The latest from TechCrunch
- Path Lands Another Ex-Facebooker To Run Ops
- Twitter Getting Photos In Order Ahead Of iOS 5 Integration
- With 2 Million Downloads Under Its Belt, Appsfire Raises $3.6 Million Series A
| Path Lands Another Ex-Facebooker To Run Ops | Top |
| It’s something that Dave Morin isn’t too quick to talk about, but it’s impossible to ignore: his new startup, Path, is becoming quite the gathering ground for ex-Facebook employees. Of course, Morin’s reluctance to establish the connection probably has to do with the fact that he used to be the head of Platform there, and still has close ties to the company. But the small startup just hired its fourth ex-Facebooker today. And the latest is a pretty big one, considering he had been at Facebook over four years. Matthew Welty will be Path’s new Head of Operations, Morin tells us. Welty had been an operations engineer at Facebook for the past four-plus years. For some perspective on how long he had been there, when he joined in April 2007, Facebook had 20 million active users. Today, they’re about to hit 700 million active users. And when Welty joined Facebook, Morin was just gearing up to launch Platform. Now Morin will be Welty’s boss in this new venture. Welty decided to leave Facebook a few weeks ago, and approached Path about an opportunity. “Welty is a world class leader in technical operations, we are excited he chose to join Path as his next step. He will be key in ensuring that Path is always available to our quickly growing user base and that our infrastructure continues to scale with quality in mind,” Morin says. Welty follows Nathan Folkman, who joined Path from Facebook a couple weeks ago . Interestingly enough, Folkman used to be Head of Operations at Foursquare (and is the only employee to leave Foursquare so far). The team that Google has already offered $100 million+ for is getting stronger. CrunchBase Information Path Facebook Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Twitter Getting Photos In Order Ahead Of iOS 5 Integration | Top |
| Yesterday, we first reported that Twitter was on the verge of launching their own photo-sharing service. That report has since been confirmed by Liz Gannes , who happens to work for All Things D, which is hosting a conference where Twitter CEO Dick Costolo was planning to announce this news. So, yeah. “Sources familiar with the matter.” Confirmed. And now we know a bit more. First of all, this move is a direct assault on services like TwitPic and yFrog. With Twitter Pictures, you’ll be able to upload from Twitter.com and the clients and you’ll get a nice, tidy URL that links to your picture (and a small thumbnail may now appear in your stream). We’ve heard that this might use the twimg.com URL that Twitter has used internally for a long time, but that’s not certain yet. And while it’s a direct assault on longstanding ecosystem players, we’ve also heard that Twitter did the right thing and reached out to these guys quite a long time ago. Specifically, we’ve heard that in January, Twitter sat down with a few of the major players to let them know their intentions to move into the space. Presumably, those guys will move into more white-label offerings now (maybe even with Twitter’s help in some way), rather than die off. So why is Twitter doing this? After all, the service is famous for having difficulties staying up as they scale — why get into the image business? Well, for one thing they may be using Amazon S3 to host the files rather then do it on their own servers. But more importantly, this is another move by Twitter to be more fully in control of their product. Some may point to the revenue that yFrog and others pull in from ads as playing into this, but that money is likely negligible to Twitter. It’s about owning the product. And they may have a very good reason for doing that right now. We’ve heard from multiple sources that Twitter is likely to have a big-time partner for such a service: Apple. Specifically, we’re hearing that Apple’s new iOS 5 will come with an option to share images to Twitter baked into the OS. This would be similar to the way you can currently share videos on YouTube with one click in iOS. Obviously, a user would have to enable this feature by logging in with their Twitter credentials in iOS. There would then be a “Send to Twitter” option for pictures stored on your device. Apple announced today that they plan to show off iOS 5 for the first time at WWDC next week, confirming a report of ours from March . Now you see why Twitter would want to get this picture service out there ASAP. And why they’d want their own service. No word on other photo players — namely Facebook and Flickr — also being baked into iOS 5. But Apple does have deals with both of those companies for iPhoto, so it would make some sense. More to come, I’m sure. CrunchBase Information Twitter Apple Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| With 2 Million Downloads Under Its Belt, Appsfire Raises $3.6 Million Series A | Top |
| There are literally hundreds of thousands of iPhone, iPad and Android apps to choose from, and yet finding good apps is far from easy. App discovery and recommendations is a fertile niche where a few startups are fighting for mindshare. After being downloaded more than 2 million times, app discovery startup Appsfire closed a $3.6 million series A, led by French VC firm IDinvest. (Appsfire is based in Paris and Tel Aviv, and was co-founded by Ouriel Ohayon, who used to be the editor of TechCrunch France ). Appsfire crossed 1 million downloads in February, and then the 2-million mark in May. Ohayon says its various apps for the iPhone , Android, iPad, and kid’s apps is generating 3 million leads to app developers each month. Appsfire lets you share your favorite apps with your friends via the web, your mobile device, or Facebook . Previously, in February, 2010, company raised a seed round from a group of French angel investors including Marc Simoncini (CEO of dating site meetic.com), Jacques-Antoine Granjon (CEO of Vente-Privee.com), Xavier Niel (CEO of French ISP Free), and entrepreneur and angel investor Jean-David Blanc, as well as Lerer Ventures. CrunchBase Information AppsFire 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