Monday, January 3, 2011

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Quora Fact-Checks Quora On User Milestone Top
Earlier today, Quora got a nice write-up on Fast Company . The article talks about all the buzz the Q&A startup has been getting (something we’re well aware of ). But at the bottom of the post, something interesting happened. “ Despite the company's reported $86 million valuation, and over 500,000 registered users as of today ,” Fast Company wrote, citing a Quora thread that noted that the profile image numbers had passed 500,000. Obviously, that’s a nice milestone, and another Quora thread popped up to celebrate it. The only problem? Quora hasn’t actually hit that milestone yet. How do I know? Quora, of course. Within a half hour of the 500K congratulations post going up on Quora, it was being updated in realtime describing why the numbers Fast Company was citing were wrong. Specifically, investor Matt Cohler cited co-founder Charlie Cheever saying, “ The numbers below are incorrect. See Charlie’s comments in the notes on this page.” Cheever had actually noted that back in early November that the methodology people were using to calculate user numbers was no longer correct. This is a similar issue that has occurred with Twitter, Foursquare, and others in the past. Of course, if Fast Company had just been reading TechCrunch in December, they would have known this. Seemingly, the only answer you can’t get on Quora is how many users are actually on Quora. We also went the old school route and reached out to Cheever just to clarify. “ That number is wrong. I just sent a note to the author of that piece letting her know that ,” he writes. “ I also tried to make it more clear on that question that the methodology described there is faulty ,” he continues. So all at once you can see both one potential problem and also the actual potential of Quora. There’s so much information flowing through the system, that it’s getting hard for all of it to be monitored even if it has already been fact-checked. But when something is wrong, it gets corrected in minutes before your very eyes. Again, this is reminiscent of Twitter and blogging before that. Information appears to be more like living organisms than static words on a page. So how many users does Quora actually have? Since Quora is no help there, we’ll do the old school way: deduction. If you believe that Quora changed the way they handle those IDs sometime in October, it seems likely that they have something over 200,000 but less than 500,000 users now. If my friend requests (and those of several others I’ve talked to) are any indication over the past few weeks, it has got to be inching up towards the latter. CrunchBase Information Quora Information provided by CrunchBase
 
TechCrunch 2010 In Review (Care Of WordPress) Top
The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health: The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow. Crunchy numbers The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 240,000,000 times in 2010. If it were an exhibit at The Louvre Museum, it would take 10,306 days for that many people to see it. In 2010, there were 9,624 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 27,041 posts. The busiest day of the year was August 11th with 1,950,634 views. The most popular post that day was Confirmed: HOPA Dry Erase Girl Is A Hoax, Identity Revealed . Where did they come from? The top referring sites in 2010 were twitter.com , digg.com , Google Reader , news.ycombinator.com , and techmeme.com . Some visitors came searching, mostly for techcrunch , tech crunch , best iphone apps , htc evo , and youtube video downloader . Attractions in 2010 These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010. 1 Confirmed: HOPA Dry Erase Girl Is A Hoax, Identity Revealed August 2010 231 comments and 38 Likes on WordPress.com 2 YouTube Video Download Tool November 2006 155 comments 3 Search March 2010 4 The 35 Best iPhone Apps Of The Year (So Far) August 2009 272 comments 5 Firefox Just Perfected Tabbed Browsing. It’s Like Apple’s Expose Plus Spaces For The Web July 2010 285 comments and 13 Likes on WordPress.com
 
WITN: Book Publishing Has A Better Future Than Music and Movies (Thinks One Of Us) Top
Aaaand… we’re back. Fresh from our Christmas and New Year break and ready to talk about the Most Important Stories Outside of Silicon Valley. Stories like, uh, Kevin Rose’s new email newsletter . But, yeah ok, while the jumping off point might be a stretch, we soon get to the meat of this week’s episode: whether we’re seeing a move from fame for fame’s sake to a more targeted, troll free kind of media. And also whether mobile platforms are going to prove to the saviour of the content industry. Ohh, it’s good to be back. Video below.
 
Paul Buchheit Looks Back At His First Years As An Angel Investor Top
If you follow technology news, Paul Buchheit is a name that seems to pop up all the time. Among other things, he invented Gmail, built the first prototype for AdSense, coined Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto, cofounded FriendFeed (which was acquired by Facebook), and recently became a partner at Y Combinator . Oh, and he’s also a prominent angel investor, with stakes in dozens of startups. Today, Buchheit has posted a retrospective on his first three years as an angel investor. Between 2006 and 2008 Buchheit invested a total of $1.21 million across 32 companies. He writes that half of those were either acquired or dead, and that between all of the acquisitions he’s netted a 10% gain. Of course, many of the companies that haven’t been acquired, like Weebly and Meraki, are sure to bring him much more down the road, so he’s in good shape. His post is worth reading in its entirety , and it shows that even the smartest investors (Buchheit may be relatively new to the investing game, but he’s certainly one of the smartest) are bound to make missteps. One of the more amusing passages: Of the current acquisitions, only two have yielded a greater than 10x return: Heroku and Mint. Unfortunately they were also two of the smaller investments, proving that I don’t know what I’m doing, or at least showing that I need to make a point of investing more money into the best companies (Mint was oversubscribed, but I don’t remember why I didn’t put more into Heroku). Buchheit also describes the improving quality of Y Combinator companies — as a partner at YC he’s obviously biased, but it’s a trend that I’ve observed too (as have many investors and other reporters).  And for those of you ready to pull out your pocketbooks, Buchheit closes out his post with two key pieces of advice: 1) Assume you’ll lose your money and 2) Plan on investing in a large number of companies. CrunchBase Information Paul Buchheit Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Reddit Has Banner Year, Boasts 232% Traffic Growth Top
Social news site  Reddit has just posted some interesting statistics on a remarkable 2010 filled with traffic spikes and user engagement growth. Most notable? The jump in pageviews from 250 million in January of 2010 to 829 million in December of 2010, a 232% growth. Reddit has increasingly become a favorite haunt of many in the social media community, especially  since competitor Digg’s v4 redesign underwhelmed both its casual and core users leading to an exodus in September . Digg which was worth $170 million earlier in the year , is now valued at just $102 million. The site still has more monthly unique visits than Reddit, according to Comscore. Says power Digger and active Reddit user Victor Barrera , “I think Reddit’s growth can be atrributed to a couple main factors: Digg’s decline and a multitude of improvements and upgrades that really played into the scalability of their platform.” It’s no surprise that Reddit’s emphasis on a steadily increasing its userbase is now reflected in increased traffic and site time per visit (by 2 minutes and 40 seconds). But can the company sustain these monumental numbers in 2011, with no major competitor downfall in site? Barrera thinks so, “I think at the moment that the damage to Digg and the ensuing benefits for Reddit are pretty much near the end of that road. Reddit, in a way, is kind of in the driver’s seat. Uptime, scalability, and improving their platform from a technology perspective are what they’re trying to focus on the most. It’s a very “if you build it they will come” kind of thing.” CrunchBase Information Reddit Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Microsoft Corp Dev Exec Bails, Raises Angel Round For Hot Stealth Startup Top
Microsoft Senior Director of Corporate Strategy and Acquisitions Fritz Lanman quit his job a few weeks ago. I heard rumblings about this and assumed he’d be focusing an angel investing full time – for the last couple of years he’s done it as a part time hobby. But nope, that’s not what he’s doing. He’s started a new company that’s creating a “social utility” mobile application called 5Star. And he’s raised somewhere around $1 million in an angel round from first tier angel investors, says a source. That’s all we know right now. Will post details as we get them, or when Fritz starts answering my phone calls again. CrunchBase Information Fritz Lanman Information provided by CrunchBase
 
OK, "Pivot" Is Officially Over-Used Top
Maybe you all saw this, but I’m catching up from vacation. It seems even the venerable, old-school New Yorker is mocking the over-use of the word “pivot.” And they are doing it in old-school cartoon form, no less. (As pointed out by Eric Ries here .) If you can’t read it below the caption says, “I’m not leaving you. I’m pivoting to another man.” Brilliant. For the good of the industry, I think TechCrunch should implement some sort of online “swear jar” for press releases, pitches and Tweets containing the word “pivot.” (Apologies to Tagged. I realize the irony of this post coming directly after this one . The first step is admitting even we have a problem…)
 
How A Startup Pivots: The Tagged Story (So Far) Top
Editor’s Note: This a guest post by  Greg Tseng , who co-founded Tagged in October 2004 and has served as Chief Executive Officer since its inception. He has been a driving force in creating Tagged.com with his partner, co-founder and long-time friend, Johann Schleier-Smith. In September, I gave a candid update on Tagged in a video interview with Michael Arrington , discussing how we’d launched one of the original social networks in 2004 and competed for three years but did not win. How in 2007 we made the decision to differentiate by pivoting to social discovery, and how since then we’ve built a great product for meeting new people, become a profitable business and now operate a leading site for discovering new relationships. Since September, many people have asked for a more detailed insider’s look at how a company like ours was able to pivot. Here it is. First, some context. We’re not at all unique. Many successful startups go through some form of pivot, changing their direction when their first idea was not successful. PayPal was beaming money between Palm Pilots . YouTube was a video dating site . Twitter was group SMS , which came out of a struggling Odeo. Pandora started as a B2B music recommendation service . Groupon started as The Point, serving collective political action . The list goes on. Of course, there are some notable exceptions, such as Amazon, eBay, LinkedIn, Facebook and Yelp, which brings up an important distinction between pivots and merely expanding a core business: Amazon going from books to other categories and Facebook going from college students to open registration. Tagged also first attempted an expansion and then a pivot. The Tagged Story I have always been interested in how people connect online—BBS’s, USENET, SixDegrees, eGroups, chat rooms, forums, and other methods—so I was extremely compelled when I first saw Friendster in January 2003. My best friend, Johann Schleier-Smith and I were running a different company at the time. However, we were so drawn that we decided to help start hi5.com as an international social networking site and co-found Tagged for U.S. teens . Facebook had started in February 2004 just for Harvard ( I have user id 3607 ) and U.S. colleges, and MySpace had launched in September 2003. We started Tagged in October 2004 and used word of mouth and viral marketing to quickly attract about 10 percent of the 25 million U.S. teens. But we were late. By July 2005, nine months after our launch, MySpace had already been sold to News Corp. and kept growing. Facebook had entered the market with its own high school product. By 2006, we were not winning the U.S. teen market, and in October we decided to expand globally and to ages 13 and up—just as Facebook made a similar move. This expanded our market from about 25 million to 1 billion people online—and launched us into the social networking battle with Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, hi5, Friendster, Orkut and others. We got lift in 2007, registering more users than any other site at one point, but the engagement wasn’t strong. A battle for new features was waged, and Facebook launched the brilliant News Feed. Bebo and hi5 followed with their own feeds, and all three sites saw strong engagement gains. Our feed, called What’s New, produced no gain whatsoever. By late 2007, our traffic was flat while others were growing. We weren’t in the top 5 social networks and faced being pushed out of the top 10. We had to acknowledge we’d lost the particular social networking battle we were fighting. We had to rethink and find a different path. We took a step back and conducted a series of user polls and surveys. We also dug deep into our own stats to find answers to fundamental questions: Who were our users? What were they doing on Tagged? What was Tagged to them? The results were astounding: What is your main social site? 49.2% Tagged 36.8% MySpace 4.7% Facebook 2.3% Black Planet 1.6% Bebo 1.2% hi5 4.3% Other Why do you use Tagged? 51.2% to meet new people online 24.5% to have something to do 11.4% to keep up with online friends 8.2% to keep up with real-life friends 4.7% to express myself Who are your friends on Tagged? 75.2% people I met on Tagged 24.8% people I know in real life This was an “ah ha” moment for us! People weren’t using our site to stay in touch with their friends. They were using it to meet new people. Tagged isn’t social networking, it is social discovery. How did this happen? Perhaps because our Browse and Online Now features were easier to use than searching the site, and we didn’t have an established “network” concept. Perhaps because we had display names, not real names, and we showed ages by default. On Facebook, real names are used but not ages, and you only search for people you may already know. Facebook also goes to great lengths to prevent online-formed relationships that may “pollute” the social graph. So it may just be that one set of features encouraged staying in touch with existing friends, while the other encouraged meeting new friends. In late 2007, with Facebook having been set at a $15 billion valuation, and with MySpace, hi5 and Bebo all continuing to grow, we executed our pivot, and we’ve spent the last three years building a clearly differentiated business. We improved the UI and performance of our Browse and Search. We built and optimized a dating feature called Meet Me. We built a Groups feature for common interests. We built social games, the most popular is Pets, which is all about meeting people. We even re-architected our What’s New feed to focus on meeting people by adding an “Everyone” tab, where you can see the updates and photos from anyone on Tagged, subject to your filters. All these features are backed by powerful recommendation algorithms. On Facebook you just search an address book or otherwise find people you already know. On Tagged, we have to decide which 100 of 100 million users to recommend to you—it’s a different and much harder problem. This pivot to social discovery has led to tremendous growth. Today we have over 100 million registered users with more than 20 million monthly unique visitors. Collectively, they form over 100 million new connections and consume over 5 billion pageviews per month. We achieved full-year profitability in 2008, did over $30 million in 2010 revenue, and we are targeting over $50 million for 2011. Even though we’re in a different space, Hitwise ranked us as the third largest social network in the U.S. behind Facebook and MySpace. In Q1 of 2010, comScore ranked us as a top 10 display advertising publisher in the U.S. And in October 2010, we made the Inc. 500 list of fastest growing companies. This growth was only possible by the pivot and thank goodness we did it. Back in 2007 social networking was still up for grabs but today Facebook is the undisputed king, and most others that kept fighting have suffered declines or have died off. Meanwhile, meeting and socializing with new people remains a core human need that’s been sorely neglected online so I’m very excited by our new direction. Our mission is “to enable anyone to meet and socialize with new people” and our team works hard every day towards achieving it. Want to join us? :) Postscript People have asked me how I feel about not winning social networking now that Facebook is serving over 500 million active users and is the largest site in the world by usage. My reply is this: I first met Zuck, Dustin, and Parker in 2004, and it has been awesome watching a Harvard dorm room business ( hey I once started one ) become a “once in a decade” company up there with Microsoft and Google. I have read about those, but this one I actually got to watch. Facebook never had to pivot, and while there is always some element of luck, from what I can tell, Facebook’s success is almost all due to superior execution, not resting on laurels, and the willingness to continually push the envelope toward achieving their mission. Their success is 100 percent deserved. I certainly wish Tagged had become the king of social networking, but at least we played a hand (or two, if you include hi5). And only by playing did we find the winning direction for Tagged that I’m very passionate about. Still, if we ever see a pivot that could lead to the next “once in a decade” company, then guess what? We’ll pivot again.   CrunchBase Information Greg Tseng Tagged Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Need More Proof Quora Is "Blowing Up"? Meet The Quora Button Top
While co-founders Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever are famously quiet about Quora’s user and traffic numbers, blogger Semil Shah has discovered something even more indicative of the site’s entrance into A-List status — A Quora button right along side that off Facebook and Twitter on startup BankSimple ‘s website. A sign of an impending Twitter moment ? Says Shah, “As much as older brands may resist, the rising tide behind Quora’s popularity will reward those businesses who choose to embrace this trend rather than learn lessons the hard way, too late.” If you’re on Quora and have signed up for email alerts, you probably noticed a massive influx of “follow” emails over the past two weeks,  including some unlikely ones from top brands . This userbase expanision is hard to ignore, culminating in Quora surpassing 25K daily unique visitors during the last week of December, according to Google Trends. Some tech pundits are blaming the notorious Scoble Effect for the explosive growth, but Quora has seen this kind of spike before (sans Scoble) last year right around Thanksgiving, when just like Christmas, people have more free time to futz around on the Internet. While Cheever admitted in a Quora thread that “a number of things going on at the same time, including these blog posts” are responsible for the growth, D’Angelo tells TechCrunch that the Google Trends numbers are “off” and that this oft-referenced user chart is also inaccurate. Perhaps the existence of bootleg “Follow me on Quora” buttons are more evidence than any analytics of the site’s having hit already mainstream? When asked whether if they plan on making official Quora buttons or adding even more social “Tweet this question” type features anytime soon, D’Angelo stated, “We haven’t prioritized that use case yet. we have our hands full just keeping up with growth.” Just like in the case of the Quora Chrome extension , hardcore Quora fans have come to the rescue. Quora uers who want to stay ahead of the curve, can download an unofficial button here. Update: Need even more proof Quora is “like Twitter in 2008″ ? It’s down. CrunchBase Information Quora Information provided by CrunchBase
 
J.P. Morgan: Global E-Commerce Revenue To Grow By 19 Percent In 2011 To $680B Top
With e-commerce spending performing well over the past holiday season, retailers are hoping this trend will continue into 2011. J.P. Morgan senior analyst Imran Kahn has released his annual report forecasting trends for the New Year that includes a number of positive projections for the e-commerce industry. The report forecasts that e-commerce revenue will grow to $680 billion worldwide up 18.9 percent from 2010 revenue. Online retail commerce in the U.S. alone will grow 13.2 percent to $187 billion. J.P. Morgan anticipates that global e-commerce revenue will hit a whopping $963 billion by 2013. The number of people who shop online keeps increasing, with 38 percent buying at least once per month. And the percentage of people who don’t shop online declined to 12 percent in 2010 from 20 percent in 2007. Higher income consumers shop online the most often, with 34 percent of those making $100,000 or more shopping online at least three times per month. While e-commerce spending may be growing, Kahn reports that the pace at which retail is moving online is less rapid than the online advertising space (See chart below). As of 2009, e-commerce was only 3.9 percent of all U.S. retail, however; online advertising represented 13.7 percent of all U.S. advertising. The report also highlights other unsurprising trends. For example, Amazon continues to gain market share, as smaller players have trouble competing with the e-commerce giant. Kahn writes that the growth in mobile commerce could negatively effect brick and mortar stores and that one potential weakness in e-retail growth is the possibility of an internet sales tax.
 
Survey Says: The iPad Is Not A Kindle Killer Top
While plenty of people predicted that the iPad would kill the Kindle when it first came out ( including us ), that turned out to be wrong. Very wrong. The Kindle went on to become the best selling product in Amazon’s history over the holidays, selling an estimated 8 million units last year. The Kindle is a very different device. In fact, in a recent survey of about 1,000 consumers by JP Morgan’s Internet team, 40 percent of iPad owners also own a Kindle. That sounds a little high to me, although it does describe everyone I know who owns an iPad. According to the same survey, another 23 percent of iPad owners plan on buying a Kindle in the next 12 months. The Kindle appeals to heavy readers. Bookworms are a niche audience, but a lucrative one. About half of the people surveyed read between zero and ten books a year. But 16 percent read more than 25 books a year. The big takeaway here is that the iPad and the Kindle are perceived as different types of products, and rightly so. Amazon has done a good job marketing the Kindle as an ebook designed specifically for book lovers, and at $139 for the lowest-priced Kindle it is seen as a different class of device than the $499 iPad. (It also doesn’t hurt than you can use the iPad as a Kindle reading device, removing the need for consumers to make an either-or decision). Amazon’s aggressive Kindle advertising is also paying off. The Kindle has 76 percent brand awareness, which is almost up there with the iPad’s 84 percent. And that is much better than its direct ebook competitor, the Nook, which has 45 percent. And 28 percent of respondents say they either own or plan to buy a Kindle in the next 12 months, compared to 7 percent in July, 2009. CrunchBase Information Amazon Kindle iPad Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Digg Founder Kevin Rose Launches Private Newsletter Called Foundation Top
I bet you didn’t know that Twitter was almost named Jittter or Twitch. Well, now you will. Last year Digg founder Kevin Rose was mulling over a new video show called fforward . Fforward never launched, but the idea did change into something else. Today Rose is launching Foundat.io/n , a private monthly newsletter where subscribers pay $3.99/month. The highlight will be an included video interview, product review, rant, etc. Each video will be 20-30 minutes in length and subscribers will get first access. A week after subscribers get the videos they’ll become available on Revision3 for free. Rose is using TinyLetter , which we wrote about late last year, to host his newsletter. Rose says he was inspired to create Foundation by Dave Morin when he read this post . The first Foundation video is being released today and includes a FAQ email and a video interview with Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey . He talks candidly about the early days of the company, including how they finally settled on the name Twitter. And also on how “following” someone was almost called “worshiping” them. The FAQ and video are below. Hello all, Kevin Rose here. Thanks again for subscribing to my fforward newsletter.. I’m writing you because I have some exciting news! I’m launching a new podcast and private newsletter today, which is now called “Foundation” (formerly “fforward”). What is Foundation? Foundation is a monthly private email newsletter that features video interviews, product reviews, rants, and early access to pre-launched websites. How do I get access? Foundation videos will always be free of charge and available on Revision3.com, iTunes, my blog (kevinrose.com), and tweeted out (@kevinrose / @foundat_ion). That said, for newsletter subscribers ($3.99 per month), you’ll receive the videos without ads a week before everyone else, along w/product reviews, rants, rumors, and early access to pre-launched websites. To signup for the private newsletter visit: http://foundat.io/n How can I watch the first episode? Right here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQy_HFHOZug Why are you charging? I’m spending money on equipment, travel, and editing. As you’ll see in episode 1, quality is very important to me, and I want to take the extra time and deliver the best experience possible, without ads in the video. That said, if you can’t afford the subscription, the videos will be released to the general public one week after it’s released to newsletter subscribers. What else do I get as a newsletter subscriber? I plan on releasing rants, product reviews, rumors, and occasionally sending out early access to pre-launched websites. What happens to fforward newsletter that I’m subscribed to? I’m deleted this list, this is the last email you’ll receive from your fforward subscription. To sign-up for the Foundation newsletter visit: http://foundat.io/n Thanks all, and I hope you enjoy the newsletter/videos! Kevin
 
BitTorrent Hits 100M Active Monthly Users, 400K Client Downloads Per Day Top
BitTorrent seems to be growing like a weed – the company just announced that it’s hit 100 million monthly users of its software, the BitTorrent Mainline client and µTorrent . That’s up from 80 million monthly users most recently. The company also revealed that it has over 20 million daily active users, over 400,000 daily client downloads, and uses are checking in to the clients from over 220 countries every day. Put simply, BitTorrent’s clients make easy for users to downloads large files online. Using the BitTorrent protocol, files are distributed in small pieces from peer-to-peer without the need for centralized data centers. These files are downloaded from many different origins in pieces and are also uploaded in pieces at the same time to other consumers, which means that the more people who are downloading a file, the more who are also concurrently uploading it to others, so availability increases as demand increases. BitTorrent recently released its annual list of the most popular searches on KickassTorrents; with Inception taking the top spot. CrunchBase Information BitTorrent Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Facebook Now Worth More Than Yahoo And eBay Top
Facebook’s latest round of financing from Goldman Sachs at a $50 billion valuation , which is about the same valuation its shares are trading on SecondMarket , clearly puts it in the pantheon of the most valuable Internet companies. At $50 billion, Facebook is now worth more than Yahoo (which has a $22 billion market cap) and eBay ($37 billion), and almost worth more than both of them combined—and that is before it has even gone public. On the valuation scale of publicly traded Internet companies, however, it is still smaller than Amazon ($83 billion) and Google ($193 billion). Facebook passed Yahoo in implied valuation last summer. And that feels about right. But is Facebook actually worth $50 billion? Its revenues for 2010 are rumored to be around $2 billion, which gives it a multiple of 25 times revenues. Google, in contrast, is trading at about 9 times estimated 2010 revenues. Of course, Facebook is growing much faster. And what really matters is profits. Facebook is believed to be profitable, but nobody really knows how profitable and there is still a sense that it hasn’t quite perfected its monetization model for social ads. If anything, Facebook’s desire to push of an IPO as long as possible buys it more time to figure out its business model. Right now, it is just raking in cash based on the fact that 1 in 4 pageviews in the U.S. are on Facebook. It is a volume game, not a quality ad targeting game (yet). And look at Groupon, which is now valued at about $5 billion with probably half the revenues of Facebook and extremely healthy margins. They are very different businesses with different longterm prospects, but why is one worth ten times more than the other? Something is out of whack. Maybe both are overvalued. Remember also that private valuations are based on what a handful of wealthy investors are willing to pay—in this case Goldman Sachs, which has other motives as well. By plowing in money now, it moves to the front of the line to manage an eventual IPO. And it has the option to sell a portion of its stake to DST, as well as to sell $1.5 billion worth of shares to Goldman clients through a “special purpose vehicle” designed to skirt the SEC’s 500-shareholder rule, which is when public-level financial disclosure requirements normally kick in. At $50 billion, though, Facebook is going to have to come out with the biggest IPO in history to justify the current frenzy of private investment. Google’s initial market cap was only half that amount. CrunchBase Information Facebook Google Yahoo! Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Compete Says Bing's Combined U.S. Market Share Rose To 29% Last November Top
A couple of weeks ago, comScore came out with a report that said Microsoft’s Bing had reached an all-time high market share of 11.8% in November 2010. According to rival Compete , however, Bing’s market share is actually much larger than that . Based on search data from its panel of more than two million US-based internet users, the Kantar Media company says Bing-powered search engines as a whole grew 4.3 percent month-over-month in query volume, driving Bing’s total market share up by 1 percentage point. Bing (‘MSFT’) and Yahoo’s search products (which are powered by Bing these days) had 14.4% and 14.6% market share, respectively, which means the combined market share of the search engines rose to a healthy 29% in November 2010, according to Compete’s search data. Bing.com also saw the highest growth in the number of unique visitors, with a month-over-month increase of 7.4 percent (Yahoo’s number of UVs actually declined .3 percent). In November 2009, Bing’s market share was just over 10%, according to Compete. Both ASK and AOL’s share remained flat from October 2010 to November 2010, which means there’s only one search engine whose market share effectively declined last November: Google ‘s. According to Compete, Google has seen its query volume decline for the second month in a row now, with a recent 1.1 percent month-over-month drop. Compete registered 66.4% market share for the search engine, down a noteworthy 7 percentage points compared to November 2009. Excuse the blurry screenshot, but this was the best I could do ( see source image ). CrunchBase Information Bing Google Search Compete Information provided by CrunchBase
 
[x+1] Raises $10 Million From Intel Capital For Online Targeting Platform Top
The impossibly named [x+1] , which specializes in online targeting technology , has raised $10 million in a Series B round led by Intel Capital . Existing investors Advanced Technology Ventures, Blue Chip Venture Company and Hudson Venture Partners also participated. The additional capital will serve to promote adoption of the startup’s media software services and to expand its international reach. [x+1] provides a so-called “end-to-end Digital Marketing Hub” for advertisers and agencies to optimize engagement rates and lift conversion in both media and on websites. Its (patented) technology essentially enables delivery of the right ad and content to the right person at the right time. [x+1] has been around since 1999 and is based in New York. The company has raised $28 million in funding to date. CrunchBase Information Information provided by CrunchBase ,Intel Capital”]
 
Will CityVille Be First To Blow Past 100 Million Monthly Active Users? Top
Zynga launched CityVille on Facebook just over a month ago, and according to the application page there are now over 84,222,766 users actively playing the game. To put that in perspective, there are about 58 million monthly active users for FarmVille , Zynga’s other hit game. CityVille has thus become the largest app ever on the Facebook platform, by a significant margin. The game attracted nearly 2 million new players today alone, and almost 22 million over the past 7 days. Just look at that nice little curve below, courtesy of AppData . As Inside Social Games points out, FarmVille logged 83.76 million players in March 2010, an all-time high for any app on the platform at the time (and that was when the rules were slightly different). Consider that record shattered now. ISG also forecasts 125 million monthly active users for CityVille down the line. Though growth is bound to level off at some point in the near future, that’s actually a relatively conservative prediction in my book. Looking at the numbers, it appears that CityVille will become the first app/game to surge past 100 million active monthly users within the next two weeks or so. CrunchBase Information Zynga Information provided by CrunchBase
 

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