Archive for the 'Social Media' Category

A New Net

Published on February 6, 2012 in High Tech & Media and Real-Time Web. 0 Comments Tags: .

A startup called Nicira is launching a product today with the audacious goal of making all Internet services smarter, faster, and cheaper. With his startup, Nicira, Martìn Casado intends to make Internet services slicker by rewriting some of the rules of computer networking.

The crux of that supposedly unworkable idea was to take away the stubborn independence of the network hardware. All those routers and switches would take orders from one central piece of software; a single command could then reconfigure every piece of a network.

Casado’s PhD thesis showed that it was possible. By writing software that could reprogram routers and switches, he was able to turn computer networks into the secure channels that he had been asked for back in 2003. A different intelligence agency put up the money for further trials of the technology, and in 2007 Casado, McKeown, and Berkeley professor Scott Shenker founded Nicira. Rich entrepreneurs and two of Silicon Valley’s most prestigious venture capital funds soon put in money of their own [Source].

The Year on the Web

Published on December 28, 2011 in Real-Time Web and Social Media. 0 Comments

Social networking grew up in 2011, becoming more of a fundamental underpinning of the Web.

We’ve been living in the age of social media for a long time, but 2011 was the year that all the information we share online began to accrete into something greater than the sum of its parts. It is creating a layer of intelligence that anyone can mine in Web searches and that content creators can use to hone their services.

But all the while, our growing reliance on the Web is animating a debate about the potentially catastrophic effects of a cyberwar—an attack, or series of attacks, meant to disable consumer or military resources online. A top computer scientist recently suggested that the U.S. consider striking first against enemies who would be hard to pin down if they struck first. It’s a reminder of the limits of social networking: even as companies like Facebook map more and more of the online world, some sectors will remain in the shadows [Source].

For Google, a New High in Deal-Making

Published on October 31, 2011 in High Tech & Media and Social Media. 0 Comments Tags: , .

With 57 completed deals under its belt this year, Google has already smashed its 2010 record of 48 acquisitions — and it is only October.

According to a filing submitted on Wednesday, Google announced it had spent $1.4 billion in the first nine months of 2011 on acquisitions.

That tally includes its $151 million purchase of Zagat, the online restaurant reviews site, $114 million for Daily Deals and $676 million for ITA Software, the travel software company.

Beyond those three transactions, Google largely focused on completing smaller transactions of $10 million or less. The remainder of its deals, 54 in all, accounted for about [Source].

Related stories: Google Cranks Up M&A Machine; Inside Google’s M&A machine: 3 months, $145 million, 9 deals; Google M&A boss presides over record year.

Klout raising new $30M round at a $200M valuation

Published on October 28, 2011 in Real-Time Web and Social Media. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Klout, the startup best known for its ability to measure a person’s online influence, might be raising a new, third round of investment that would significantly add to the company’s total funding and valuation.

Klout works by measuring a person’s activity on a variety of social networks such as Twitter, Facebook LinkedIn Google+ and others. Based on that individual’s interaction within those social networks, Klout calculates the true reach of that person’s communications and issues them a 1 to 100 Klout score.

A company spokesperson told VentureBeat it doesn’t comment on rumors. However, the new round, possibly led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from IVP, might be as high as $30 million at a $200 million valuation, according to a report from Business Insider [Source].

The hottest new internet companies are growing up outside the USA

Published on October 25, 2011 in High Tech & Media and Social Media. 0 Comments Tags: .

High-value financings for venture-backed private internet and digital media companies seem to be happening at a rapid pace. Dropbox, Tumblr, AirBnB, Foursquare, and Spotify have all raked in big fundings and attained record valuations in recent months. Meanwhile, public investors are decidedly less sanguine. The Nasdaq Composite index is flat for the year – and the average internet and digital media company is down 50% from 52-week highs.

As you can see from the chart, only six of the 116 publicly-traded internet companies are projected by analysts to achieve over 30% top-line growth in 2011 and 2012 and to achieve 2012 EBITDA margins of at least 30%. That means only 5% of the current crop of public internet companies are in the top echelon in terms of profitability and growth.

Let’s take a further look at these six companies: Baidu, Tencent, Yandex, Mail.ru, Qihoo 360 Technology, and MercadoLibre. What do these companies all have in common? Most obviously, they all operate outside the U.S. Second, they are being richly rewarded by public investors – all six are presently valued at at least 10x revenue – a very meaningful premium over the group of internet and digital media companies as a whole, where median revenue multiples fall in the 1-3x range, depending on subset [Read more].

The future in 140 characters

Published on October 16, 2011 in Ranting and Raving and Social Media. 0 Comments

The World in 2012: What will next year bring?

This year The World in 2012 has also invited a number of contributors to make their predictions in the space of 140 characters.

If you are not a Twitter user you can still take part by leaving your prediction (in no more than 140 characters) in the comments below. Winners will be announced near the date of publication, in mid-November. Good luck [Read more]!

Google close to launching music service

Published on October 14, 2011 in Global Strategy and Social Media. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Google is reportedly preparing to launch its own Mp3 store, according to the New York Times. Citing unnamed “music executives,” the report said Thursday that the company will open the store in the next several weeks [Read more].

Music is becoming a key part of Google’s drive for dominance online. Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple are all locked in a race to become the one-stop shop for social, shopping, media and communication. Amazon has a cloud music player that’s hooked into its huge library of tracks. Facebook recently announced integration with Spotify, which will let users listen to music together with their friends [Read more].

Is the future of social commerce on Facebook?

Published on September 4, 2011 in Social Media. 0 Comments Tags: .

Facebook’s explosive growth has led many to question whether it will become the de facto hub of commerce for retailers. Facebook Commerce is alluring because it enables companies to harness social capital, and retailers are eager to tap into the tremendous word-of-mouth potential of fans liking products, making purchases, and sharing with friends.

Social media strategists often tell their clients to “fish where the fish are,” but while Facebook storefronts can be effective to facilitate impulse purchases, are they the right long-term strategy to grow sales through social media? Perhaps not.

Facebook Insights does provide valuable data on interactions and soft metrics such as impressions, likes and comments. While these are great for measuring engagement, retailers must ultimately make decisions based on factors that directly influence transactional metrics like conversions or acquisition costs, and Facebook’s analytics engine does not yet provide the level of relevant data required for effective merchandising [Read more].

Are Google and Facebook splintering the social web?

Published on August 24, 2011 in Social Media. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Facebook is in the process of rolling out a sweeping series of changes to the way users can control their profiles and content-sharing on the massive social network. Among other things, the changes allow users to selectively share status updates or content with certain groups of friends, just as Google+ introduced the idea of Circles, which allow users of that network to segregate the people they follow into specific groups. These kinds of features are seen by many as a positive step for privacy — but will they make people less likely to share what they are doing with the public at large? And how will that affect the social web [Source]?

New Apps Aim for Social Serendipity In Real Life

Published on May 25, 2011 in Social Media. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

People have created a web of connections online through social networks. But a new wave of apps aim to help people create spontaneous connections when they arrive at specific locations, giving rise to temporary social networks that are built around a place and a time.

LoKast, a proximity-based media sharing service, is updating its mobile app today to enable local chatting among strangers and other social tools. Two of the start-ups at TechCrunch Disrupt this week Karizma and Sonar showed off the ability for people to connect with others right around them for video chats or live interactions. A couple of months back, Color made a splash in the photo-sharing app space with the promise of letting people share pictures with the people immediately around them.

We’ve already seen some of this momentum with apps like Yobongo, a new chatting app that brings people together in one area. Local question and community-assisted recommendations sites like LocalMind and CrowdBeacon help get answers for people from the nearby community. Gay dating app Grindr also works to bring people together locally. But many of those are targeted on a larger area, not just built around one specific location [Source].