Wednesday, June 1, 2011

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Groupon Now Has 8,000 Employees—About Half Of Them Salesmen Top
Follow @Bill_Gross @Bill_Gross Bill Gross " #Groupon is now in 46 countries and has about 8,000 employees, up from 1,500 just a year ago." Andrew Mason, CEO @ #D9 about 1 hour ago via TweetDeck Reply Retweet Favorite Groupon, as everyone knows by now, is growing like crazy. How crazy? CEO Andrew Mason just revealed at the D9 technology conference that he now employs 8,000 people, which is up from 1,500 a year ago. That means it is growing headcount at a 433 percent annual rate. About half of it’s employees are sales people. Signing up local businesses to offer group discounts requires a lot of hand-holding and sales calls across many local markets. Groupon is now in 46 countries. Groupon is a selling machine, so it needs a lot of sales people. But these aren’t door-to-door salesmen. The only way Groupon can scale this sales organization is through centralized call centers with different teams focussed on different markets. (Yelp does the same thing). And you thought it was all about Groupon’s comedians-turned-copywriters and the “Groupon Voice.” (The company employs a lot of copywriters also, but they don’t have thousands of them). CrunchBase Information Groupon Andrew Mason Information provided by CrunchBase
 
At 1.6 Billion Queries Per Day, Twitter Finally Aims To Make Search Personally Relevant Top
While much of the talk leading up to today was about Twitter’s move into the photo game , the bigger news is actually what they’ve done to their search product. They’ve completely rebuilt it. And while it may not be immediately apparent, the product should be much, much better than before. Twitter details the project in a long post on their Engineering blog today. Notably, they go into the backstory of Twitter Search, which evolved from the Summize purchase in 2008. While that product worked well for a while, the technologies behind it would not allow it to scale to the level that Twitter eventually needed. So things had to be re-written — on the fly. Twitter detailed some of this last October. But it wasn’t until this past April that they were able to replace the old Ruby on Rails front-end with the newly-built Blender. At the time, Twitter said this made search 3x faster and gave them 10x throughput. This is important since they’re now seeing 2,200 tweets-per-second on average and serving up 18,000 queries per second — 1.6 billion queries per day. That’s up from 1 billion last Ocotober. But that’s still mainly back-end talk. The key to today’s search announcements are what is now being surfaced on the front-end. ”Blender completed the infrastructure necessary to make the most significant user-facing change to Twitter search since the acquisition of Summize,” Twitter writes. Notably, Twitter now has a “Most relevant” tab on the search results page. And while at first glance it may seem that this is simply searching your contacts’ tweets (something that is long overdue) and displaying them in reverse chronological order, there’s actually a lot more going on. At its most basic, here’s how Twitter says to think about it: “Often, users are interested in only the most memorable Tweets or those that other users engage with. In our new search experience, we show search results that are most relevant to a particular user. So search results are personalized, and we filter out the Tweets that do not resonate with other users.” Twitter cites three key types of signals they’re looking for: Static signals, added at indexing time Resonance signals, dynamically updated over time Information about the searcher, provided at search time Based on these, a “personal relevance score” is computed for each tweet. “The highest-ranking, most-recent Tweets are returned to the Blender, which merges and re-ranks the results before returning them to the user,” Twitter notes. Another big thing going on? Duplicates are removed. This has been a huge issue with Twitter search in the past. Finally, Twitter has begun surfacing images and videos for searches. Right now, these are shown in the right-side pane when a search is done on twitter.com. Because they’re different from text-based tweets, these queries have to be handled differently. So all of this sounds great. But it’s just step one. Twitter says that in the coming months, quality will improve as will scale. And they’ll be bringing these relevant searches to their mobile products. As for full tweet history search? I still wouldn’t hold my breath. Real-time is simply more important to Twitter right now, so they’re focusing on that, instead of the past. Hopefully one day… CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Mobile Network Revenues To Push $1 Trillion By 2016, But Facing 'Nightmare' Scenario Top
Juniper Research released a report today that found that global mobile network operator revenues are set to exceed $1 trillion by 2016. This would be something to celebrate were it not the case that costs are forecasted to rise in accordance with revenues — and exceed them. The report says that mobile networks are facing a potential “nightmare” scenario within four years if remedial action is not taken soon. The cause of the impending crunch? The report indicates that the dire situation is caused by market saturation and falling average revenue per user, which is causing core revenues to flatline, while the cost of handling mobile data traffic is skyrocketing. As one might expect from the growing use of smartphones (Nielsen predicts there may be 100 million by the end of the year), cellular data traffic doubled in 2010. And it’s expected to increase thirteen-fold by 2015. Luckily, the report doesn’t just present the bad news and leave it at that, the researches also suggest a few prescriptions, which can be tailored by the different operators to fit their individual businesses. The report encourages mobile networks to offer integrated rate plans, while “providing a wide range of segmented postpaid and postpaid tariffs”. It also puts stress on the potential for escalating revenues in the cloud, machine-to-machine, and mobile financial services where networks can leverage their existing assets. Some other highlights from the report, include the fact that second tier networks (those with lower traffic) could be poised to gain significant advantage by retaining flat rates for data bundles. Integrated Mobile Broadcast represents a new 3G standard (endorsed by the GSMA ) that has the potential to add infinite capacity to 3G for popular content, offering a solution to the impending capacity crunch. Lastly, as the cost of fossil fuels continues to increase, transition to green networks and base stations is beginning to “represent both an environmental and economic imperative”.
 
Instagram Unveils "iPhone Hooks" So Other Apps Can Play Nicely With Them Top
A few days ago, the iPhone app 100 Cameras in 1 got an update with a great new feature: the ability to send photos to Instagram . As GigaOm’s Om Malik pointed out , this was the first outside app to gain such access. But that made it sound as if it was the first app to use a write version of Instagram’s API. But Instagram actually doesn’t have a write API yet (their API continues to be read-only). Instead, what they’re doing with 100 Cameras in 1 is much more simple and clever. And they’re now opening it up to everyone. This page (meant for developers) details the feature Instagram is calling “iPhone Hooks”. Essentially what these do is allow any other iPhone app (remember, Instagram is still iPhone-only) to interact with the Instagram app. This can mean both opening the Instagram app to a certain photo, user, location, or tag. Or it can allow another app to open the app and load the Instagram camera immediately. Most importantly, it allows pictures taken with other apps to be seamlessly passed into the Instagram “sharing flow”. This means a photo can be passed into the app right to the filter screen within Instagram. Co-founder Kevin Systrom compares this functionality to the copy and paste functionality baked into iOS. But again, this is for images, not text. “We wanted to make it easier for other iPhone apps (and iPhone web-apps) to hook into Instagram to open a particular item or post a photo through our app,” co-founder Mike Krieger says. Yes, you read that correctly, this can work with web-based apps too. Currently, only 100 Cameras in 1 is using this functionality, but Instagram says they’re discussing implementation with other partners. And again, as of now, this is open to anyone to use. Hopefully we see popular camera apps like Camera+, Hipstmatic, and CameraBag start to offer this option. So what about a proper write API? Systrom notes that they could turn it on at anytime, but they’re hesitating right now as they don’t want Instagram feed overrun with low-quality images. Plus, Instagram is still interested in owning the posting flow. This work-around with a higher barrier to entry is a compromise, of sorts. CrunchBase Information Instagram Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Google: Group In China Targeted Senior US Officials, Chinese Activists, Others With Phishing Attack Top
Google has just revealed that it has detected a phishing attack originating from Jinan, China that targeted hundreds of people, including “senior U.S. government officials, Chinese political activists, officials in several Asian countries (predominantly South Korea), military personnel and journalists”. The attack itself — which relied on phishing passwords — doesn’t appear to be overly sophisticated, according to a report that identified it back in February. But it was very targeted, which is unusual for phishing schemes. Google says that the perpetrators were stealing user passwords, then setting Gmail accounts to automatically forward messages to other inboxes (delegation settings, which can grant other people access to accounts, were also changed). Google says that it ”detected and disrupted this campaign” and that it has already notified affected victims, as well as government authorities. It then goes on to detail some of the things you can use to secure your account, including 2-step verification , strong passwords, and by checking to make sure you aren’t forwarding your email to any inboxes you don’t know. Google’s post emphasizes that this was not an issue with Gmail itself and that its internal systems weren’t attacked. This isn’t the first time Google has had issues with cyberattacks originating in China. Early last year, Google revealed that it had been the target of a “highly sophisticated and targeted attack” that originated there, prompting the company to radically revise its operations in China. Google doesn’t mention anything in today’s blog post about the attacks being related, but the previous attack also targeted the accounts of Chinese activists. Here’s a description of the attack, from contagio : Victims get a message from an address of a close associate or a collaborating organization/agency, which is spoofed. The message is crafted to appear like it has an attachment with links like View Download and a name of the supposed attachment. The link leads to a fake Gmail login page for harvesting credentials. CrunchBase Information Google Information provided by CrunchBase
 
@Shaq Announces Retirement On Twitter Using Video Sharing Tool Tout Top
Maybe I’m just obsessed with pop culture and technology, but it’s still fascinating to see how celebrities use Twitter. Some use the platform to vent , others for raising money , and some use it as a launching pad for political campaigns. It’s a fact that celebs have actually helped the network grow into a mainstream social tool. Either way, Twitter has become a go-to communications and news platform for most celebs and political figures. And today, NBA basketball star Shaquille O’Neal ( @Shaq ) used Twitter to announce his retirement after 19 seasons, and four NBA titles. Shaq, who has 3.8 million followers, kept things pretty simple in his retirement Tweet, simple stating ‘im retiring’ with a link to a video message of the star announcing the news via Tout, an iPhone app that allows you to send short video updated to friends. He also included the hashtag, ‘#ShaqRetires,’ which is now trending on Twitter. It’s a big win for startup Tout, who faces competition from TwitPic and perhaps soon from Twitter, if the company expands photo sharing to videos as well.
 
Groupon Partners With Expedia For Groupon Travel Top
We’re hearing that Groupon will be shortly announcing a partnership with Expedia to provide a separate channel for Groupon Travel, apart from deals in your area. Travel deals will probably be regional says our source, not hyper local. We’re also hearing that Groupon was in negotiations with Priceline, Travelocity and Expedia but it looks like Expedia offered a better deal. According to our source internal estimates are that Groupon Travel could increase revenue by 40% once the company gets the ball rolling. This news shouldn’t come as a huge surprise: Expedia has flirted with Daily Deals on its own and has actually partnered up to provide daily deals with Groupon in the UK. Update: It’s live at Groupon.com/Getaways . Looks like Groupon is now the Groupon for Travel. CrunchBase Information Groupon Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Backstage Pass: Bing Gordon on What EA Needs to Do to Survive (TCTV) Top
We’re continuing to highlight some of our favorite moments from the many hours of backstage content live-streamed during Disrupt last week. One of my favorite sit-downs was with Bing Gordon, general partner of Kleiner Perkins. A fireside chat with Gordon is always…unique. We didn’t get poetry this time, but we had a fascinating talk about how the cost of entertainment has collapsed from $1 an hour to as little as $.05 per hour. In terms of gaming, Gordon was one of the people who set the $1-per-hour price back in the 1980s while at Electronic Arts. (When the Bill Cosby-esque shirt to your left was also in fashion.) Now, he’s helping erode it as a board member and investor in Zynga. That’s the Silicon Valley ecosystem in a nutshell. He expects the cost of media– whether news, movies, or games– will settle out at $.15 to $.20 per hour. That doesn’t mean EA is necessarily toast, but it does mean the company needs to radically rethink its business model. Game quality and playtime aren’t the issues, he argues. All of that is increasing. It’s missing this fundamental shift in what people pay for an hour of entertainment that is slowing strangling the gaming giants of yore. Gordon and I also chat about the similarities between hockey and venture capital, and a he gives a warning for entrepreneurs. Playing hard to get doesn’t work with him. Hi this is Sara Lacy backstage with the Poet Laureate of Tech Crunch Disrupt, Bing Gordon. Thanks for joining us. Hey, you look awesome. Thank you. It's all baby glow. I think the body provides this glow hormone so you husband won't leave during pregnancy. Ooh. I haven't heard that cynical thought before. This is what happens when a cynical reporter gets pregnant. Whatever it takes to look great in Manhattan. Yeah. And at a three day conference on camera for eight hours. Here in this teak lined palace. Yeah, I know. It's amazing acoustics, isn't it? I said something earlier in an interview. I said, "What!" and it echoed throughout the hall and crows flew out. As a reporter, you like you messages to reverberate. Right. So first question about EA. Every time anyone says Bing Gordon says long time EA executive, now on the board of Zynga. So those are the two things from your resume everyone knows. has one made the other toast? Is EA just done? I think all old physical media companies have challenges. But this is just cyclical, media is hitting a 10x disruption, and the problem is that venture capitalists love disrupters and they don't care if the size of an industry shrinks, so long as the- As long they are the one cannibalizing. -new 10% is theirs. So what's going on with games is there's more people than ever, the traditional games business is bigger than ever. But, in general, games used to, I helped set the pricing in the early eighties. People paid a dollar an hour for games, which is about what they paid for hardcover books and, you know, about what they pay for a movie rental. And we're headed toward - and about what they used to pay for a New York Times. and we're headed - I think World of Warcraft now gets nineteen cents an hour. Pogo and Facebook get a nickel an hour. We're heading to fifteen to twenty cents an hour media business. And at 15 to 20 cents an hour, because with the internet, what happens with Madden Football or Need for Speed, is people are playing them 4 times longer, so you need to figure out how to monetize it, and you can't charge two hundred dollars for a video game DVD. It seems unfair. So does that mean EA is toast? Can't they adjust? No, it means EA needs to reduce its costs and/or monetize the extra hours. Because the games are great. People who play the traditional video game are playing them longer and longer. Individual games have become hobbies. You know, we pay a lot of money for our hobbies. So, they just need to get to the point where they can people will pay Madden for $200, they need to get $200 from those consumers. Well, they needed to cut their costs a lot. Right. But, by the way, it's not unlike what, you know, TechCrunch and Huffington Post are doing to print media. That's why I switched teams, I went from Business Week to Techcrunch. Guess what, it's good for trees, ut it's bad for delivery trucks and printing presses. Right. I think even modernization, I mean TechCrunch, I always say TechCrunch has made more people money than it's made itself. We've never found a way to monetize on the impact that we have versus a Business Week, Wall Street Journal and other business publications that
 

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