The latest from TechCrunch
- Twitter Close To Acquiring AdGrok
- The Next 6 Months Worth Of Features Are In Facebook's Code Right Now (But We Can't See)
- Twitter Is Launching Its Own Photosharing Service
- Airbnb Has Arrived: Raising Mega-Round at a $1 Billion+ Valuation
- Behind The Scenes: Making Spotify More Convenient Than Piracy
- Users Say They're More Likely To Buy If A Business Answers Their Question On Twitter
| Twitter Close To Acquiring AdGrok | Top |
| We’re hearing from multiple sources that Twitter is in talks to acquire Y Combinator-backed key word bidding platform AdGrok , in a deal that is less than $10 million. It’s still unclear where exactly they are in the closing process or whether this is a tech acquisition or an acqui-hire. AdGrok itself automates the process of bidding on contextual keywords on Google AdWords; Perhaps Twitter could find some use in this for its own Promoted Trends/Tweets? Twitter seems to be in acquisition mode, most recently dropping $40 million on pro-client Tweetdeck. Fun fact about this particular grab: The last person Twitter corporate development executive Jessica Verrilli followed on Twitter was AdGrok co-founder Argyris Zymnis. Co-founder Antonio Garcia-Martinez has yet to return my calls. CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| The Next 6 Months Worth Of Features Are In Facebook's Code Right Now (But We Can't See) | Top |
| A few days ago, Facebook held a tech talk at their headquarters. The topic of the talk was pushing changes — bug fixes, new features, product improvements, etc. Every day, Facebook engineers push hundreds of these; some big, some little. Most of the 600 million-plus users never notice a thing. And apparently, we’re even less likely to notice changes due to a special feature Facebook has. The “Everyone But TechCrunch Can See This” feature. As Facebook engineer Chuck Rossi details around minute 23:00 in the video, Facebook has a tool they call “Gatekeeper” which allows them to be in control of who can see what code live on the service at any given time. As Rossi points out, right now on Facebook.com there is already the code for every major thing Facebook is going to launch in the next six months and beyond! It’s the Gatekeeper which stops us from seeing it. And I do mean “us”. While some of the Gatekeeper parameters are obvious — filter by country, age, data center — one is really interesting. “One of my favorite ones is an ‘everyone except people from TechCrunch can see this’,” Rossi says. He’s serious. What Facebook has done is likely just put all of our personal profiles on a list of people never eligible to see hidden code. Of course, that doesn’t always work . But it’s also the same type of feature that allowed them to “launch” a new faxing service with us, even though no one else could see it. Funny stuff. We appreciate Facebook’s attention to detail in keeping us out of their code. Of course, now they’re really asking for it. Do they really think you can’t make a fake account on Facebook? Sure… Stay tuned for the next six months of features coming from Facebook… The whole talk is excellent and worth watching, we’ve embedded it below. [thanks Almir ] CrunchBase Information Facebook Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Twitter Is Launching Its Own Photosharing Service | Top |
| Twitter has been completely emphatic about where developers should stake a claim, with Twitter Platform Lead Ryan Sarver warning the ecosystem to stay away from building “ client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience.” Well if Sarver stays true to his word the Twitpics and Yfrogs of of the world can just it give up now. According to multiple sources, Twitter is on the verge on announcing its own built in Twitpic competitor. Like tomorrow, if things go according to plan (naturally this post might change that). This shouldn’t really come as a surprise to anyone, as photosharing is the next logical step of Twitter expanding its in app experience. It’s basically grabbing at low hanging fruit. Twitter is flinging money around; It just spent $40 million on power user client Tweetdeck which represents 13% of its userbase. It’s only natural that they would spend more resources on photosharing, especially considering how much money is being poured into the white hot space and that images were the crux of the success of competitor Facebook. I’ve got no details on what exactly the photosharing URL shortener will be if any (Twitphoto.me?) or what the Twitter for Photos product will look like. Just that it’s coming, soon. And if they’re smart they’ll put ads on it. CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Airbnb Has Arrived: Raising Mega-Round at a $1 Billion+ Valuation | Top |
| According to several sources Airbnb is in the process of closing a whopper of a funding round: $100 million or more at a $1 billion-plus valuation. The round is being lead by Andreessen Horowitz , and includes participation from DST , say our sources. That’s a big increase from the company’s last funding round of $7.2 million , which included Sequoia Capital, Greylock, SV Angel, Ashton Kutcher and Youniversity Ventures (Kutcher broke the news that he’s an investor in AirBnB at TechCrunch Disrupt last week). The company, which launched via Y Combinator, has raised just $7.8 million to date. No surprise, it was a hotly contested deal. The service has exploded, growing more than 800% last year and booking 1.6 million night stays in other people’s homes to date. On any given night in New York there are more people staying in homes via Airbnb than there are rooms in the biggest hotel in Manhattan. Airbnb has become the sleeper hit of the startup world. It’s one of those companies plenty of well-heeled investors passed on in the early days, because they thought no one would want to open his or her home to strangers. Out of twenty angels he pitched in 2008, founder Brian Chesky said half didn’t return his emails and most of the others told him it was an awful idea. Even Paul Graham hated it, but he liked Chesky and backed him hoping he’d change the company. TechCrunch’s own hotel expert Paul Carr was a cynic too. Now, the fear of missing another Airbnb is palpable in the Valley, and one of the reasons GetAround became the darling, audience choice and winner of our Disrupt conference this week. Earlier in the week, I sat down with Airbnb founder Brian Chesky to talk about this reversal in fortune and how the business is going, although at the time we hadn’t heard the details of the deal he was busy negotiating. Check it out below. Hi, I'm back stage with Brian Chesky, the founder of Airbnb. You guys have kind of been a sleeper hit. I mean you certainly didn't have the color fanfare when you launched. Nope. Or anything like that. Mike was just back here. He said he thought you were stupid. Paul wrote something nasty about you. There's Ron Konway waving. That they were stupid? Are you live? You are live. Alright, so no one really thought you guys were going to be as big as you have. Absolutely not. And I can tell you, the last couple of days, you guys have been the sort of example everyone keeps bringing up. One of the companies thats in the finals get around. Chris Saka said, "Oh this the Airbnb I could get. I passed on Airbnb. I thought it was stupid. I can't believe I passed on it". I mean the fact that people passed on you is dictating investment decision. It's ridiculous. Because it's seen as such a mistake. That's ridiculous. When I first told my parents. They thought I was insane about this idea. Paul Graham, when we first met him in January 2009, he admitted he thought the idea was terrible. Hm-mm. And Paul Graham only invested in us, when he heard about the Obama O's story. And he figured, well these guys are like really creative, smart entrepreneurs; they'll probably change their idea. That's the only reason he invested in us, is he thought we were going to change ou idea; he hated it. And we met in the Fall of 2008, probably 15 or 20 Angels, and well, probably half of them didn't return my emails and the ones that did, no one wanted to invest in us. Right. It was just something that seemed like obviously a bad idea until one day it seemed like obviously a good idea. And I don't know when that tipped, I think it was just enough people doing it. So what was the insight that you had that other people missed? The insight we had was that we actually did it. The way this started is that I moved,--Joe, my co-founder, was living in San Francisco, and I was living in Los Angeles. I came up to San Francisco. We had to figure out a way to make rent. This international design conference is coming to San Francisco, all the hotels are sold out. We were trying to figure out, how are we going to make rent? And Joe had some air beds in his closet. We pulled the air beds, and we decided we're going to create an "airbed and breakfast" one weekend, and it was only meant to make our rent. We ended up hosting three people. We made a bunch of money, and so I think the insight we gained was, we by accident, I guess you could say, did it ourselves, had an amazing experience. And by then we realized, this is awesome, one day people all over the world are going to do this. I don't think we had the vision that people were going to be renting all the spaces and renting? We originally envisioned, like, kind of air beds, and like kind of budget. I was a little different vision. Right. Well, it's fascinating because it tips so quickly, and usually when someone has this kind of story it takes a long time. It's also interesting because, you know, especially in the 90s when I first moved into Silicon Valley, founders would say exactly what you said. They have this story of, like, "Oh, you know, I did this, and then I saw these keys, and I realized | |
| Behind The Scenes: Making Spotify More Convenient Than Piracy | Top |
| If you’re in the United States, you’re probably tired of hearing about Spotify , the on-demand music service that lets you to listen to any of 13 million tracks as often as you’d like on both your PC and mobile phone. The service still hasn’t managed to close deals with the major music labels over here, but it has developed quite a following in Europe, with over 10 million users and 1 million paid subscribers. And when it finally does come stateside it might turn into an even bigger hit. And it all started with one main business idea: make a music service that’s more convenient than piracy. That’s one of the highlights from a presentation given by Spotify engineer Gunnar Kreitz at KTH Royal Institute of Technology last month (many of Spotify’s engineers came from KTH). Unfortunately I’m not seeing a recording of the presentation anywhere online, but Kreitz has posted the slides to his website, which you can find embedded below. The slides outline some of the key technical attributes that make Spotify what it is, many of which revolve around one key factor: speed. According to the slides, Spotify has a median playback latency of only 265 ms, which Kreitz says “feels immediate” and avoids Spotify’s forbidden word, “Buffering”. Only 1% of songs streamed have buffering issues. In other words, the Spotify player is every bit as fast and reliable as, say, iTunes, and it’s a hell of a lot faster than finding the latest album release on BitTorrent. Here are some of the interesting datapoints from the presentation: Development is done in three week sprints, called the ‘scrum methodology’ Spotify uses a proprietary protocol that was designed for on-demand streaming, with most streams at Ogg Vorbis q5 @ 160kbps While Spotify streams music on demand, caching is very important. The player caches your most-recently listened to tracks, and a lot of them: it uses 10% of your disk space by default (you can adjust that figure). Most Spotify users have a lot of data cached, with 56% over 5GB. And the strategy works: over 50% of data is served from the local cache, which saves a lot of bandwidth When you listen to a song, the first ‘piece’ is immediately streamed from Spotify servers, and the player switches to P2P whenever possible (if P2P isn’t working, it will switch back to Spotify’s central servers). P2P makes it easier for Spotify to scale, and leads to them needing fewer servers. It can also provide better uptime. Mobile clients, as you’d expect, aren’t participating in P2P streaming. View this document on Scribd CrunchBase Information Spotify Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Users Say They're More Likely To Buy If A Business Answers Their Question On Twitter | Top |
| Currently I am not in Cancun . The reason I am not in Cancun is out of my control (an over three hour Virgin delay on the tarmac at JFK caused me to miss my connecting USAirways flight at SFO). I spent a good part of those three plus plane-trapped hours bitching on Twitter, asking both the @VirginAmerica and @USAirways Twitter accounts for guidance, because calling their respective 800 numbers either put me on hold or wouldn’t go through. Guess which Twitter account responded? Guess which one I’ll consider purchasing tickets from again. And according to a recent survey of 2049 Twitter users completed by Twitter Q&A search service inboxQ, I am not alone: 64% of the inboxQ survey respondents were more likely to make a purchase from a business account that answered their questions on Twitter, 24% were just as likely and only 12% were less likely. Another added benefit of answering user questions on Twitter (ARE YOU LISTENING @USAIRWAYS ?) is that users are more likely to follow a business that answers their questions, at 59% versus 29% who are just as likely and 12% who are less likely. The inboxQ survey results are filled with other lovely “well duh” info nuggets like how users with high follower accounts are more likely to receive answers to their questions, at 41% respondents with more than 100 followers receiving an answer from a business versus 21% with less than 100 followers (Maybe brands don’t think its worth the effort? Or maybe the questions from low volume accounts get lost in whatever social media monitoring service businesses are using?). In any case, pro tip: If you’re a business serious about user engagement on Twitter, go out of your way to sincerely answer sincere questions from users, no matter how many followers they have. They might just end up buying something. Or not hating you . @bmull Brenden Mulligan I specifically this (6 hour) @ usairways flight because they advertised it had wifi. But it doesn't. Boarding for my last @ usairways flight! about 23 hours ago via Twitter for iPhone Reply Retweet Favorite CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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