We spoke to iFund manager and Kleiner Perkins partner Matt Murphy about the iFund’s close relationship with Apple, its approach to competing mobile platforms including the mobile web, what iPad apps he’s most excited to invest in and what has already been done to death. Read more »
Kleiner Perkins said today that it will double the size of its iFund — capital dedicated specifically to companies developing for the iPhone and iPod touch — as it’s already spent its allocated $100 million in the two years since the fund was first formed. Read more »
It’s hard not to be intrigued by the bits of information that have filtered out of stealthy startup New Travelco, which comes from Expedia, Zillow and Glassdoor founder Rich Barton, along with other “early Expedians” including Greg Slyngstad, co-founder of VacationSpot and board member of Kayak. Read more »
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Twitter is now recommending individual tweets by harnessing the power of its userbase to algorithmically show which ones are interesting. The new Top Tweets account, which will be featured on a new home page that’s currently being tested, shares a small sampling of popular tweets. Read more »
Google, Microsoft, AT&T, Salesforce.com, AOL, Intel, Loopt are asking for updates to federal electronic privacy laws to address new forms of surveillance and data collecting. Coalition members would like to defend themselves and their users from forced sharing of data contributed through email and location-tracking services. Read more »
One of the more interesting and fulfilling trends that’s picking up steam is using social technology for social good. On Tuesday Giveo is launching a platform for corporations and foundations to accept donations from and engage with online donors, especially younger ones. Read more »
When given a choice of login systems, visitors to mainstream media properties such as Slate, Forbes, Newsweek, Discovery, Time and Press Enterprise are most likely to choose Yahoo, according to data collected by commenting system Echo, which helps power such sites. Read more »
What’s next for Google Buzz and Google Docs? Google’s VP of product management for Apps (aka everything but search and ads) Bradley Horowitz gave a bit of a roadmap last night, saying the motto he’s given his team is “We build apps for people, not markets.” Read more »
Don’t spend money on marketing, do offer flexibility and data exporting to eliminate buyers’ regret, make sure to capitalize on and value goodwill, and only charge for things that are hard to do. These were the lessons of successful startups at today’s Freemium Summit. Read more »
Gravity, a site meant to foster online conversations between people with common interests, became available to the public today. The company, founded by a trio of former MySpace executives and funded by Redpoint Ventures and August Capital, has built a, easy-on-the-eyes, snappy forum platform. Read more »
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Addicted to Groupon, where the appeal of an amazing expiring deal gets you in the moment — but then you neglect to use the coupon you bought? Now there’s a site — DealsGoRound — to trade daily deals rather than let them go to waste. Read more »
Discovery Communications may not distribute much of its full-length premium content freely on the web, but the company — which owns TLC, Animal Planet and of course the Discovery Channel — has experimented quite liberally when it comes to mobile. Read more »
OK, so let’s just get this one thing out of the way. There are startups named both “Embedster” and “Embedly” in the current batch of Y Combinator companies, which gave demos this week for investors and press after participating in the Mountain View, Calif.-based startup incubator […] Read more »
Social web behavior is increasingly filling the need for a traditional search engine, but you can’t monetize the social web by transferring over search advertising. What does that mean for Google, and what are some of the most promising ways startups are filling the gap? Read more »
When I think Y Combinator, I think a couple of scrappy college dropout co-founders for whom ramen is more than proverbial and coding is life. They pitch an idea, come out to California, drink in some startupy goodness and maybe make something of it. Not anymore. Read more »
Yahoo this week described itself to Forbes.com as “laser focused” on bringing local brand advertisers online. Meanwhile, Google’s director of mobile advertising, Diana Pouliot, said that a third of mobile Google searches are now related to the location of the searcher. Read more »
Foursquare asks users to share their real-time locations, which means that as it’s grown, some of the more avid ones have been voluntarily telling thousands of people where they are. But for real celebrities the service today is launching a limited mode. Read more »
Google Trends says that search volume for “social media” surpassed “Web 2.0″ right in the middle of January this year, though the new hotness has yet to reach the heights of “Web 2.0″ hit circa 2007. But what key changes marked a change in eras? Read more »
Formspring.me, the fascinatingly simple and popular personal Q&A site, has raised $2.5 million from an impressive list of angel investors: The site, which launched exactly 113 days ago, had 50 million unique visitors in the last 30 days and more than 300 million questions answered. Read more »
“Location wars” between rival services, unmet expectations of the Twitter keynote and the hordes of newbies crowding out regulars were some of the leading threads at SXSW. But I saw three things I think showed us the way social technology will work in the near future. Read more »
Citing examples from campaigns run on Funny or Die and AdMob, Sequoia Capital partner Mark Kvamme told an audience of marketers at OMMA Global in San Francisco today, “If you can harness social media marketing, you don’t have to pay for advertising any more.” Read more »
LikeCube combines metadata, user activity and personalization to help its clients, such as Qype, the European Yelp, recommend locations on a per-user basis. It works around the idea that the wisdom of the crowds isn’t smart enough to find the right place for everybody. Read more »
“The web is becoming a live medium — sales and auctions happen in time, product launches, chats with celebrities, live video events and audio, games, events in virtual worlds — there are a huge amount of scheduled things taking place,” says Nova Spivack, who recently sold […] Read more »
The web is now host to many live events — streaming video, virtual worlds meetings, online sample sales — but there’s no grid to tell us where it all lives and what’s on at any one time. That’s what Live Matrix wants to do. Read more »
After attendees waited an hour see the event, Twitter CEO Evan Williams’ keynote at SXSW disappointed thanks to a lackluster product launch with @Anywhere, and a dull interview by Havas Media Lab director Umair Haque which had the audience tweeting complaints and finally leaving. Read more »
Google, to its credit, is rolling with the punches thrown in response to its Buzz launch. Members of the product team spoke on an inside-the-scenes panel at SXSW today, facing industry-wide criticism as well as cutting attacks over privacy issues from keynoter & researcher Danah Boyd. Read more »
Today social technology theorist Clay Shirky delivered a fitting counterpoint to Danah Boyd’s keynote on privacy at SXSW the day before. Where Boyd spoke of the danger of making information more public than users intended it, Shirky talked about new opportunities for sharing information. Read more »
How to deal with user privacy on social networks as they grow, mature and become more sophisticated has been a frequent topic of conversation at this year’s SXSW. Is privacy just a technical problem? Read more »
Researcher Danah Boyd brought fighting words to SXSW, where she delivered a well-received keynote on the subject of online privacy and publicity, calling out Google and Facebook for being cavalier with their users’ personal information, including repurposing it for a larger audience. Read more »
There’s a big geeky holiday coming this weekend — and no I don’t mean SXSW. It’s Pi Day on Sunday, aka March 14, aka 3/14. But many self-proclaimed nerds are ramping up for the longest extended Pi Day of our lives on 3/14/15. Read more »
Ohai has grand ambitions of jumpstarting an industry for social massively multiplayer online (MMO) games. Think World of Warcraft crossed with FarmVille — engaging and rich, but also easy to use and social. Check out our latest GigaOM studio interview with Ohai CEO Susan Wu. Read more »
One of the more solid and genuinely useful Internet startups out there, Kayak, was dissected in a report released today by NeXt Up Research for SharesPost. Based on estimated revenue and comparison to competitors, the report estimates Kayak’s market cap at between $705 and $771 million. Read more »
Foursquare, the New York-based location services startup, has more than 500,000 users and 1.4 million venues, it announced today, one year after it launched at SXSW. The company says it had its biggest day ever last Friday, with 275,000 check-ins. Read more »
We know there are lot of entrants in the group deals space — see my recent piece Groupon and the Wannabes — but now the competitors are seriously bulking up. LivingSocial is today announcing it’s raised a $25 million Series B round. Read more »
Facebook redesigned at the beginning of February, moving its search box from the right side to the top middle of its home page, and it seems to have paid off, with the company’s U.S. search queries growing 10 percent in February, according to comScore. Read more »
A little-known white-label mobile social network company is suing Google and Facebook for patent infringement. Wireless Ink, maker of Winksite, says it owns the intellectual property for enabling users to join social networks from their mobile phones through a patent awarded in October 2009. Read more »
Thing Labs has acquired two “passion projects” from former Apple and Google developers to expand social web aggregator Brizzly. Birdfeed, a premium Twitter app, will become the free Brizzly for iPhone app; and Wikirank, a visualization for Wikipedia data from Small Batch, will help illustrate data. Read more »
Get Satisfaction, which offers web-based community support tools, this week became the recipient of a couple of influential integrations. While not official endorsements per se, both Facebook and Google brought on the company to help their own customers offer social CRM. Read more »
Did you know that Google Maps’ most-requested feature addition is biking directions, in large part due to a vocal 50,000-signature-strong group of “Bike There” petitioners? The petitioners’ wish is being granted tonight, with bike directions for 150 U.S. cities and 12,000 miles of trails going live. Read more »
Google Apps is moving closer to being an integrated corporate dashboard with the announcement tonight of Google Apps Marketplace at a developer event at its headquarters. The company will give vendors multiple hooks into its own products and take a 20 percent cut of revenue. Read more »
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