Unite to Solve: June 2008

Monday, June 30, 2008

SocialTimes.com

Posted: 30 Jun 2008 03:31 PM CDT

Pixverse Logo Techcrunch is reporting that hi5 has acquired one of the application developers that has built apps on their platform. This is the first time that any application developer has been acquired by a platform owner instead of a third-party company looking to expand their reach.

The company which got acquired, Pixverse, has appeared to develop an interesting chatroom which in addition to chat has the avatars of users moving around the screen. I have included a version of the chat room below. It’s an interesting way to interact. While it’s an interesting technology, I doubt that the company was acquired for that much.

Unfortunately I doubt we’ll ever know the exact number since it wasn’t announced. If you are looking for a fun way to chat while browsing through hi5, this looks like a pretty good solution. Based on this acquisition, I would doubt that we’ll see hi5 launching their own instant messaging solution anytime soon. Conversely, perhaps the acquisition was to expand upon the existing service.

Do you think the chat room below is useful? How much would you pay to acquire it?

Is Twitter Worth $1 Billion?

Posted: 30 Jun 2008 02:32 PM CDT

This morning I loaded up Twitter.com and received an error message telling me that the site was not responding. Not the good way to start the day for a billion dollar company. How did I come up with the company being worth $1 billion? I didn’t, my friend Nate Westheimer did. Nate wrote a piece suggesting that a mobile payment system would be Twitter’s ticket to becoming a billion dollar company in a short period of time.

Not a bad idea to be honest, and it is similar to the idea that Facebook has, which is preparing to launch a payment system for their platform. Want to send your friend $5 real quick for the beers they bought you last night? No problem, just text “p biznickman $5″. I hadn’t thought of this solution for Twitter previously, but this makes a lot of sense.

Micropayments are currently an area of rising importance. While I may not text my friends $0.50, I could easily see an API tying into Twitter to transfer small payments for a virtual gift or obtaining access to a premium blog post. While the concept is still foreign to many people, a text based way for transferring small amounts of money makes a ton of sense.

While Twitter doesn’t have a massive amount of market penetration, the site has become ubiquitous among early adopters and making the leap to the mainstream is not far away. So how will Twitter end up making money (if they can keep their site up)? Text based payments if the follow Nate’s advice. Do you agree that a Twitter based payment system would make a lot of sense?

Plurk Adds Search, Becomes Increasingly Attractive

Posted: 30 Jun 2008 10:29 AM CDT

Sometime in the past week or so, Plurk added a new search feature which enables users to search through all plurk on the site. For a site which makes it challenging to browse through entries by your friends, search is extremely useful. While the search feature does not currently enable users to subscribe to an RSS feed of a custom search, this new feature has made the site much easier to navigate.

This is one more step toward providing the full set of features provided by Twitter, which can’t seem to stay online as of late. Tamar Weinberg suggests that Plurk shouldn’t event be compared to Twitter though since it’s extremely noisy with their current timeline format. I think that with the addition of text support and alternative timeline views, we could have a new competitor to Twitter.

For the time being I am split between the two services but I have become increasingly attracted to Plurk as I receive many more replies for everything I write on there versus Twitter. You might even call me a plurk evangelist at this point given that I’m the second highest ranked plurker in Washington, D.C. I also appear to be the 354th highest ranked plurker overall.

Such an honor to be among the top ranks on plurk! Just as on other sites, I think the most important issue will be how to develop systems that most effectively cut through the noise. At this point it is no longer easy to track all the conversations on Plurk, FriendFeed, Twitter or pretty much any other site that I’m a member of. Have you found more effective ways for filtering through the noise generated by these new services?

Plurk Search Screenshot

Platform-A Jumps Further Into Social Advertising

Posted: 30 Jun 2008 09:02 AM CDT

Platform-A, the AOL owned advertising network which has the largest reach of any network based on the number of pages their ads are shown on, has announced that they will begin offering social application developers on Facebook and Bebo a guaranteed rate. Platform-A already advertises on AOL Instant Messenger and Bebo but this extends them into third-party applications. This is a similar strategy to Lookery who guarantees 12.5 cent CPMs (cost per thousan impressions) globally and 25 cents in Europe.

According to Larry Dignan, Platform-A’s CPM rate will probably be closer to the 70 to 80 cent range. PaidConent is reporting a much lower rate at around 40 cents. This is still extremely low for most developers and the overall industry is finding it extremely challenging to boost the CPMs much higher. The move by Platform-A into this space emphasizes how this is an industry wide problem and not just confined to a small group of application developers. It is ultimately in everybody’s best interest to figure out a way to boost the CPMs.

Last week at the Digital Media Conference in Virginia, Lynda Clarizio, President of Platform A, stated that she expects a substantial amount of consolidation in the industry. Ultimately, having countless advertising networks is not really sustainable. Over the next 12 months we are going to see new monetization models pop-up but it will still be a challenge to try and increase the overall industry returns. Do you know of any networks providing higher CPMs?

Marc Andreessen Joining Facebook’s Board

Posted: 30 Jun 2008 09:00 AM CDT

Marc Andreessen Headshot Techcrunch is reporting that Marc Andreessen will be joining Facebook’s board with Jim Breyer, Peter Thiel and the majority seat holder, Mark Zuckerberg. It has been rumored that Andreessen would be joining the board but now the news appears to be official.

Marc Andreessen is currently the Chairman of Ning, a competing social network platform. This new position is important because it will tip the balance of the Facebook board, adding one more person and removing Zuckerberg’s majority seat holder position. It is also an interesting position for Andreessen given that he is currently running a competing service offering.

As Mike Arrington points out though, “Andreessen is known to be a mentor to Zuckerberg, who calls on him often for personal advice.” While the news theoretically puts Zuckerberg in a minority position, Andreessen would most likely tend to side with Mark on most issues. Then again, this news may suggest that Zuckerberg realizes it is becoming time for him to reduce some of the control he has and let the company have more seasoned management.

What Really Happened to Top Friends?

Posted: 30 Jun 2008 08:00 AM CDT

Last week, the immensely popular Top Friends application was shut down by Facebook. By Friday, the company wrote in a blog post:

Recently, we suspended Top Friends, one of the most popular applications on Facebook. This application violated user privacy by displaying some profile data to people who should not otherwise have been able to see the information. Though the application developer insists that this violation was not intentional, the seriousness of the violation required us to take immediate action.

We don't take lightly that millions of users lost their access to this application. Because so many people interact with Top Friends on a daily basis, our immediate action to suspend the application was vital in protecting users and assuring them that their confidence in Facebook and the applications on Facebook Platform are well-placed.

The application has been providing consistent functionality for a while but this finding only recently took place. Slide then received a notice to update their application within a limited period of time (less than 24 hours according to one source) otherwise it would be shut down. According to another source, RockYou also received requests from Facebook to resolve privacy issues within a few of their applications. Following an all-nighter, the company was back in compliance. Slide on the other hand did not fall into compliance and the application was shut down.

Privacy Clampdown at Facebook

So where is the Top Friends application? Can’t the company simply throw programming resources and bring the application back into compliance? Possibly, but there is speculation that another issue is at hand. This is the issue of the storage of data which has attracted increasing attention over the past couple weeks resulting in an internal clamp down on all applications abusing privacy restrictions.

There have been a number of public reports about lack of privacy on applications which generated a substantial amount of buzz. Some users that I’ve spoken to have also become weary about the use of applications due to the risk of having their data retrieved. As Dan Birdwhistell wrote yesterday, there is a ton of data that is currently accessible via the platform.

Companies Not Obeying Terms

It is becoming clear that not all companies are playing fair. There are privacy violations but in addition to that some applications are simply caching user data for more than 24 hours. With Facebook preparing to have a new services launch less than a month from now, Facebook is working overtime to pursue these companies that aren’t playing by the rules.

So did Slide break the rules and cache user data beyond the allowed period? Based on the screenshots plastered around the blogosphere last week there is a good chance that’s the case. Whether or not Slide was within the caching limits, days later Top Friends is still down and we are still waiting on the company to get their act together.

Video of Last Week’s Event

Posted: 30 Jun 2008 07:00 AM CDT

Peter Corbett of iStrategyLabs was live on the scene at last week’s event with Robert Scoble and Gary Vaynerchuk. He was doing interviews with a number of attendees to get their take on the event as well as technology’s role in politics. Over the weekend he posted a video on his blog and I’ve included it below. Big thanks to Peter for helping out!

LinkedIn Launches Direct Ads

Posted: 30 Jun 2008 12:00 AM CDT

Last week LinkedIn quietly launched their new LinkedIn Direct Ads service. LinkedIn Direct Ads is a similar service to that which is currently offered by Facebook via their SocialAds program. LinkedIn’s offering targets based on age, gender, industry, and seniority of ad viewers. As pictured in the image below, advertisements show up above the fold. Additionally, these advertisements are currently limited to the United States.

One thing that was substantially different from SocialAds is that the owner of advertisements is displayed next to ads. As the Direct Ads documentation reads, “LinkedIn DirectAds feature your name and a link to your LinkedIn profile on advertisements that you purchase. We want to provide LinkedIn members who view your advertisement with as much transparency and visibility into the advertiser as is appropriate for our community.”

Currently the minimum order for advertisement purchases is $25 and it appears that ads are charged based on a CPM model (cost per thousand impressions). While there has been no test of the advertisements run on this system versus Facebook Ads, this systems has been positioned as a direct competitor. I’m not so sure that the CPM model will wok in the long run though.

Thanks to Rob Webb for the heads up.

Sramana Mitra on Strategy

Alibaba Enters India

Posted: 30 Jun 2008 08:25 AM CDT

Alibaba.com (HKSE: 1688), China’s leading B2B e-commerce company, announced its first quarter results early last month. Revenue for the quarter increased 53.2% to RMB680 million (~ $99 million) and EPS rose 118.6% to HK$6.47 (~ $0.93) for the year. (more…)

Vision India 2020: Bioscope

Posted: 29 Jun 2008 06:00 PM CDT

Professor Raj Reddy at Carnegie Mellon University first urged me to look at MicroFranchise as a vehicle of economic development. MicroFinance today has become a world-renowned phenomenon, especially with Dr. Yunus' Nobel prize two years back. [You can read my interview with Raj here.] (more…)

Saturday, June 28, 2008

Sramana Mitra on Strategy

Why Reality TV Will Soon Die a Healthy Death

Posted: 28 Jun 2008 12:31 PM CDT

Besides writing the stories that Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, Paycheck and A Scanner Darkly were all based upon, Philip K. Dick was also known for his own reality-bending brand of social commentary. His observation that “reality is whatever refuses to go away when I stop believing in it” is particularly poingant in this age of reality TV inundation. And while Dick’s definition of reality still holds water in the current milieu of hit RTV shows with names like The Surreal Life and the canned spontaneity of shows like Big Brother 8 and The Hills, it begs the question, is there anything “real” about RTV at this late stage? RTV started off innocently enough with Candid Camera and all those crazy pranks. (When is that coming back?) Back then, we were swept away by the talent show tide of the 1950s, which culminated in spectacular reality-based competitions like the Miss America Pageant in 1954. But then things started to get weird. Our fascination with observing the really real took a darker turn with the 1973 PBS reality series The American Family, which depicted a typical nuclear family in the US going through a divorce.

Infineon: Wireless Business

Posted: 28 Jun 2008 07:13 AM CDT

We recently evaluated Infineon's industrial and automotive business and its wireline communications business. Let’s now take a quick look at its wireless communications business, which has been in the news for the past year due to the company's presence in the iPhone. Infineon's cellular ICs include solutions for GSM/GPRS, EDGE and 3G/UMTS solutions. It has sought to leverage its strength in power management and system integration to design low-complexity, low-cost, high-performance chips. The company recently announced the latest additions to its single-chip X-GOLD family of cellular ICs. Infineon's highly integrated power management features enable it to set industry-leading battery life standards. Its SMARTi transceivers for 2G and 3G are widely used by leading handset vendors.

Building A Vertical Ad Network Powerhouse: Glam Media CEO Samir Arora (Part 5)

Posted: 28 Jun 2008 01:59 AM CDT

SM: I always like it when a pioneering company takes a new approach with a solid business model already in place.

SA: I will tell you something which has never been made public. At the conclusion of our first quarter after our launch, Glam faced a fork in the road. Most startups experience a decision point two or three years after launch. Typically, once they have used all of their venture capital money, they try to solidify their business model. Then they have to either re-start or focus.

Friday, June 27, 2008

SocialTimes.com

Interview With Jim Benedetto of MySpace

Posted: 27 Jun 2008 03:10 PM CDT

This afternoon I had the opportunity to speak with Jim Benedetto, the Senior Vice President of Technology over at MySpace. We discussed the new MySpace Data Availability which launched yesterday. Jim and I discussed MySpace’s position in relation to competing platforms as well as some of the underlying technical issues pertaining to the new service.

The podcast was probably one of the shortest one ever since Jim was very concise in responding to my questions. Earlier I asked people on Twitter, Plurk and Facebook what questions they would like to have answered and most of them were responded to. One reader asked if the iPhone works with the new MySpace Data Availability service.

While I assumed that the service works with pretty much any web-based technology, Jim confirmed that the new service does indeed work with iPhones. Does this mean we’ll soon see a number of mobile implementations? Probably but I’m not so sure how soon we’ll see this being implemented. I’ve already spoken with a number of mobile services who said that they plan to build software around the new services being offered by Facebook and MySpace.

Check out my interview to with Jim to learn more about the new Data Availability service.

This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

iGoogle Getting Social, Adding FriendFeed Feature

Posted: 27 Jun 2008 01:03 PM CDT

Today Google announced the redesign of their highly popular iGoogle start page. The start page will have a FriendFeed like feed that shows shared feed items from your contacts in Google reader, their recent photos uploaded to Picasa, Google Talk status messages and shared iGoogle gadgets. Sound familiar? It’s pretty much the same thing as other social networks except that your homepage is your startpage for everything.

Google has reduced the newsfeed down to a single feature. Honestly, this makes a lot of sense and I could see Google being successful with this strategy. The only downfall to the new startpage? Well, it’s limited to Google owned items. Currently there is no way to import activities that your friends are involved in else where on the web.

One other substantial addition is the creation of canvas pages for Google gadgets. That means that Google gadgets function similarly to Facebook applications as well as the new Google Friend Connect canvas pages. It appears that the concept of canvas pages has become pervasive throughout the social web. While I don’t know how many users interact with iGoogle on a daily basis, I know it is in the millions.

That means Google has now developed a way to compete directly with Facebook and other social networks for the first page someone loads when they sit down at their computer.

iGoogle Screenshot

Hedging Advertiser Risk on User Generated Content

Posted: 27 Jun 2008 10:09 AM CDT

One of the most significant challenges facing advertisers is the lack of control of what content their advertisements are displayed next to when advertising on social networks. Yesterday while attending the Digital Media Conference in Tyson Corner, VA, I listened to Lynda Clarizio, President of Platform-A, speak about systems the company is building to protect advertisers.

Through leveraging AOL’s parental controls technology Platform-A will have a tool which automatically determines whether or not there is offensive content on a page and will determine whether or not to display an advertisement. I spoke with Lynda and the communications director at AOL, both of which said that there was mention of this technology in their press release about their Bebo acquisition.

Apparently I glanced over that part of the release! This type of technology would prove to be extremely valuable. The only question is how effective this technology is. Ultimately, each advertiser has custom demands for what content their advertisements are not displayed next to. The complexities of such technologies have created a hurdle for most social networks to get through.

Last year Vodafone, Orange and Virgin each pulled advertisements from Facebook. Google also stated that they decided to cut ads from Orkut due to “complaints in Brazil about offensive content.” The issue is an industry wide problem and this filtering technology is the first I’ve heard of which moves in the right direction.

Whether or not the filtering technology works, social networks need to figure out ways to reduce the risks that advertisers face while placing their advertisements next to user generated content. Have you heard of any other technologies that help protect the advertisers?

Censorship photo

Next 6 Months Will be Transformative for Social Web

Posted: 27 Jun 2008 08:00 AM CDT

The upcoming six months are going to transform the social web. Yesterday, MySpace was the first social network to release a public API which extends users’ friend connections (or as Facebook would call it, “social graph”) to the rest of the web. It is highly anticipated that Facebook will be launching a competing version next month at their second annual F8 event.

Next month Apple is set to release the second version of their iPhone which will include a developer platform which has fundamental similarities to the Facebook platform released by Facebook over one year ago. If anything could transform the social web, I am betting heavily that the iPhone becomes just as large of a catalyst as Facebook was for change in the industry.

Combine the data portability movement with open mobile platforms and then add on Facebook’s highly anticipated payment platform and you are looking at big changes ahead. Companies will be working overtime to adapt to the new platforms and embrace it all. So what does this mean for business? Considering that I was writing about a similar shift taking place one year ago, it means a lot.

The most substantial question which has been unanswered is how do large businesses adapt in such a rapidly changing environment? It’s understandable that companies with a few employees can adjust to the change overnight but for most people it’s unsustainable. This may be one of the primary reasons that the social web industry has so much difficulty in gaining traction with brands.

Cutting through all the buzz is critical. Large brands will simply need to pick innovative companies that can adapt to all of the change and work with them to help build a presence in social media. The best rule of thumb at this point is: anything is better than nothing. While large companies may not have all the cutting edge tools, staying educated is the most important thing.

As the social web transforms over the coming months, what do you think is the best way for large corporations to stay up to date and not appear out of the loop?