Tuesday, February 2, 2010

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The Nexus One Just Got Multi-Touch Top
Google has just started to deploy an update to the Nexus One that brings a long-desired feature to Android: Multi-touch.  In a blog post announcing the news, Google says that the new update will bring “Pinch-to-zoom functionality” to the Nexus One, which will allow users to pinch-to-zoom in the Android browser, Gallery, and Maps applications. So does this mean that Multi-touch will be coming to all Android phones? Not quite yet.  A Google spokesperson says that multi-touch support is part of the Android 2.0 framework and that its integrated support on the Browser, gallery, and Maps applications will be part of the next Android update.  However, it will be up to carriers and device manufactures to roll the updated software to these devices.   The post also says that Nexus Ones will be receiving some other updated apps.  The new version of Google Maps Navigation will include a ‘night mode’ that automatically changes the screen for optimized night time driving.  And Google Goggles , which lets you search with pictures , will now be included in the default set of applications on the phone.  Finally, 3G connectivity has been improved. You may have to wait a little longer to get your update though — while the over-the-air update will start going out today, Google’s post says some users may not get it until the end of the week.
 
MyHeritage Buys Germany's OSN, Now 540 Million Profiles Strong Top
Israeli genealogy site MyHeritage has completed its third acquisition,  buying Germany's OSN. OSN operates seven genealogy sites including Verwandt.de in Germany, Moikrewni.pl in Poland and Dynastree.com in the US. It was launched in 2007 just after LA-based Geni and, at first, it was just your typical German clone. But it added features and grew fast in older European markets like Germany and Poland, and even emerging markets like Brazil. In a clone-rarity, OSN grew twice as fast as Geni in the early days according to TechCrunch . The merger gives MyHeritage a lot of new features and a whopping combined 540 million profiles, 47 million active users and 13 million family trees. The companies have been quietly merging the sites together for the last few weeks, and all of OSN's information, profiles, family trees and pictures should be all live on MyHeritage, as of about thirty minutes ago. This was a big job because each profile has a lot of bits and pieces attached to it and there was only a 5% overlap in accounts. That may be a sign that MyHeritage wasn't doing so hot in Europe, proving this was a smart deal. MyHeritage has an algorithm that helps find family tree connections for users, so it should be interesting to see how this influx of European users expands existing users’ family trees in the coming weeks. "A huge amount of people in North America are going to discover unknown roots," MyHeritage founder Gilad Japhet says. I visited Japhet the last time I was in Israel  and we chatted about the merger over the weekend. He wouldn't disclose whether the deal was stock or cash or how much he paid, but it was clear that he was eying OSN for some time. "It was founded by two very talented individuals, and I knew from their track record they were serial entrepreneurs," he says. "I thought from the start they wouldn't have the patience to run this for ten years, maybe they'd be willing to merge their vision with ours. Eventually that theory proved correct." Japhet is not playing around. It won't come as a surprise to anyone whose spent time in Israel if I tell you he's intense, competitive, and relentlessly determined. Post-deal, MyHeritage is far beyond most genealogy competitors with the exception of Ancestry.com, which started in 1983, has spent some $80 million acquiring census information and went public last year. But there's a key difference: MyHeritage is more about living family members, and Ancestry.com is more focused on, well, ancestors. So in practice the companies are far different. There's more interaction, communication, and photo and video sharing on MyHeritage because—bluntly put—more of the profile-owners are alive. Last Saturday when Japhet and I talked, 1 million photos had already been uploaded to the site that day . "There is a clear need for families to have a secure and private place online to share memories, stay in touch and preserve their history," says Saul Klein, partner at Index Ventures and a MyHeritage board member. "I think the further Facebook opens up to the real-time web and defaults to public, the greater this need will become." Indeed privacy is a big issue to Japhet, even if it means slower growth. Unlike competing sites, if you chose to be public on MyHeritage, only your information goes public, not the details of your siblings, nieces, nephews and other members of your family tree. This is less about beating other genealogy sites now and more about MyHeritage making up the third leg of the social networking stool, which is still largely up for grabs. Facebook has won on friends, LinkedIn has won on professional and MyHeritage is seeking to win on family. It took LinkedIn far longer to get to critical mass because professional relationships were less viral and sexy, and my guess is family relationships may take even longer. Indeed, MyHeritage started six years ago and is still largely unknown in the high-brow Valley circles. But eventually it's a huge opportunity, and Japhet is patient. His site has those same endorphin-rush elements of discovery and connection that Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have. But here's kicker—it has to be international to work because the US, Israel, and much of the world are essentially young nations with huge immigrant melting pots communities. You can't trace distant cousins too far back, if you're only going to focus on the US. And you only get those moments of true "holy-shit!" joy when other trees start connecting to yours and you discover whole new branches. If you're just entering your known-relatives, it's not too exciting. Don't expect this to be MyHeritage's last acquisition. Japhet borderline stalks competitors. He can rattle off any stat from Ancestry.com's public filings and viewed Geni's 2007 launch as a huge wake up call for better UI and features. Japhet knew a lot about genealogy, but MyHeritage was a wonky, tech-heavy download before Geni's beautifully simple site launched—and got a whopping $100 million valuation. Later, when Japhet saw OSN's faster growth in Europe, he knew he had to have them. Japhet says OSN didn't have a deep understanding of genealogy, but they killed it on features, many of which MyHeritage will be keeping. Among other things OSN had an iPhone app, operated in 14 different languages, and offered poster printing of family trees in any size. "There's nothing like German engineering," Japhet says. [Update: Originally I wrote "40 languages" which is what I heard via our Skype connection.] Japhet's favorite feature is the coat of arms. If you don't have one, you can create your own, and it appears on all your pages—you can even order merchandise bearing your new coat of arms. The site will soon allow you to register it with the coat of arms authorities– a big hit with its European audience.  When designing his own coat of arms, Japhet was a bit put off by the dragons and swords and instead asked an engineer to design some chess pieces. Yep, tech geeks are the same in every country. Is all of this making MyHeritage a target for someone like Ancestry.com? "I'd like to say we're too expensive for them," Japhet said. MyHeritage has raised $24 million to date and started to focus on revenues last year. It's profitable now, making money through ecommerce transactions and premium services. MyHeritage has been funded by some of the strongest investors in Europe including Index and Accel. That's ultimately the thing I find most exciting about Japhet and MyHeritage—he wants to build a billion dollar business, and he's not put off by how long that will take or by the rap that Israelis are great at enterprise, but bad at the consumer Internet. Japhet himself wasn't naturally great at it, but he's benefited mightily from his competitors who were and moved quickly to compensate—whether it's learning from them or buying them. CrunchBase Information MyHeritage Information provided by CrunchBase
 
BlockChalk Locates A New Co-Founder From Craigslist (Another Former Delicious Key Architect) Top
It looks like another  Delicious key architect is migrating to the new location-based startup  BlockChalk . The latest is Josh Whiting, who was formerly the lead engineer at Delicious for three and a half years before he left that role to do become a senior engineer for Craigslist. Whiting joins former colleague, Stephen Hood, who was the product lead at Delicious before starting BlockChalk with Dave Baggeroer of Stanford's Institute of Design. Along with his title of co-founder, Whiting will be BlockChalk’s chief engineer. The location space continues to be red hot right now, and BlockChalk has a compelling, yet simple product . It’s a mobile app that lets you adds notes to the real world by pinning them to any location. Hood notes that in the past few weeks alone, they’ve doubled traffic and users, and are now available in 111 countries, 8217 cities, and nearly 13,000 neighborhoods all over the world. Whiting’s engineering expertise will certainly come in handy, as will the local experience he’s picked up with Craigslist for the past year. You can find the BlockChalk iPhone app here in the App Store . Or simply use the mobile web to use it on Android phones (or the iPhone since it’s HTML5-ready).
 
Glam Media On A Roll: Raises $50 Million In Private Equity At $750 Million Valuation Top
Glam Media , a vertical advertising network, has raised its fifth round of venture capital – $50 million from aeris CAPITAL , a Switzerland and Silicon Valley based private equity fund. The company is not disclosing the valuation of the round, but it is rumored to be around $750 million. Glam’s last major funding was a $85 million combined debt and equity round in early 2008, two years ago, that valued the company at around $500 million. $10 million – $15 million of this new round will be used to purchase stock from existing employees/founders as well as early venture investors. The rest of the round will be used for investment in the business and strategic acquisitions. Profitable and Rolling Glam is also announcing EBITDA profitability on North American operations and break-even results globally for Q4 2009. 2009 revenue was likely around $55 million, up from $40 million in 2008. The company attracts nearly 160 million unique monthly worldwide visitors to the sites it controls and represents, putting it at no. 14 on Comscore’s top 100 worldwide Internet properties. Those visitors racked up over 2.5 billion page views and 2.5 billion minutes spent on the site. The network includes over 1,400 publishers and other content sites. Glam attracts around 72 million montly U.S. visitors to its site, more than double competitor iVillage’s 33 million. The company, which is headquartered in Silicon Valley and New York City, is clearly gearing up for an IPO in the next 12 – 18 months.
 
Top Ten VC Firm Websites By Traffic Top
Larry Cheng, Managing Partner at Volition Capital recently put together a list of the top VC blogs according to traffic. On that list, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures is the top VC blogger, followed by Guy Kawasaki of Garage Technology Ventures and Paul Graham of Y Combinator. But which VC firm Websites attract the most attention?  Today, Cheng released another list.  This time, he ranked technology VC firms by traffic to their websites during the fourth quarter of 2009 (as measured by Compete). Topping the list is First Round Capital, with 31,632 average monthly uniques. Sequoia Capital , which sports a very spare look on its site with only a searchbox and four faint links underneath (“U.S.,” “Very Early,” “Early,” and “Growth”), has the second-most popular site with 22,441 average monthly uniques.  Rounding out third place is  Bessemer Venture Partners with 14,825 average monthly uniques. In order to make the list, the firm's website had to have monthly unique data from Compete for October, November, and December 2009. Volition Capital averaged the traffic and ranked 150 VC firm sites. Of course, the traffic stats are just one benchmark of popularity, but Cheng did say he will be updating the list quarterly. These are tiny numbers as far as most Websites go, but these are not consumer-oriented sites. The people who go to the sites are prospective startup founders, partners, and people looking for information on VC portfolio companies. Still, it’s interesting to see that First Round took the top spot; perhaps because its VCs are heavy bloggers. In fact, there seems to be a correlation between blogging and traffic to the related VC website VC and seed firms with investors who blog heavily, such as Founders Fund, Founder Collective, Foundry Group, Union Square, and Spark, all have top 25 websites. Here’s the list of the top ten: Venture Capital Firm Directory (Avg. Monthly Uniques – Q409) 1. First Round Capital (31,632) 2. Sequoia Capital (22,441) 3. Bessemer Venture Partners (14,825) 4. Highland Capital Partners (12,704) 5. Garage Technology Ventures (12,375) 6. Draper Fisher Jurvetson (11,823) 7. New Enterprise Associates (11,762) 8. Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers (10,924) 9. Polaris Venture Partners (10,217) 10. Benchmark Capital (10,162)
 
Twitter Responds To Phishing Attack Top
This morning, Twitter started locking out a subset of users of their accounts, sending them e-mails asking them to change their passwords in order to regain access to the service. The e-mail said those measures were taken due to concerns that their accounts may have been compromised in a phishing attack , and hinted at a third-party service being at fault. We asked Twitter for more information about the attack, and this is the response that they just gave us: As part of Twitter’s ongoing security efforts, we reset passwords for a small number of accounts that we believe may have been compromised offsite. In one case, a number of accounts posted updates indicative of giving their username and password to untrusted third parties. While we’re still investigating and ensuring that the appropriate parties are notified, we do believe that the steps we’ve taken should ensure user safety. Asked how many users were affected, Twitter declined to share details but said the number is ‘very small’. Twitter also said its response is for issues seen from last Wednesday on. Update: asked if Nutshellmail has something to do with this, which has been suggested on other blogs, Twitter says it isn’t, but referred to multiple "get followers fast" schemes causing troubles for users. Twitter promises to continue to provide updates and encourages users to read the help pages on what to do if their account is compromised . Note that Twitter has yet to communicate the whole ordeal on its company blog and/or status website , although the account @safety acknowledges the attack and refers to its security measures as a ‘precautionary step’. We’ll keep you posted as we try and obtain more information about these attacks.
 

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