Friday, August 3, 2012

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Facebook's Big Challenge: Building A Stable Platform For Developers While Maintaining User Experience Top
Screen shot 2012-08-03 at 3.28.39 PMToday at The TC CrunchUp at the Fox Theater in Redwood City, a group of founders and entrepreneurs took the stage to talk about the future of Facebook's platform, where it's been and where it's going as a result. Although the company's stock has been limping of late, Facebook continues to be impossible to ignore -- by the end of June, for example, the platform was seeing 955 million monthly active users, with 81 percent of those coming from outside the U.S., and more than 230 million people playing games on Facebook.com every month. Although it may seem like Facebook has plenty on their plate in terms of stock downturns, ad monetization strategies and more, Facebook Director of Product Management Doug Purdy said that a big challenge facing Facebook today is building a solid and stable platform for third-party developers via its APIs.
 
Peter Deng On How Facebook Develops Mobile Apps Top
peterdeng.fbPeter Deng of Facebook said on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt today that the company's mission is now focused on mobile. There is no singular team that is focused on mobile, said Deng, Facebook's director of product development. Instead, each group, be it the messaging or location teams, are thinking about mobile development.
 
Lover.ly Gets To Know Users, Vendors Better With New Features: My Style And My Portfolios Top
photo (9)In the newly crowded wedding space, Lover.ly has found a way to not only make money but also connect brides and grooms with the best possible vendors for their wedding. If you have yet to dabble on the platform, it's much like a Pinterest for brides, offering a curated imagery-based interface to market wedding bloggers and vendors while helping brides plan for the big day. But founder Kellee Khalil had a broader vision for the startup: to become a bride's one-stop recommendation platform. And that's just what Lover.ly has done. The platform just got a brand new feature called My Style, which takes into account all of the user's "loved" and "bundled" items to recommend more excellent products, ideas, venues, etc.
 
230 Million People Played Games On Facebook.com In The Last 30 Days Top
crunchup-1-3Doug Purdy, Facebook's Director of Developer Products, just announced that 230 million people played games on Facebook.com in the past 30 days and that 8 of the 10 top grossing iPhone apps are integrated with Facebook. This is an interesting bit of news when thinking about actual user interaction with the service and what third party developers could expect to see when building for the platform.
 
Zynga VP Sean Kelly: Zynga Will Make Back The Money It Spent Acquiring OMGPOP Top
crunchup-2Peter Deng was joined on our Facebook Ecosystem CrunchUp stage by Zynga product development VP Sean Kelly, Bump CEO David Lieb, and Xyologic co-founder Matthaus Krzykowski to tackle the prospect of creating and nurturing "modern" mobile applications. One of the juicier tidbits that came to light during the panel came courtesy of Zynga's Kelly, who noted he believed that the company would make its money back on its multi-million dollar OMGPOP acquisition. "It's been a good contributor to our numbers," Kelly said to moderator Kim-Mai Cutler.
 
Another Round Of Google Shutdowns: Google Apps For Teams, Google Listen & Google Video For Business Top
GoogleAxeGoogle just announced yet another batch of services it plans to discontinue in the near future. Most of these are relatively obscure products that probably didn't have a large amount of traction. In this round, Google is shutting down three products, as well as a number of company blogs that had become redundant or just weren't updated very frequently. The products include Google Apps for Teams, Google Listen and Google Video For Business.
 
Google Ventures-Backed MediaSpike Brings Product Sponsorships Into Social Games Top
mediaspike logoBlake Commagere, who's probably best known for building early, popular Facebook apps like Zombies and Vampires (hey, remember those?), has started a new company called MediaSpike to tackle one of the big problems he faced as a developer: Integrating sponsored product placements into the games. Commagere says those placements were one of the most effective and popular ways to monetize — in fact, when some of those campaigns ended and the sponsored content disappeared, "Users would actually complain." On the other hand, he says that managing the process was "incredibly difficult." Without any tools to help with the process, everything took a lot of time, whether it was determining where the sponsorship would appear, creating the media assets (i.e., the art for the sponsored product), and then providing all the data that the advertisers wanted. Then, when the next campaign came around, he'd have to start from scratch and do it all again.
 
Facebook Doubles Release Speed, Will Roll New Code Twice A Day Top
418740_10151076511697200_122890827_nFacebook announced in a blog post today that they are doubling the site's release speed, rolling Facebook onto new code twice per day. "Last week, in conjunction with the opening of our engineering office in London, we decided to double the release speed of facebook.com and indeed "ship often," release engineering manager Chuck Rossi writes.
 
VP Mike Schroepfer: 7,000 Different Types Of Mobile Devices Access Facebook Every Day Top
facebook-5Why is mobile such a challenge for Facebook? Well, for starters, 7000 different device types are used to access Facebook each day. At today's Facebook Ecosystem Conference, VP of engineering Mike Schroepfer said that part of the difficulty Facebook faces in reaching mobile users is just that there are so many different SKUs. As a result, Facebook can't re-build mobile apps and iterate on the experience in the same way it does for the web. Now that Facebook is on so many platforms, most of its focus is on refining the apps and making them better. Facebook generally pushes updates to its platform on the web every day or even twice a day, but that's not something that the company can do for mobile. So the company is working on a new release schedule specifically for its mobile apps. Android apps are shipped every four to six weeks. Facebook for iOS isn't quite on that type of schedule, yet.
 
Gillmor Gang Live 08.03.12 (TCTV) Top
Gillmor Gang test patternGillmor Gang - Doc Searls, John Borthwick, Kevin Marks, Danny Sullivan, and Steve Gilllmor. Recording has concluded.
 
HTML5-Centric Artillery Raises $2.5M To Make the Browser The Console Top
Screen Shot 2012-08-03 at 11.22.05 AMA challenging area that has seemed perpetually ahead of its time, HTML5 gaming has seen many startups come and go as Flash or native iOS and Android development have held their own. Yet the lure of having true cross-platform play keeps entrepreneurs coming. Now some former early Facebook and early Google engineers are attacking the problem with a new startup called Artillery. They've raised funding from a stellar cast of investors including First Round Capital, Playdom co-founder Rick Thompson's Signia Ventures, Chris Sacca's Lowercase Capital, General Catalyst, Andreessen Horowitz, longtime former Googler Ben Ling, Greylock's Ali Rosenthal, Bubba Murarka, Tim Ferriss, Crunchfund and Kevin Colleran, who was one of Facebook's first 10 employees. "We set out to solve the problem that real games don't exist in the web browser," says CEO Ankur Pansari, who was an early Facebook engineer.
 
Live Now: Watch TechCrunch's Facebook Ecosystem CrunchUp Top
crunchupftw-5-3For all its successes Facebook has yet to conquer mobile. With that thought in mind TechCrunch is hosting our 5th annual CrunchUp today at the gorgeous Fox Theater in Redwood City, CA. Throughout the day leading developers, Facebook executives and industry experts will take the CrunchUp stage and speak on the state of Facebook's platform, products, ads and mobile initiatives. Our live stream is available below, thanks to our partner Ustream. You can join the conversation on Twitter using #crunchup.
 
Google Takes Political Online Ads Local, Allows Campaigns To Target Congressional Districts Top
png;base64cdc2c373b3a4ecd5Google's tools for tracking the upcoming U.S. election later this year mostly focus on the presidential election. It's no secret, though, that Google - thanks to its various advertising services - also makes a good amount of money from political campaigns that compete in smaller contests, including the 435 races for seats in the House of Representatives this year. This year, thanks to the recent redistricting of many congressional districts, quite a few of these races are very different from just two years ago and many districts now include new media markets that can make reaching voters hard. Today, Google launched a new tool that allows political campaigns to simply select their district and ensure that their ads are shown only within their district. This tool, says Google, allows campaigns to "quickly and easily target their search, display, mobile and video ads *solely* within that particular district's border."
 
Fol.io Is An Online Market For Digital Products Top
Screen Shot 2012-08-03 at 9.16.13 AMProducers of digital goods have a few problems. The first is finding good clients (preferably not these clients) and the second is building a popular portfolio of work. But without the former, you can't create the latter and vice versa. That's where fol.io comes in. A Manhattan-based company, fol.io aims to make it easier to sell digital assets. Founded by Cillian Kieran and Simon Keane, the site is designed to make it easier for web creators to grab handsome, usable graphics for their projects. Rather than futzing with Photoshop all day, they can grab a "share this" button for a dollar or a funny little graphic for $3.
 
Procured Health Nabs $1.1M From Bessemer, Athena Health Founder To Help Reduce Health Costs Top
Screen shot 2012-08-03 at 10.42.59 AMProcured Health, a startup that aims to help hospitals better discover, evaluate and adopt quality medical devices, is today announcing that it has raised $1.1 million in seed funding from a flock of angels and VCs. Investors in the startup's first round included Zimmerman Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Fidelity Biosciences, NaviMed Capital's Bijan Salehizadeh, CEO of Bloom Health Abir Sen, Kal Vepuri of Trisiras Group, former Athena Health CFO Carl Byers as well as Athena Health co-founder and CEO Jonathan Bush -- to name a few.
 
Zimride Brings Ride Sharing To New York And Washington D.C. Top
Screen Shot 2012-08-02 at 12.16.53 PMZimride, a San Francisco-based startup that helps commuters share rides, is bringing itself to the East Coast with a new route between New York and Washington D.C. With an already popular route between San Francisco and Los Angeles, this will add another one on the other side of the country. The average passenger from New York to Washington D.C. should pay about $25 for a seat, and the average Zimride driver should make $150 if they sell three seats. The geographic expansion caps off a pretty hectic spring for the company. The company just added a third leg of its business in on-demand, mobile ride-sharing. Called Lyft, the product resembles Uber's model except that it uses regular people who bring their own cars. Zimride, of course, vets drivers for their driving history, criminal records, auto safety and so on. They add some personal touches too with a fist-bump for every passenger and pink moustaches on the cars.
 
Electronic Arts Sues Zynga, Says The Ville Is An "Unmistakable Copy" Of The Sims. Zynga: EA Doesn't Understand Copyright (Updated) Top
(1) The Ville on FacebookZynga has a bit of a reputation for cloning other game developers' ideas. Now, the company is being sued by gaming giant Electronic Arts on behalf of its Maxis label for "infringing EA's copyrights to its Facebook game, The Sims Social." Lucy Bradshaw, General Manager of EA's Maxis Label, says Zynga's The Ville "copied the original and distinctive expressive elements of The Sims Social in a clear violation of U.S. copyright laws." The degree to which Zynga copied The Sims, says Electronic Arts, "was so comprehensive that the two games are, to an uninitiated observer, largely indistinguishable."
 
Beyond Partisanship: Congress Unanimously Opposes UN Internet Takeover Top
220px-Vladimir_Putin_12015Democrats and Republicans in Congress can't agree on a budget, cybersecurity, immigration, tax reform, or even whether to sanction their corrupt colleagues. But, the House of Representatives unanimously opposed more United Nations control over the Internet.
 
If Dell Is Focusing On Enterprise, Why Is It Sponsoring A YouTube Lollapalooza Live Stream? Top
Screen Shot 2012-08-03 at 9.39.10 AMLollapalooza starts today and if you can't make it, YouTube has got your back--they're streaming it live from Chicago. The YouTube streaming is sponsored by Dell, an odd choice for a music festival, but a good way for Dell to reach a younger, wider audience than most of its current users. But wait--for the past six months, Dell has been telling us "we're no longer a PC company" and that they are focusing on enterprise.
 
Burning Question: Is Outlook.com Just A Reskinned Version Of Hotmail? Not Exactly. Top
outlook-hotmailPeople want to know: is the new Outlook.com just a reskinned and rebranded version of Microsoft's Hotmail, aka Windows Live Mail? Answer: Um, sort of. Maybe? OK, the truth is, it's a little hard to prove. But there are a few things worth pointing out. Microsoft stated that Outlook.com is "a break from the past," and that it built "a brand new service from the ground up." But if it's an all-new, re-imagined, reinvented email service, then why does Oultook.com redirect you to a Live.com URL when you login? Microsoft could have at least switched the DNS around, right? There's also the fact that part of the brand-new experience takes you to older live.com webpages, still lacking the Outlook.com makeover. You can see this in action if you hit up the mobile site, for example, or try to import email from another service, like Gmail. But there's other evidence, too, which indicates that Outlook.com still involves a good bit of re-used Hotmail/Live Mail code.
 

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