc., is an online marketplace which lets commercial and private property owners list their properties, and consumers search for them by date, price, and purpose. Eventup also manages all the financial transactions related to booking, and provides customer support on both sides of the transaction.

At launch, the site is populated with listings from the L.A. area including the houses from HBO’s Entourage and CBS’s Big Brother set, and the former homes of Eric Clapton and Jim Morrison. Going forward, property owners from anywhere can list their venues on Eventup, and the site plans to roll out dedicated sections of the site for more cities in the weeks and months ahead.

“We’ll list everything from a privately owned Hollywood loft for a small dinner party, to larger mansions, to the Pasadena convention center for a corporate event,” Eventup co-founder Tony Adam said in an interview. He explained the difference between Eventup and existing sites like this: “With Craigslist, you have to go in and look at hundreds of listings just to find the one that you want, and contact each place individually. With Airbnb, we share the same type of searching and booking platform, but we’re not booking room rentals. We’re in the event space business.”

In all, it seems like a solid idea to me, and the fact that the platform is launching with some seriously attractive properties could give it nice traction right out the gate. The key thing will be how quickly Eventup grows beyond its homebase of Los Angeles — in web startups, of course, scaling is everything. It’ll definitely be one to watch in the months ahead.

Eventup was built by a team of 10 people in LA’s Science Inc., the L.A. technology studio backed by investors including Rustic Canyon, White Star Capital, The Social+Capital Partnership, Tomorrow Ventures, Siemer Ventures, Philippe Camus, Jean-Marie Messier, Jonathan Miller and Dennis Phelps.

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Ignite’s flagship game, Simracway, launched to the public in November 2011, along with its physical steering wheel game controller. The game allows people to race against multiple other players in real time. Ignite touts racing pros such as IndyCar champion Dario Franchitti as advisors, and has secured licensing deals with car companies including Bentley, Bugatti, and Mitsubishi.

On a larger scale, Ignite’s purported aim is to have “the most authentic, immersive simulated racing experience on the market” — to basically be like the World of Warcraft of online auto racing. Seems like $17.5 million and a bunch of big name partnerships should help a lot toward making that dream a reality.

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Screenshot of JetBlue's iPhone app (click to enlarge)

Well-designed websites and snazzy mobile apps aren’t just for travel search engines anymore. JetBlue Airways just debuted its own native app for the iPhone, an app that lets users search for and book flights from their mobile phones. The low-cost airline also unveiled newly redesigned web and mobile sites with clean user interfaces and new features such as personalized flight recommendations based on users’ travel history and geolocation data.

It goes to show just how much startups such as Hipmunk, HotelTonight, Room77 and others have spurred innovation for the travel industry’s more-established players. And more such developments are on the way: A recent Airline IT Trends survey found that 90 percent of airlines are increasing their investment in mobile capabilities, according to a report by CNN published this past fall. Another notable example of this larger trend is luxury hotel chain The Four Seasons, which last month gave its website a makeover that taps into social media and incorporates user-generated reviews and photos of its properties. In all, it is nice to see large corporations such as these tapping into newer technologies and investing in mobile app development, realizing that spending the money on making these tools can ultimately drive more business.

Of course, as these established travel companies step up their game in a bid to bring customers directly to their sites, aggregation engines will in turn have to bring even better user experiences to the table. It is a competitive cycle that should ultimately benefit us consumers more than anyone else, which is always a good thing.

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Screenshot of Doxo healthcare (click to enlarge)

Doxo, the Seattle startup that makes “digital file cabinet” software, has thus far focused on giving users a single place to manage regularly occurring bills for services such as telephone, cable, and credit cards. But now, the company is taking on a much bigger and more complicated system: Healthcare.

Doxo is announcing Friday that a number of major healthcare provider systems have signed up to send medical bills and receive patient payments through the online service. According to Doxo, its new clients comprise 40 hospitals and 3,000 physicians, and include Saint Luke’s Health System, Advocate Health Care and Advocate Medical Group, Novant Health, Northwestern Memorial Hospital, University of Illinois Medical Center, Rockford Health System, and Rush-Copley Medical Center.

It’s a big coup for the Doxo, which was founded in 2008 and launched its service to the public in mid-2011. The company has raised $15.3 million in venture capital from Sigma Partners, Mohr Davidow Ventures and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ VC firm, Bezos Expeditions. Doxo is free for consumers, and the company charges the businesses who sign up to send bills through the service. According to Doxo CEO Steve Shivers, companies pay for the service because it saves them a significant amount of money compared to paper billing — and the healthcare space can especially benefit from this type of savings.

“Hospitals send invoices to patients three times, on average, before they pay it,” Shivers said. “So for a $10 copay, they’re spending $10 to $15 just to collect it. This is an industry that has runaway costs, and from a consumer standpoint there’s runaway complexity.”

But of course, it’s not easy to convince complex, entrenched industries like healthcare to try something new. That’s why it’s a big deal for Doxo to have inked these initial contracts. The hope is that after this initial batch, many more healthcare providers will be emboldened to sign up to do paperless billing through Doxo, Shivers said.

“Since we launched to the public last summer, the first providers we really signed up were what I call more conventional categories like banks, credit unions, alarm systems,” Shivers said. “But healthcare has been one of most important verticals for us to get into. We have these six providers signed up now, but the healthcare industry is huge. This is just the start.”

I think it’s a great move: The time for healthcare to really adopt technology is right now, and going paperless is a great first step toward that goal. Many health providers have websites that patients can create profiles for, but the reality is most people don’t go to the doctor enough to create a log-in ID and remember a password. So we end up getting paperwork sent in the mail that often goes ignored, since many of us prefer to do our bills online. It’s a big cycle that ends up creating stress for consumers and costing healthcare providers lots of money. There’s a big opportunity here, and it’s nice that a startup like Doxo is gaining a good foothold in the space.

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An image from the SodaHead poll results (click to enlarge)

Facebook is in the process of converting all user profiles to the new Timeline design. But according to a new poll, the majority of people aren’t so keen on the new look.

Seventy percent of respondents to a poll of 1,900 people held by online opinion site SodaHead.com said they did not like the Timeline design and that Facebook should get rid of it. Just 20 percent of respondents liked Timeline, and 10 percent said they did not have Facebook profiles.

And it turns out that the older people are, the less they like the new design: Only 10 percent of people over 65 liked Timeline, compared with 34 percent of people age 18 to 24.

That won’t come as a big surprise to the folks at Facebook, since it lines up with the research the company itself did before Timeline was announced this past fall. At a press Q&A during the f8 conference, in September, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that older users tended to respond more negatively to Timeline than younger ones. But, he said, that would not stop Facebook from making big changes: “The world is moving quickly, and we want to be innovative and try new things,” he said at the time.

Either way, it seems that Timeline is here to stay. With the Open Graph API, scores of third-party developers have invested significant time and money into building apps that work within the Timeline interface. So now it is not only Facebook that is tied to the new look but also an entire ecosystem of other companies. Besides, this is certainly not the first time Facebook users have reacted negatively to a change in the site’s look, and it seems that by now the people who run the social networking company have learned to ride out the initial jeers.

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