Liz Gannes has been a Silicon Valley-based business technology reporter since 2004. She currently covers the web for GigaOM. In 2006, she founded NewTeeVee, a GigaOM Network site that is now the preeminent source for news and analysis about the intersection of entertainment and technology. She graduated from Dartmouth with a degree in linguistics and started her career as a reporter at Red Herring.
Disclosures and conflicts of interest: Liz's husband does some contract work for Facebook. Neither of them are shareholders in the company.
Kleiner Perkins today reasserted itself as a powerhouse and relevant venture capital firm by rounding up Facebook, Zynga and Amazon to announce a $250 million fund for social web startups, called the sFund. Kleiner partner John Doerr today won on-stage testimonials from Facebook, Amazon and Zynga. Read more »
Posterous, the email-based blogging platform, aims to keep things simple and easy to use, but it can’t resist adding new more advanced features such as increased support for groups, premium accounts for businesses, proximity-based geoblogs, and a better bookmarklet to bring in outside content. Read more »
In light of recent outcry about social networking privacy lapses and potential misuse of users’ personal information, long-time web thought leader Esther Dyson had this to say at the marketing conference Pivot in New York City today: online privacy a marketing problem. Read more »
Have a hankering to take a few days off and go somewhere? A new startup called Wanderfly, which launched today, wants to help inspire you. Type in your approximate travel dates, budget, duration and interests, and Wanderfly will serve up a set of glossy options. Read more »
Now angel investing seems to be becoming an industry, complete with its own tools, services and even an iPhone game. Today comes the beta launch of CapLinked, a web-based tool for managing fundraising that helps startups and investors communicate with each other and share documents. Read more »
Today I attended Y Combinator’s annual Startup School at Stanford University. From the 11 talks from startup founders and funders full of first-person lessons, these were some of the most resonant tips for other entrepreneurs about what to do and what not to do. Read more »
For the most part, as soon as I lose connectivity, my mobile apps are mostly broken. Musing over to my most-used apps — Gmail, Facebook and Twitter — only gets me error messages and frustration. And even Angry Birds and Word Warp are handicapped when they’re offline. Read more »
Google today on its quarterly earnings call broke out some numbers that it doesn’t historically give (and doesn’t promise to give in the future): revenue and monetization rates for display, video and mobile advertising. The intent was to show that Google isn’t just a search company. Read more »
Mozilla Corporation, which makes the Firefox browser, has named its next CEO: Gary Kovacs. This was a planned transition — current CEO John Lilly wants to become a VC at Greylock Partners — but perhaps not an expected choice, given Kovacs comes from outside the Mozilla fold. Read more »
Facebook has done a remarkable job of getting developers to adopt its Credits virtual currency before the program was fully fledged. Today, the company announced a partnership with PlaySpan to add 20 additional ways for users to pay for credits and plans to accelerate rollout. Read more »
Microsoft today launched social search features for Bing created in partnership with Facebook. The two companies are teaming up to take on their common enemy, Google. The implementations are basic, but significant because they will automatically show up to all users of both Bing and Facebook. Read more »
i/o Ventures, the new San Francisco Mission District tech incubator, invited an audience over last night to see what its first class of startups have been working on. i/o has a friendly and non-pretentious vibe, in keeping with its founding partners. Read more »
Former Google CIO Douglas Merrill has set out to provide an alternative to payday loans that uses data analysis to determine whether borrowers are likely to pay him back. Called ZestCash, Merrill’s Hollywood-based startup is launching tomorrow in the Utah market. Read more »
“Laughable,” “absurd,” “ludicrous” and “pointless” were words Twitter founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone used Monday night to describe a recent Malcolm Gladwell story in the New Yorker about the futility of social media to create real social change. Read more »
The average Malaysian Internet user has 233 friends on social networks, which is the most in the world, according to interviews with nearly 50,000 online users in 46 countries. By contrast, the least social web users appear to be the Japanese, who count only 29 friends. Read more »
Crowdsourcing is often used for fairly menial tasks: correcting databases, screening offensive images, transcribing audio. But what if you could make those little bits of human labor even more menial, discrete and interchangeable? That’s what the Finnish company Microtask does. Read more »
Google today announced it is shutting down its free U.S. and Canada directory assistance service, 1-800-GOOG-411, to put its focus on its other speech recognition services and extending them to new languages. As of Nov. 12, the number will go dead. Read more »
Pivotal Labs is a name that comes up often in regards to web startups like Diaspora, Twitter, Groupon and Gowalla, but it’s sort of an enigma. We paid a visit to Pivotal’s San Francisco office to see what it looks like and find out more. Read more »
After Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg debuted a new Groups tool to encourage more private and directed interactions between subsets of his more than 500 million users on Wednesday, he sat down with me and Groups product manager Justin Shaffer. Read more »
Mobilize 2010 was not what you might call a focused conference. So here’s some good news: the entire conference is already online, available for your viewing pleasure at your leisure. Read more »
Facebook launched a new approach to understanding groups of friends today. CEO Mark Zuckerberg called groups “a fundamental building block” and “the biggest problem in social networking,” and said Facebook has determined the best solution is a social one: to enable users to tag each other. Read more »
Want to apply cool filters to your iPhone photos without paying for an app like Hipstamatic? Try out Instagram, which is launching today. Om already reported on how it comes from the makers of Burbn, a demo HTML5 app that was neat enough to win $500,000. Read more »
Eventbrite has closed $20 million in Series D funding led by DAG Ventures, and including Tenaya Capital as well as previous investor Sequoia Capital. The four-year-old, San Francisco-based company has now raised a total of $29.5 million. Read more »
AppNexus has stepped up its fundraising, bringing in $50 million for its real-time display advertising platform from existing investors as well as Microsoft. The company has now raised $65.5 million over the last three years from investors including Venrock, Kodiak Venture Partners and First Round Capital. Read more »
ATX Innovation, which makes TabbedOut, an app that enables bar and restaurant patrons settle their tabs from their iPhone or Android handsets, has raised $2.05 million in funding from NEA, for a total of $2.8 million raised. Read more »
Yahoo recently announced a number of product tweaks to modernize and standardize its products, including stalwarts like Yahoo Groups. But amidst complaints about user privacy, Yahoo rolled back the redesign entirely last week, and promised to tread much more carefully as it explores any further changes. Read more »
“The Social Network” comes out today (Mathew and I are playing hooky to see it this afternoon). The publicity tour is in full swing, leaving us with tons of videos to watch. It’s time for a little Friday video fun. Read more »
Nicholas Negroponte and Weili Dai of One Laptop Per Child take the stage for the Mobilize 2010 Keynote to discuss One Laptop Per Child, the future of the tablet, and what connectivity is doing to bring about change for children in developing nations. Read more »
On a panel of mobile payments providers at GigaOM’s Mobilize 2010, everyone was happy to agree that mobile payments are finally getting their day in the sun due to the growth of smartphones, mobile application platforms, and the sheer market size of 5 billion phones. Read more »
Local businesses now have awesome tools available to them to monitor, market to, communicate with, give discounts to and reward loyalty from customers. These services are all run separately, even though if they were integrated together they would all be more effective. Read more »
Real-time content discovery startup Evri is turning its focus to a mobile strategy, and on Thursday at our Mobilize conference, the company will launch five Android and iPhone applications that drill down on specific content interests: celebrity gossip, technology, baseball, football and rock music. Read more »
The American market for virtual goods will grow 31 percent to $2.1 billion in 2011, according to a new report from Inside Network. Virtual goods sold in social games are set to account for 40 percent of the market, or about $840 million in 2011. Read more »
Peanut Labs is announcing today it’s been acquired by e-Rewards, owner of Research Now. The two companies both perform online data collection, Peanut Labs by getting users to complete market research surveys in exchange for virtual credits on services like Pogo, RockYou, Playdom. Read more »
There were high expectations among attendees at TechCrunch Disrupt that last week’s “AngelGate” would come to a head today. That didn’t happen. All the involved parties now seem to be chanting the mantra that the focus should return to startups, entrepreneurs and innovation. Read more »
Zynga CEO Mark Pincus got lobbed some softballs this morning at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference by his investors at Kleiner Perkins. But he did give up some specific metrics about how his very metrics-driven company runs, and he talked about the larger themes at stake. Read more »
Social gaming has been the biggest success story of the four-year-old Facebook Platform, but only now is Facebook rolling out a plan to offer a dedicated gaming experience, get game developers to stop spamming its non-gaming users, and make some serious money off of ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Six months after we first met the founder of Greplin just after he came up with the idea for the company, he’s found a co-founder, raised funding, launched a beta and gotten so much interest he had to stop accepting new testers. Read more »
Earlier this week, Facebook introduced changes intended to foster the growth of games on its platform that are less spammy and more engaging. Game developers are worried their games will be less viral, but the good thing is Facebook is finally incentivized to help games grow. Read more »
Twitter plans to roll out a free real-time analytics dashboard in the fourth quarter, said Ross Hoffman of the company’s business development team at a conference yesterday. If true, the announcement has implications both for Twitter’s business model and for startups currently offering analytics. Read more »
Web data API provider Factual is making a play for the hot geo-local space today. Today it came out a huge new dataset for geo-coded information like addresses and phone numbers tied to latitude and longitude for 14 million local U.S. businesses and points of interest. Read more »
