Gidsy goes to Hollywood with its Airbnb for activities
Hot Berlin startup Gidsy, which lets people find and book tours, lessons and other offline experiences, is opening the doors on a service in Los Angeles on Wednesday. Read more »
DataSift now gulps two years from the Twitter firehose
The new DataSift Historics can examine Twitter feeds going back two years — something that consumer product and other companies might find very useful in their product design, pricing and promotion decisions. The service will be available in April. Read more »
Karma lets you send gifts by phone to Facebook friends
A new app from the founders of Tapjoy is emerging to combine mobile and social commerce on iOS and Android devices. The app, called Karma, makes gifting to friends a breeze, by integrating with a user’s social graph on Facebook and suggesting gifts for them. Read more »
Scott McNealy’s Wayin nets $14M in Series B funding
Wayin, the social networking startup launched by Sun Microsystems co-founder Scott McNealy, just closed $14 million in Series B financing, bringing its total backing to $20 million. U.S. Venture Partners led the round and USVP partner Rick Lewis is joining the board of the Denver-based company. Read more »
AT&T’s mad, mad plan to charge wireless app developers
AT&T doesn’t give up on trying to monetize its pipes, and thanks to a lack of network neutrality on wireless networks, limited data plans, and a hunger for bandwidth-consuming mobile apps, it may have found a way to charge developers to use its pipes. Read more »
John Chambers on the future of Cisco
Cisco hit the skids 18 months ago which led to a restructuring that was completed in record time. Now Cisco is ready to roll again, and to celebrate, CEO John Chambers discussed the company’s future. Here are 3 key takeaways. Read more »
Is the honeymoon over for Facebook gaming?
By the end of 2010, about 50 percent of all Facebook monthly active users were gamers. But that fell to about 25 percent in 2011, as Facebook aggressively added new users. The result is that game makers need to work harder to find and retain users. Read more »
DiData launches OpSource cloud services
Systems integrator Dimension Data bought OpSource for its cloud services in June, and is now unveiling the updated cloud offering under its brand. The updated services include a public compute-as-a-service cloud, a private version of same, as well as managed hosting and managed services. Read more »
Rapportive officially bought by LinkedIn
Contacts startup Rapportive has officially been acquired by LinkedIn, the company announced on its blog Wednesday. The deal follows weeks of speculation after rumors surfaced earlier this month. Rapportive will continue to support its popular Gmail plugin, but its acquisition could lead to greater integration with LinkedIn. Read more »
Tiny Review: Instagram + Yelp + Twitter FTW!
Tiny Review is a photo-sharing app with a twist: instead of adding filters and sharing with your social network a la Instagram, Tiny Review makes it easy for users to add up to three short lines of text to their photos. Read more »
Why start up in Boston?
It may not be Silicon Valley but the Boston-Cambridge metro area has a lot going for it — infrastructure expertise, a deep talent pool, and VC funding. Facebook famously went elsewhere, but here’s why other local companies started here (and will stay put.) Read more »
The Internet won the mobile broadband war (but you could still lose)
Mobile operators might as well give in and work with web companies. But if they are smart they will adapt their pricing before consumers start dumping texting and voice services, so they can still maintain the same wallet share (and maybe higher margins). Read more »
ThingLink targets advertisers with new Facebook embeds
Finnish startup ThingLink has been trying to find ways to encourage users to get excited about its “rich pictures.” Now it’s hoping it may hit the mother lode by helping advertisers and marketers build interactive images inside Facebook pages. Read more »
Why is Facebook addictive but enterprise social adoption a challenge?
Harvard Business Review’s Tammy Erickson ponders a puzzling question for forward-thinking businesses – while most workers have trouble turning off the likes of Facebook in their personal lives, getting the same folks on board with enterprise social is a challenge. Why is that? Read more »
Glassmap is like Find My Friends but better
The latest social-local-mobile app to enter the market is Glassmap, which is like a cross-platform Find My Friends, but with more features and better battery management. The app, created by a YCombinator-backed startup, also provides better privacy, messaging and notifications than the competition. Read more »
Vantage plants energy-efficient data center in the Valley
With its newest facility, Vantage Data Centers wants to prove that a low-power data center in Silicon Valley is not an oxymoron. Vantage’s new Santa Clara, Calif., V2 data center claims an impressive 1.12 PUE (power use efficiency) energy rating. Read more »
What’s Facebook mean for early developers? Huge traffic, apparently.
Facebook released some metrics around early partners for its app platform, showing how the apps affect their traffic. The results? Partners like Pinterest, Fab.com, Artfinder, Foodspotting and Foodily are seeing large increases in the number of users connecting to their sites. Read more »
Engagio wants to be your one-stop social inbox
Engagio, which launched on Wednesday backed by seed funding from Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures and other angel investors, pulls in comments and replies from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr and a number of other social services and sites to create a one-stop social dashboard. Read more »
LinkedIn: Mobile growing fast in everything but revenue
Mobile usage is the fastest-growing part of LinkedIn’s business, but it’s not a big revenue driver — yet. That could soon change, as LinkedIn plans to test out advertising across mobile devices, now that it has gotten the product and user experience right on those platforms. Read more »
Of funerals, digital photos and impermanence
The era of cheap digital photography means it is easier than ever to take a good picture, but it also means we are drowning in photos, and pictures have become just another form of digital detritus. Where will those digital memories be when we need them? Read more »
Facebook’s monthly rent is $1M+, and other gems from S-1 update
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. We dug through it so you don’t have to. Read more »
Lessons from Path and Pinterest: Tell users everything
Path and Pinterest are getting some significant backlash because of recent decisions that appeared to put their interests ahead of their users and a lack of disclosure about that behavior. It’s a welcome reminder that the trust of users is not something to be taken lightly. Read more »
App Economy has created almost half a million jobs
Could the app economy be the cure for United States’ employment doldrums? A new report suggests that the nascent app economy spurred on by iOS, Android and Facebook apps has generated 466,000 jobs in the U.S. economy since 2007. Read more »
Do users really care whether the web is open or not?
photo: Flickr user Fabio Venni
Open-web advocates may long for a revolt against walled gardens, but in the end the success of a social network is determined by the willingness of users to put up with its restrictions. For Facebook, that is both its biggest strength and its biggest weakness. Read more »
Facebook filling the gaping hole in its mobile strategy
It looks like Facebook wants to address the big weaknesses in its mobile business model before it has to deal with nagging questions of its investors. According to FT, Facebook plans in March to include sponsored posts in its mobile news feeds. Read more »
Poll: The older you are, the more you hate Facebook Timeline
Facebook is in the process of converting all user profiles to the Timeline design. But according to a poll, the majority of people aren’t so keen on the new look. Seventy percent of all respondents disapproved of Timeline, as did 90 percent of people over 65. Read more »
How Marc Andreessen makes Silicon Valley magic
At just 2.5 years old, Andreessen Horowitz, the VC firm founded by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, has become a tech industry institution with holdings in Facebook, Twitter, and more. GigaOM talked with Andreessen to get his thoughts on Silicon Valley and the larger tech landscape. Read more »
How the Huffington Post became a new-media behemoth
In addition to some eye-popping figures for page views and unique visitors, the latest Huffington Post statistics show that if there’s one thing the site knows how to do, it’s how to get reader engagement that other news sites and publishers can only dream of. Read more »
In one crucial way, Facebook is still a private company
Even after it goes public, Facebook will still be controlled single-handedly by CEO Mark Zuckerberg through a special class of stock and voting agreements. In other words, while you may own stock in the company, you will have virtually no say in what happens to it. Read more »
Will clean power and microgrids be the future of data centers?
Will an idea to build a data center park powered by onsite clean energy and paired with a microgrid in Colorado, represent the future of data centers? Read more »
Tales from the Trenches: Flip Flop Shops
The five partners in charge of Flip Flop Shops run their expanding franchise out of home offices spread across North America. How does this entirely remote team keep the business on track while maintaining a flip-flop friendly lifestyle? President Brian Curin fills us in. Read more »
Facebook has nothing to fear, except itself
According to Edward Aten, founder of Swift.fm, Facebook is recreating and competing with nearly every significant Internet product of the last few years. It’s an unprecedented pivot that threatens Facebook’s core products and may eventually benefit the very same startups Facebook is trying to crush. Read more »
Facebook wants to rewire the way the world works
In the letter to shareholders included in Facebook’s IPO filing, co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg makes it clear his vision goes beyond just a social network. He wants to fundamentally rewire the way the world works, from interpersonal interactions to commerce to even government. Read more »
Mark Zuckerberg wants to teach Wall Street “the Hacker Way”
In Facebook’s IPO document filed Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg dedicated a significant portion of his letter to something a bit out of the ordinary: Teaching potential investors about “the Hacker Way” and dispelling the negative connotation the word “hacker” has gotten in the mainstream media. Read more »
It’s here: Facebook files for $5 billion IPO
The most highly anticipated initial public offering in today’s tech world is officially happening. Facebook filed S-1 documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission Wednesday afternoon to raise a maximum of $5 billion. According to the filing, Facebook made $3.7 billion in revenue in 2011. Read more »
Is Facebook’s IPO the start of something, or the end?
As everyone awaits the $100-billion Facebook IPO, the biggest question hanging over the offering is whether it marks the beginning of a new era for Facebook — or if it’s just a massive cashing-out exercise, a sign that this generation’s version of AOL has peaked? Read more »
Study: Pinterest drives more referral traffic than Google+, nearly on par with Twitter
It’s clear that Pinterest is really hot, but a new study shows just how powerful the virtual pinboard company has become. Pinterest is now driving more referral traffic on the web than Google+, YouTube, Reddit, and LinkedIn combined, according to Shareaholic’s January 2012 Referral Traffic Report. Read more »
The era of the 100 MW data center
The era of the 100 MW data center is coming, as Internet companies build more and more server-packed data centers to support the growing number of web users and the increasing amount of time spent online. Read more »
SocialFolders plugs into Evernote to be your social media diary
SocialFolders, a freemium application that launched last month to let you store and manage any file created on the social web, rolled out an integration with Evernote on Tuesday that lets users drag-and-drop content such as Tweets, Facebook updates, Instagram photos into their Evernote accounts. Read more »
The trouble with Twitter? Bad, bad advertising
Almost a year after it angered users with its ‘quick bar’ advertising, and several months into its new Promoted Tweet service, Twitter’s ad platform seems as shaky as ever. Is targeted advertising a myth, or can Dick Costolo and team turn it around? Read more »
