Author Archive for Liz Gannes
Liz Gannes, Editor, NewTeeVee. Prior to founding NewTeeVee in December 2006, Liz covered the web beat for GigaOM.com. In addition to writing and editing for NewTeeVee, she programmed the NewTeeVee Pier Screenings as well as NewTeeVee Live. Prior to GigaOM, she wrote for Red Herring.
By Liz Gannes
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Friday, November 20, 2009 |
10:26 AM PT |
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Twitter COO Dick Costolo, speaking today on a panel at TechCrunch’s Real-Time CrunchUp event in San Francisco, shed some light into the micromessaging service’s revenue plans, promising that it will begin taking a cut of its partners’ advertising revenues “early next year.” Meanwhile, it will “foster mechanisms that allow partners to do more sophisticated things” with its APIs. Twitter also plans to offer commercial accounts that contain premium features like analytics dashboards and multiple authors, according to Costolo. Continue »
By Liz Gannes
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Friday, November 20, 2009 |
9:00 AM PT |
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Updated: Infoaxe is revealing to the world today its alter ego: a search engine. Unlike other real-time search engines such as OneRiot, Infoaxe doesn’t depend on Twitter streams and the like (Update: OneRiot emailed to note that it also uses a panel in addition to social sharing streams). Instead, it anonymously harvests data from its millions (low millions, for now) of people who use its personal search history plug-in. Continue »
By Liz Gannes
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Thursday, November 19, 2009 |
5:30 PM PT |
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In my first week back on the web beat at GigaOM, one of the topics I wanted to focus on was location. Let’s just say that hasn’t exactly been a difficult task. Coming at us from Boulder, San Francisco and London, here are today’s top three geo-tagging developments:
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By Liz Gannes
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Thursday, November 19, 2009 |
3:25 PM PT |
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By Liz Gannes
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Thursday, November 19, 2009 |
1:00 PM PT |
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Though there’s no lack of venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, you can count one more. Maveron this week announced it is opening a San Francisco office, headed by partner Amy Errett, the former CEO of Olivia.com who joined Maveron as an entrepreneur in residence two years ago.
Errett (a fly-fishing enthusiast, as pictured) told us that Maveron differentiates itself because it will only fund consumer-focused businesses, and it spans the range of seed to late-stage investments. With portfolio companies such as kids’ browser KidZui, language education site Livemocha and online college enabler Altius Education, Errett said her two main areas of focus are “web-enabled consumer services — classically things consumers did offline — and online education.” Continue »
By Liz Gannes
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Thursday, November 19, 2009 |
10:11 AM PT |
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Employee shares of Facebook are selling for $21 on SecondMarket, valuing the social network’s common stock at $9.5 billion, Bloomberg is reporting today. That’s up 42 percent in the past four months, which SecondMarket takes to mean that an IPO is nigh, but could also just reflect Facebook’s recent announcement that it’s cash-flow positive. And $9.5 billion doesn’t include the preferred shares issued to investors. Continue »
By Liz Gannes
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Wednesday, November 18, 2009 |
6:00 AM PT |
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With of an infrastructure of social location information just starting to coagulate, the monetization side is raring to go. Since real-time mobile advertising is inherently somewhat invasive (and by extension, somewhat creepy), these products end up less groundbreaking than they could be. (Which is OK by me.)
A new offering from a San Francisco-based company called 1020 Placecast — which is announcing today that it’s raised a $5 million Series B — will be trialed with three retailers over the holidays; it uses a double-opt-in relationship built directly between users and their favorite shops. Once users sign up to receive alerts on a phone that has persistent location information (BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Android), they get pinged with marketing messages from that brand every time they enter a “geo-fence” targeted area, as small as a single city block. Continue »
By Liz Gannes
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Monday, November 16, 2009 |
5:38 PM PT |
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Nextstop, a user-generated travel site, is releasing an API for its location-specific short-form recommendations. The self-funded company, founded by former Google product managers, only launched in June and has attracted low hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors, however it has ambitious plans to be a global (read: not hubbed around a few cities like Yelp) and comprehensive resource of recommended places and activities. Continue »
By Liz Gannes
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Thursday, November 5, 2009 |
4:10 PM PT |
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With only less than a week left until our NewTeeVee Live conference, we’re raring to go. Some of the sessions I’m most excited about for next week’s conference are the startups and the stars, so I wanted to call them out for you. We are getting close to a sell-out crowd, so you’re highly encouraged to snag your ticket ASAP. Continue »
By Liz Gannes
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Wednesday, October 28, 2009 |
3:00 AM PT |
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Vdopia, a profitable iPhone advertising platform, has raised $4 million in Series A funding from Nexus Venture Partners. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company, which only launched in the U.S. in March, claims it’s seeing 4 percent click-through rates for its pre-roll videos before applications start — an impressive number that Vdopia says does not include accidental clicks, as so many ad stats do. Continue »