The latest from TechCrunch
- Facebook CTO Bret Taylor On HTML5, Mobile As The Future, And Yes, FriendFeed
- Streaming Is Driving New Subscriber Growth At Netflix
- Sony Unveils The PSP2 ("As Powerful As The PS3″)
- Task Management Startup Cohuman Raises $600K
- IMHO, Imo Is A Pretty Great Way To Chat. Today Brings A New Design And An Exit From Alpha
| Facebook CTO Bret Taylor On HTML5, Mobile As The Future, And Yes, FriendFeed | Top |
| Yesterday, following his talk at the Inside Social Apps conference in San Francisco, I had a chance to sit down with Facebook CTO Bret Taylor . I’ve been following Taylor’s work pretty closely since the early FriendFeed days, so it has been interesting to watch his transition into this powerful role inside of Facebook. And make no mistake, he’s transitioned well. We talked about a wide range of topics regarding the company these days, and Taylor has a clear command over pretty much all of them. Obviously, he knows plenty of things that he’s not going to tell me, but the answers he did give are actually pretty insightful as well. First of all, just as he did during his time on stage, Taylor made it very clear that there are two key high-level focuses for Facebook in 2011 from a technology perspective: HTML5 and mobile. And actually, as he sees them, those are both very much related as well. Taylor said that the biggest transition internally that Facebook will make this year is a shift towards much more development resources being placed in mobile. Whereas right now, most developers are working on the site itself, over the next year, as they focus more on HTML5, that’s going to shift. Further, “ over the next couple of years, a large percentage [of development teams] will be working on mobile primarily ,” Taylor said. Taylor said that there’s already a team just devoted to making HTML5 games within Facebook a reality. Sure enough, today we got a lengthy post from Facebook about the very matter. Of note, so far the team has found that short-term, 2D games are the only kind that are going to be really feasible with HTML5 until WebGL is more of a reality. And all of this s very early, but Facebook wants to share their finding as quickly as possible to help the web evolve. Does that mean an evolution away from Flash? After all, Flash dominates the market for the types of HTML5 games that Facebook is talking about. “ Well it’s hard ,” Taylor said about Flash specifically. When I laughed and noted he was giving the diplomatic answer, he assured me that it is something they think about a lot. “ We want to be ahead of the curve and fill in the gaps when possible ,” is how he ended up putting it. And this stance on HTML5 is vital for Facebook because Taylor really does see mobile as the future — but as it stands right now, that’s a bit of a problem. “ The popularity of mobile devices will change ,” he said implying that the dominant devices today might not be so dominant in the future. And if that’s the case, why should Facebook dump resources into them? Wouldn’t it be easier if they just focused on HTML5 — something which will work on an increasing number of devices going forward? Of course. “ We want Facebook to be consistent on the web and on mobile ,” Taylor said, echoing what he had said earlier on stage. He also spoke about the trend of web applications taking cues from mobile apps. “ I think that’s a really interesting trend. And it’s one that I’m really excited about ,” he said. “ People design better with constraints ,” he continued, acknowledging that the latest version of Twitter on the web was a great example. Oh, and yes, Taylor also said that work is well underway for tablet-optimized versions of Facebook. But he still wouldn’t commit to a Facebook iPad native app anytime soon. I then moved on to more specific products within Facebook. I first asked about Single Sign-On. This is the product that’s supposed to greatly ease the strain of having to sign in over and over and over again within native mobile apps. Taylor noted that most of the top apps have already implemented it, and said that as its adoption continues, the entire experience will only get better. But he acknowledged that it’s not a perfect system, and went into some detail about how they have to get it to work on the iPhone, which is more limiting on background functions between apps. Essentially what they have to do is dump you into the Facebook app to load up your info then immediately take you back to the app you’re trying to log-in to. Asked about Messages, Taylor said that it’s going great overall. “ It’s a pretty big new system for us ,” he said noting that the email and SMS additions require quite a bit of work to get going. “ We’re rolling it out social group by social group ,” he continued. “ We hope to have it rolled out fully in the not too distant future ,” he went on to say, which should be good news for a lot of users out there. When I asked about the transition at the top of the Places group, with Justin Shaffer (fresh from the Hot Potato acquisition) taking over the project from Michael Sharon, Taylor noted that Sharon had been working on it for a long time. “ It’s business style versus functional style ,” he continued. “ We encourage people to rotate around projects ,” he said noting that Sharon was still working on the mobile team. In terms of the Places product itself, “ right now we’re focused on social value ,” Taylor said. “ Obviously, deals is a big part of the product, but we need to build really valuable social interactions ,” he said. In terms of what’s driving people to use it, it’s simple: the ability to tell friends where you are — and the way they can tag you at a place. With regard to the Questions product, Taylor was a bit more reserved, calling it “ a very different product than most Facebook products .” “ It’s not quite in the state that you want to roll it out fully. We have a lot to do on it ,” he continued. Groups, however, Taylor was much more enthusiastic about. “ Groups are being used a lot ,” he said. Again, one of the big things he cited there is that people can set up Groups on behalf of other people. When I asked if this was helping the product much like picture tagging did early on in Photos, Taylor said it absolutely was. “ It’s been growing really well ,” he said. “ Lists were really about filtering, Groups are about sharing ,” he said also noting that the privacy issue here is interesting. That was a key focus for Groups, making it very easy and obvious to see who exactly you’re sharing what with. I then asked what Taylor thought about the rise of these new mobile photo sharing apps like Instagram and PicPlz. Do these pose some sort of threat to Facebook? “ It’s something we’ve talked about a lot — about what the interaction they’re seeing means ,” Taylor said. “ But we’re really happy that they’re built on top of our graph ,” he continued with a laugh. He also said that he can’t wait to see how those products will evolve, noting that this is the first time we’ve seen a genre arise around a very particular element. He also said that like Flickr and other more established photo services, the majority of pictures coming into Facebook now come from smartphones. So the service has to look at what these smaller players are doing and adapt. Finally, I asked Taylor about the Turkish use of FriendFeed sustaining it against U.S. traffic loses . He said it has been amazing to see it rise there and in a few other countries organically. He also said that before he left Facebook, fellow FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit did a few things to ensure that FriendFeed will be able to run completely autonomously indefinitely. [image: flickr/ scriptingnews ] | |
| Streaming Is Driving New Subscriber Growth At Netflix | Top |
| Netflix is betting its future business on streaming movies and TV shows over the Internet, and so far that bet is paying off nicely. Just last November, it introduced a streaming-only subscription for $7.99 a month, and that helped drive subscriber growth up 63 percent last quarter to end the year with 20 million subscribers. “More than one third of new subscribers are signing up for the pure streaming plan,” Netflix reports in a letter to shareholders ( PDF and embedded below). And it expects that percentage to keep growing. Netflix added 7.7 million net new subscribers total last year, up from 2.9 million in 2009. The growing appeal of streaming should keep driving that number up. And Netflix is spending less to attract new customers. While new subscribers grew 63 percent, Netflix spent 10 percent less on marketing. Its average cost to acquire anew subscriber fell to $11.13 in the quarter, from $19.81 during the September quarter before pure streaming was an option. Also, a lot more people are taking advantage of Netflix’s free one month trial to see if streaming is for them. Nearly 9 percent of subscribers were in free trials during the quarter, up from about 6 percent the quarter before (and 3 percent a year ago). Netflix also addressed the fears it is stirring among some media companies that streaming will compete with cable. But it offers the example of one of its content partners, Starz, to show that streaming does not necessarily have to cannibalize other sources of revenue. It also calls out HBO for not licensing its shows to Netflix. In the letter, Netflix notes: Some content owners fear that licensing to Netflix will undercut other, larger profit streams. The Starz example suggests otherwise. We have carried Starz since October 2008 and we have not licensed HBO. Over that time, Starz' Multichannel Video Programming Distributor (MVPD) subscriber count has grown, and HBO's has not. At a more granular level, the Starz Original "Spartacus" was available at the same time on Netflix as on MVPD, and it was a big success in MVPD viewing, as shown by its Nielsen ratings. Even the DVD box sets have been a great success. So having content on Netflix does not appear to materially harm the revenue of that content on other channels. In other words, the evidence is pretty clear that content that is also licensed to Netflix generates more money for its owners than content that is withheld from Netflix. Stepping back, some consternation about Netflix success is natural. Like the rise of the Fox broadcast network 20 years ago, a new entrant bids up the price of content, and the incumbent aggregators are not pleased. Netflix is good for consumers, good for content producers, and is one more competitor for existing aggregators. Many of the major media companies are part content producer, and part aggregator, which leads to Netflix being a frequent topic of discussion. If Netflix keeps adding new streaming subscribers at the rate it did in the fourth quarter, it will become an even more frequent topic of discussion in both living rooms and media company board rooms. View this document on Scribd CrunchBase Information Netflix Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Sony Unveils The PSP2 ("As Powerful As The PS3″) | Top |
| As previously reported , Sony just unveiled a PSP successor, codenamed "Next Generation Portable", at an event in Tokyo. The biggest bullet point here is that Sony claims the portable system is as powerful as the PS3 , which means it will be supposedly able to produce "PS3-like graphics". Sony did show the hardware up and running. Read the rest on CrunchGear . | |
| Task Management Startup Cohuman Raises $600K | Top |
| Cloud based task management service and Disrupt Startup Alley alumnus Cohuman has raised $600K in additional angel funding. Investors in the round included Diamond II Investments , Jupiter Partners , Stage One Capital and other angels. This is the second round of angel funding Cohuman has received and is added to a $800K raised in the fall of 2009 for a total $1.4 million. On Cohuman people can assign individual tasks and because it is web-based any group of people can collaborate through it. “We really think co-human is a better way to get things done, it really addresses some of the shortcomings of contemporary messaging technologies,” says CEO Matthew Work . In the same organizational management space as Salesforce, Chatter and Basecamp, the web-based Cohuman, whose usership has tripled to over 15,000 users since launching at Disrupt in September, is currently freemium and monetizes with a subscription based “Professional” version. Cohuman is headquartered San Francisco and comprised of 8 people, and while Work doesn’t plan on hiring more staff the company will be using the money to focus on business app integration and mobile moving forward. CrunchBase Information Cohuman Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| IMHO, Imo Is A Pretty Great Way To Chat. Today Brings A New Design And An Exit From Alpha | Top |
| It was almost exactly two years ago that my colleague Robin Wauters first wrote about a service called Imo with the title: IMO.IM Is The Best IM Web Service You’ve Never Heard Of . I’ll be honest, I didn’t listen to him at the time (though, to be fair, I didn’t even work at TechCrunch yet). He followed up a few months later when the service added Facebook chat support. But since then, they sort of dropped off our radar. So it’s time tonight to give them some more love, because the service really is pretty great — and after three years in alpha, they’re finally dropping that label. The idea is super simple: Imo is an IM client that allows you to sign in to many different types of IM accounts at once, all managed through their service. Obviously, there are many services like this out there. But the key to Imo is that it’s fast and easy to use. I mean really easy. All you have to do is enter your user name and passwords for the different services and you’re off and running in a way that’s very seamless. And they’ve just launched a complete redesign of their web experience. It actually makes the service even easier to use. Now Imo on the web sort of looks like a blank canvas just waiting to be filled up with chats. Chats that you can drag and drop to position anywhere in your window on the browser. And like t he new version of Gmail launched today, Imo.im can send you desktop notifications for new chats. And like their mobile clients, you can now send instant voice messages of up to 30 seconds in length as well (another feature that has fascinated me recently ). That’s the other key to Imo.im: their great mobile clients. Whether you have an iPhone, iPad, or Android device, Imo offers a nice, simple way to connect with all your various chat services. Below, find a demo of the iPad app in action. While it may seem a bit odd that the service has been up and running for three years and is just now dropping the alpha label, remember that one of the Imo co-founders is Georges Harik , one of the first 10 employees at Google. He’s learned well. CrunchBase Information imo.im Information provided by CrunchBase | |
CREATE MORE ALERTS:
Auctions - Find out when new auctions are posted
Horoscopes - Receive your daily horoscope
Music - Get the newest Album Releases, Playlists and more
News - Only the news you want, delivered!
Stocks - Stay connected to the market with price quotes and more
Weather - Get today's weather conditions
| You received this email because you subscribed to Yahoo! Alerts. Use this link to unsubscribe from this alert. To change your communications preferences for other Yahoo! business lines, please visit your Marketing Preferences. To learn more about Yahoo!'s use of personal information, including the use of web beacons in HTML-based email, please read our Privacy Policy. Yahoo! is located at 701 First Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA 94089. |
No comments:
Post a Comment