Uh oh. Less than ten days after Bang With Friends made its mobile debut on the iOS App Store, Apple has seemingly changed its mind and given it the boot. As I noted in the post at the time, I was actually a bit surprised to see Apple green light this one to begin with. The guys behind the app tried to chaste things up a bit for Apple, changing the name for the iOS version of their app to the slightly more inconspicuous “BWF” (The Android app, meanwhile, is still just “Bang With Friends”. Google don’t give no damns.) Alas, it seems that wasn’t enough for an extended stay. Apple has reportedly pulled the app without notice or explanation, with requests for the app in iTunes being met with the error below: So what happened here? Did someone higher up at Apple get word of the app and decide to drop the ban hammer? Or could it be… something else? Note, for example, that Zynga just went after dating site CupidWithFriends for using their “With Friends” trademark, requesting that the name be changed. We’re looking into what happened. So is the Bang With Friends team, it would seem; a page put up by the team says they’re “working with Apple to get BWF back in the App Store shortly”.
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This week, we hosted Accel Partners’ Rich Wong in the studio for our Ask A VC show. Wong, who has invested in Angry Birds (Rovio), Mobilespaces, Atlassian, MoPub, talked about where he sees the next wave of disruption in mobile technologies. He believes mobile security is a huge opportunity mobile, especially at the enterprise level. We also chatted about whether entrepreneurs can build a great tech company outside of Silicon Valley. Wong has some interesting perspective on this considering that Atlassian’s headquarters are in Sydney, Australia and Rovio is based in Finland. Tune in above to hear what Wong’s favorite Rovio game is and more.
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$FB is still stuck at $26.25, way down from its $38 IPO price, but it’s made important progress since going public a year ago. Daily users up 26%, mobile monthly users up 56%, and revenue up 38% are some highlights. It’s running out of people to sign up in the developed world, but with this growth and no serious competitor in sight, it’s survived its hardest year yet. Likes – 4.5 Billion – Up 67% – Average number of likes generated as of May 2013, up from 2.7 billion likes generated daily in August 2012 Content Items Shared – 4.75 Billion – Up 94% – Average number of content items shared daily as of May 2013, up from 2.45 content items shared daily in August 2012 [Stats and images provided by Facebook] Likes and sharing are growing faster than Facebook’s user count, indicating strong engagement. This contradicts rumors that people are tuning out of Facebook. Zuckerberg’s Law, the CEO’s Moore’s Law-style theory, states that people will share twice as much every year. Facebook almost made good on Mark’s claim. It’s important that Facebook keeps that number growing as it’s shared content that keeps people visiting Facebook and seeing its ads. To do that, Facebook is working on the more immersive mobile experience Home which has increased time spent on Facebook by 25% for its small number of active users. More time spent could lead to more sharing. This year it doubled the speed of its massively popular iOS and Android by switching them from HTML5 to native architecture, which lead to longer session times. It added content-specific news feed to boost browsing, and launched Graph Search to pull additional value out its data and get people to contribute more. It’s also been beefing up its mobile SDKs for iOS and Android to make it easier for apps to share content to Facebook. That’s a big reason Facebook cares about helping its developers grow — they’re scratching each other’s backs. Monthly Active Users – 1.11 Billion – up 23% – As of March 2013, up from 901 million MAUs in March 2012 Daily Active Users – 665 Million – up 26% – On average as of March 2013, up from 526 million DAUs on average in March 2012 Mobile Monthly Active Users – 751 Million – up 54% – As of March 2013, up from 488 million mobile MAUs in March 2012 Instagram – 100 Million Monthly Active Users – As of February 2013 Facebook is still signing up people pretty quickly, but all users are not created equal. While it earned $3.50 per user in the U.S. and Canada in Q1 2013, it only made $0.50 per user in much of the developing world including India and Brazil. Those emerging markets are where Facebook is getting most of its growth, meaning each subsequent 100 million users added is worth less than the last. Growth in mobile has a similar issue. Facebook can show as many as seven ads per page on desktop whereas it has to be more careful not to overwhelm the small screen on mobile. So as Facebook’s users shift their access medium to mobile, it may earn less on each of them. Facebook is hoping that getting developers to pay for mobile news feed ads to get their apps discovered could counteract this, and that market is poised to grow as more businesses launch apps and the developing world switches to smartphones. Overall, though, Facebook is still growing strong nine years after launch. The network effect of its ubiquity should not be underestimated. Dislodging Facebook as the premier general purpose social network will require something that’s not just better, but much, much better. Competitors might pick away at certain use cases, but are unlikely to replace it as the core identity provider for the web. Considering Facebook’s willingness to buy out threats like Instagram (which is still growing quickly in the first world), could stave off disruption and let it reign for years to come. Local Businesses – 16 Million – up 100% – Number of local business pages as of May 2013, up from 8 million in June 2012 Promoted Posts – 7.5 Million – Number of promoted posts made from June 2012 to May 2013 Revenue – $1.46 Billion – up 38% – In the first quarter of 2013, up from $1.06 billion in the first quarter of 2012 Ad Revenue – $1.25 Billion – up 43% – In the first quarter of 2013, up from $872 million in the first quarter of 2012 Employees – 4,900 – up 38% – As of March 2013, up from 3,539 in March 2012 Game Payers – 24% more – Increase from March 2012 to March 2013 There’s no doubt about it. Going public made Facebook focus more on making money. It went from nearly zero revenue on mobile to $375 million a quarter, or about 30% of its total ad revenue. That in large part came thanks to the mobile app install ads it launched late last year. These let developers promote their apps in the Facebook news feed with ads that link straight to download pages in the Apple App Store and Google Play. These stores are getting more and more clogged with apps, inspiring developers to pay Facebook to get found. Facebook also made big headway with Facebook Exchange, its retargeted ads that use people’s browser histories to show them highly relevant ads. FBX is absorbing advertiser budgets set aside for retargeting. Less successful has been Facebook Gifts, its entrance into direct e-commerce. Gifts has failed to produce meaningful revenue and may need to be overhauled to get more users purchasing real-life presents for their friends. Growth in payments revenue has been relatively slow too, as more game developers move from Facebook’s web canvas where it earns 30% to mobile, where Apple and Google get that cut. One opportunity that should excite investors is that Facebook started showing ads in Graph Search. While they use the standard Facebook targeting now, they’re expected to incorporate keyword targeting, which could make them a more direct competitor to Google’s wildly lucrative AdWords business. The increasing technological savvy of local businesses could be a boon to Facebook in the future. Right now few of them actively buy social ads, but expect revenue to shift towards Facebook and away from less targeted print and telephone book ads in the future. Still, Facebook isn’t trying to make as much money as it could. Another year went by without TV commercial-style auto-play video ads (though they’re rumored to be getting closer to this), and it even paused its experiment with a mobile ad network. If Facebook built out these streams it might piss some people off or make them feel like they data is being exploited, but it could definitely produce a huge boost in revenue. Off-site and off-app ad networks could let Facebook leverage its enormous wealth of personal data to power ads elsewhere so it can earn money without showing more ads on its own properties. That potential more than any is an argument for why Facebook is undervalued. Most importantly of all, Facebook’s efforts to earn more money have not significantly impeded its mission of connecting the world. There are definitely more ads on Facebook, especially on mobile, but the data shows that they’re not annoying users enough to reduce their engagement. Facebook has grown up. It’s no longer the red-hot startup that could double its user count every year. And it’s not the mature corporation churning out amazing profits by squeezing every last dime out of its data and usage. But Facebook has weathered the storm of going public without letting it destroy its regard for the user experience. It’s now a fundamental utility for most of the world. If it can keep from getting too greedy and stay focused on the long-term health of its community, it will have plenty of time to figure out how to turn the world’s life story into serious business.
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Any programmer or blogger knows that when you work on the Internet, on a computer, it’s easy to gain weight. Tech office pantries are stocked with Red Bull, candy, chips and even things you wouldn’t think were too unhealthy, like protein bars. Protein bars are basically injections of sugar. That’s why they taste like a Snickers. But what no one talks about is that the “Startup 15″ or 40 is unavoidable if you put in the effort, not to diet, but to be healthy. Because she is constantly around tech geeks and herself works online, blogger Darya Pino, who is both my friend and the wife of Google Ventures Partner Kevin Rose, is acutely aware of this pain and has a solution: Foodist, a way to stay healthy without going crazy dieting. Reading her book a couple of weeks ago, I came across this passage that struck me as truth. In “Instagram, A Parable,” Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom described a breaking point in his work/life balance as he tried to build the company. If you’re shoving down burritos in between database sharding, you probably can relate. “We never ate healthy at the release,” recalled Systrom. “At least in the beginning, we’d be so into our work that crafting a salad out of arugula and radicchio just wasn’t going to happen midday.” Instead, they’d opt for the local food trucks or burritos near the office. Without their even realizing it, weight started to creep on. “We were looking at old pictures from Instagram, and people were like, ‘Oh my God, you look so young,’ and I was like, ‘What does that mean? Do I have gray hair? That was like six months ago,’ ” Systrom ex- plained. “After that I kept telling myself, ‘I’ve got to get healthy again.” Systrom had gained 25 pounds between Instagram’s launch in October of 2010 and its first 10 million users. “I bought a scale one day and realized my weight was up to 235,” he writes in Foodist, “And I had never been this heavy in my life. I used to be 210, and I was like, ‘That’s not okay.’ But I knew I was not going to pull a sorority girl and just eat salad, because I love food. I can eat less, but I’m not going to stop eating food I like just to lose weight. That would make me unhappy.” How did he do it? Exercise, by waking up earlier, making sure healthy food options were available in the Instagram office, the buddy system and saving indulgences for the real deal. He also packed a gym bag before bed, like a true hacker of life. “I knew that if I didn’t pack my gym bag with the clothes I was going to wear the next day, I wouldn’t make it to the gym. I also needed to lay out my workout clothes. I’d wake up in the morning and just make myself a deal: ‘Listen Kevin, all you need to do is put on those clothes and you’ll wake up on the drive to work and you’ll be fine.” Instagram ended up getting acquired for what was a billion dollars at the time. And Systrom (and Instagram developer Shayne Sweeney who was his partner in crime) ended up losing all the startup-induced weight: “We can tuck our shirts in finally. Seriously, I can fit into a large now and not the bulky extra large, and that felt really good.” Instagram: A Parable
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Google’s major developer conference, Google I/O, went down this week. Was it a bit of a letdown? Probably. Did cool stuff still come out of the event? Eh? Maybe? We discuss these topics and more this week on the TC Gadgets podcast. In fact, we even had Frederic Lardinois join as a guest, along with John Biggs, Matt Burns, Jordan Crook (that’s me!), Romain Dillet, and Darrell Etherington as Bob McKenzie. Enjoy! We invite you to enjoy our weekly podcasts every Friday at 3pm Eastern and noon Pacific. Click here to download an MP3 of this show. You can subscribe to the show via RSS. Subscribe in iTunes Intro Music by Rick Barr.
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One of the more interesting projects to emerge from Evernote’s 2013 Devcup hackathon is called Postach.io, a new blogging platform which turns your Evernote notebook into a Content Management System. Input Logic, the Vancouver-based company behind the now just four-week old service has already caught the attention of local investors, as well as Evernote, who met with the team to discuss possible monetization ideas. Input Logic was founded two years ago by UI designer Shawn Adrian and programmer Gavin Vickery, with the intention of becoming a software development firm. The company bootstrapped its first app, proposal writing aid QuoteRobot, and has sustained itself with contract work over the past couple of years. The five-person team (3 full-time) has worked for clients including Nest, Michael Kors, ski resort Mt. Washington, and others, doing everything from coding to design. This year, the company stopped doing client work to focus on Postach.io instead. Adrian says that initially, neither he nor Vickery were Evernote users, having “not drank the Kool-Aid,” so to speak. But at the urging of Lance Tracey, Full Stack partner (now investor, who just funded the company with $200K), they decided to take another look. “We started playing with it, got into it, and said ‘hey, this thing has really come a long way,’” Adrian explains. “And Gavin especially just got fully addicted to it,” he adds. Later on, when the co-founders were collaborating on documentation for a newly redesigned QuoteRobot using Evernote, a thought occurred to them: “wouldn’t it be great if we could just publish it instead?” Vickery, too, wanted that same functionality for his own blog – he writes all his blog posts in Evernote anyway, why not just publish directly from there? So they decided to build a service that did just that. Having worked on CMS’s in the past, the team built Postach.io to include nearly everything you would expect from a lightweight blogging system: customizable themes, RSS (Atom) feeds, built-in Disqus commenting, support for multimedia, and more. In fact, anything you can store in Evernote – images, audio, video/YouTube, etc. – will work on Postach.io, too. Currently, the half dozen themes available are reminiscent of sites like Svbtle or Medium, favoring clean, minimalistic design and rounded icons. Now the plan is to extend Postach.io’s feature set even further, with special themes designed for Evernote Food and Hello app users, as well as support for social sharing, wikis,  and community features designed to help new bloggers have their content found. To use Postach.io yourself, after setting up an account and authorizing the service with Evernote, it’s only a matter of tagging posts in a pre-determined notebook with the tag “publish” to make them go live on your blog. You can also use Evernote’s date field to schedule posts for a later time. Blogs are given their own subdomains like yourname.postach.io, for example, but you can have them work with your own URL instead, if you choose. In the future, the service might monetize by charging for premium features or converting users to Evernote Premium, while doing a rev share with Evernote. But those ideas are still in the works. Today, the focus is on growing the product and user base, which today includes 1,500 bloggers who signed up since the April debut. Blogging platforms, of course, are numerous – from the big guys like Tumblr, WordPress and Blogger to newcomers like Medium, Svbtle, and Posterous repository Posthaven. But the team behind Postach.io see the value in building on top of a successful platform instead of a creating a destination site of their own. (And they’re not the only ones with the same idea: see also, Everblog or maybe this IFTTT recipe.) “One of the big things with Evernote is that you own your content – it’s actually on your own computer,” Adrian explains. “Even if our servers are struck by lighting and everything falls apart, everyone will have their blog posts.” Interested users can sign up for Postach.io here.
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Yahoo has been on an acquisition tear of late, snapping up apps and mobile startups like they’re going out of style. Summly, Astrid, GoPollGo, MileWise, Loki Studios have all been acquired in the last month-and-a-half, while Yahoo simultaneously made a play for a significant stake in French video giant, DailyMotion. With that falling through, rumors have begun to swirl that Yahoo is making a bid for Tumblr, AllThingsD reported yesterday. Is this desperation or genius? Everyone has an opinion, which to Mayer’s credit is not something one has been able to say about Yahoo for a long time. On Monday, it seems that we may get a better sense of what Yahoo plans to do with all these new acquisitions, as CNBC is reporting that Yahoo will be holding a “product-related” news event on Monday in New York City. Marissa Mayer will reportedly be speaking at the press conference, but that’s all we know about the contents of the event at this point. Yet again, Yahoo’s CEO shows that she understands how to leverage the press to get the company back into the conversation. This has already led to speculation over what Yahoo will announce, if anything, at the event. Amidst the rumors of its potential billion-dollar bid for Tumblr, some are saying that Yahoo might use the stage to announce yet another acquisition. Even if a blockbuster acquisition isn’t the focus of the press conference, people will still be talking about Yahoo. At the very least, let’s hope Yahoo begins to explain the strategy behind its acquire-and-shut-down approach and what its “big” plans are for mobile — “touching people’s lives ‘every day’” doesn’t quite do it. Yahoo to hold a product-related news event in New York City on Monday; CEO Marissa Mayer to speak at event. $YHOO—   (@CNBC) May 17, 2013
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About a month and a half ago, Google switched to its own WebP image format in its Google+ Android app, the company revealed at its I/O developer conference in San Francisco today. This, Stephen Konig, a Google product manager who focuses on WebP and Chrome Remote desktop, and Make the Web Fast team member and Chrome developer advocate Ilya Grigorik said in today’s presentation, is saving Google – and its users – about 50% in bandwidth. Google+ App For Android Quietly Switched To WebP Image Format A Month And A Half Ago, Saves 50% Bandwidth Google+ is obviously a very image-heavy service and given that Android can display WebP natively since the introduction of version 4.0, this was a pretty logical move for the team. The team, however, also said that the plan is to introduce WebP to virtually every other Google product, too – and possibly within the next year. The slide the team showed during the session including the logos of YouTube, Google Image Search and virtually every other Google product (and sadly I didn’t catch it in time). The company made this switch very quietly, just like it did with the Chrome Web Store earlier this year. In the Store, the team reiterated today, using WebP resulted in image sizes that were about 30% smaller than using PNGs. The current problem for WebP – which can save developers a good amount of bandwidth thanks to its improved compression ratio – is that it’s only natively supported in Android, Chrome and Opera. For other platforms, developers still have to service traditional JPEG or PNG images or use other tricks to display WebP. The WebP team, however, also said that it believes Firefox will support it within the next year, too, and seems pretty optimistic about the format’s future (but then, of course, they would say that…).
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Google held a session today at I/O 2013 about how to make money on Android, and in the initial few minutes it shared some updated stats around Google Play revenues and how those are progressing. Not surprisingly, the big growth is coming with in-app purchases, though Google’s recently launched subscription model is also making headway. Google said that its in-app revenues through Play are up 700 percent since the same time last year, which is reflected in the top apps as listed by highest grossing titles in the Play rankings. Subscriptions, which just launched around 12 months ago, is also making headway, doubling inbound revenue each quarter according to Google. Some apps which use subscription as their exclusive revenue model are now cracking the top grossing list, like Pandora. The momentum is still clearly behind in-app purchase, and as a result Google suggested that there’s good reason to consider that as a revenue model when building apps. Session host and Google Play Product Manger for Commerce and Monetization Ibrahim Elbouchikhi said that while the team likes to play a game called “Where’s Minecraft?” where they spot the world simulation sim from Notch, which continues to sit high on the charts despite being a one-time purchase paid app, the trend is overwhelmingly favoring freemium experiences. Other key trends identified include a higher propensity to buy things on tablets vs. phones. Google framed this in light of its attempts to get developers to build tablet-optimized experience, saying that there’s a 1.7x higher purchase rate on tablets than on phones for apps. Also, updated versions of apps that take advantage of recent platform additions like the new capabilities unveiled at I/O this year have a 2.2x advantage at monetization vs. older versions, on average. For Google, spelling that out is a way of it being able to show devs that it makes financial sense to invest the resources and efforts needed to convert apps to tablet versions, or to make them available with as many new features as possible that show off Android’s system improvements. And it does look to be having an effect on Google’s efforts to improve Android user monetization; Elbouchikhi said that average revenue per user (ARPU) among the Android install base is up 2.5x versus the same time last year.
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Google unveiled its completely redesigned Google Maps product on the web at I/O 2013, and at a panel dedicated to the new Maps experience, Maps User Experience Design Lead Jonah Jones and Engineering Director for Maps on the web Yatin Chawathe took us through what went into creating Maps and the engineering effort behind the considerable change seems prodigious. Specifically, Jones and Chawathe took us much deeper into two of the main driving concepts behind the redesign of Maps, including “Building A Map For Every Place” and “Explore The World.” The former has to do with customizing maps every time a user clicks on a new location, in real-time and with more contextually relevant information, and the latter involves providing beautiful imagery including via Earth integration directly into maps, and with 3D virtual photo tours. A Map For Every Place In making a Maps product that is extremely adaptive to both a user’s personal input sources and to specific locales, Google had to rethink its approach to maps, and it looked to the way we casually share directions as a marker of a good system for surfacing relevant information. When you draw a map on a napkin, you are automatically filtering out the most important information, and doing it with your specific audience in mind. The result is a simplified map, that involves maybe a few major routes, as well as smaller roads, and a prioritization that doesn’t necessarily reflect how important a road is to the general population. “A map draw for you is great because it highlights aspects and things personal to you,” Jones explained, adding that there’s also nostalgic value in something like a hand drawn map. Google wanted to be able to replicate both of these, and so it took an engineering approach to automate a process that’s normally human-powered. Google didn’t want to exactly replicate the hand-drawn map, however, since it leaves out a lot of information that you want to still be present in a modern, digital, interactive map. But it did want to subtly highlight and downplay certain map elements, bring to the fore aspects that are useful and fading back others that aren’t as important. To do that, it took a big data analytics approach. First, for a specific location the new Maps algorithm will analyze the entire set of people looking for directions in that area, and then highlight the routes that come up most often. Then from that subset they’ll focus in even further and weigh more vs. less important routes, based again on aggregated user data. They can see which roads are more popular, and then pop those out vs. the less important ones. Finally the less important ones are cut away, and you’re left with something resembling the hand-written map. Once those are flagged, however, you could still be missing info on the ground regarding very small routes important to a specific place. Those are then targeted via a hyper local re-labeling algorithm that addresses just the immediate surroundings, adding labels to key routes and taking them away from other locations to decrease clutter and subtly change the focus. That then informs the UI rendering of the Map itself, which still retains the street markers for all surrounding routes. Lines along routes important to getting there are made bold and lines on less important streets are thinned out, but not removed in case some users still require that information. It’s about drawing attention and changing perspective, not eliminating something altogether. All of the above takes advantage of the immense processing power in Google’s data center to do the whole thing in real-time every single second, for every single one of Map’ millions of users. Yet the impact on a user’s computing requirements is minimal; Google sends even less data than it did with the previous version of Maps, keeping bandwidth requirements low. Explore The World Google’s other big addition to the new Maps experience has to do with bringing beautiful imagery to the web, in the form of both Google Earth 3D flyovers and the new virtual tours that provide an up-close-and-personal view of some prime spots. Those virtual tours also represent a massive engineering effort, one which Chawathe explained in broad strokes on stage. The virtual tours are a crowdsourced effort, which users may not even realize they’re actively contributing to. The images are drawn from pictures uploaded to Google+, Panoramio and other sources within the Google photo sharing ecosystem. To get from that group of photos to an actual 3D tour requires a lot more than just aggregating photos, however. Google says it can map not only where every photo in its database was taken, but can also tie each individual pixel in every image to a very specific location using its algorithm, making it much easier to stitch sets together. Once that process is complete, it’s left with a point cloud that can flesh out a region, but that’s a brute force approach, and some art is required to make it look good. That involves filtering the photos, picking ones that show the landmark in context with its surroundings, ones that show the landmark clearly from visually pleasing angles, pics that capture architectural detail, interesting picturesque scenes in various lighting conditions and more. It picks these photos based on visual recognition tech and their popularity and ratings on Google properties; so an image that gets a lot of +1s on Google+ will be rated over one that’s got none, for example. Once it has a set of top-quality pictures, it determines an order in which they should appear that makes the most sense. Even then it wouldn’t be smooth as a finished product, however, since there gaps and the transition between angles would involve a lot of bizarre warping and image artifacts that would taint the overall experience. So finally, Google’s algorithm goes back to the larger set of images and picks ones that fit nicely in the gaps. These don’t need to be the best quality, since they’re just filling out the animation. Jones said that what they’ve built is impressive, but still pales in comparison to what a human artist could achieve manually stitching together their own photo tour. He hopes to bring up Google’s automated process to the point where it’s impressive regardless of the source, and comparable with what humans are capable of working on their own. In response to a question from the audience, Chawathe also said that Google could in the future look for a way to make its 3D guided tour feature a consumer tool. It sounds like it’s not something Google is currently developing, but putting that power in the hands of Google+ users for instance might make it more of a draw for photography enthusiasts. Google already showed that it’s making efforts in that direction with the new auto-enhance and auto-awesome features it introduced for G+ at I/O. The World In Your Browser Changes As Fast As The Real One Does These efforts show how Google is making use of its immense computer processing power to deliver experiences via Maps that reflect a continually changing world. It sounds like this is just the beginning for both of the projects, too, and as with every major change, we’ll probably see more refinement of these approaches as users come on board and provide more feedback.
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Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the twin Harvard graduates who famously sparred with Mark Zuckerberg over the founding of Facebook and are now working as tech investors through Winklevoss Capital, are part of the growing group of venture capitalists who have taken a keen interest in Bitcoins. Last month, it was revealed that they personally own roughly one percent of the currency, having purchased the equivalent of some $11 million. And now, the Winklevosses tell TechCrunch they have invested in Bitcoin in another meaningful way — by leading a funding round for a startup in the space. BitInstant, a New York City based startup that operates an online platform for buying and selling Bitcoins, has raised $1.5 million in a seed funding round led by Winklevoss Capital with the participation of other strategic investors including money services veteran David Azar. The investment was closed this past fall, but the Winklevosses are just now publicly announcing it in the lead-up to the Bitcoin Foundation’s 2013 Conference being held in Silicon Valley this weekend. BitInstant, which has a full-time staff of 16 led by CEO Charlie Shrem, has emerged as a key player in the nascent Bitcoin market: The company already processes approximately 30 percent of the money going into and out of Bitcoin, and last month alone facilitated 30,000 transactions, the Winklevosses said in a phone call this week. The funding is meant to allow the company to further scale up its staff and product as it angles to become the go-to site for Bitcoin transfers. The Winklevosses say they were attracted to invest in BitInstant in large part because of its leadership. CEO Shrem is the vice chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation, and CIO Alex Waters previously worked with the core developers on the original Satoshi Bitcoin client. “Charlie has been in the space for a very long time, and he has an impeccable reputation among Bitcoiners. He knows everyone in the space and everyone in the space knows him,” Cameron Winklevoss said. “One of the most exciting things about people who are into Bitcoin it’s that they’re a really passionate community, and Charlie is a passionate entrepreneur. He would be in that category of someone who lives, breathes, and sleeps Bitcoin.” Speaking of that community, the world of Bitcoiners does indeed have an interesting edge to it: There’s an underground vibe that seems like it would contrast with the more traditional East Coast prep style of the Winklevosses. In our phone call, Cameron and Tyler said that they’re intrigued by the current feel of the Bitcoin space — and its potential for becoming a bit more structured in the coming years. “We’re definitely pretty fascinated by it. The classic issue with Bitcoin is that it’s very early days,” Tyler said. “The entrepreneurs in the space are very impressive, but it takes really two areas of expertise: One is technology, and the second is understanding money services and regulation and all those things that are important for sustainability. Most entrepreneurs and companies we see in the space have the tech down, and they’re super strong there, but in terms of being buttoned up and looking like an average bank, it’s hard to couple both of them together. We think that BitInstant and Charlie do a fantastic job of doing both.” This marks the third big-name funding news for Bitcoin startups in just a few days. Earlier this week Adam Draper announced that half of the companies in his next Boost.vc accelerator program will be focused on bitcoin, and yesterday Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund led a $2 million investment in Bitcoin processing startup BitPay. It will be interesting to see how the Bitcoin space in general evolves as even more buttoned-up types and traditional money managers get involved.
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Native Client – a technology that allows developers to run native compiled C and C++ code as part of their web apps – has long been a part of Google Chrome. Even though other browser vendors haven’t adopted it yet, Google is clearly putting quite a few resources behind this technology and at I/O this year, it announced Portable Native Client (or PNaCl, which Google says we should pronounce as “pinnacle”). PNaCl is now available in developer preview in Chrome 29 and will slowly find its way into the stable version over the coming months. PNaCl, the company says, will allow developers to write web applications “that are truly architecture-independent.” It’s essentially an architecture-independent version Native Client, so unlike now, developers can write their apps and know that they will run on ARM and X86 (both 32-bit and 64-bit). PNaCl, the team says, uses an LLVM compiler infrastructure with a “compile -> link -> translate” workflow that creates an intermediary bitcode, which is then translated locally for the specific infrastructure. That’s some pretty complicated stuff, but essentially it will allow developers to write high-performance apps that offer near-native speeds for today’s existing platforms and they can be sure that these apps will also run on new architectures as they become available without having to rebuild their apps (assuming, of course, that Google will continue to support this product). Other browser vendors, of course, are also trying to speed up web apps. Most recently, for example, Mozilla announced the asm.js project, which ports C and C++ code to asm.ja – a subset of JavaScript. This scheme, Mozilla says, allows JavaScript code to run at speeds within 2x of native performance. That’s not quite what Native Client can achieve, but the advantage of Mozilla’s approach is that the JavaScript code that the system generates will run in any browser – just slower than on Firefox.
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It sounds like a nice idea, if you don’t own a calculator. The governor of Wisconsin wants to give his residents a tax break, using the revenue from a proposed Internet Sales tax to lower the state’s income tax. “I want to make clear, should federal Marketplace legislation become law, my intention would be for any resulting additional revenue be used to provide individual income tax relief for Wisconsin’s taxpayers,” Wrote Governor Scott Walker to members of Congress. The Marketplace Fairness Act will permit state governments to collect sales taxes from any business that both grosses more than $1M in revenue and has a substantial operating base in their region. Earlier this month, a draft of the bill passed the U.S. Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support, but faces tougher opposition in the House, where Republican leadership is concerned that the law will be a logistical nightmare for small businesses. Although, I wouldn’t get too excited. With 5 million residents in Wisconsin and an estimated $95M in savings, that’s about $16/per person, assuming it would be distributed evenly. If Forrester’s research is any indication, the sales tax would cost the average American roughly $167 per year, so it’s a net loss. If it’s unevenly distributed, a few already wealthy people will be slightly wealthier. Still, it’s a nice gesture.
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Earlier this week we reported on how Backupify was closing down TweetBackup, a free service to back up your Twitter account that it acquired in 2010; now we have confirmed that, as we’d heard, this is part of a bigger plan at the company to phase out consumer services altogether, as Backupify focuses its efforts on paid services for enterprise customers. From today, it will stop accepting new sign-ups for its free tier of back-up services for personal files. It is also discontinuing by the end of this year support for certain sites, including Facebook personal profiles, Blogger, Picassa and Flickr. It will continue to offer services to back up Facebook Fan Pages, Twitter and personal Gmail accounts, but it’s likely that these will be moved to all-paid services over time, as part of its personal backup products, which it will continue to support “for the foreseeable future” (even if only as paid, not free, products). Rob May, CEO of Backupify, tells us that the timescale for free support is around two more quarters. The moves are a signal that some startups that began with consumer social media services in mind have found that market hard to monetize. On the other hand, as enterprises become increasingly social, they are proving to be willing paying customers for many of the same kinds of offerings. Rob May, CEO of Backupify, tells us that this move has been a long time in the making — some two years in fact. “We started Backupify as a consumer-facing business but we quickly realized there was money in SMB and enterprise, so when we raised money the intention was to use it to go after the B2B market. And this is now a bigger chunk of our revenue — over 90%,” he told TechCrunch. In a blog post on the news, May also notes that enterprise was only a small percentage of revenues three years ago. The company is not revealing total user numbers currently but when it announced a Series C round of $9 million last year, it had 170,000 users, and didn’t break out how many of those were free or paid. He notes that in fact there is nothing of TweetBackup getting left behind in the closure. Over time, as Twitter has changed its own APIs, the company had to rebuilt its product from the ground up. It’s that rebuilt technology that has also gone into Ditto, the Symantec service for backing up Twitter accounts, which turns out was co-developed with Backupify (one by-product of the strategic investment that Symantec made as part of that most recent $9 million round of fundraising). In the meantime, Backupify is working on developing services to back up other platforms and sites. It’s currently in testing with Apptivo, Freshdesk, Mavenlink, Nimble and Pipeline Deals to provide backup services to their users, and with the increasing move to cloud-based enterprise services, you can see how and where something like that could develop further. May says it’s not currently working with Evernote — a company with an ethos of saving your data for the rest of your live and beyond — but that he would love to.
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Tripshare, an iPad application for travel planning, is joining a crowded space. But its CEO knows a little something about the industry – Bob Dana was the former employee #1 and first CFO of Virgin America. He once wrote the business plan and feasibility study for Sir Richard Branson in 2003. And now he’s doing a travel startup. Dana tells us the inspiration for Tripshare was based on a personal experience he had years ago. As CFO, he spent ten hours on a plan each week flying back and forth from New York to California. Back in 2006, Dana was trying to convince his family to come out to California for a vacation, so he put together a proposed itinerary to help sell the idea. “I ended up preparing this ten-page Word document that included text and photos I cut and pasted from various websites. It was intended to be persuasive in nature, and collaborative, too,” he explains. “I thought afterwards, that collaborative travel planning was something that was rather difficult to do.” But not only was it difficult to plan, it was also hard to move from the point of inspiration and discovery to actually booking the trip. This idea later formed the basis for Tripshare, which he founded two years ago. The app was originally built in conjunction with then co-founder and CTO Ken Goto, a former director of engineering at Apple. Goto has since moved on but his ex-Apple development team, including acting CTO Eric Kapke, now continues the work. The app itself has actually been live in the iTunes App Store as unpublicized beta since August 2012. However, though that app was functionally similar, it drew some criticisms from early users because of its user interface. Today’s version is an overhaul, and much improved. Still, despite having done no publicity or marketing, Tripshare has been downloaded nearly 20,000 times while still a work in progress. In other words, today’s release is technically a version 2.0, but for all intents and purposes, this is the big debut. Designed for those planning vacations or other complex trips with multiple destinations or activities, Tripshare allows you to browse, collect and share information with others before booking. Using the iPad’s big screen, you can flip through photos of destinations and lodgings, create itineraries, discover flights, hotels, restaurants, activities, and more. Today, the app allows you to explore over 20,000 cities worldwide, plus 500,000+ lodging options, thousands of flights, and over 200,000 tours, activities and restaurants. After creating a sample itinerary, you can then share it to other Tripshare iPad users, or via email, Facebook, and Twitter. For those not using the iPad application, the shared trip displays in the web browser. These trips can include all the details, too  - photos, descriptions, reviews, and prices – so your family and/or friends won’t have to redo the work on their end before giving you their feedback. Pricing and availability also update in real-time, something another new planning app Pintrips offers as well, but on the web. Users can also communicate with the trip-organizer within the application using an IM-like chatting function, or leave suggestions if the trip’s planner is offline. While there are quite a few trip planning applications and services on the market (and that’s an understatement ) what makes Tripshare stand out is not the uniqueness of the idea, but the overall package. The app’s user interface is easy to use, which is critical when planning complicated trips where you’re trying to pack in a lot of activities and outings. At first glance, Tripshare seems inspired by Khosla-backed social travel app Jetpac, which uses smart technology to index photos from social networks, allowing you to see where friends have traveled, in order to find inspiration for trip-planning purposes. It has the same general layout, and it shares some common features – like the idea of making a list of places you want to go. But Tripshare’s photos don’t come from Facebook. They’re high-resolution images from its travel partners, including HomeAway, Fly.com, the Expedia Affiliate Network, and Viator.com. Plus, the overall vision for the application is not one of just inspiration, but converting that inspiration into an actionable itinerary by actually allowing you to book the trip, including the flights, hotels, outings and more, directly in the app. Dana says the company plans to integrate content from more travel aggregators and services into the app in time, including things like vacation rentals from Flipkey, car rentals, restaurant reservations, cruises, safaris, and even travel insurance. By year end, the plan is to have many of these live, as well as an iPhone-optimized application. Afterwards, the goal will be to further build up the social community. Tripshare is backed by $1.47 million in angel funding; some of that is founder money, and the other part comes mainly from the New York angels community, including David S. Rose. The app itself is free to users, as it will earn revenue via a percentage of the bookings users make. Tripshare is live here on iTunes.
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How do you market a hot new TV show without the benefit of commercial space which you can fill with network promos? Just ask Netflix. The company has come up with a number of clever marketing stunts to get the word out about the upcoming premiere of Arrested Development ranging from Easter eggs on Netflix.com to this month’s real, live frozen banana stand in New York visited by hundreds. It even sent around jokey emails to the media, reportedly from “Dr. Tobias Funke.” The latest to get in on the action is Seamless.com, which has partnered with Netflix to offer an ordering page for “Bluth’s Original Frozen Banana.” If you don’t know what that is, then go watch the show, I guess. The menu, which went live on Monday, is filled with food and drink items referencing the Bluth family, including the option to buy a double-dipped frozen, or a nice martini to accompany your snack. Unfortunately, the delivery minimum is $250,000.00, so you probably can’t afford to eat there. Oh ha, ha. Though these publicity stunts are funny, they do in fact have a serious purpose – Netflix needs to make original content work, and part of that is making sure its users (and potential users) know that content is out there. With a cult classic like “Arrested Development” on its hands – a show with the potential to top Netflix’s most-watched program, the original series “House of Cards” – it’s important to get word out. A study from February of this year suggested that Netflix’s quality, original programming has the potential to not only bring in new subscribers but keep current ones from canceling. Around 86 percent of those surveyed said they would be less likely to cancel after watching “House of Cards,” for example. “Arrested Development” was a critical darling and beloved by many, but it didn’t have the numbers to keep it on the TV airwaves. However, Netflix doesn’t need a TV-sized audience to make this model work, only all the niche audiences surrounding this show and others, who, combined, can make up a significantly sized viewer base. That leaves the network (we’re calling Netflix a network now, right?) the wiggle room to have a little fun with its promotional stunts, instead of having to spend big on mass media campaigns. (h/t PSFK)
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Now that Defense Distributed is on the defensive, it’s time to think a bit harder about what 3D printing really means. To that end, Michigan Tech is sponsoring a Printers For Peace contest that is encouraging designers and engineers to make amazing stuff using a 3D printer that can change the world for the better. “Unfortunately, the only thing many people know about 3D printing is that it can be used to make guns,” writes Dr. Joshua Pearce, founder of the project. “This is an open-ended contest, but if you’d like some ideas, ask yourself what Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King, or Gandhi would make if they’d had access to 3D printing.” The deadline for the contest is September 1st and they’ll announce winners on the 4th. They are looking for designers to build things that will help, not harm, people. low-cost medical devices tools to help pull people out of poverty designs that can reduce racial conflict objects to improve energy efficiency or renewable energy sources to reduce wars over oil tools that would reduce military conflict and spending while making us all safer and more secure things that boost sustainable economic development (e.g. designs for appropriate technology in the developing world to reduce scarcity) The winner of best project will win a Type A Machines Series 1 3D Printer and the runner-up gets a simpler RepRap Prusa Mendel 3D printing kit. With all the press attention on 3D printing is the gateway to firearms anarchy, it’s refreshing to see someone take a different path. By backing 3D printing engineers into a corner, DefDist and the government are simply using fear to achieve competing goals. The results will be both needlessly draconian legislation and a variant of the Streisand Effect that will spread these arguably faulty plans far and wide. When the government outlawed DVD decryption code you could buy a T-shirt with the code printed on it. The same will happen in this case, although this code, when run, could take off fingers and give legislators more ammunition for a full crackdown on home 3D printing. Let us know if you enter and good luck. We need more weapons against poverty and fewer weapons against each other. [Image via Thingiverse]
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Google impressed a lot of people when it debuted its Grand Canyon Street View imagery in October. The Trekker backpack used to capture that imagery, which is essentially a backpack-mounted version of the same all-seeing eye that sits atop the Google Street View car. The roughly 40-pound backpack is not all that uncomfortable to wear, I found out when I slipped the Trekker on. It’s a little top-heavy, and I’m not sure I’d want to risk running at a brisk clip if I was using one out in the wild, but it’s really no heavier than a standard backpacker’s kit for a few days’ journey. Silverman explained how the Trekker works, including how its camera sensor head gathers images and how those are then stored on a hefty solid state hard drive built into the backpack, where they can later be transferred back to Google’s servers to get started with the process of recreating a hike. I asked Silverman whether we might see the Trekker make its way to the backs of other beings beyond humans, and he said that they are indeed mulling the idea of strapping versions of it to beasts of burden to help them continue to map the world in images. There are also plans in the works to mount it to remotely operated robots and small vehicles to help get imagery that otherwise wouldn’t be easily reachable by a human Trekker. He said to expect plenty more to come from the Trekker team in terms of Street View imagery of some of the world’s most interesting – and most remote – locales. Combined with Google’s new underwater street view project, that means everyone can probably get a lot more familiar with a lot more of the world in the near future.
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The march of the enterprise software IPOs continues, with not one but two companies debuting on New York stock exchanges today. Business intelligence provider Tableau Software, trading as “DATA”, is one of the more highly anticipated tech IPOs of the year, and so far it has not disappointed. It priced its IPO at $31 per share, and it has popped 58% to nearly $49/share in early trading on the NYSE. Marketo, a cloud-based marketing services company, priced its IPO at about half that, $13 per share. It will be trading as MKTO, but has yet to trade this morning. Tableau Software is raising some $254.2 million at the $31/share price, after raising that IPO from an initial range of $23-26, with a valuation of $2 billion. Marketo, meanwhile, is raising just under $85 million for a $550 million valuation. That figure puts Tableau just shy of the $260 million that enterprise security company Palo Alto Networks raised in July 2012, and still a ways behind HR specialist Workday’s IPO in October 2012, which raised $637 million. Tableau Software’s multi-billion IPO sets the stage for other multi-billion tech IPOs from the likes of Box and Twitter. Tableau had raised less than $40 million prior to this from NEA and Meritech (Crunchbase puts the total at only $15 million, but Geekwire says that NEA’s total investment in the company has been $29 million). In contrast, Marketo has raised $108 million in six rounds, from investors that include Institutional Venture Partners, InterWest Partners, Mayfield Fund, Storm Ventures and Battery Ventures. Taken together, the two are strong endorsements for the market for enterprise services and some of the still-emerging trends within it. Tableau Software, as its stock ticker unsubtly hints, is aimed more at a big-data play, offering visualization and analytics that it says are easy enough for non-technical people to use. Up to now, it still offers the majority of its services as downloadable, on-premises software rather than as cloud-based apps. Marketo is positioned as a software-as-a-service, and like a Salesforce for the marketing department, offers its various services — inbound marketing, lead management, social marketing, event management, instant CRM integration, sales dashboards, and marketing ROI reporting and analytics — all in a one-stop-in-the-cloud-shop.
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Vevo, popularny serwis muzycznych teledysków, ogłosił oficjalną dostępność w Polsce. Usługa, wcześniej niedostępna w tym regionie geograficznym, będzie zawierać video-clipy najpopularniejszych polskich gwiazd jak Brodka, Pezet, a może i nawet David Hasselhoff. Usługa jest dostępna na Vevo.com i pojawi się również na urządzeniach mobilnych oraz konsoli Xbox Live. Vevo jest spółką joint venture pomiędzy Sony Music i Universal Music Group, powołaną do istnienia w 2009 roku. Obecnie zawiera tysiące teledysków, występów koncertowych i wywiadów. Aby przygotować się do tego nawału treści wideo muzyki, proponujemy zjeść solidny posiłek z marynowanych śledzi, pogonić go wódeczką i umieścić na swojej szyji przystojny szalik Wisły-Kraków. A tak przy okazji, będę w Krakowie na Bitspiration w czerwcu tego roku, jeśli chcesz porozmawiać o Żubrówce, disco polo lub weselnych hulankach. [Thanks, Victor, for translation help. Check out Victor's startup, SlashDB.]
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“The tech industry is, frankly, being greedy. They are going back and asking for changes to language they helped write and blatantly trying to roll back requirements that give high-skilled American workers a fair shot at getting a job,” said AFL-CIO legislative Representative Andrea Zuniga DiBitetto about new proposals to ease the hiring of high-skilled foreign workers. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg reportedly called Senator Orin Hatch to push more tech-friendly changes to the comprehensive immigration reform bill. Among Hatch’s most contentious suggestions is an end to a 90-day wait period before companies can solicit applicants with a foreign work visa. According to Reuters, under Hatch’s amendment, employers would only have to make a good-faith effort to hire Americans. While, conceptually, comprehensive immigration reform has strong bi-partisan support, its passage is far from certain. Reuters could not report whether unions would support the bill, should Hatch’s changes go through. Many unions have been long-time opponents of high-skilled immigration reform. Most recently, the union-backed Economic Policy Institute published (and criticized) a study on why the need for high-skilled immigrants was a myth. Should the unions lose this latest battle in the Senate, it will demonstrate their decline relative to the tech industry.
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I like little notebooks. I need a place for my introspective musings. Moleskine notebooks are fine. But now there’s DODOnotes, a clever little notebook *slash* iPhone holder that could soon earn a place in my pocket. This contraption is from DODOcase, the same San Francisco-based startup that created the make-a-tablet-look-like-a-book craze. DODOnotes costs $13.95 and is available for both the iPhone 5 and iPhone 4. Sorry, Galaxy S owners; DODOcase doesn’t want your money. This isn’t a case, per se. DODOnotes is more of an open sleeve. A colorful elastic band holds a naked iPhone into a slight frame. Yeah, that band prevents the owner from, well, playing Dots while it’s held in place, but answering the phone or glancing at notifications is totally possible. But for most actions, the phone needs to be removed. The case is available in red, black or blue. DODOcase tapped Mohawk for the paper. There are 30 tear-out pages of Mohawk’s Superfine soft white eggshell paper. No lines. DODOnotes isn’t for everyone. This won’t be a mass hit. But it’s certainly a clever take on the classic notebook. It’s available for order now but takes 2-3 weeks to ship.
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If you were among the select few that signed up for NVIDIA’s Shield newsletter then you’ve been able to pre-order the company’s curious handset for a few days now. The remainder of the gaming masses originally had to wait until Monday for their own turn, but that’s no longer the case — NVIDIA’s retail partners have jumped on the pre-order bandwagon too so you can now stake your claim on a Shield from Newegg, Gamestop, and Canada Computer starting today. MicroCenter will also sell the Shield in June but it hasn’t yet gotten its pre-order page set up. Get yourself together, MicroCenter. I’m still not convinced that the Shield will find a foothold outside of the geekiest mobile gamers, but our own Darrell Etherington recently took the thing for a spin and came away rather impressed. He even went as far as calling it “the way Android games should be played,” a sentiment I don’t completely disagree with — we’ve seen the quality of mobile games surge by leaps and bounds these past few years, to the point where they easily eclipse consoles of years past. While those mobile games have slowly come into their own, the control schemes that are forced upon us thanks to the advent of the touchscreen leave much to be desired. There’s still something limiting and unsatisfying about effetely pawing at a piece of glass (or worse, a resistive display — yuck), a sentiment that others have championed, too. Early reactions to the Shield are generally positive, at least where the hardware and control layout is concerned, so at least there’s that to look forward to. But in the end, will the Shield sell? And what does NVIDIA hope to get out of it? As it happens, NVIDIA may not care all that much about pure sales volume anyway. Time’s Jared Newman spoke to NVIDIA GM of mobile games Bill Rehbock at I/O, who pointed out that the Shield was designed to highlight the sorts of high-end gaming experiences developers have crafted for Android, not to mention the power of the company’s Tegra 4 chipset. There’s little question that NVIDIA’s newest system-on-a-chip has got plenty of horsepower to play with, but it’s still hard to see the Shield as much more than an incredibly niche device that raises more questions than answers.
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The first rule of being cool is not telling people you want to be cool. Yahoo is not following this rule, with its M&A team in full pray-and-spray acquisition mode post-Marissa Mayer hire, hitting on everything that walks, or at least has traction. I’ve heard rumors that Yahoo was trying to get into the following deals over the past couple of months: Foursquare (at an $800 million asking price). Path (at a $2 billion asking price). Pinterest. Hulu. Zynga. Daily Motion. And at a smaller scale: Gdgt. Wavii. Media Ocean (?). A spate of others. And now Tumblr. “Literally they talk to everyone,” said one person familiar with the matter on the matter. There was a kid in my high school who used to buy the popular kids lunch so he could sit with them. Yahoo has become that kid. At a reported $1b Tumblr would be a pricey picnic, about 1/4 of the cash Yahoo has on hand. But it could work if it goes through, which I don’t think it will. A Tumblr buy fixes the issue of declining Yahoo traction, particularly amongst us wild, mobile-addicted youth. Yahoo, which wants to be a “key part of everyday life,” is limited by the fact that young people don’t want to use it at all, let alone every day. Tumblr is the exact opposite, hitting the sweet spot of mobile, social communications, messaging and viral distribution — Even bringing in some coin in the process. Just to heap another dollop of speculation on top of this already absurdly speculative post: It wouldn’t be surprising if Google was also courting David Karp, as Mayer, a former Googler, still thinks like she’s in Google M&A, “Hey, a critical mass of people are using it …  Let’s buy it and stick ads on it!.” Imagine what the social blogging platform could do to revive Google+ engagement and content creation … And how much more it would be worth to Google? And it certainly makes sense for Yahoo to explore this strategy as well, in its larger, non-acquihire deals. But perhaps it should try being less promiscuous about it.
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Despite rising costs and increasing competition from rivals like Tencent, Chinese Internet giant Sina narrowed its first-quarter net loss to $13.2 million from $13.7 million a year earlier, the company reported today. Sina’s net revenue increased 19 percent year-over-year to $126 million, strengthened by stronger-than-expected non-advertising revenue. The company’s Sina Weibo is China’s largest microblogging service, with over 46 million daily users. Last month, e-commerce giant Alibaba Group bought a 18 percent stake in Sina Weibo for $586 million, a deal that valued the site at over $3 billion. Sina hopes that the Alibaba deal will allow it to strengthen advertising revenue despite the slowdown in ad sales that has hit all major Chinese Internet companies, including Baidu and Tencent. Sina’s ad sales dropped 15 percent in the first quarter from the previous quarter to $94.3 million. Adjusted non-advertising revenue, which includes revenue share from Web games and membership fees on Sina Weibo, increased 17 percent to $27 million, more than the range of $21 million to $23 million range forecast by the company. “As we start 2013, we are making good progress in transitioning from a PC-centric to a mobile-centric Internet company with new product launches and improved monetization,” said Sina chairman and CEO Charles Chao in the earnings release. “In April, we formed a strategic alliance with Alibaba Group to catapult us into social commerce. By partnering with Alibaba, Weibo is well positioned to play a key role in the future of e-commerce, particularly in mobile commerce as we explore ways to search, share and buy the goods and services of the millions of merchants on Taobao and Tmall.”
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