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Jim Barnett is co-founder and CEO of Turn, a three-year-old online advertising firm that uses an eBay-like auction to improve the way advertisers are matched to web publishers. Previously, Jim was president of AltaVista, and later, of Overture’s search division, which Yahoo bought for $1.6 billion… Read More »

Networking has always been a high art in business. Just ask Susan Roane, my mentor and author of the seminal tome, “How to Work a Room.” (I know a handful of VCs and startup kings on Sand Hill Road who have her book tucked into a… Read More »

This is hilarious. Google ignores MySpace. Facebook blocks Google’s Friend Connect. Now that Google has launched Friend Connect, we’ve had a chance to evaluate the technology. We’ve found that it redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users’ knowledge, which doesn’t respect the privacy standards… Read More »

MySpace this week won a ruling against Samford Wallace and Walter Rines, reinforcing the fact that there’s no love lost between big web sites and spammers. But it’s also a sign of an escalation of the war on spam. Spammers are finding virgin territory in emerging messaging… Read More »

Neither Om nor I are shy about talking infrastructure, but the High Scalability blog has gone totally geek and parsed the details of how Facebook plans to scale its new Jabber chat service to 70 million members using a hella lot of servers and Erlang. As… Read More »

What began last March with Warbook, a no-frills Facebook fantasy strategy game first conceived by an intern, has lead to today’s announcement: Social Gaming Network, a startup still based in a Palo Alto garage, is getting $15 million in Series A funding from a VC… Read More »

Last week, I pointed out that MySpace’s Data Availability efforts were welcome in that they expand the number of sites on which a user can use her MySpace data, but that MySpace still had a lock on the user data since it hosted and determined who… Read More »

Rising Cost of Facebook Infrastructure; CTO Resigns

Last month, I wrote about Facebook’s insatiable hunger for hardware. Over the weekend, Spencer Ante of Business Week reported that Palo Alto-based social networking company had raised about $100 million from Triplepoint Capital, a venture lending operation. “It will be used entirely for servers,” Facebook Chief… Read More »

MySpace Builds a Bigger Walled Garden

MySpace today launched announced a data availability initiative that will allow users to opt in to sharing their MySpace information on a variety of partner sites. While not exactly complete data portability (the social networking company also said it was joining the Data Portability Project), it’s… Read More »

Who Will Cache in on Cloud Storage?

As data moves into the cloud, many storage companies are evaluating their use of memory in the data center as they try to strike a balance between easily accessible cache memory powered by flash and slower-to-access disk memory powered by hard drives. At the same… Read More »

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