The Founders Fund has a raised a new $220 million fund, their second. They will invest in 15-to-20 early stage start-ups, they announced today. The four managing partners of FF include Peter Thiel, well known for his investment in Facebook and Sean Parker, who was involved with […] Read more »
An old management adage says ‘tis better to apologize later, than ask for permission first.’ This is typically intended to encourage entrepreneurial risk-taking, or ambitious career moves, (e.g ‘Do I ask to call on that customer? Or just do it and apologize later if necessary to […] Read more »
Update: It’s mea culpa time for Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. The social networking site’s founder and CEO has finally succumbed to the criticism of its ad platform, Beacon, and delivered a confessional worthy of “Oprah.” We say better late than never. But is that enough? Probably not, and here is why. Read more »
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Coca-Cola’s decision to pause and rethink their involvement with Facebook’s Beacon advertising program was a big topic of discussion over the weekend in this corner of the Internet we call the blogosphere. It was a particularly shocking reversal given that Coke was one of the landmark […] Read more »
After I questioned if Facebook was continuing to receive information transmitted from partner sites (even if it wasn’t published), a researcher at Computer Associates came up with proof that indeed was the case. Facebook got in touch with the CA folks, and had this to say: […] Read more »
Now that Thanksgiving is over, it’s time to start speculating about what will be hot and what will be not in 2008. After all, 2007 was not the Year of the Widget, despite what Newsweek predicted. If anything, it was the Year of Facebook. But what about that business networking contender, LinkedIn? Could 2008 be the year of business networking? Read more »
Update: Three weeks is a long time on the Internet. It was on Nov. 6 that I raised the question: Is Facebook Beacon a Privacy Nightmare? Three days later, my next post, Facebook’s Cruel Intentions elicited some response from the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company, which responded […] Read more »
So a lot has been made of the Facebook vs. Google fight, whether it be the fight over talent or potential advertising revenues. The reality is that if Facebook needs to keep growing, it needs Google. Mike Arrington yesterday pointed out that Facebook was advertising on […] Read more »
Facebook may announce alterations to the Beacon social advertising system as early as today, according to BusinessWeek. Perhaps Facebook will now allow global opt-out of publishing third-party activities on the Facebook site — and this would appease many who have complained. But that may not go […] Read more »
It just might be sheer coincidence, but Silicon Valley’s Facebook lovefest has brought a certain feistiness to Fox Interactive and its flagship property, MySpace. The largest social network has been rolling out one feature after another, partnering with others where it lacks the oomph, and keeping […] Read more »
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Now we all know that Facebook is worth one gazillion dollars, but how about the people who are always social networking? In other words, how much is your personal network worth? Germany-based Xing has come up with a tool called MyNetworkValue that lets you put a […] Read more »
[qi:090] The VoIP community, like so many others, got swept up in the Facebook platform euphoria. Not a day passed without some startup or another unveiling their Facebook application amid much fanfare. Well, the party is over, and it has become clear that VoIP apps have […] Read more »
[qi:010] Google, which has been battling Facebook for talent recently, is facing an attack from another source. VMWare, the server and PC virtualization company that went public this summer, is hiring all the engineers it can find. Ann Winblad, a general partner at venture capital firm […] Read more »
If there was ever any doubt that competition is a good thing, witness the case of MySpace. The social networking site has been on a tear recently, signing partnerships with the likes of Skype and AOL, and expanding into new avenues such as OpenSocial and, more […] Read more »
Google’s apparently thinking that by attracting developers they can give Android, their mobile phone platform, the best chance at success. Targeting developers, though, is not the only way to find success with new technology: some companies succeed by going directly after users while others ride on […] Read more »
[qi:012] If you are a Facebook app developer, I have some good news for you: Joyent, a Marin County, Calif.-based on-demand computing and web hosting startup, is going to start offering free hosting to Facebook app developers. The company, we are told, is going to offer […] Read more »
Updated: Facebook Responds, and explains. It has been 48 hours since I asked Facebook to clarify the point about whether a user’s data is still being passed to them from their web partners even after the user chooses to opt out of Beacon. I’ve since given […] Read more »
This being the week of ad:tech, news of online advertising has dominated the conversation: from MySpace’s hyper- targeted ads to Facebook’s new ad system to broadband advertising systems introduced by companies such as AnchorFree. The advertising, of course, is becoming social, mobile, and behavioral. If you […] Read more »
Lets Be Friends, AdFriends Engagement & The Future of Online Advertising Is Facebook Beacon a privacy nightmare? Why is Google afraid of Facebook? OpenSocial advertising for all Will privacy concerns take boom out of the online ads? Read more »
By Mark Kingdon Meet Leah. She is a fictitious consumer, but one whose life in 2007 will help demonstrate how drastically online advertising is going to change over the next five years as it morphs from an industry based on impressions to one based on engagement. […] Read more »
Mark Zuckerberg & Co. stood up in front of the advertising community in New York today and unveiled Facebook Ads, an ad system that allows companies to use the Facebook social graph and to develop highly targeted ads. Large brands such as Coca-Cola (KO), Sony Pictures […] Read more »
Google (GOOG) announced its OpenSocial strategy last week, starting with some of the smaller (albeit fast-growing) social networks, and quickly ensnaring MySpace (NWS), Bebo and a bunch of other companies to join its efforts. Nick O’Neill, the brilliant young man who writes the AllFacebook blog, described […] Read more »
Professor Fogg, iPhone clutched in hand, began the class by asking if everyone had received his Facebook message alerting them to that morning’s OpenSocial announcement. The class nodded. Of course they’d seen the message, they’d all been logging insane hours on Facebook. But not in the […] Read more »
[qi:036] A group of physicists at the University of California, Berkeley, have made the world’s smallest FM radio, crafted out of a single carbon nanotube that is about one ten-thousandth the diameter of a single human hair. In the nanotube radio, a single carbon nanotube works […] Read more »
Google’s (GOOG) much awaited answer to Facebook ecosystem is finally coming to light. The existence of this Google platform was first reported by TechCrunch and is going to become official tomorrow. Google will announce its new social networking initiative, Open Social on Thursday. Joining Google and […] Read more »
How much time and money do you spend on Facebook? That was the question we recently asked those who installed the GigaOm Question of the Day app, that we launched on October 17. Over 80 people piped in and offered up gems like these: * “Since […] Read more »
[qi:053] This will be good news or bad news depending on how you feel about Microsoft, but the software company seems to be roaring back. And it has nothing to do with its overpriced, over-hyped 1.6 percent stake in Facebook. Instead, it has more to do […] Read more »
Microsoft (MSFT) has invested $240 million in Facebook at a valuation of $15 billion and gets the rights to sell third-party ads on the Facebook network. That’s about 2 percent stake. Not as crazy as the $900 million that MySpace (NWS) pried out of Google (GOOG), […] Read more »
I am currently reading “Reality Show,” a new book by The Washington Post columnist and TV commentator, Howard Kurtz. The book is about Brian Williams, Katie Couric and Charles Gibson, the evening news show anchors, their gigantic (and sometimes creaky) news machine and of course, their […] Read more »
[qi:020] First it was music, then web video, and now it is time for MySpace to turn the attention of its 100-million plus members to casual games. The company has signed a deal with Oberon Media, and two companies will create a new casual gaming channel […] Read more »
Written by Alistair Croll, Coradiant co-founder and VP of product management who blogs about online user performance and networking. [qi:073] Earlier this year, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg decided to let people build applications atop his social networking site. Many of the attendees at this week’s Web 2.0 […] Read more »
[qi:013] It is only a matter of time before Facebook gets some insane amount of money from someone like Microsoft (MSFT), but one thing is clear: it isn’t going to sit in the bank for very long. The company is growing way too fast and it […] Read more »
[qi:012] Instead of facing the wrath of the New York Attorney General and testing the legal system, Facebook has decided to settle a probe over child safety on the social networking site. This is a smart move, and one that may clear the way for the […] Read more »
[qi:011] Update: Hey Michael when you say, “Om Malik says Facebook traffic is tanking” it is not quite true. As I said in my original Facebook-traffic post from late last night, I don’t quite buy it. My exact words, “It just doesn’t make any sense! Unless […] Read more »
comScore is about to issue September 2007 user engagement and page views data, and it seems like the SVFurby, I mean Facebook unique visitors took a little dip. See the little decline on the red line. I can’t exactly tell how many and how accurate the […] Read more »
[qi:026] It shouldn’t come as a surprise: some of the early Googlers who have cashed in their millions and are looking for new challenges are hitting the escape button. We wrote about this pending exodus a while back. Some of them are leaving to start their […] Read more »
[qi:004] Somewhere in San Jose, Calif., devotees of all things Facebook have gathered to celebrate the cult of Mark Zuckerberg and the little company he started. Dave McClure might call it his Graphing Social Patterns conference, but we all know it’s all about Facebook, Silicon Valley’s […] Read more »
Erm, Santa Monica, actually. Popular destination for the weird and wonderful on the web BoingBoing has enlisted the services of production company DECA (which we profiled last week) to produce the new BoingBoing web show. Federated Media, which already brokered ads for the BoingBoing blog and […] Read more »
Forget about Zombies, Ninjas, or even Texas Hold ‘Em– if you’re looking for the Facebook game with the numbers that matter most, think more old school. Facebook developers recently added a Daily Active Users metric to their Applications page, and those numbers drastically changed my thinking […] Read more »
Kara Swisher of AllThingsD takes a contrarian point of view on Facebook and does a pretty good job of deconstructing the social-networking company, its potential and all the hype around it. What set her off: Facebook has apparently indicated that it might hold out for a […] Read more »
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