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Those Millions On Facebook? They Actually Visit, And It’s Not A Huge Deal Anyway.

kram412 — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 10:33:29 +0000

Traffic numbers provided by companies should always be questioned — I mean, of course each company is going to try to present the data in a way that makes them look as good as possible. Which is what New York Times finance writer Andrew Ross Sorkin has understandably done, going to town on Facebook for how it counts its active users in an article out tonight called “ Those Millions On Facebook? Some May Not Actually Visit .” His main criticism is that Facebook counts 845 million monthly active users and 483 million daily active users, but gets to these numbers by including people who click “Like” or take another action on the web or mobile devices — but don’t visit Facebook.com during that time. Because they’re not visiting the home site, where the ads are, he suggests Facebook might not be making as much money off of them. First, I’ll look at what third party data says about actual Facebook on-site usage, then at the idea that these users not visiting the site is a problem, anyway. The article cites Nielsen , a well-regarded web measurement firm, to draw a contrast with Facebook’s own numbers. The filing said the social network had 161 million monthly active users as of December. Nielsen said 153 million unique visitors in the same period. From there, Sorkin goes on to guess that this difference might be due to the Like button and other off-site Facebook usage: “Assuming that Facebook’s United States traffic accounts for only about 19 percent of its business, that means the numbers are off by at least 40 million users from the 845 million Facebook defines as “active.” First, Nielsen is just one data source, which itself disagrees with the numbers provided by competitors. For example, direct rival comScore showed that Facebook.com actually had 162.5 million uniques in December . Nielsen and comScore use similar types of methodologies, which involve doing things like tracking a sample of internet users, and there’s no reason (that I know of) to think one is more right than the other in this case. So if Sorkin went by comScore’s numbers, he apparently would have guessed that Facebook was actually undercounting site usage. Another point on the comparison. Both of these companies track “unique visitors,” which are standards units of measurement that they separately define for all sites they track. The measure is a rough equivalents to the active visitors that Facebook tracks to Facebook.com, but we don’t know that for sure. But Sorkin does have a fair point in noting the differences between the results. There are probably some users, especially the all-important daily active users, who don’t actually visit places with Facebook ads every day. ComScore provides worldwide Facebook numbers, and it shows 794.3 million monthly uniques and 297.1 million daily uniques. That could indicate Facebook’s monthly numbers are high by a relatively small 50 million MAU but a huge 186 million difference in DAU versus daily uniques. But that point comes with its own qualification: comScore may not be able to track Facebook data equally in every country based on local factors, like lots of users getting on a single computer at an internet cafe. And there are also comScore data points in Facebook’s favor on this issue. There average Facebook user worldwide spent 11.6 minutes on the site per visit and December… and get ready for the kicker: visited 32.6 times. So if you’re an investor and you were worried that lots of users were clicking Like but not going to the site very single day, comScore seems to be saying that, well, they are visiting the site multiple times on some days even if they’re not on at every point of the calendar. This means they’d still be seeing a bunch of ads. But this is just comScore data, possibly as right or wrong as Nielsen’s. There’s a bigger point to Sorkin’s article, which he sort of addresses, which second-guesses the premise. Likes are actually quite valuable in and of themselves, because Facebook can use them to target ads, and provide the data to developers so they can build products that use Facebook to customize user experiences. Likes and other actions also generate content in the news feed that in turn makes the site more engaging. It’s hard to know exactly how valuable all that targeting and engagement activity is. But the Like buttons and other web-focused products are only part of what could be going on with Facebook’s web-wide play. It could turn on an ad network or a payments system that is available across the web at some point in the futre. These possibilities have been speculated about for many years now in tech circles, and Facebook has tried to avoid saying anything definitive. But the idea of an ad network for publishers — like, uh, AdSense, which Facebook chief operating officer helped build in her previous job at Google — seems pretty straightforward. Facebook could sell ad inventory on other sites on behalf of publishers, and give them a cut just like Google does with its Adsense publishers. And on the payments front, Facebook could expand its Credits payment system to the web as well. In fact, it already has in the form of games like FarmVille.com, Zynga’s web version of its Facebook game. That game relies on Facebook as the login credentials, so it counts as off-site, but it also monetizes via Credits, so Facebook still makes money. All in all, it’s reasonable for Sorkin to question the original numbers, and he might have a point. But third party data indicates that it might not be a meanginful one. And as far as this relates to prospective stockholders, Facebook is already monetizing traffic on the web via targeting, and could have ad plans for the future that would make this discussion moot. [Top image via NASA .]

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Those Millions On Facebook? They Actually Visit, And It’s Not A Huge Deal Anyway.

Ron Paul, Mitt Romney Leading On Facebook Ahead Of Florida Primary

jos — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 06:49:38 +0000

The Republican presidential candidacy is still far from decided, based on the split primaries and mixed polls so far. So here’s another source for trying to figure who’s really pulling ahead — the number of new Facebook fans that each candidate is getting, according to the Inside Facebook Election Tracker . Mitt Romney is finally making some strong gains this month, in contrast to his Facebook performance over December. By “strong gains” I mean he’s been attracting a roughly similar number of fans to Ron Paul, the candidate who normally dominates on the web (and the clear leader last month ). The two have fought for the daily lead for most of January, except for when Rick Santorum surged around his Iowa primary win on the 3rd. Newt Gingrich, meanwhile, managed to win South Carolina on the 21st, which corresponded with his biggest gains on Facebook. But he’s still way weaker than the others. And the rest of the candidates are no longer registering any meaningful gains, whether or not they’ve officially dropped out. Overall, Romney still has the most Facebook fans among Republicans, with 1.39 million. Paul is a distant second at 800,000. Gingrich is down at 250,000 and Santorum a pitiful 90,000. Of course, these numbers only say so much about who’s actually the most popular. Fan growth can come through inorganic methods like Facebook ads, fan page promotions, or clever use of the news feed. And fans can come from anywhere in the world; they’re by no means primary voters. But, the gains made by Santorum and Gingrich right when they won their primaries suggests many new fans are Liking candidate pages organically, at least in the sense that users are acting on their because of larger events. Certainly, the low fan counts that these candidates are showing overall on Facebook suggest that they are not doing much of anything to reach more voters. Paul’s fanbase could also be discounted because he consistently does well in online matchups like these, even though he has trouble winning primaries. But maybe that will change in Florida? He had the biggest day of the month recently, at 9,500 new fans on the 24th. As Brittany Darwell notes over on Inside Facebook regarding the other primary winners, the fan counts seem to start climbing right before they do well with the vote counts. Otherwise, Romney’s position is looking stronger than ever, similar to the latest polls .

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Ron Paul, Mitt Romney Leading On Facebook Ahead Of Florida Primary

Y Combinator Names Seasoned Entrepreneur Geoff Ralston As Its Newest Partner

vertical8 — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 02:15:28 +0000

Y Combinator has just announced the newest partner to join the prestigious firm: Geoff Ralston . Ralston’s previous credentials include founding Four11, which was acquired by Yahoo back in 1997 for $96 million and served as the foundation for Yahoo Mail. Ralston spent eight years at Yahoo, eventually becoming Yahoo’s Chief Product Officer. Several years after leaving Yahoo he was named CEO of Lala, before it was acquired by Apple in 2009. Most recently he cofounded Imagine K12 , a tech incubator for education-related startups, which presented at TechCrunch Disrupt SF (you can find the incubator’s first batch of companies here ). In his post announcing the news, Y Combinator’s Paul Graham writes that Ralston will continue as a full partner at Imagine K12. He also writes that he’s known Geoff for 13 years, ever since his days at Yahoo (Graham’s startup, Viaweb, was acquired by Yahoo in June 1998). The news comes only a few days after YC announced two other new partners: Garry Tan (formerly of Posterous) and Aaron Iba (formerly of Appjet/Etherpad), both of whom are YC alumni. The timing probably isn’t a coincidence — YC just opened up applications for its Summer 2012 batch yesterday , and a bigger team will doubtless help the firm deal with the growing number of inbound applications (and larger batch sizes). Fun sidenote: Ralston holds the honor of taking part in one of the most entertaining startup pitches I’ve ever seen, when he and fellow Lala execs Bill Nguyen and John Kuch (now both at Color) explained how Lala — whose previous incarnations included a CD swapping and a failed music hub — was being reborn as an innovative streaming music service. It took around an hour (and a lot of hilarious handwaving and bickering between the three then-Lala execs as they debated what they could tell me — in front of me), but I went from being convinced Lala was launching something completely illegal to believing it was a taste of the future . Lala never got too much traction, but it was great, and it had a nice exit: Apple acquired the company for a reported $80+ million.

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Y Combinator Names Seasoned Entrepreneur Geoff Ralston As Its Newest Partner

Fanhattan Adds A Personalized News Feed To The Mix, Lets You Read While You Watch

admin — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 20:59:43 +0000

We’ve been following the Fanhattan iPhone/iPad app from the very beginning , when it was exclusively available for the iPad and only had a handful of content partners. But the app has come along way in a short time — migrating to the iPhone and adding new content — and the company is today announcing an update that offers up way more functionality and content, though it may not be the kind of content you’d expect. If you don’t already know, Fanhattan is an app that lets you discover new TV shows and movies that are available to watch on the iPad/iPhone. It features a Smart Filter which makes narrowing down content super easy and the app itself is quite beautiful, but today an entirely new layer is being thrown into the mix: news. To start, Fanhattan is integrating a news feed into the app thanks to dozens of new content partnerships between Fanhattan and your favorite news sources (full list below). With news feed integration, you’ll now be able to “Be A Fan” of certain shows or movies, and as a result see all the news on that particular movie/show and its stars from over 60 sources. Fanhattan already offers up Rotten Tomatoes reviews and actor bios, but bringing news sources into the equation should make it that much harder for Fanhattan users to veer outside of the app. If you’re already a Fanhattan user, the update should show up right about now on your device. Otherwise, head on over to the App Store and check out what Fanhattan version 1.2 has to offer. New content partners: BBC Billboard Celebuzz CNN E! Online Entertainment Tonight Entertainment Weekly Entertainment Wise Glam.com Hollywood Reporter ivillage KCAL Los Angeles KTLA-TV, Los Angeles McClatchy-Tribune News Service Metal Underground MSN Entertainment MSNBC MTV.com New York Daily News New York Post NYT Music People PopMatters Popsugar Reuters Rolling Stone The Guardian The Huffington Post The Los Angeles Times The New York Times The Seattle Times The Wall Street Journal TIME Magazine TMZ USA Today Variety VH1 Washington Post

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Fanhattan Adds A Personalized News Feed To The Mix, Lets You Read While You Watch

What Happens When Apps Go On Sale?: Revenue Up 22% On iPhone, 29% On Android

Administrator — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 20:56:42 +0000

In a new research report from Distimo , the app store analytics provider examined two different ways that allow mobile developers to get a bump in both their download numbers and revenue. One way, which is within the developers’ control, is putting the app on sale. Within the first day, iPhone developers see an average increase of 41% in revenue using this method, and see revenue increases of 22% by the sale’s end. Android apps, however, rose just 7% on day one, but closed out the sale with higher percentage gains than either iPhone or iPad. The second method Distimo looked into is getting the app featured in the app store. This is up to the app store’s operator, like Google or Apple, of course. (We’ll examine Distimo’s findings on featured apps in a subsequent post). When a developer decides to put an application on sale, there’s a delicate balance that has to be achieved. The sale price has to be low enough to encourage more downloads, obviously, but it also needs to be low enough that it encourages enough download volume to make up for the lost revenue. To examine what happens during when apps go on sale, Distimo examined the 100 top grossing apps in the iPhone App Atore, iPad App Store and Android Market. On the first day of the sale, the average revenue increase by +41% in the iPhone App Store, and by 15 days in, was up by +22%. On the iPad App Store, the day one effect was even greater: up +52% on day one and up +19% by day 15. But the boost in the Android Market was the largest of all, although this couldn’t immediately be seen. By day one, revenue was just +7% on average, but by day 15, it was up +29%. These are percentage increases, though – not dollar amounts. Keep in mind, too, that these gains are averages . Not all developers were so lucky. In looking closer at the numbers, Distimo found that 44% of iPhone apps lost revenue during the sale, with 23% seeing a decline in revenue by more than 20%. This is why the sale price setting is key to maximizing the gains. For example, a discount of a dollar on a $7.99 app lowers the revenue, but a discount of $3 increased revenue by 131%. In general, the tipping point occurred when the app’s price was cut in half or the app was offered in Tier 1 ($0.99) or Tier 2 ($1.99). The graph below shows what happens when prices were cut by 40%, 50%, 60%, 70% or 80%. The conclusion here is that it can pay to put an app on sale, but to actually earn more revenue, you have to make a significant price cut. This all begs the question, then: what price should a developer ask? There isn’t a simple ratio to use. The right price depends a lot on what kind of application it is, where it’s sold, what category it falls into and its overall complexity. Simple apps that are easy to make (and copy) are priced lower. You can see the variations by revenue, category and app store here: Since this is a lot of info to take in, we’ll look at Distimo’s findings related to apps being featured in the app store in a separate post. You can find the full report here .

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What Happens When Apps Go On Sale?: Revenue Up 22% On iPhone, 29% On Android

Reed Hastings: “We Expect DVD Subscribers To Decline Every Quarter … Forever”

jos — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 06:55:10 +0000

After some fairly sizable blunders last summer , Netflix suffered for the remainder of 2011, losing money and subscribers. Perhaps surprising many, Netflix bounced back today in its fourth quarter earnings — in spite of the fact that it will continue experiencing losses throughout 2012 thanks to the costs of rolling out its service internationally. Of course, while the creation of Qwikster (and splitting its DVD and streaming businesses) seems silly in retrospect, as Erick pointed out today , the financials show that Netflix had good reason to want to separate the two. Breaking out DVD vs. streaming earnings for the first time, Netflix showed that the two businesses have drastically different margins, with streaming at an 11 percent profit margin, compared to 52 percent for its DVD business. Unfortunately, everyone knows that streaming content has a much, much brighter future than DVDs, so likely Netflix (and others) just have to “bite the bullet” on that front. After all, when CEO Reed Hastings was asked about the future of DVD profitability and DVD subscriber share on Netflix’s 4Q earnings call this afternoon, he simply stated: “We expect DVD Subscribers to decline every quarter … forever.” In the last quarter of 2011, the DVD business lost 2.76 million subscribers, while streaming gained 220K. While it hopes streaming subscription rates will pick up (especially internationally), there’s no reason to think that this is going to change. Yet, the DVD business has fixed costs, and Netflix is forced to continuously jockey for rights to streaming content. In the near term, one would think that, based on margins, DVDs are a significantly more profitable business; however, Hastings said that, in reality, it’s just the opposite. Streaming subscribers now outnumber DVD subscribers 2:1, and the CEO said that the marginal streaming subscriber is “almost pure contribution,” whereas the average DVD subscriber leads to a number of variable costs. “Profitability of each new streaming subscriber is almost twice what it is for DVDs … we’d obviously like them to do both, but if they’re only going to use one, we’d much prefer they use streaming,” he said. Thus, Netflix will continue to focus on international expansion, and even though the cost of expansion will hamstring earnings results over the next year, leadership believes strongly in the opportunity abroad. Although Amazon acquired LoveFilm (the U.K.’s answer to Netflix) last year, the leaders said that their business is still predominantly DVD-based. Profitability, Hastings said, is naturally based on competitive barriers and scale. While they think that LoveFilm and others obviously pose a few competitive barriers, they’re mostly low, so the opportunity to sieze the streaming market internationally is big, and likely extremely profitable. Basically, Hastings words imply that Netflix doesn’t really see any sizable competition abroad in terms of on-demand video streaming at scale, so they’re investing aggressively to be “early in the game.” Hastings and Chief Financial Officer David Wells made a few other interesting points during the investor call today. One being that, although they now believe that splitting the business was a mistake , they continue to stand by their 60 percent price increase last July, which was really the primary driver behind the exodus of subscribers Netflix experienced for the remainder of the year. Since then, Netflix’s stock dove from around $300 a share to under $70. That’s absurd. Wells said that if he had it to do all over, he’d make the same decision again. The other points of interest include the fact that Hastings said that, while smart TV streaming is the fastest growing segment of its business and 3-D streaming will be a big future play, Netflix has no plans to go into video game rental, which was to be a new feature of Qwikster. Some might think that, with the scale of its distribution, Netflix could easily enter the video game rental market and quickly begin undercutting the competition. But not so, according to the executives. Redbox and Gamefly will obviously quite relieved to hear this news. (At least for now.) Another inquiry asked Hastings and Wells why they weren’t considering a la carte options (i.e. pay-per-view), which it was insinuated might help them become a one-stop-shop for movies. This is an interesting subject, because of an example many of us have probably experienced. If you don’t have Tivo and you happen to miss an episode of a TV series you love to watch, oft-times you’re out of luck. Hastings and Wells seemed to imply that networks are only going to increasingly offer their shows right after they air on their own websites (something which is already very popular, check out Fox, for example). If Netflix were to offer pay-per-view episodes of Mad Men right after they air, isn’t this something that customers would love? Probably, but Hulu has already won a lot of these rights (most of which are exclusive in video streaming). And Hastings said that he thinks that there isn’t a lot of brand strength in “being everything for everyone,” and being unlimited streaming video for a low fee is the core of their brand proposition — adding pay-per-view would confuse both the brand identity and its customers. Vudu, Amazon, Blockbuster, there is a huge list of companies already offering pay-per-view, he said, and we don’t think we have a way to do it any better. “In some sense it’s niche,” the CEO said, “but it’s a very big niche, which we think we can lead.” Dolby Digital came to mind, he said, as an example of what Netflix wants to do — be on every platform, and get along with everyone. Clearly, this was another way of saying that, at this point, pay-per-view would put strain on its relationships, and the potential customer acquisition that it could catalyze isn’t worth the cost. Listen to the webcast here .

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Reed Hastings: “We Expect DVD Subscribers To Decline Every Quarter … Forever”

Early Facebook App Causes Is Being Reborn As A Polished Web Site For Good

user — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 06:27:41 +0000

Causes launched with the Facebook Platform back in 2007 as a way to help friends more easily campaign for the social causes of their choice. The app benefited from getting in early on the platform, being the only one in its category (other developers were building poking apps or games at the time), and from having a tight relationship with Facebook via cofounder Sean Parker. The product, though, has lost some momentum over the years — at least until a multi-part revamp that the company is in the middle of pushing through. Most strikingly, the Facebook canvas app no longer exists. Instead, as of this past fall, everything is now on Causes.com . But, consider this a preview of sorts. The company is planning to roll out major new features in the coming months, with a full launch planned for mid-March. “When [Facebook's] platform launched in 2007, we made a bet that for Causes to get above the sheep-throwing and zombie-killing noise, we needed to look like an app that was made by Facebook, as natural to use as their Photos or Events apps,” product vice president Chris Chan tells me. ”This was the right call then.” Even so, he explains, the product got too focused on viral growth and not enough on overall quality. “As the years have progressed the web has gotten a lot more social, and it makes more sense to have our own brand and site. We can still be ‘on’ Facebook in the sense that we plug into News Feed and fan pages, but having our own brand gives us full, top to bottom control over the product experience, something that we think is critical for building the best tool possible for organizers to create campaigns for social change.” The site today still relies on Facebook as much as ever, but as an Open Graph app developer (as it announced last week) If you’re signed in to Facebook, you can sign in to Causes with the click of a button, and easily do things like invite all of your Facebook friends, or just the ones who have installed Causes at some point in the past. And because it’s an Open Graph app developer, the company is now able to share your activity back to your Timeline and your friends’ Tickers, in addition to the news feed, notifications, etc. The more dramatic changes have been in what else the site offers. Chan has been leading an overhaul that for the last six months has focused on the user experience, cutting underperforming features, introducing usability testing and other unglamorous but crucial aspects of product development. The design has been streamlined from the clunky-feeling app to focus on the key aspects of Causes today. A big rotating image shows major Causes across the top of the site, with recent activity by your Facebook friends underneath. The search bar, along with links to your profile and to finding or starting a Cause are located across the top navigation bar. To their right, you’ll find an image of yourself (your Facebook photo) as well as the amount of money you’ve raised and the number of actions you’ve taken. Below on the right-hand side, you’ll see a link to your profile, your friends’ new Causes, and the Causes raising the most money on the site. The focus, meanwhile, has shifted more to quality awareness-building, away from the promise of fundraising (which has to date not always yielded the funds that many users had hoped for). If you create a new Cause now, you’ll also see some of its newer features added in, like pledges, petitions and polls — and, if you’re a nonprofit, you’ll see that the organizing tools that it had originally launched separately have also been integrated. While the site is still full of purely altruistic causes, like Village Enterprises’ funding campaign to help support entrepreneurs in developing countries, Causes itself is also available for corporate clients who want to get in on the doing good thing. You know, the companies with lots of fancy-sounding efforts about Corporate Social Responsibility, that often produce less than clear results. Take AT&T, for example. The perennial under-performer in customer telecom satisfaction ratings has a few credible uses of Causes going on. One is a quiz that builds awareness around wasted cell phones — answer it and the company will donate $2 to The Nature Conservancy. Another use is a pledge not to text while driving , where the company promises to donate $2 to “educate drivers” for every action. Evolving along with Facebook’s platform has brought Causes from being a lightweight app to a socially-powered web site. On the business side, the company is now monetizing through the corporate clients, as well as ads. As a product, it is also maturing as the web wakes up to the true power of online activism. The past year has been full of examples showing how online campaigns can force governments, corporations and other powerful entities to change their decisions, most recently with online activism helping to convince congresspeople to delay SOPA and PIPA, two controversial anti-piracy bills. Causes traffic, which has fallen after the viral early years of the platform, has already been on the rise in recent months due to the changes the company has been pushing out. As it continues to add features and refine how web users engage with it, Causes is particularly well-placed to be a go-to tool for a new era of internet activism.

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Early Facebook App Causes Is Being Reborn As A Polished Web Site For Good

SOPA Spring

ACMAir — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 10:10:52 +0000

I haven’t written one of these things in quite a while, since before PandoDaily and SOPA Spring and the Republican Rumble in the primaries. The way things are going for Mitt Romney, it appears harder for him to close the deal with voters than for Twitter to come up with a business model. What really boggles the mind is how the Democrats have handed No on SOPA to the Republican Party. Suddenly Chris Dodd has become the Senator from Clueless with his rant about how his former colleagues in Congress will regret not living up to the contract they signed for their SuperPAC auto deposits. What part of realtime do these guys not get? It’s not so much that the world has changed as that the speed with which events evolve has telescoped. The rise of social analytics and realtime feedback loops means that business processes are now transformed on the fly by the velocity with which the impact of a product or idea or strategy is folded back into the process flow. Products become services, interactive streams of data and influence metadata where who thinks what about it when changes the service elastically. That explains why our leaders are having so much trouble with realtime. Their expertise is in the politics of yesterday, where all the PI used to live. What’s happening? Look at the last election’s data. Meanwhile this year’s voters are getting Twitter push notifications with links to the most up-to-date attitude from a cloud-curated stream of instant influentials. Translated: the news is delivered on a whispernet by those we trust with follows and engage with @mentions. Speed in and of itself is different, but with that comes the requirement for prioritization to signal context. Those in the media who crawl out of their defensive posture will realize they can and must translate their insight into context metadata or be abandoned as a source of clarity and value. What Steve Jobs understood was that those who could adapt would find success in the digital realm. He bet Adobe would not adapt. The result: Flash Spring. He bet apps would win because standards follow, not lead. He built in the HTML hole, to evangelize the native edge. I can’t wait for HTML5 to catch up, and I don’t have to. While others check email, I’ve cherry picked a blend of email, Twitter IM, news flashes, and @mention traffic, waking up the iPad or window-shading in from the top of the screen. It’s that little extra step that wins in the new information culture. It doesn’t change everything, but something important every time it works. Our brains are still ahead of the flow of these realtime streams, whether we realize it or not. Information overload is a symptom of our inability to use the stream efficiently, not a capitulation. We are fatigued by the intuition that we are wasting time on useless data. In email, we are at the mercy of a lack of global context. They, the ones who are emailing, have knowledge we don’t have, or an agenda to be revealed, or one of a million spam splits, or a reply. That last one is a no-brainer, something we asked for with a message of our own. But often we get something in between a reply and spam, the cc or blind cc. Gmail did a good job of providing context to the reply and cc stream by rolling the thread up and escalating incoming updates to the top. Contrast this stream with a combination of Twitter @mentions and direct messages. Twitter messages carries two types of context absent or submerged in email. Direct messages require a mutual follow, eliminating the interruption of unwanted email. @mentions and their cousins retweets carry a social context that suggests publicly the presumed value of the communication, an implied or overt endorsement. Looked at through the lense of push notification, it’s easier to rank value via a socially curated stream. Unpacking an email thread is better left to opening the replies as they come in, once vetted by name. Twitter DMs suggest a need to know, and an immediate push. @mentions also push a social context with a kind of social cc texture. You can use some form of Track to harvest those streams and derive a cloud of authority. The various Springs are much more attuned to this kind of notification than the socially immature vehicle of email. The enterprise adds Chatter to further enhance the power of social context via private and external groups, where @mentions and external customers can bridge internal corporate email and external Twitter DMs. It’s no surprise when I get a push notification that RIM’s co-CEOs have given up power. The Blackberry broke out of the pack with its ability to bring email into realtime on mobile devices, but could not compete with the spread of iOS and Android. With ActiveSync, Microsoft provided a good-enough notification on the iPhone and iPad for Exchange. But iOS 5 and the iPad’s viral corporate adoption has created enough scale for the advent of the push notification platform. Those who underestimate the power of the new realtime platform will be as surprised as Chris Dodd was when SOPA Spring arrived.

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SOPA Spring

RIM’s New Playbook: The CEO Sneak

bestcbstore — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 09:53:12 +0000

It was a big day for football fans, with both the AFC and NFC Championships taking place this afternoon and this evening. The games grab more than a few eyeballs every year — last year’s championships grabbed 54.8 million and 51.9 million viewers, respectively . While the numbers aren’t out yet for today’s games, the viewership is expected to be equally as enormous. That’s why so many in the Twittersphere have been so quick to point out that, nestled quietly behind a hotly contested NFC Championship between the New York Giants and the San Francisco 49ers, and an equally great game over in the AFC, was a fairly huge announcement for the maker of BlackBerry , Research In Motion. During Championship Sunday, RIM quietly released a statement saying that its co-CEOs, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, are stepping down and will be replaced by current COO for products and sales, Thorsten Hein. It’s certainly no accident that they would make such a statement during a highly-publicized and much-watched event like the NFC and AFC Championships — even if they did benefit from close games, with one that ended in sudden death overtime. Thus, we’re calling it taking advantage of the “The CEO Sneak,” in honor of football’s time-honored play called the Quarterback Sneak . The CEO sneak is not employed as often as the quarterback sneak, so it’s good to see RIM taking advantage of the diversion to sneak in their announcement about its leadership changes. And, again, this obviously big news for RIM, whose co-CEOs have been leading the company for the better part of decades. Unfortunately, RIM has been struggling mightily of late, and when a once-enormous public company falls on hard times, lays off thousands of employees, and loses large chunks of its market share to the competition, investors and shareholders are bound to get antsy. Many have called for new leadership, management overhauls, and even the sale of the company to a larger entity. In fact, last year, several large investors in the Canadian mobile device company floated a proposal seeking to break up RIM’s co-CEO duo, arguing that operations (and chairman and chief executive positions) are best managed by one person. Pardon the bad joke, but you might see it as the officials throwing a flag for too many CEOs on the field. The co-CEOs managed to retain their dual leadership, but today the pressure was too great. Both former leaders are saying that they were not forced out by the board of directors, but instead made the decision themselves, recommending that the board make Thorsten Heins the new CEO. It was a bold move to mollify its dissenters, especially in naming a new CEO that many are, at least to date, somewhat unfamiliar with in Heins. However, the new CEO will still have to contend with the shadow of the former leaders, as they will be staying on at RIM in board positions, with Lazaridis becoming vice chair. If the former CEOs did in fact step down under their own volition, then there was no better time to let the news trickle out than on a Sunday — during the NFC Championship, when many would be distracted yelling at their TV screens and spilling beer on their remotes. And it’s certainly better than having to wait for the Super Bowl, which won’t be played until February 5th. There’s already been one notable Super Bowl Shuffle . Points to whomever comes up with the best spoof of the Super Bowl Shuffle for RIM. If the company is confident in its new CEO and the management changes that are afoot ( more in our latest post here ), why hide it behind football? Why not do so proudly and boldly on a slow news day? (Granted, Sunday can be just that.) So, what do you think readers, was this a smart move? And more importantly, do you think this management shuffle bodes well for RIM going forward? Will its stock jump on this Hail Mary, or fumble and dive? Weigh in and let us know. Let’s hope that the future of RIM is bright and won’t require a post like this . Read RIM’s release here , and our coverage here . And, as a bonus, here’s the guy who was leading the sneak, or being snuck, if you prefer. Can Thorsten Heins become RIM’s Tim Cook? Hard to believe so based on this video, but it is early in the game. Image credit: AP Photo/Julio Cortez

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RIM’s New Playbook: The CEO Sneak

Pulse Jumped From 1 Million To 11 Million Downloads In 2011; Now Seeing Download Every 2 Seconds

Budowniczy425 — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 06:24:47 +0000

In November, Amazon began shipping its new Kindle. At the time, even though reactions were varied, though Amazon hoped for the best, as some projected it would sell as many as 5 million by the end of 2011. Though the indications are that it didn’t get there. However, the media hype and early Kindle sales have still been a boon for a young startup that you’re probably by now familiar with: Pulse . At launch in November, the suped up RSS-style news reader tailored for mobile devices found itself the unofficial news reader for the Kindle Fire. While Amazon never officially endorsed them as such, Pulse was one of a handful of native apps to appear on the device’s homescreen right out of the box. Of course, Amazon keeps their cards close to their chest, like Apple, and Pulse Co-founder Akshay Kothari tells me that the team didn’t know Amazon had chosen them as such until a few weeks before the device was shipped. In fact, the Kindle Fire’s sales saw Pulse rack up 1.1 million downloads on Christmas Day alone. Of course, this is aided by the fact that the newsreader app has been both lucky and fleet with pushing designs early on emerging platforms. Steve Jobs mentioned Pulse at the iPad launch event , and although Pulse was subsequently pulled, it started a trend. The app went on to see a lot of adoption on the iPad, and caught fire on Honeycomb (as much as an app can), and has leveraged that early success to secure such optimal placement on the Kindle. Kothari today shared with TechCrunch that over the course of 2011, Pulse went from 1 million downloads to over 11 million, and are currently averaging approximately one download every two seconds, and 1.5 million every month. Of course, downloads are one thing, active users another. Pulse isn’t ready to share active users numbers, presumably because they aren’t particularly close to the downloads statistics, but people are using it. For example, in total, users have read a total of 1.39 billion stories through Pulse, and shared 9.8 million stories. As a note of tribute to Steve Jobs, 812K stories were read about the Apple co-founder on October 6th. The app has seen high adoption for several reasons, and part of that is hanks to its touch-based interface (easy swiping/scrolling), clean design, and visual appeal. But, it’s also the fact that it’s been able to strike a number of strategic partnerships with big media outlets, like ESPN, and with deal sites like Groupon. (Pulse now has over 250 publishing partners.) And, as a word to wise entrepreneurs, Kothari tells me that the success has also been attributable to the fact that the team is on all of the major platforms, iPhone, iPad, Android, Android tablets, Nook, Amazon, Windows Phone 7, etc. Focusing on building apps for each OS and mobile experience is important, and giving readers the ability to sync their Pulse apps across platforms was a big move for Pulse. Kothari says that the key, while difficult to always implement effectively, is to maintain a consistency of brand across mobile platforms, while optimizing apps for each of their particular experiences. Like others before, he said that the experience building for each is different, but that iOS makes it easy to prototype different looks, there’s a lack of fragmentation, only one screensize for the iPad and iPhone, and they have great tools. The benefit to Android is scale and the quick turnaround cycle. “Mobile hasn’t seen a great A/B testing formula,” Kothari says, but Android gets the closest. Amazon, on the other hand, has done a pretty good job of making it easy for Android developers to build apps for their modified mobile OS. Windows Phone? Well, that remains to be seen. Pulse has seen some great competition from Flud, which hasn’t seen nearly the same scale and adoption Pulse has managed thanks to its great distribution plays, but it’s trying to push forward the socialization (so to speak) of the newsreading experience . Because it was a fast-paced, hockey-stick-growth type year for Pulse, the focus was mainly on scaling. But the co-founder said that they’re getting to a point where they feel comfortable with their progress there and are ready to focus more on the social aspects of news, as well as productizing their experience. And, hey, with Streamglider , Taptu, and others, there’s plenty of competition to go around. They’ve been able to get pretty far with their Palo Alto-based team of 20, but they’re ramping up in their hiring thanks to that $9 million round in June in hopes of doing more with the reams of data they’ve been collecting around what people are reading. There’s a lot of potential around this, just as we’ve seen publishing companies launching news apps on Facebook to get in the news feed, Pulse is looking for the best ways to encourage social news sharing. And as something that’s already, in my opinion, social, there’s plenty of opportunity. For more, check out Pulse’s stats in their infographic below:

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Pulse Jumped From 1 Million To 11 Million Downloads In 2011; Now Seeing Download Every 2 Seconds