“Following the sun” to Lion City: The why and how behind Voxel’s move into Singapore

“Following the sun” to Lion City: The why and how behind Voxel’s move into Singapore Posted: 23 Sep 2011 09:05 AM PDT (IDA has teamed up with VentureBeat to explore Singapore's potential as an Asian launchpad in a series of posts that will culminate in a live video webinar. This sponsored post is part of that series. To read the full series and sign up for the webinar, go here.) Voxel is a tiny company in a field of telecom giants. Yet even with a staff of barely 50, we have become a multinational service provider thanks to a few key decisions. One of those was to “move east” and set up an office in Asia. The Background Voxel is a managed hosting company that delivers high availability Internet applications. We got our start in 1999 providing Linux web hosting in the sleepy town of Troy, NY.  We then moved the entire operation to New York.  Over the next several years Voxel built out its IP network, moved into private datacenter facilities, opened interconnection points around the U.S. and got a toehold in the European market.  But being a 24×7 start up, long nights and working weekends quickly stretched us thin. We started dreaming of an awesome counterpart to our New York-based team that would work while we slept. But we were scared of what the "outsource" effect might do to our tightly-knit, local group of engineers.  The last thing we wanted was a corporate culture where people only knew each other as names in a Global Address Book. By 2007, however, we realized we couldn't provide the level of service we wanted (and our customers demanded) without expanding our operations.  With a growing customer base and an increasing international demand, we needed a 24x7x365 "follow the sun" model not only for our support team, but also for sales and engineering.   So we began the search for a new office location in a place that wouldn't break our culture, or our bank. The Search Although we briefly discussed opening an office in Europe, our thoughts immediately turned to Asia.  Europe had a large market, but it was spread across a myriad of countries, all with established (and strong) competitors. In Asia, on the other hand, we found fast-growing economies, somewhat-lazy nationalized telecoms (we love those!) and huge population centers with strong demand for Internet applications. To us, the choice was clear: If we had to pick one location (and, at the time, we could only afford to pick one), we would look east and head for Asia. But Where in Asia? Our goals were simple: We needed a country where we could establish both a network point of presence (PoP) and an office.   We needed to cross-subsidize our operations team, network peering and sales activities to make the numbers work. With only 20 employees at the time, we also prioritized a few other "must haves." We needed to work and sell in English, wanted to operate under business practices and laws that were similar to those in the U.S., and required access to a strong local talent pool. Unlike most companies, opening an office in Asia was less about the cost/benefit line item and more about gaining the competitive advantages associated with an expanded operation. In the end, our shortlist of possibilities came down to Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan. Settling on Lion City In the end, we finally settled on Singapore.  Singapore met all our key requirements and, although not as natural a fit as Hong Kong from an IP network perspective (the Singapore market is slightly less competitive in pricing/flexibility), we felt it was a market that could utilize our services and we had the support of the local government. Other pluses included the city-state's top notch infrastructure, a rich local talent pool (with the immigration means to bring in skilled workers from outside of Singapore), a super friendly business environment and a very central location to other major business markets, such as Thailand, China, Australia, and Malaysia. The Singapore government was instrumental in helping us navigate the complexities of setting up an office halfway around the world and providing access to the information and contacts to help us get started.  We found ourselves learning a lot once we finally sat down in Singapore, but the government officials helped us every step of the way and we continue to have a good relationship today. So What Went Wrong? Although we're happy with our choice to open a Singapore office, it wasn't all smooth sailing.  Costs were higher than we wanted — particularly data center, telecom and office space — and there was definitely a lack of local financing for foreign owned subsidiaries. And, although not related to our Singapore choice specifically, growing a global team was and still is incredibly challenging.  Start-ups like Voxel often operate with lean management, make quick decisions and move rapidly because employees are in tune with the intimacies of the product and the company. But when you start separating people by a 12-hour time difference and thousands of miles, communication and team management become vital. Even though we knew these would be challenges before we opened the Singapore office, we still underestimated what it would take to solve them. Hint: We rack up lots of miles on Singapore Airlines! As of Now…. Voxel is thriving in Singapore.  Our Singapore office has almost 15 people spanning sales, operations, support, and software engineering, and we're still hiring.   In the past two years we have acquired almost 100 local customers, and 30 percent of our new sales now come out of the Asia-Pacific region. Best of all, our customers always have access to an awesome, talented and dedicated Voxel engineer whenever they need help, providing around the clock support and turning all our customers into raving fans.  This article was written by Zachary Smith, COO of Voxel. Filed under: Entrepreneur Corner, VentureBeat This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

BuzzTable aims to revolutionize how restaurants connect to customers Posted: 23 Sep 2011 08:36 AM PDT Most restaurants spend a lot of time and energy on attracting new customers, but New York City-based BuzzTable wants to make it easier for restaurants to connect with their existing customers, a far cheaper and potentially more rewarding process. The company has built a mobile customer relationship management (CRM) platform that lets restaurants easily offer deals, loyalty programs, news and even table waiting management, directly to their customers’ phones. BuzzTable was a part of NYC’s Entrepreneur Roundtable Accelerator’s first class, all of whom presented on stage during ERA’s demo day today. BuzzTable launched several weeks ago with its simple table waiting management, which lets restaurants easily track and communicate with customers waiting in line on their phones, without relying on more traditional table buzzers. The company says that buzzers were used over 1 billion times in the last year, but since they’re dumb devices, restaurants had no useful data to gather from them. Buzzers are also expensive (most cost around $50) and get lost easily, often costing restaurants thousands of dollars every year to replace. With BuzzTables’ platform, restaurants get information about their customers as they’re waiting. Customers waiting for a seat receive a text message telling them when there’s space available, and they’re also directed to download BuzzTable’s app. Restaurants can then use the app to stay in touch with customers by delivering news, or tracking loyalty programs. BuzzTable says they’re filling a gap created by popular daily deal sites like Groupon, who don’t care if customers end up going back to a particular restaurant. The company has progressed quickly in its time at ERA. Four months ago it only had basic wireframes (early design prototypes) for its app and service, now it has a fully working product that’s being used by four restaurants in New York City. So far, BuzzTable’s service has helped seat 7524 people and 1837 tables. The company is in discussions with national chains, including Ruby Tuesday. BuzzTable is in the process of raising $750,000, and it hopes to expand to over 300 restaurants and three national chains in the next year. Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Crimesourcing, crime as a service and how data criminals are like startup employees Posted: 23 Sep 2011 08:14 AM PDT “Organised crime is exactly that – organised” said Marc Goodman at this week’s O’Reilly Strata conference, “especially in the field of cyber crime.” Goodman knows a thing or two about crime. He started off as an LAPD streetcop before starting the service’s first Internet crime unit in the mid-1990s. After spending a decade working with Interpol he founded the Future Crimes Institute to track how criminals use technology. Cybercrime is already an agile, globalised and outsourced business."Anything that would motivate a startup employee would motivate a criminal.” explains Goodman.”They want money. They want shares in the business, they want a challenge, they don’t want a 9-5 environment. They want to respect of their peers and they are engaged in a game of us against them.” Cybercriminals use malware like viruses, worms and trojans to harvest personal data. “There are 268 million pieces of computer malware which have been identified in the wild.” Goodman reports. They also use social engineering techniques such as fishing emails using data gleaned from social networks to trick people into providing further details. Technology has allowed cybercriminals to become more like high-growth startups.”Datacrime can be scripted and automated and it scales. If you take a gun or a knife and stand on a street corner, there’s only so many people you can rob. You have to do the robbery, run away from the scene of the crime, worry about the police, so you can’t really rob that many. You can’t walk into Wembley stadium with a gun and say ‘everybody put your hands up’. But you can do that from a cybercrime perspective." Organised crime breaks crime down into its component parts and outsources, or more accurately crimesources, it to specialised technical teams. There are people who write the malware, people who deploy it, who control and rent the botnets, receive goods bought with stolen credit cards and do the money laundering. Criminals even offer SLAs (service level agreements) and technical support lines. The crime market also obeys the laws of supply and demand. After the Sony PSP attack in which Sony lost the credit card details of almost 100 million customers there was so much stolen credit card information available that prices dropped. Cybercrime has also become a totally globalised business."One of the reasons that cybercrime thrives is that it’s totally international whereas law enforcement is totally national.”says Goodman.”Now the person attacking you can be sitting in new York or Tokyo or Botswana. The ability to conduct business without getting on a plane is an awesome advantage that International organised crime uses." Criminals constantly pioneer new business practices.”They are probably ahead of the curve on cooperating with their competition. I think it will be a long time before Pepsi has a serious conversation with Coke but surprisingly Japanese Yakuza will talk to Chinese triads, one cartel may talk to another if it has a specific area of expertise. Specialities are also regional. If you want a hit man you go to Serbia. If you want to do money laundering you find someone in Dubai.” Like the porn industry, organised crime continues to be an early adopter of new technology. “Cybercriminals are highly innovative and adaptive.” Goodman observes. “They have so many ways of being clever and imaginative because they never take the straight on approach. They always find the side way to go about something that the good person would never have considered” Filed under: Entrepreneur Corner, offBeat, social, VentureBeat This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Spotify uses Facebook exposure to open free streaming to everyone for 6 months Posted: 23 Sep 2011 07:50 AM PDT After several months of keeping its new service invite-only, Spotify took advantage of its spotlight at the Facebook f8 event to open its doors to anyone who wants to use the on-demand music service. And they’ll get to do so free for 6 months! One of Facebook’s big announcements Thursday was allowing for much more interactivity between users when it comes to media like music services. For example, Spotify users can use Facebook friends to find new music to listen to and even see what friends are listening to right now. This sort of capability is one that Spotify wants all Facebook users to have, so this is an ideal moment to take down the invite-only wall. Spotify will now let anyone in the U.S. join its streaming music service by simply signing up at spotify.com. Users will be able to use the service for six months with occassional ads for free, but after that time is up Spotify will give you 10 free hours a month or you can sign up for a premium plan. For $5 a month, users can listen to Spotify's catalog without ads via PCs and for $10 a month, they can listen to music without ads via PCs and mobile apps for iPhone and Android. Streaming music services have been making quite a few headlines as of late and the field is getting exceptionally competitive. While Spotify is relatively new, it has done a good job a keeping its profile up against strong rivals like MOG, Rdio and Rhapsody. Spotify currently has more than 2 million paying subscribers in eight countries, adding about 400,000 paying users since its U.S. launch. In terms of financing, the company has raised $120 million so far and is valued at about $1 billion. It recently finished raising a round of financing from Russia's DST, the investment company that has previously backed Facebook, Groupon and Zynga. Filed under: media This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Cory Doctorow: Tech companies exploit the way we undervalue privacy Posted: 23 Sep 2011 07:30 AM PDT How much is your personal data worth? Will photos you post on Facebook or your Foursquare check-in data get you into trouble in five years time? In one of the standout talks at this week’s O’Reilly Strata Summit, author and Boing Boing editor Cory Doctorow explained why people undervalue their privacy, and how data-driven companies exploit this mis-pricing of privacy. The privacy bargain we make with tech companies usually involves giving up some personal data in return for a free service, as with Facebook or many mobile applications. Doctorow argues it’s hard for people to assign a value to personal data. When the full consequences of giving up that data are still unknown, how do you determine whether the privacy bargain is a fair one? "It’s hard to get worked up about things where the failure and the deed are separated by a long way,” said Doctorow. “It’s the same reason that people start smoking.” He insists data-driven companies such as Facebook actively exploit users to solicit as much data as possible. “Facebook trains you to undervalue your privacy. These companies are choca with social scientists now and those people have read their Skinner (an American behaviorist), have read their Adler (founder of the school of the school of individual psychology) and they understand intermittent reinforcement.” In exchange for posting status updates, photos and other information, Facebook users are intermittently rewarded with attention from people they care about. This mechanism can have addictive qualities similar to gambling. “Eli Pariser, who wrote The Filter Bubble, told me someone at Facebook explained to him that they know that men who have female friends who post photos of themselves, spend more time on the site,” reports Doctorow. “They know that women who see their friends post photos, upload photos in response. So if a man who used the site a lot then dropped off, they look for women in his social group, show them pictures of their girlfriends, the women post pictures back and then the men stay on. This is not the bargain." Another form of social manipulation practiced by tech companies involves search results and news feeds. "The algorithms by which things like Facebook decide what to show you and what to hide are totally opaque. There’s this kind of weird, big lie about how an algorithm is not a form of editorial control. Google will say ‘we have organic search results’ in contrast with what Alta Vista used to do, where they would take payment to put a result first. It’s ‘organic’ because it’s done with math, but actually it’s editorial by another name. All the companies that do editorial by algorithm claim that there’s something about math that makes it free of bias and will." Tech companies often do not offer clear or easy privacy choices to users. Facebook constantly changes its privacy settings to push the default towards more public data, and its Byzantine custom privacy settings are bewildering for a new user. "Complexifying a proposition is usually there to stop you from finding out whether the deal is good," comments Doctorow. With mobile applications, the choice is often between giving the application all the data it requests or not installing at all. "Imagine apps that let you iterate through privacy decisions when they arise, not making a lot of a priori decisions,” explains Doctorow. “Apps that start from a presumption of privacy, and when your privacy settings interfere with your stated desire to access a service, in that moment you are prompted to make the decision." More generally, Doctorow says we need simpler cookie managers: "One of the things you can do is give people meaningful choices in their browsers. That would be way more useful to me than giving them hard to enforce, impossible to audit, privacy legislation." He also thinks that the way we approach educating children about privacy is flawed. “We have this weird contradiction in our school system where all the grown-ups in the school spend all their time wagging their fingers at kids saying ‘Get off the Facebook, every disclosure you make is something precious that you lose forever ‘but ‘I’m spying on every click you do, spying on every IM you send, spying on all your Facebook conversations just like a parent who has 3 fags in his mouth and says ‘You shouldn’t smoke because it’s bad for you,’" he says. "We could start by teaching kids to jailbreak every device, break every firewall, to do all the things that will make them good at privacy. It’s a learned skill. If kids can compete to see who can divulge the least information to the grown-ups in their lives, we will, by definition, get kids who are better at not divulging information than kids who are punished every time they try to prevent grown-ups from looking at their information." One of the reasons that we undervalue out personal data seems to be that the threat is not visceral and concrete. "In technology we often have this core problem of taking a fairly abstract social harm and rendering it concrete,” concludes Doctorow. “I think science fiction is rubbish at predicting the future, but it can create narratives that become part of our discourse. Imagine it’s 1947 and Orwell hasn’t written 1984 yet, and you’re trying to explain to someone why you don’t want to be electronically surveiled." Filed under: social, VentureBeat This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Brands finally succeed in social games on Facebook Posted: 23 Sep 2011 07:00 AM PDT Facebook gamers are finally embracing well-known brands in their social games. That was one of the conclusions from a panel on social games at the f8 conference for Facebook developers yesterday. Sean Ryan (pictured left), director of game partnerships, pointed out that Facebook as a gaming platform has evolved from a place where original game ideas prospered at first. But now that there are 800 million users on the social network, it’s only natural for brands to take over. Gamers can gravitate to them because they can pick up a game already knowing the narrative behind it, making the game much easier to learn. For a time, Facebook was resistant to brands. Friends share games that they found to be fun, and in the early days, Zynga dominated the market. That turned into a huge advantage, and Zynga’s distribution might now allows it to launch original titles that can succeed in part because they can be cross-promoted to so many of Zynga’s existing users. The same was true with the iPhone, where original titles such as Koi Pond drew a lot of attention at first but now there are plenty of brands such as Bejeweled, Plants vs. Zombies, and Uno in the top charts. What was unusual about Facebook is that non-branded games held onto the top rankings on the popularity charts for a longer time than usual, largely because of the power of friend recommendations on the platform. Many game companies tried to launch branded games on Facebook and it was like hitting their heads against brick walls. But this year, that is beginning to change. The biggest proof is The Sims Social, a Facebook game from Electronic Arts that taps the Sims franchise which has sold more than 100 million units on the PCs and consoles. The Sims Social is now the No. 2 game on Facebook, with 53 million monthly active users, second only to Zynga’s Cityville. In turn, the Sims Social is helping other branded EA games catch on. “Brands are an important part of the business,” said Barry Cottle (pictured left), head of EA Interactive, the social, mobile and online division of EA. “Early on, in traditional gaming markets, original intellectual property caught on. At the core, you always have to have a great game. That’s a core ingredient. But brands give the ability to be recognized, to tap into loyalty.” Within six weeks, the Sims Social hit 10 million users without much advertising at all, mainly because it has been known for a decade, Cottle said. “People coalesce around things they recognize,” Cottle said Zynga has mostly stayed away from brands. But Owen Van Natta (pictured right), chief business officer at Zynga, said that the company took advantage of a chance to get a license with Lucasfilm for its Adventure World game. By October, the film character Indiana Jones will be integrated into the game. That deal came after the game launched, but it could help the game get wider awareness over time. “Indiana Jones was an opportunistic thing,” Van Natta said. “I’m amazed at how we were able to create brands quickly on Facebook.” Zynga also has run promotions with a variety of movies and with the singer Lady Gaga in its FarmVille game. We ran our own feature story recently on startup Iconicfuture, which has created a marketplace so that brands can license their properties in a matchmaking service with game companies that want to license them. Kabam also jumped into the branded-game business by acquiring the rights to the Godfather for Facebook. But he said the game evolved when the company decided to create a crime game, said Kevin Chou (pictured left), chief executive of Kabam, a maker of mostly original hardcore social games on Facebook. Kabam figured out the core fun mechanics in the title, and then looked around for a narrative that could become the overarching back story for the game. The Godfather made a lot of sense, and Kabam was already talking to Paramount Pictures about a license. “You have to start with the core game,” Chou said. John Pleasants (pictured right), head of Disney Interactive and Playdom, said that the company tested the power of a brand with a title called Gnome Town, launched two months ago. That title did OK at first, getting 500,000 daily active users, but then Disney renamed it Disney Gnome Town. The result was that the cost of acquisition, such as advertising a game, dropped by a third as the game took off more on its own. Users were also more likely to spend money in the game, since they trusted the Disney name. Disney also launched a couple of ESPN-branded games, where it was able to advertise the games on TV using remnant (unsold ads). The result was that the users who came in from the TV commercial had a much higher “lifetime value,” or spending on the game over the course of the game’s life. That was because those users were much more loyal to the ESPN brand. During 2012, Pleasants said that Disney will come out with two to four major Disney brands as social game properties. “We think it’s an advantage, if you put game play first,” Pleasants. Filed under: games, social This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

How IBM’s chip technology might lead to better water filtration (video) Posted: 23 Sep 2011 07:00 AM PDT Bob Allen spent much of his career as an IBM researcher exploring semiconductor manufacturing processes. But at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., Allen is now trying to use his understanding of nanotechnology and membranes to come up with better methods for water filtration. It’s funny to think that technology that was used to make the fastest chips is now being studied for use in water desalination plants, which take the salt out of sea water. We caught up with Allen (pictured) in a tour of the IBM Almaden Research Center. In an advanced materials chemistry lab, Allen pointed out that the lab developed materials such as photoresist, a light-resistant coating that is used to make different patterns on chips and is now used all over the world in the chip industry. The lab also developed materials for extending photolithography, or printing patterns on chips, for years to come through the use of water. Allen said the lab created a new class of materials to enable new generations of chips. Now Allen and other researchers are applying their minds to cleaning impurities out of water. Now the lab has been recast as a water-membrane characterization facility. The team takes exotic new membranes and assesses how good they are at filtering seawater. The water is pumped through the nano-assembled membrane and the biggest impurities are blocked from going through. “Filtration efficiency is incredibly important,” Allen said. Among those interested in the research: Saudi Arabia, naturally. Desalination is becoming more important around the world, and even better waste water reclamation. The most critical stage of that is using membranes in the last step of cleaning waste water. It reminds me of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel Dune, about the desert planet Arrakis. “We should rename this lab ‘Dune,’” Allen said. Check out the video interview with Allen below. Filed under: VentureBeat This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Sean Parker says Spotify on Facebook lives up to original Napster vision (video) Posted: 23 Sep 2011 04:30 AM PDT Sean Parker, the billionaire of Napster and Facebook fame, is on to his next big deal: Spotify, which started in Europe and is now offering streaming music in the U.S. In a conversation with Spotify chief executive Daniel Ek, Parker said that the rise of Spotify and other music streaming services and the debut of their integration with Facebook today fulfilled the original vision he had for Napster. And that vision wasn’t about music piracy. “This is actually very similar to what I dreamt of 10 years ago,” Parker said, speaking on stage at a press event after Facebook’s f8 event. (That’s Parker on the right in the above photo; Ek is on the left in the “Suits Suck” t-shirt.) “We never really wanted to create a service to destroy the record business or hurt artists in any way. The goal was really to create a more frictionless system. We really believed we would succeed in striking deals with the record labels.” Parker predicted no less than a rebirth of the music business itself, thanks to better music discovery through the combination of Facebook and Spotify. Parker was a co-founder of Napster, an early shepherd of Facebook, and is now an investor in Spotify. He was such a unique and interesting character that he was played by Justin Timberlake in the movie The Social Network, a fictionalized account of the founding of Facebook. In real life, he played a role in cracking the foundations of the old music business, and now he’s looking to rebuild it. Parker and Ek held their discussion in a warehouse in San Francisco with opulent party trimmings. The catered meal included roasted pigs, oysters, bottles of tequila, and sushi. The entertainment included The Killers, Jane’s Addiction, and Snoop Dogg. Ek said that Napster, the disruptive music sharing service started by Parker and Shawn Fanning (who was also there tonight), inspired him when he was growing up. “Napster for me personally was probably the biggest event in my life when it comes to the internet,” Ek said. It really changed how I considered music, my favorite artists, how I shared music with friends.” And Parker said, “Meeting Daniel was one of the three key moments in my life, alongside meeting Shawn Fanning and meeting Mark Zuckerberg.” Facebook today announced that Spotify would be integrated into Facebook so that a friend could listen to a song at the very same moment another friend was listening to it, in a kind of social music discovery. Spotify’s iPhone app, which offers users convenience, requires a subscription fee. Users can now listen to music, watch TV, or view movies without ever leaving Facebook. “If you want full portability, you have to pay,” Parker said. “The iPhone version has paved the way for that. This was ultimately the most important element in monetization. The element that consumers were wiling to pay for was convenience.” Parker added, “Solving the music piracy problem can’t happen unless you build a music service that is more convenient than piracy. It didn’t compete with any of the existing services like iTunes or Napster. It competed with piracy.” The most important unanswered question? Parker said, “Music discovery has always been social. Obviously there has been these top-down media like MTV and radio, but so much music discovery has happened by word of mouth in a dorm room, people going to clubs or hearing music in a restaurant. That social process has always been the real fuel.” With Facebook, Spotify can now “supercharge that discovery,” Parker said. “More people will experience music than ever before. As long as that is coupled with a monetization platform that actually works, we have a solution.” Here’s some video of the full conversation between Parker and Ek below. And below that we have a panel of industry artists and managers talking about the significance of Spotify. The panel includes Jane’s Addiction lead singer Perry Farrell, Brandon Creed (manager for Bruno Mars),  producer Ray Romulus, Paul Rosenberg (Eminem’s manager) and disc jockey Kaskade. Afterward, the Killers opened the show and Parker danced next to me. Filed under: social This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Basis launches heart rate monitor and health tracker Posted: 23 Sep 2011 12:56 AM PDT Basis Science  hopes to get us all in better shape. It will do so with its $199 heart and health monitor that you can strap around your wrist. The company is revealing today the design of its B1 Basis Band that will launch later this year. The tracker has multiple sensors that measure your heart rate, calorie intake, sleep patterns, and other metrics. It has a liquid crystal display and looks like a digital watch. The device can be connected to a web-based personal dashboard. You can look at it to see your heart rate, diet, sleep data, and more. With that data, Basis makes recommendations for how you can improve your overall wellness. The latter part makes use of gamification, or making unappealing activities such as exercise more fun by making them more competitive and game-like. You can share your updates with friends and family over social networks and receive encouragement for your progress. "With ongoing concerns about our nation's health and wellness, combined with rising healthcare costs, people are looking for smart, useful tools to help them make better lifestyle choices," said Jef Holove, Basis CEO.  "Most devices today provide guesstimates on people's health from simplistic metrics like motion or footsteps. Basis technology can provide a much richer, more insightful picture of your wellness." You can export your data from your personal dashboard, sharing it with a personal trainer or doctor. While other devices try to calculate your activity through a smartphone or, as Striiv does, through a keychain devices, Basis believes it can get a lot of data from your wrist, the bloodflow under it, and the state of your skin (sweaty or not). It has a three-axis accelerometer that records movement and activity. It calculates metrics based on that data and shares it to the cloud. The B1 Basis Band has multiple-day battery life and it is light. You can change the style and color of your straps and wear it easily while running. Basis also said today it is creating an advisory board that includes Kevin Colleran of Facebook, Charles and Kai Huang (founders of RedOctane and creators of Guitar Hero), Patrick McGill, physician Daniel Kraft, and Jeff Rosenthal. Basis also appointed Chris Verplaetse as vice president of development. San Francisco-based Basis has raised $9 million to date. Preorders are available on the company’s web site. Basis will show off the band at the upcoming Health 2.0 conference. Filed under: VentureBeat This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Round-up: 7 drastic Facebook changes announced at f8 Posted: 22 Sep 2011 11:45 PM PDT According to informal polls, web traffic statistics and general discussion with a handful of friends, Facebook’s f8 developers conference wasn’t nearly as interesting for non-tech folks. At the very least, it didn’t generate the same level of discussion as an Apple event like I previously described. Part of that could be because it’s a developer conference (not always the most interesting for people who aren’t developers) that was held in the middle of a working day. On top of that, digesting the Facebook platform changes announced today might be difficult after putting in a full day of work. After all, the company renamed several long-time parts of the site and added tons of new functionality. For people who didn’t keep up with the f8 news as it broke, we’ve created a round-up of all the new Facebook changes and what they mean. Profiles are now Timelines We knew ahead of time that Facebook was planning to re imagine user profiles, which is exactly what Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg revealed at f8. Profiles have now transformed into personal Timelines, a more visual representation of the profile page. At the top of a person’s Timeline is a large, horizontal photo called a cover that can be customized. The familiar “Face” photo overlaps the cover on the left side and all of a person’s basic information (location, current employment, marital status, etc.) is listed just below. Basically, the left sidebar on profile pages are now combined into the Timeline. Scrolling down a person’s Timeline reveals posts, photos and other events, which can be adjusted in size and hidden from view based on privacy settings. The Timeline sorts content based on algorithms and users can fill in gaps in their Timeline at any time. Older content is less frequently shown the as you scroll down the Timeline. Liking (and other actions) now pop up in a real-time Ticker Facebook has removed the automated updates from various apps and activities and placed them into a separate stream on the right side of the page. For example, posting an update from an entertainment check-in service like Miso — “Tom just rated Game of Thrones on Miso”– will now only appear in the ticker stream instead of the main news feed. The same is true for any alterations you make to your Facebook account — e.g. Tom Cheredar liked Game of Thrones and 7 other TV shows. As previously reported, the Ticker stream contains all the activity from people you subscribe to in real-time. It’s intended to be a lightweight feed of updates that won’t annoy your friends. Open Graph: Never leave Facebook (ever) Facebook’s new Open Graph is probably the vaguest of the new additions talked about at f8, and the part of Facebook’s platform that does the most. The Open Graph allows for a "frictionless experience," real-time serendipity, and finding patterns in what you and your friends do, according to Zuckerberg’s description. Basically, what that means is that you can now more easily view what’s popular among the people you’re friends with on Facebook. Once you do discover something worth examining, you don’t even have to leave Facebook to experience it. So, if someone is watching and episode of AMC TV show Breaking Bad on Netflix, you’ll now be able to pull that video up without leaving the social network. While many people reading this post may not understand why you’d never want to leave Facebook to experience anything else, the majority of Facebook users exclusively interact on the internet through Facebook or not at all. As VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi reported earlier today, Facebook is making a move to capture your whole life, which means keeping you content to never leave the site. How Facebook does music, movies and TV shows Prior to f8, there was plenty of speculation that Facebook would be creating its own music service — a sort of streaming music dashboard — that would aggregate the activity from all the popular services like Spotify, MOG, Rdio and others. What Facebook actually debuted wasn’t far from that concept, but it also wasn’t limited to just music. Facebook’s Open Graph lets outside services to create apps that integrate into Facebook’s news feed. Services like Netflix can be used within Facebook and allow users to watch shows at the same time. The same is true for music services, however, its worth noting that this functionality won’t be available in all regions due to copyright licensing laws. News Media brings its content to Facebook If the majority of Facebook users aren’t going to seek news and information outside of the social network, the news media will bring that news content to them. Zuckerberg announced partnerships with a dozen news organizations who would be creating Facebook apps that feature their content. The apps operate on Facebook’s Open Graph (see description above). When users want to read an article they find within their news feed, they are sent to a Canvas Page. The Wall Street Journal, one of Facebook’s news media partners, launched its Facebook publication app earlier this week. Originally, I saw the move as interesting but ultimately something that wouldn’t be successful in the long-run. However, the app has far more potential for success within Facebook’s new Open Graph platform. Lifestyle Apps: Facebook’s next evolution of apps Previously, most of the applications I came across on Facebook’s platform were mostly useless and not at all useful in terms of an integrated experience. With Lifestyle apps, that might change. Lifestyle apps allow users to share information about their various activities, such as exercising, cooking, watching TV shows, picking out clothes and more. Facebook has partnered with several companies, like Nike, Airbnb, StubHub and Foodspotting. The best way I can describe this new evolution of Facebook apps is… applications that grew up, graduated from college and are now just as useful as they’d be on other platforms (iOS, desktop, Android, etc.). And just like with the other apps, Lifestyle Apps will allow you to interact with outside services without having to leave Facebook. Social Games will turn Facebook into an arcade from the `80s. Facebook Social Games will bring back the experience of hanging out at an old school arcade (the place with the video games that are housed in huge heavy boxes that only work when you pump quarters into them as shown in the original TRON movie). Facebook’s Open Graph platform will enable new kinds of social game interaction. As VentureBeat reported earlier, if two of your friends are playing the Zynga game Words With Friends on Facebook, you can see that happening in the activity ticker (see description above). If you click on the ticker notification, you’ll see a window pop-up showing the exact word someone is playing. Clicking within the pop-up window will allow you to see the entire game board being played in real-time. Filed under: media, social, VentureBeat This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

The Unnamed Writer’s Room Video: f8 or h8? (video) Posted: 22 Sep 2011 06:37 PM PDT Facebook was the talk of the day with chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s f8 conference keynote speech and the announcement of many new features being added to the Facebook platform. Those features included the new Timeline, a history of your activity on Facebook, which for most is a record of high school and college years all the way to marriage and work. New ways to find content through friends was also in the mix. You can now click songs friends are listening to, watch television shows and read articles as your social graph develops. The news feed now plays a big role in content discovery, and uses Facebook’s Open Graph platform to show trending topics, popular news articles as well as a real-time scrolling bar for non trending information called the Ticker. We chatted about the new features and whether they harm or improve the Facebook experience. Check it out: Side note: Ginkgo Biloba, noun, an extract of the leaves of the ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) that is used as a dietary supplement and is held to enhance mental functioning by increasing blood circulation to the brain. [F8 Key image via JohnKwan/Shutterstock] Filed under: social, video This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Facebook wants you to influence the news your friends read Posted: 22 Sep 2011 04:46 PM PDT Facebook is focusing on integrating news discovery based on your friends’ activity in the news feed, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced today at f8, the company’s annual developers conference. Zuckerberg’s keynote presentation focused on the influence you have over your friends, and your ability to find various types of content through them, including news. “We think that Open Graph creates a great opportunity to rethink the way we discover and read news,” said Zuckerberg in his speech. With the Open Graph you are able to see trends in your news feed. Zuckerberg showed how his own news feed aggregated content and showed him what was most popular among his friends. It will also show you all of the articles under a specific topic, should there be one trending. News that is not trending doesn’t fall by the wayside. Instead, it will appear in the ticker section, or the scrolling bar on the left hand side of the news feed. When an article of interest shows up, you can hover over the ticker, see the full activity and click on the article. Many publications are developing apps for Facebook as well, allowing readers to view an article from within Facebook. Zuckerberg showcased a few of these apps at f8. Many are canvas apps, or apps that appear within Facebook on a blank page like a fan page, though Facebook is excited about any app focusing on the serendipitous discovery of news through preexisting social relationships. Washington Post: Social Reader The Washington Post released its Social Reader, an app that allows users to read any content published by the Washington Post, as well as content from its properties. In keeping with finding content through friends, the app will publish stories that you are reading directly to your news feed. It does this with permission, which you grant upon installing the app. Your reading behavior also dictates a specially aggregated section of content for you to discover. In order to create this list, Social Reader will look at posts both you and your friends have read, interests and preferences showcased on your Facebook profile and news trending that day. Yahoo: Into Now Yahoo’s Into Now is a mobile app that focuses on sharing TV preferences. But now, Into Now will show you not only what your friends are reading, but sync your Yahoo news activity with your own Facebook updates. Into Now does this through an opt-in process, giving it access to your profile. You can delete updates made your behalf and see a full stream of your activity in the “You on Yahoo! News” section. There is also a tab dedicated only to what your friends are reading on Yahoo news. The purpose is, again, to give you opportunity of discovery through friend’s preferences. NewsCorp: The Daily The Daily originally existed as a news subscription for the iPad, released in February of this year. NewsCorp has now turned this into a separate canvas app for Facebook users. “Newscorp is publishing the web version of this app only inside Facebook because they believe that eventually everyone is going to discover news that they’re going to read through their friends,” said Zuckerberg. The app’s editors post news about news, sports, gossip, opinion, arts and life, and apps and games. More apps to come This is just the beginning for Facebook news. Zuckerberg thanked more than a dozen different news publications for building social news apps on Facebook. NewsMix, a Flipboard-like magazine for Facebook, launched this week using data from fan pages liked by both you and your friends. Zuckerberg was candid, “Knowing that you helped a friend discover something new…is awesome.” Filed under: media, social This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Color piggybacks on Facebook announcements to lure much-needed users Posted: 22 Sep 2011 03:12 PM PDT Color was once an iPhone app for sharing photos with people near you. Now, founder Bill Nguyen says it’s a Facebook app for sharing photos and video. Nguyen told the New York Times that in spite of a buzz-laden launch, the service has fewer than 100,000 active users. So the company is taking a slingshot approach to public relations and rebranding itself as a Facebook app on the day of Facebook’s biggest announcements of the year. Clever, no? Color’s original point was to organize images around places and events. With the relaunch (note: Color hasn’t actually, publicly launched its application yet; you’ll still need to sign up for a preview), Color now acts as an uploader for Facebook photos. If a Facebook friend clicks on the photo and wants to know or see more, he or she can request a “visit.” If you approve your friend’s “visit” request, he or she has the ability to see a live broadcast stream from your phone. To us, the new Color sounds like a convoluted, Facebook-linked version of Justin.tv or Ustream, but with super granular privacy controls. Some users might like it; others still might not get the point. For a young app, Color has already traveled a rocky road. The app launched shortly after SXSW. The timing was puzzling for launching to the app-weary post-SXSW tech crowd, but with $41 million in funding out of the gate, Color got a ton of initial press and around 1 million downloads. About a week after the launch, the app got a significant facelift, perhaps to answer publicly posed questions about what users were actually supposed to do with the initially confusing application. As users expressed their frustration, some of the apps’ competitors were publicly sounding off on Color’s drawbacks, adding to a growing stack of negative publicity. Then in May, the company lost a co-founder. Peter Pham, the company’s president, left a scant two months after the app launched. Pham didn’t offer an explanation for his departure, but a co-founder leaving a company is never a good sign, and Pham’s leaving so early was definitely more bad PR for Color. Whether or not the feature revamp and app rebranding will help the struggling Color attract the users and traffic it needs to stay afloat remains to be seen; we’ll keep you posted. Filed under: mobile This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Dish and Blockbuster to introduce Netflix competitor Friday Posted: 22 Sep 2011 03:08 PM PDT Satellite TV operator Dish Network will announce a new Blockbuster-branded all-you-can-watch video streaming service on Friday, according to a CNNMoney report. The move for Dish to create a Netflix rival is hardly surprising. Dish acquired Blockbuster in a bankruptcy auction for $320 million back in April and a month later Dish CEO Joe Clayton said he wanted to “take a small piece of the pie from Netflix” when it came to streaming video. This seems an opportune time to announce a rival, as Netflix — the leader in streaming movies — is hurting when it comes to consumer sentiment. First, the company instituted a 60 percent price hike on combined streaming and physical DVD rental plans at the beginning of September. Second, the company just announced that it will spin off its physical DVD rental service into a new company called Qwikster. Netflix customers were angry with the changes, so Dish already has a group of potential users it can easily court if it offers a cheaper price for comparable content. Dish is also one of the companies said to be bidding for streaming service Hulu, alongside the likes of Amazon, Yahoo and Google. If the company were to control Hulu on top of its Blockbuster DVD-and-streaming plans and Dish at-home service, it would easily become an entertainment powerhouse in its own right. Dish Network did not immediately respond to questions we had about the new service. Filed under: media This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Zillow, Pandora only fresh IPOs to outlast market slip Posted: 22 Sep 2011 02:26 PM PDT Continued uncertainty about financial stability in Europe and a government deadlock in the United States struck publicly-traded equities on Thursday, sending the tech-heavy NASDAQ index down 3.3 percent and below a technical level of support that might indicate future weakness. The S&P 500 crashed through a level of support — a numerical value that sends a signal to automatic trading algorithms to stop selling stocks — the index held at around 1,150 during a massive market sell-off in early August, but it quickly re-established that level of support throughout the rest of the month. The index closed Thursday under that same level of support at 1,130 at the bell. Falling through a level of support is usually a bad sign for the major indices and indicates that further losses might be en route. The NASDAQ composite index (pictured above), which includes a number of the largest tech companies in the world, fell 3.3 percent while the Standard & Poor’s 500 index fell 3.2 percent. The NASDAQ composite index established a level of support at around 2,475 after a brief crash through that support level during August’s massive sell-off. The tech-heavy NASDAQ closed at 2,455 today — below its previous level of support. Other technical values suggest continued weakness for the tech-heavy NASDAQ. The index’s 20-day moving average (beige line), a widely-followed technical by investors, remains well below its 50-day moving average (red line). Both moving averages dipped below the 200-day moving average (green line) during August’s broad market crash in what’s typically called a “death cross.” That doesn’t bode well for fresh initial public offerings (IPO), which fell broadly during regular trading on Thursday. Only Zillow and Pandora, two web services that tackle real estate and music streaming respectively, notched gains amid the market’s sell-off. Spotify, a competing music streaming service to Pandora, announced today it would work with Facebook to simplify streaming music on the website. Here are some of the market’s most recent initial public offerings, and how they performed as of the end of trading on Thursday: LinkedIn (Debut: May 19) — $76.07, down 3 percent Zipcar (Debut: April 14) — $16.84, down 1 percent Renren (Debut: May 4) — $5.02, down 9 percent Pandora (Debut: June 15) — $10.05, up 1 percent Zillow (Debut: July 20) — $28.00, up 1 percent Fusion-io (Debut: June 9) — $15.11, down 10 percent Tudou (Debut: August 17) — $16.92, down 15 percent Upcoming IPOs may encounter stronger headwinds given the market conditions. For example, in July Zynga filed to go public, hoping to raise up to $1 billion at an expected valuation between $10 billion and $20 billion. It made around $90 million in 2010 and $11.8 million in the first quarter this year. Despite that strong performance, investors may still prove skittish. Groupon isn't looking quite as rosy, with significant losses in its first operating year. A pair of $100 million IPSs in insurance software provider Guidewire and revenue performance management software provider Eloqua are in the pipeline. And Yelp chief executive Jeremy Stoppelman said his company is on track to file for an initial public offering later this year. "My sense is that if you have a very compelling story, a robust business and there's moats around it and it isn't going away over night, the IPO window is still very much open," Stoppelman told VentureBeat in an interview. Consumer electronics super-giant Apple fell 2.5 percent while enterprise tech provider and computer manufacturer Dell was down 4.7 percent. Online retailer Amazon was down 3.7 percent while search giant Google was down more than 3.4 percent. Filed under: media This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

HP’s CEO revolving door will hurt it in the long run Posted: 22 Sep 2011 02:26 PM PDT Hewlett-Packard has many advantages as the world’s biggest technology company. But having a consistent CEO is not one of them. Today, the company announced that Meg Whitman will replace Léo Apotheker as CEO, giving the company its fourth CEO in a decade and its third in a year. That says a lot about a failure at the company’s board of directors, which has seen a considerable amount of turnover itself. Now the task at hand is not just about making sure that HP can stay on top as a tech giant. It’s about whether HP survives in the long term. For the life of me, I don’t know why the HP board doesn’t choose an insider, like one of its major division chiefs, to run the company. With decades of inside knowledge, these executives are the ones who really make the company as profitable as it is. Sure, they haven’t been doing a great job lately, but they have institutional knowledge that outsiders such as Apotheker and Whitman just don’t have. Getting rid of Apotheker was a no-brainer. In the past month, his approval rating among employees dropped dramatically to just 25 percent, according to jobs site Glassdoor. He spent more than 25 percent of HP’s market value on acquiring Autonomy, a software-as-a-service company that might get the company a billion dollars a year in revenue, or less than 1 percent of its revenue. Apotheker gave up on HP’s WebOS devices (acquired less than two years ago at an expense of $1.2 billion) after just six weeks doing battle with Apple and other tablet makers. And he said HP would spin off its PC business or sell it — in maybe 18 months time. That decision will likely cost HP a lot of PC business, as customers aren’t likely to buy from a company whose fate is uncertain. As the CEO of HP, Whitman now has to decide what to do with this mess. The board wholeheartedly approved HP’s move into software and its decision to get out of businesses where it wasn’t making enough money. HP’s resources aren’t unlimited, and it can’t fight everybody — Apple, IBM, Dell, Microsoft, Cisco and others — all at once. But Whitman is being tapped to lead because she is a good communicator and a strong customer advocate. But Whitman has never run a company as big as HP. HP has seen more than $126 billion in revenue in the past year, which Bloomberg points out is 14 times the size of eBay’s revenues. She hasn’t run a hardware business, but now she is going to oversee one — and she is going to be the person who makes the call about whether HP should continue its long-term business relationship with Intel, particularly its alliance with Intel on the Itanium, a 64-bit chip that has been a joint project between HP and Intel since 1994. Like previous CEOs, Whitman’s temptation will be to do whatever it takes to get short-term profits. For Apotheker, that meant terminating the WebOS device business, even though that product was strategic to HP as users make their transition from a PC-centric world to a mobile-centric world. HP really needed the WebOS technology to ensure it had a future in a post-PC world. Now what is Whitman going to do? Hire all the fired WebOS people back? The problem is that Apotheker has just made some very big decisions and he has taken HP down a certain path. Investors hated these decisions, but the board was fully behind them. Whitman has said she will stay the course on these decisions, at least for now. On the other hand, if Whitman makes investors happy, she could wind up displeasing the board that employs her. It isn’t clear what Whitman can do going forward. The sad thing is that the recent CEOs of HP seem to be obsessed with reorganizing the same set of assets. Carly Fiorina built up the PC and enterprise business by acquiring Compaq. Now Apotheker was planning to spin off the PC business, effectively undoing the Compaq deal. Mark Hurd bought Palm, and Apotheker dismantled it. That will be tremendously disruptive to HP’s work force, which has always been one of its strongest assets. With every change in CEO, commentators like me bemoan the loss of the HP Way, the vision of the founders David Packard and William Hewlett, who believed in putting their people first. Every time, we suggest that HP hire an insider as CEO to keep the company on the straight and narrow path of the HP Way. But every time, the board goes with an outsider. Each time, the outsider decides to spin something off. At some point, there won’t be anything to spin off. And that will probably be the end of HP. Filed under: VentureBeat This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

New HP chief Meg Whitman pledges to stay the course Posted: 22 Sep 2011 02:23 PM PDT As expected, Hewlett Packard ousted chief executive Léo Apotheker today, replacing him with former eBay chief Meg Whitman. HP board chairman Ray Lane will take a more active role in managing the company alongside Whitman, becoming executive chairman (he was previously non-executive). As co-leaders of the company, Lane and Whitman both pledged to stay the course set by Apotheker, but with a renewed focus on operational execution and maintaining shareholder value. “HP really matters. It matters to Silicon Valley, to California, to the United states and frankly to the entire world,” Whitman said on the call today announcing her new role. “Going forward, HP will have no higher priority than to meet the challenges of today’s macroeconomic environment and also to improve our operational performance.” Whitman and Lane made no immediate changes to the plans announced by Apotheker in August. The company is still investigating the possibility of spinning off its personal systems group (PSG, the home of its industry-leading PC business), and Whitman said that she and the board will make a decision on that by the end of this calendar year. Whitman also said that the $10.3 billion acquisition of Autonomy is moving forward as planned, and the company is still investigating the possibilities of using webOS somehow, while still discontinuing its webOS-based devices, the Touchpad, Pre and Veer. “We will take the necessary actions to get HP back on track,” Whitman said. However, she warned shareholders and employees that results might not be visible immediately. “That’s not something that’s going to happen overnight. It’s going to take time,” she said. “This board of directors cares deeply about Hewlett Packard. The decision to change the leadership of HP was one the board took very, very carefully,” said Lane. “It became increasingly clear that we needed new leadership to focus on operating our businesses.” Questions have been raised about the competence and cohesiveness of HP’s board, which has fired two CEOs in the past year. Lane defended the current board, pointing out that many of the board’s members are new, and that this is not the same board that was involved in the pretexting scandal that cost former CEO Carly Fiorina her job, or Mark Hurd’s ouster less than a year ago. “This board is not the same board,” Lane said. “More than half of this board is new after Léo.” “We’re embarrassed about the communications of these decisions. It could have been done better,” Lane acknowledged. But, he said, the board carefully considered its decisions announced on August 18, and stands by those decisions. HP also revised its earnings guidance slightly, suggesting that fourth-quarter revenues would be somewhat lower than predicted in August. See also: HP's CEO revolving door will hurt it in the long run Here’s the text of HP’s press release. HP Names Meg Whitman President and Chief Executive Officer Ray Lane appointed executive chairman; Léo Apotheker steps down as president, chief executive officer and director PALO ALTO, Calif., Sept. 22, 2011 – HP today announced that its board of directors has appointed Meg Whitman as president and chief executive officer. In addition, Ray Lane has moved from non-executive chairman to executive chairman of the board of directors, and the board intends to appoint a lead independent director promptly. These leadership appointments are effective immediately and follow the decision that Léo Apotheker step down as president and chief executive officer and resign as a director of the company. "We are fortunate to have someone of Meg Whitman's caliber and experience step up to lead HP," said Lane. "We are at a critical moment and we need renewed leadership to successfully implement our strategy and take advantage of the market opportunities ahead. Meg is a technology visionary with a proven track record of execution. She is a strong communicator who is customer focused with deep leadership capabilities. Furthermore, as a member of HP's board of directors for the past eight months, Meg has a solid understanding of our products and markets." Whitman said, "I am honored and excited to lead HP. I believe HP matters – it matters to Silicon Valley, California, the country and the world." Speaking on behalf of the board, Lane said, "We very much appreciate Léo's efforts and his service to HP since his appointment last year. The board believes that the job of the HP CEO now requires additional attributes to successfully execute on the company's strategy. Meg Whitman has the right operational and communication skills and leadership abilities to deliver improved execution and financial performance." Photo: Meg Whitman for Governor/Flickr Filed under: VentureBeat This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

VentureBeat readers save 15% on Socialize: Monetizing Social Media — West Posted: 22 Sep 2011 02:06 PM PDT This post is sponsored by mediabistro. Don't miss your chance to connect with today's most influential social media leaders at Socialize: Monetizing Social Media – West, October 20-21 in San Francisco. This two-day, four-track event gathers social media enthusiasts for comprehensive sessions, focused discussions, and diverse perspectives on gaming, mobile, marketing, media, and all things social! The Socialize: Monetizing Social Media program features over 80 speakers including Geno Church (Brains on Fire), Vivian Rosenthal (Goldrun), Chris Cunningham (appssavvy), and Megan Berry (Klout). They’ll be covering a wide range of social media topics and will be there to answer all of your questions. Sessions include: Social Media Intelligence and Crisis Survival Lessons for the Digital Age Building a Successful Social Games Distribution Strategy: Facebook and Beyond Mobile Gaming: The Next Stage of App Monetization Word of Mouth Movements: Integrating Social Media with Offline Engagement Social Media: Harvesting Intent for Better ROI Targeting Facebook ROI View the full program here. VentureBeat readers save 15% off of Gold Passports with code SZVB. Register now for best rates. Filed under: social, VentureBeat This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Medical appointment startup ZocDoc grabs another $25M from Goldman Sachs Posted: 22 Sep 2011 01:25 PM PDT Online doctor appointment startup ZocDoc on Thursday announced that is has raised an additional $25 million in third-round funding from Wall Street titan Goldman Sachs. ZocDoc is shaking up the businesses of scheduling doctor appointments, as well as making doctors more accountable by having patients publicly rate them. The company makes its money by charging doctors $250 a month to list their practice. It lets patients find a doctor easily, set up appointments and rate their experience. Well-rated doctors then attract more patients and attention from ZocDoc's more than 700,000 monthly users. The $25 million from Goldman adds to DST Global’s $50 million investment from early August to create a monster $75 million third round. The company said the most recent funding will help “speed its expansion into additional regions.” ZocDoc’s service is now available in 11 metropolitan areas in the U.S., with six of those areas launched in 2011. The service is live in Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Francisco and Washington D.C. Before the third round of funding, ZocDoc had raised around $19 million, with investments coming from the likes of Khosla Ventures and Founders Fund. All together, the hot startup has attracted about $95 million in funding. Have you used ZocDoc to book an appointment or rate your doctor? Filed under: deals, VentureBeat This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Analysis: Facebook makes a move to capture your whole life Posted: 22 Sep 2011 12:55 PM PDT Facebook made its power move to capture everything about your life today. In a keynote speech at Facebook’s f8 developer conference today, Facebook CEO executive Mark Zuckerberg talked about how to make the social network indispensable to the recording of our memories, the big moments in our lives, and our interactions with friends. What Zuckerberg didn’t say about this move is that it is also a huge power grab. If Facebook successfully captures all of this data, it can make itself a far more integrated part of your life than other companies such as Google, Microsoft or Apple. If you ever decided to switch from Facebook to another social network, it would be incredibly hard to start from scratch. Facebook already has an advantage in terms of indexing the moments and connections in your life, which is why it has more than 800 million users. But now it will get its hooks in even deeper by capturing your past and your tastes. The company will collect more data than ever, if you allow it, and it will offer you enticements to share that data. It can, for instance, take your information and mine it for useful nuggets. It can give you back statistical information about your behavior that you didn’t know about. Zuckerberg announced a new feature called Timeline, which takes your news feed and other interactions, and presents them in a single stream that extends back as long as you’ve been on Facebook. It is meant to show your friends and family what you have done in your life at-a-glance, and to be the digital equivalent of a scrapbook. “You can see everything you have ever done in any app,” said Bret Taylor, one of Facebook’s top executives. To do that, Facebook has to move from just showing what you are doing now, to turning that information into a whole, browsable history. That means it has to change how it stores your data, which could raise privacy concerns. But if Facebook manages it properly, it could work its way into your life in a way where you won’t want to get rid of it. Facebook had to re-engineer its archive system and back-end infrastructure because of Timeline’s need to access a lot of data from the past, said Mike Schroepfer, vice president of engineering at Facebook. Facebook has the relevant data in archives that are almost never accessed by users now, so it has minimized the amount of computing power dedicated to make retrieval fast. But now, users are expected to dip into the data of their past all of the time. Facebook is also working its way into collecting more and more data that you wouldn’t otherwise keep, like interactions with friends, the games you play, the movies you see, the music you listen to and other minor things you wouldn’t normally think to track. Now Facebook will be able to track so much that you’ll be one of the people who can have a “quantified self.” The quantified self is the practice of tracking, indexing and analyzing as much data about your daily activities as possible. You’ll know, for instance, how often you have read your favorite book. “We exist at the intersection of technology and social issues, and we spend a lot of time thinking about both,” Zuckerberg said, taking a quote from Apple’s Steve Jobs, who says Apple exists at the intersection of “technology and the liberal arts.” If there was any doubt that Facebook is a data mining company with a lot of “big data,” that ended today. Sam Lessig, the Facebook leader in charge of Timeline, said that you can hide things or highlight things in your Timeline, so there are some things about your life you don’t have to record. He said that a Timeline can include highlights of your life, where you can put a “star” to indicate one of your favorite moments, and then that will blow up into a big section on your Timeline. Lessig said it would be really boring to see that “Sam listened to Rihanna” over and over again on your Timeline. But it would be a “great story if it said you listened to Rihanna 580 times last month,” Lessig said in an interview. “When you think about all of the stuff that is on Facebook, about 99 percent of it isn’t on your profile page,” said Chris Cox, a Facebook executive, who said the company worked on the Timeline project for about a year. Topics like the quantified self have been under research by people such as Microsoft’s Gordon Bell for years. Cox said that the company knew as far back as 2005 that a “social timeline” would be cool, and it had a feature like that. But Cox said it was inspiring to hire Nicholas Felton, an artist who quantified all of the play and work time in his life and recorded it in a very artistic way. Filed under: social, VentureBeat This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Twilio announces its 7 hackathon finalists (exclusive) Posted: 22 Sep 2011 12:46 PM PDT Seven developers have emerged from last night’s Twilio’s hackathon to pitch their Twilio-based products in the hopes of winning up to $10,000 in prizes. It seems every conference has a hackathon these days, an event in which developers band together at night and to create a new and hopefully useful product by the next day. Twilio’s hackathon requires developers to use Twilio’s application programming interfaces (APIs) and hack together a product for the next generation of Twilio-based companies. The hackathon lasted from 8pm to 1am — five hours of a lot of beer, pizza and telephony talk. Seven hopefuls will show their products to a panel of judges today including sponsors Salesforce, Dropbox and Appcelerator, as well as three secret Twilio employees. The winners will receive up to $10,000 in prizes such as 11 inch MacBook Air computers and an AR Droid. The finalists are: PresenTweet: A product that gives you the power to send tweets during a presentation by attaching tweet commands as you move through slides. Yap.io: A conference-focused iPhone app that allows you to submit voice recorded questions to a presenter, who can then play the recording on stage and respond during the event. Sidebox: This app allows service industry employees such as plumbers, to text in a query about a job and receive customer information and outstanding balances. Qwestioned: Adds a voice option to question and answer focused websites. Betwext Talk: An app that allows you to send SMS messages between your browser and a phone. Custard: A platform that allows you to add a customer support call center to any website. SportsSignup.com Roll Call: A coach’s best friend, this app sends notifications to teammates to see who will make it to the game. The developers will go on stage and pitch their creations at 3pm today. Successful Twilio-based companies will also have an opportunity to be funded by the recently announced Twilio Fund. Dave McClure of 500 Startups and Ron Conway of SV Angel are footing the $250,000 bill to fund a number of these companies over the next year. [Photo courtesy of Twilio/Flickr] Filed under: dev This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Netflix announces Facebook integration for Canada, Latin America — U.S. will have to wait Posted: 22 Sep 2011 12:14 PM PDT Netflix users in Canada and Latin America will soon be able to see what streaming videos their Facebook friends have been watching, but those of us in the U.S. will have to wait a bit longer due to a 1980s law regulating wrongful disclosure of video tape rental or sale records. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings hit the stage at Facebook’s f8 developer conference today to announce the news, which could fundamentally change the way Netflix users get recommendations. But while it’s a big shift for the company, enthusiasm about the social integration was dampened by its unavailability in the U.S. “We won't yet enable it for U.S. members due to a 1980s law that creates some confusion over our ability to allow U.S. members to share what they watch,” Netflix’s Tom Willerer wrote today on the company’s blog. The company points out that new legislation (H.R. 2471) has been introduced that will allow consumers to share their viewing data. To help the legislation along, Netflix has launched a campaign asking its subscribers to email Congress in support. Netflix killed off its homegrown social features some time ago, and since then it has relied entirely on its algorithm to recommend content to viewers. In 2009, the company awarded a $1 million prize to a team of statisticians who created an algorithm that best its own. But now, Hastings seems to realize there’s some value in listening to your friends. At F8, he talked about how Netflix would constantly recommend the TV series “Breaking Bad” to him, but it wasn’t until he saw a friend watching it that he felt the urge to start. “Watching content ‘because my friend did it’ really trumped [sic] ‘because the algorithm,” Hastings said. The Facebook integration will start rolling out in Canada and Latin America before the end of September. Once available, subscribers only need to connect to their Facebook accounts from Netflix’s webpage. The company stresses that your viewing habits will only be shared if you connect to your Facebook account, and the feature can be turned off at any point. Filed under: media, VentureBeat This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Facebook debuts ‘Lifestyle Apps’ for cooking, exercising and way more Posted: 22 Sep 2011 12:14 PM PDT Facebook today showed off its new Lifestyle Apps, a set of applications for the social network that allow users to share information about their lifestyle activities, such as exercising, cooking, watching TV shows, picking out clothes and more. The apps mark a huge shift in the way Facebook interacts with its users’ lives. "This is going to make it possible to build a completely new class of apps that wasn't possible before," said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the f8 developer conference in San Francisco. The Lifestyle apps will work in conjunction Facebook’s new Timeline design, which catalogs a user’s activity into one stream of events. The Lifestyle apps are focused on tracking what a person is doing — making decisions, jogging, watching a favorite movie. That activity is shared in real-time on the new news ticker stream. For instance, “Tom is watching Doctor Who on Netflix” would pop up in the ticker. Although I haven’t had a chance to play with Lifestyle Apps, from what I’ve seen they look like a giant step up from the types of Facebook apps we’ve seen in the past. At the conference, Zuckerberg explained that Lifestyle apps have the power to tie together dozens of industries. The goal of Lifestyle Apps, he said, is to help users express who they are while discovering new things and sharing them with friends. Some of Facebook’s Lifestyle Apps partners include Nike, Foodspotting, Netflix, Rdio, Foodily, Spotify, Metacafe, FundRazr, Eventbrite, Ticketmaster and Airbnb. Early partner Foodspotting gives a good explanation on its official blog of how much better the Facebook app experience can be with the new Lifestyle Apps: “Instead of just liking things on Facebook, you'll soon be able to Want, Try, and Love dishes on Foodspotting — and you'll be able to add these activities directly to your Facebook Timeline. By exploring your Facebook Timeline, your friends can now discover great dishes through you, and vice versa.” Watch the demo video of Facebook Lifestyle Apps below: Filed under: mobile, social, VentureBeat This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Building energy efficiency analytics provider FirstFuel Software raises $2.4M Posted: 22 Sep 2011 11:44 AM PDT FirstFuel Software, a provider of analytics software that tracks energy usage in commercial buildings, announced today it has raised $2.4 million from Battery Ventures in its first round of funding. The company tracks energy usage in a building without installing energy-tracking devices like smart thermostats and plugs. Instead, the company tracks energy usage data from utilities and then combines it with weather data — such as how hot or cold it is near the building — to create an energy use profile for each building. “The software analyzes available utility and weather data to create profiles of how the building uses energy, and makes the efficiency recommendations off of that,” a FirstFuel Software spokesperson told VentureBeat. “Plus, they do deep analytics on the whole building’s energy consumption, which provides them a view of end-uses, such as:  lights, heating, cooling, plug loads and data centers.” Those recommendations can include retrofitting the building with more insulation or more efficient lighting systems. FirstFuel Software makes all those recommendations without sending a professional out to the building to make an in-person assessment. The company carries out the entire process remotely through the Internet. Rather than act as a consultant, the company licenses its software out to utility companies that are looking to remove some strain on the power grid. For example, retrofitting commercial buildings with better windows or insulation can reduce energy consumption from air conditioning units at peak load times — the hottest parts of the day, when everyone else is running an air conditioning unit. FirstFuel Software was founded last year and is based in Waltham, Mass. Filed under: deals, green This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Facebook’s big plans for music and media: You can now watch & listen on Facebook.com Posted: 22 Sep 2011 11:39 AM PDT Facebook isn’t just for sharing what you like anymore. As of today, it’s also where you can watch and listen to what you like. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced today that users can listen to music, watch TV and films and more without ever leaving Facebook.com. For some types of content, absorbing new information and media will be as simple as hovering your mouse over a friend’s post. These new features will be in beta starting today. “Being able to click on someone’s music and play it is a great experience, but knowing that you helped a friend discover something new…is awesome,” said Zuckerberg. You can also do more exploration into what your friends like. For example, you can listen to their favorite songs, watch the shows they watch, and more — all directly from the Facebook web app. Each user also will have special dashboards for movies, music and TV to show off what they listen to and watch the most. Services such as Hulu, Spotify and Netflix will be passively sharing more information to Facebook if you have those services connected to your Facebook account. The media integrations announced today have everything to do with Facebook’s all-new Profiles and news feeds — the Timeline and Ticker features, which we discussed in depth in this previous post. Along with Zuckerberg, the CEOs of Netflix and Spotify both took the stage at f8, Facebook’s developer conference, to talk more about how Facebook will start integrating music, movies and other media into the site itself. Both discussed how social media is important to their companies’ growth and survival — just as important as better media integration is for Facebook itself. Scores of initial partners have worked with Facebook to integrate their music and video content on the site. Music partners for the roll-out include Spotify, MOG, Rdio, Rhapsody, Turntable, VEVO, Slacker, Songza, TuneIn, iheartradio, Deezer, Earbits, Jelli, Mixcloud and others. On the video side, Facebook is integrating with Hulu, Netflix, Blockbuster, IMDb, Dailymotion, Flixter and several others. Here’s a demo video showing how Spotify music content will appear on Facebook: Facebook is also allowing onsite consumption of news content and has established partnerships with large media partners for those features, as well. It’s important to note that because of U.S. law, partners’ coverage areas, and a mound of red tape, not all streaming media services will be available on Facebook immediately in all areas. Filed under: social, VentureBeat This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Facebook enables new real-time social interactions for games Posted: 22 Sep 2011 11:33 AM PDT Facebook’s next-generation Open Graph platform will deliver a bounty of new features for social games, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said today at the company’s f8 event. “Social games are killing it on Facebook,” Zuckerberg said, explaining that games are still the most popular apps on Facebook. The updates to the Open Graph platform will enable new kinds of social game interaction. For instance, if two of your friends are playing the Zynga game Words With Friends on Facebook, you can see that happening in an activity ticker related to games on the right side of the screen. If you click on the ticker item about your friends, you get a small pop-up (pictured above) that shows exactly what word someone is playing. If you further click on the pop-up, you can see the entire game board and watch as it’s being played in real-time. That’s the sort of thing that is possible with the update for Facebook’s Open Graph platform, Zuckerberg said during his keynote speech. Zuckerberg showed a long list of game publishers that are supporting the new Open Graph capabilities, from Zynga to Electronic Arts. The cool thing about the new feature is that it will make it much easier to discover games in real-time on Facebook. Discovery is always one of the hardest things for game developers, who have to launch their new games into a sea filled with thousands of other competitors. Filed under: games, VentureBeat This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Star Wars: The Old Republic may see 2012 release date Posted: 22 Sep 2011 11:31 AM PDT Game publisher Electronic Arts‘ massive online role-playing game, Star Wars: The Old Republic, could be delayed until 2012, the company’s chief financial officer, Eric Brown, told investors today. The Old Republic is Electronic Arts' Hail Mary pass in online games and aims to rip users away from rival online games, such as Blizzard Entertainment’s seven-year-old game colossus World of WarCraft. If Electronic Arts succeeds, it will have persistent revenues coming in from subscription fees charged to users. Electronic Arts’ game is expected to be a subscription-only premium title. “In terms of timing, we haven’t given a street date yet,” Brown said. “We won’t do so for some time, possibly at our next upcoming earnings call towards the end of October.” Electronic Arts also has to be wary of timing its release too close to the release of Blizzard Entertainment’s upcoming Diablo 3 online game. Blizzard Entertainment chief executive said the company is not committing to a 2011 release date for that game, which puts both Diablo 3 and Star Wars: The Old Republic in a similar release window. Star Wars: The Old Republic might have to show down against Diablo 3, a more casual but still free-to-play online game that has an equally large fan base. World of Warcraft has more than 11 million subscribers and has dominated the subscription-based online gaming industry since it came out in 2004. The game is a massive source of revenue for Blizzard Entertainment, which charges gamers around $15 each month to access the game’s persistent world. Electronic Arts chief executive John Riccitiello said Star Wars: The Old Republic needs 500,000 paying subscribers to break even and 1 million subscribers to be profitable. If Electronic Arts gets 1.5 million to 2 million subscribers, it will be enough to "make it look like a great investment and justify the purchase of BioWare Pandemic (the developer behind The Old Republic)," Riccitiello said. Electronic Arts bought BioWare Pandemic for $800 million in 2008. The company is targeting a third fiscal quarter launch, or the last three months of the year, Riccitiello said on the company’s most recent conference call to discuss earnings. But he said the launch could move to the fourth fiscal quarter if that is what testing results mandate. via IndustryGamers Filed under: games This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Facebook’s new Open Graph enables a wave of apps including joint music listening Posted: 22 Sep 2011 11:03 AM PDT An update to the Facebook’s Open Graph platform will allow people to express themselves in new ways and will let developers create a new class of app, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg announced this morning. Friends can use these apps to do things like listen to a song at the same time and help each other discover new music. “We are making it possible to build a new class of apps and rethink a number of industries at the same time,” Zuckerberg said in a talk before thousands of developers at Facebook’s f8 developer conference today in San Francisco.. Zuckerberg said people will be able to share all sorts of things that they couldn’t before, but without completely annoying their friends. You can publish your activities directly to your news stream, but your friends can also watch your activity on a ticker on the side of the screen. These apps allow for a “frictionless experience,” real-time serendipity, and finding patterns in what you and your friends do. The platform changes are good for apps related to communications, games, media and lifestyle, he said. The company has redesigned its permissions process to allow users to post things related to material they have posted before, without having to grant express permission every time. “Developers are using open graph not only to rethink music, but to rethink the music industry,” Zuckerberg said. “Being able to click on someone’s music and play it is a great experience, but knowing that you helped a friend discover something new…is awesome.” Filed under: social This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

LivingSocial may take $200M round instead of filing an IPO Posted: 22 Sep 2011 10:56 AM PDT Daily online deals startup LivingSocial might delay filing its initial public offering in favor of a new $200 million funding round, according to a Bloomberg report citing anonymous sources familiar with the matter. The fact that both LivingSocial and rival Groupon are rethinking their IPO strategies could signal a slow down in the market demand for daily deals across the board. The potential round, which would value LivingSocial at $6 billion, could include both equity and debt, according to the report. Investment for the new round would come from existing and new investors. Previously, LivingSocial was discussing an IPO valued at more than $10 billion. However, the stock market slump that began in July is causing the company to rethink its strategy. Daily deals company Groupon has also been rethinking its strategy toward going public because of market conditions and questions of whether the company will successfully sustain a profit in the future (Groupon has yet to turn a profit since launching in 2008). Also, both Facebook and Yelp have scaled by their own daily deals efforts, reinforcing the notion that daily deals demand is declining. Washington D.C.-based LivingSocial has pulled in $632 million in funding to date. The company was not available for immediate comment about the potential funding round. Filed under: deals, social, VentureBeat This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Mark Zuckerberg announces Facebook’s big changes, including all new Profiles Posted: 22 Sep 2011 10:30 AM PDT Today, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled some huge changes to the social network and its platform at f8, Facebook’s developer conference. The tagline for today’s event is “Read. Watch. Listen,” which foreshadows the media features and content consumption and sharing functionality Zuckerberg announced from the stage. But before Zuckerberg stepped onto the stage, Andy Samberg appeared to give his signature send-up of the young CEO, which both the crowd and “Zuck” himself clearly got a kick out of. Timeline: The new Facebook Profile Pointing out that the past five years have been about connecting people to one another, Zuckerberg told the crowd that half a billion people logged into Facebook in a single day just last week, a new record for the company. “The next year is going to be defined by the apps and the depth of engagement that is possible now that everyone has their networks in place and connections established,” Zuckerberg said. First, Zuckerberg unveiled Facebook’s new Profile UI, called Timeline: a curation of stories, apps and new ways to self-express in visual ways. We’ve known for some time that Facebook Profiles were getting ready for a major interface and experience overhaul. In fact, Facebook’s been acquiring and hiring non-coding designers specifically to work on how Profiles present information about the user. Over the summer, a Facebooker told us in an off-the-record interview that Facebook Profiles were soon going to become a much better way to get an at-a-glance picture of who you are, what you do, and what you like. “Millions of people have spent years curating the stories of their lives,” said the CEO, noting that Facebook Profiles are too difficult a way to really get to know someone else or share information about yourself. He called the new Timeline “the next few hours of an in-depth conversation” between two people, whereas current Profiles are the first few minutes. Timelines reflect the current state of web and app design. They’re in keeping with the multimedia-rich, touch-friendly look and feel of modern application design. In addition to design, Zuckerberg talks about how Timeline sorts content algorithmically. As the user scrolls down a Timeline, information becomes more and more summarized. In other words, you’ll see more stories from this month, fewer stories from last year, and a highly condensed version of what happened to you in 2009. On the right column of the Timeline, you can click to narrow down to a given year or month. Here’s an overview of how Timelines work: Even though users tend to instantly hate any changes to their favorite web apps’ interfaces, Zuckerberg said while reviewing some of Timeline’s features, “We think that people are really going to like these… We wanted to design a place that you’re proud to call your home. It’s a completely new aesthetic for Facebook.” Zuckerberg said the new Timeline is launching with a developer beta right now. In a later press conference, the company’s product chief, Chris Cox, noted that for most users, the rollout would be gradual and would occur over the next several weeks. Ticker: A lightweight stream of what you’re up to Next, Zuckerberg told the audience that Facebook will now allow users to express more specifically what they’re up to. “We’re helping to define a new language for how people connect. When we started, the vocabulary was limited.” In other words, you’ve had to “like” brands, books, movies, locations — every kind of page on Facebook just got a simple “like.” Now, instead of “liking” a book, you can tell friends you read it through Facebook’s new activities vocabulary. And you can do so without annoying all your friends. When you share a post, it goes into your Timeline. But when you have an activity from the Open Graph, it goes into Ticker. Ticker activity appears in real time; you can see the Ticker on the right side of the Facebook homepage. Ticker posts have some cool real-time interactions, too. From the stage, Zuckerberg demonstrated a Spotify integration that allows you to listen to a song in a Spotify note in Ticker just by hovering over the post. For Ticker-type activity coming into Facebook from outside apps, users won’t get prompts for each lightweight action. Accordingly, the Permissions dialog has been redesigned. It’s simpler, and it gives automatic sharing functions to the app. Settings can be modified later from Facebook’s app and security pages. Of course, a constant stream of real-time, lightweight activity from all your Facebook friends is a lot of noise and very little signal. Facebook is also allowing users to find patterns in this activity by digging a bit deeper on friends’ profiles. For example, you can see a friend’s favorite bands or albums based on Ticker activity from Spotify. And speaking of Spotify, Facebook is getting ready to make some big music, movies and media announcements. Check out that news in a separate post. Filed under: dev, social This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

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