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Early Twitter Product Head Anamitra Banerji Becomes An EIR At Foundation Capital

Achilles — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 23:34:56 +0000

When Twitter shook up its product leadership in July, it let loose four Silicon Valley veterans into a talent-starved job market. While the three others have become a VC, a cofounder, and an engineering head, the last one left unaccounted for has a new home. Anamitra Banerji has just joined Foundation Capital as its newest entrepreneur in residence. In this role, which can mean advising and joining a company or starting one, Banerji has a few ideas he’s going to explore, he tells me. They go beyond his history in the search and advertising business, and build on his experience developing social software at Twitter. But first, here’s why you may know of him. After cofounding an online health company in India in the late 1990s, he worked for a few years in that country and the US as a software engineer at various larger companies before becoming a manager at early search marketing firm Overture in 2004. He stayed there through its acquisition by Yahoo in 2006, all the way until early 2009. Then, as the first product manager and thirtieth employee at Twitter, he hired many of its engineering and product employees, and developed its ad platform from scratch. This includes Promoted Tweets, Promoted Trends and Promoted Accounts. While Twitter under returning founder Jack Dorsey has gone in some new product directions, Banerji’s impact is still clearly visible at the 700-person company. “I’m taking some time to step back to see what’s happening out in the Valley,” he says about his plans, “to see what I can do to build great companies, to share my experiences with other entrepreneurs… and to learn a little bit about what it’s like on the other side [at a venture firm].” He’s not new to the work. He’s been advising companies on the side for three years, he recently became a mentor at 500 Startups , and he’s already been working with a team of Stanford students on the Widescope project , which provides a cool interactive data visualization that lets users create their own federal budgets (er, budget deficits). The areas he’s going to explore could include ads and monetization, but he’s particularly interested in online collaboration — like the Widescope tool — marketplaces, and mobile-focused products. He’s not the first of the four ex-colleagues to start working with a VC. Josh Elman, who is also a long-time Valley product leader, recently became a principal at Greylock . Meanwhile, Kevin Cheng is now the cofounder of Incredible Labs (which is building a mobile personal assistant called Donna), and Jean-Paul Cozzatti is the vice president of engineering at social fundraising site Rally .

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Early Twitter Product Head Anamitra Banerji Becomes An EIR At Foundation Capital

Brightcove Will Price IPO At $10-$12 Per Share

kram412 — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 23:19:41 +0000

Online video service Brightcove will price its IPO between $10 and $12 per share, according to a new filing with the SEC. The company first filed for the IPO back in August of last year, saying it wanted to raise up to $50 million. Now, $50 million is at the lower end of its price range. If Brightcove sells the maximum number of shares (it’s set to sell 5 million shares, plus an extra 750,000 if demand is high) at $12, it could raise up to $69 million. The filing also updates Brightcove’s key metrics through the end of 2011. The company, which sells online video publishing and distribution services, says it had 3,872 customers as of Dec 31. Its revenue grew last year to $63.6 million (from $43.7 million in 2010), but it still showed a loss of $17.8 million. Thanks to plans to “continue to invest in the growth of our business and operations,” Brightcove says it expects to see losses until the end of this year at least. Brightcove also revealed ambitions beyond video when it announced its App Cloud last year, with its first commercial sale in September and general availability in November, according to the filing.

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Brightcove Will Price IPO At $10-$12 Per Share

Tsavo Media To Pay Yahoo $4.8M For Sending ‘Low Quality Traffic’, President Quits

admin — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 18:13:44 +0000

Tsavo Media , which operates a network of roughly 300 websites and blogs as an indirect subsidiary of Canadian online publishing and advertising company Cyberplex , is being retroactively charged $4.8 million “over a reasonable time period” by Yahoo for sending the latter company’s advertisers “low quality traffic” in 2011. To boot, Cyberplex president Ted Hastings (formerly Tsavo Media’s CEO), apparently jumped ship. It’s a curious story, to say the least. Tsavo Media, once led by former MySpace CEO and previously AOL SVP Mike Jones , was acquired by Cyberplex back in May 2010, for a reported $75 million . The company’s network of Internet publications includes crappy websites like LumaGardening.com , ThinkFashion , TechSerious , WealthyGeek , Twirlit , DiscoverFame and KidGlue . Now, according to a press statement released earlier today, a Special Committee of the Board of Directors of Cyberplex has been appointed to “review the status of Tsavo Media and strategic alternatives available to create shareholder value out of that division, which is currently heavily encumbered by debt under Tsavo Media’s credit facility with American Capital”. I bet this wasn’t what they had in mind when they acquired Tsavo Media. But then again, what good could have come out of buying a crappy content generation machine anyway? Cyberplex had this to say about the sticky Yahoo situation it now finds itself in: The Company reported today that Tsavo Media has been engaged in discussions with Yahoo! to address concerns regarding the quality of traffic provided to the Yahoo! advertising base, and Tsavo Media’s reliance on Yahoo!’s traffic quality reporting system. Tsavo Media has now been informed that it will be required to pay to Yahoo! approximately $4.8 million over a reasonable time period currently being discussed, notwithstanding prior information that indicated good quality traffic at that time. This amount may be partially offset by achieving certain performance incentives and anticipated improvements in average revenues per click, but the Company noted that there can be no assurance as to how much, if any, of this payment to Yahoo! would be offset through these incentives and improvements. Translation: unless a miracle happens, we’re going to have to cough up some serious dough, and we can only hope we don’t have to pay everything all at once and in the near future. The Company noted that Yahoo! provides bi-weekly quality reports to Tsavo Media, which are extremely important to Tsavo Media in the management of its systems, analysis, forecasting and ultimately its day-to-day business decisions. Yahoo! recently communicated to Tsavo Media that notwithstanding the good quality score reports that had been provided throughout most of 2011, Yahoo! would retroactively charge Tsavo for what Yahoo! is now saying was actually low quality traffic, ranging back over many months during 2011. While the Company and Yahoo! remain in discussions on this issue, the Company now expects that Yahoo! will enforce its decision to charge back this amount citing its right to do so pursuant to the terms of Tsavo Media’s agreement with Yahoo! Translation: first Yahoo says we did a good job last year, but now they say we did a bad job, and according to the deal we agreed upon they can actually retroactively charge us for it. “We are very frustrated by the timing of these events after spending almost one year rebuilding the Tsavo organization while negotiating a settlement with American Capital”, said Geoffrey Rotstein, CEO of Cyberplex. “These events are disappointing given all of the hard work the Tsavo employees have invested to rebuild the organization and because they continue to take away and distract from all of the other positive developments and momentum being created within both Tsavo and the other divisions of Cyberplex.” Translation: Oh FFF******CCCKKK.

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Tsavo Media To Pay Yahoo $4.8M For Sending ‘Low Quality Traffic’, President Quits

SoftKinetic And Intel Partner For Minority Report-Style Ads

blogger — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 07:05:30 +0000

Startup SoftKinetic just announced a new kind of advertising, one that combines its gesture-control technology with Intel’s video analytics. The goal is for people to walk up to a digital display equipped with SoftKinetic’s 3D camera and move their arms (or the rest of their body) to interact with the display, similar to Microsoft Kinect. Then, as you’re moving, Intel’s AIM technology can identify your age and gender, which is crucial information for advertisers — and also useful for personalizing the content to each viewer. For example, as outlined over email by SoftKinetic’s vice president of marketing and communications Virgile Delporte, a young woman might walk up to SoftKinetic-equipped display at an airport, and she could browse information about nearby malls and fashion-related shops. If the viewer was an older man, they might see an ad for a nearby cigar shop. The description reminds me of one of the most famous scenes in Minority Report , when Tom Cruise’s character runs through the mall and all of the advertisements start delivering personalized messages. (The movie is also famous for featuring gesture-controlled computers, so clearly the SoftKinetic team was watching very closely) Of course, not everyone thinks the Minority Report future is positive, but for people worried about privacy, Delporte assures me that SoftKinetic’s data will be anonymized. “Only statistical information will be stored, and this anonymous data will be shared in the cloud to provide real-time data to the advertisers, who can easily test different advertising scenarios,” he says. “Think about the way web advertising is managed today. Combined with 3D imaging analysis, the data will get even more accurate.” SoftKinetic doesn’t have any customers to announce yet, but it’s demonstrating the technology at the Integrated Systems Europe conference in Europe starting January 31. I’ve included a video of SoftKinetic’s technology in action at Yahoo, as well as the Minority Report scene, below.

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SoftKinetic And Intel Partner For Minority Report-Style Ads

DMARC Promises A World Of Less Phishing

user — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:31:43 +0000

Some 15 companies, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, PayPal plan to jointly work on a standard for blocking phishing e-mails by verifying that they come from legitimate companies. It seems obvious that trusted, legitimate companies could come together to do this, but it’s only started happening in the last 18 months. DMARC.org – or the Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance – is a new white-list system will be available for use across the Internet. The other companies in the DMARC working group are AOL, Bank of America, Fidelity Investments, American Greetings, LinkedIn, and e-mail security providers Agari, Cloudmark, eCert, Return Path, and Trusted Domain Project. The move follows an announcement in November that Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, and Agari were authenticating emails from Facebook, YouSendIt, and other e-commerce companies and social networks. DMARC said the anti-phishing initiative has actually been going on for the last 18 months. According to Google, about 15 percent of all e-mail comes from members of DMARC, but by published their DMARC records, these records can not be domain spoofed. This makes the anti-phising group much more effective at stopping criminal gangs from using phasing to dupe unsuspecting users. DMARC.org plans to submit the DMARC specification to the Internet Engineering Task Force for standardisation. So perhaps we’ll start to see the ending of phishing once and for all.

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DMARC Promises A World Of Less Phishing

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

Flurry: Amazon’s Kindle Fire Is Already Starting To Smoke Samsung’s Galaxy Tab

admin — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 01:45:49 +0000

Wuh oh, Samsung — better watch your tail. While Apple might not be seeing any impact (be it positive or negative) on iPad sales from the launch of the Kindle Fire, Samsung’s Galaxy Tab ought to be feeling the heat. Tapping into the data provided by their app analytics platform (which they estimate has found its way onto around 90% of the Android devices out there), Flurry highlights a few surprising numbers . App Sessions: This one’s pretty interesting, as it measures how many people are actually using their respective Android tablets (as opposed to how many bought them and let them sit on a shelf somewhere). It measures “User Application Sessions”, which is defined as a user opening an application and using it for at least 10 seconds before closing it. After launching in November, the Kindle Fire accounted for just 3% of application sessions. Just three months later, it’s at 35.7% — pretty much neck and neck with Samsung’s 35.6%. Think about that. The Kindle Fire, which has been out for 3 months, is seeing as much cumulative usage as a series of devices that have been out for an entire year longer. Even if the number of Galaxy Tabs sold well outweighs the number of Kindle Fires sold (and it likely does — again, the Tab series has been out for much longer. It’s also available around the world, whereas the Fire is US only for now), Fire owners appear to actually use their devices more often. Downloads: Next up, Flurry looked at the download numbers for 5 applications that were in the Top 10 on both the Android Market and Amazon’s App Store. To boil it all down: for every sale of one of these top apps to a Galaxy Tab owner, there were 2.53 sales to a Kindle Fire owner. Again, consider how much bigger the Galaxy Tab audience is (Flurry estimates that it’s at least double) — and yet, the Kindle Fire owners are buying more. If you’re an Android developer wondering whether or not you should target the Kindle Fire and Amazon’s App Store, the answer seems to be an incredibly clear “Yes.”

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Flurry: Amazon’s Kindle Fire Is Already Starting To Smoke Samsung’s Galaxy Tab

At Least Yahoo’s User Engagement Numbers Are Sort Of Up

vertical8 — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 03:10:54 +0000

Yahoo’s fourth quarter results are as underwhelming as most people expected: earnings were at $0.24 a share from $1.17 billion in revenue. But some of the brightest spots, beyond new chief executive Scott Thompson now taking the helm , are the engagement numbers. Take a look at the slide below, from the company’s earnings deck . Worldwide unique visits to both Yahoo-branded sites and to Yahoo properties were up by 12%. Since this data is from comScore , I pulled the measurement firms’ latest numbers to provide a little more detail. They show that Yahoo staged a minor visitor recovery over the last three months of the year in the US, ending with nearly 176 million monthly uniques. Worldwide, it did so through November, but then dropped slightly last month to end at nearly 692 million uniques. (ComScore graphs below, US first and world second.) Page views, meanwhile, were mixed, based on the data provided by Yahoo. The “Communications & communities” category, which includes Mail, Groups, Flickr and a hodgepodge of other products, fell by 13%, the biggest drop in two years. Search declined 4%, the worst quarter since Q2 of 2010. Media, which includes the Homepage, the mobile web apps, News, Sports, Finance, and other content sites, was the gainer. It continued to build on single-digit gains, with a 7% increase in the past quarter. Media also continued a streak of growth in minutes that started in the third quarter of last year. Communications also has seen very large gains in minutes, which appear to be from its new Mail rollout. The company has some more color on the content effort, via the earnings call today. The so-called “Tentpoles and Anchors” (aka the “Mixed Metaphor”) strategy. The company focused on covering big events like the Super Bowl, the Oscars, and the British Royal Wedding. It’s planning to build on that in 2012 with coverage of the US elections and the Olympics. It also hired more editorial staffers last year, added the ABC News content partnership. Yahoo Screens for destinations now includes 14 new shows. One in six Americans online watched one of these videos in December. It also extended Yahoo Publishing to more than 136 sites, added its social bar to news and other content sites, and added a new mail platform to 80% of global users, and created new iPad experiences.

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At Least Yahoo’s User Engagement Numbers Are Sort Of Up

Google Consolidates Privacy Policy; Will Combine User Data Across Services

ACMAir — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 02:57:52 +0000

Google has more than 70 different privacy documents over its range of products, which overwhelming for any user to comb through (and that’s after Google pared down its policies in 2010). Today, the search giant is rolling out a new, comprehensive privacy policy which the company says will consolidate more than 60 of the separate privacy notices into one simple policy. The company says the changes will take effect on March 1, and will be starting to notify users today via email and a notice on its homepage. The main change, say Google, is that if you are signed into your Google account, Google will combine user info across its products to better serve account holders. As Google says: In short, we’ll treat you as a single user across all our products, which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience. This is exemplified, says Google, in its more personalized search product that debuted recently, and received major criticism . You’ll see Google+ posts and data in your search results, and allows for the seamless transfer of data in between other services, including Docs, Calender, Gmail and more, says Google. Google wants to make the entire web experience more personal, including advertising, location-based reminders, spelling suggestions of friends names and more. “People still have to do way too much heavy lifting, and we want to do a better job of helping them out,” according to the blog post. The company also says it has rewritten its privacy policies so they’re easier to read and understand. And Google reiterates that it “remains committed to data liberation,” won’t sell personal information, or share it externally without permission and will continue to try to be transparent about the information collected from users.

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Google Consolidates Privacy Policy; Will Combine User Data Across Services

Yahoo Earnings Meet Expectations, More-or-Less

admin — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 02:22:26 +0000

Yahoo just released its earnings report for the fourth quarter of 2011, with results that were basically in line with the expectations of Wall Street analysts . The company earned 24 cents per share, which is what analysts estimated, and what the company delivered during the same quarter last year. But meeting those low expectations is no great triumph. For one thing, Yahoo’s revenues have been in declining for a while now, and the trend continued. Fourth quarter revenue, minus traffic acquisition costs, came in at $1.17 billion, a 3 percent decrease from the same period last year. That’s also less than the analyst estimate of $1.19 billion. Display ad revenue was down 4 percent, to $546 million. Search ad revenue was down 3 percent to $388 million. But hey, some numbers went up — operating income increased 10 percent to $242 million, a fact that new CEO Scott Thompson highlighted in the earnings release. “Yahoo! continued to make progress in the quarter with operating income increasing ten percent year over year,” Thompson said. “In 2012 we will be aligning resources behind key areas of focus to enable us to move aggressively in market and grow our business, bringing innovative new products and experiences to both our users and advertisers.” The numbers cover a quarter when Yahoo was mostly without permanent leadership — Carol Bartz was fired in September , and the company was run by interim CEO Tim Morse (normally Yahoo’s CFO) until Thompson’s hiring in early January. More interesting than the numbers will be Thompson’s first earnings call as Yahoo CEO, which starts at 2pm Pacific. We’ll be liveblogging the call in this post. Earnings call liveblog 2:03pm: After the boilerplate, Scott Thompson starts the call. It has been three weeks since he joined, two weeks since his official start date. He’s been “rapidly coming up to speed.” Talks about Yahoo’s “exceptional foundation,” user base, brand, etc. “We will focus on generating real, sustainable growth and value creation.” Acknowledges that there’s a lot of work to do, but says it’s too early for a detailed plan. His guiding principle is to “insist that we be balanced,” especially in “the way we allocate capital.” 2:06pm: Thompson goes over the basic numbers. “A lot of people worked very hard” to get these results, but there’s “no question” that they need to improve. Tim Morse takes over to go into more detail. “This quarter was challenging in many respects, but I’m proud of what the company accomplished.” Talks about new products, salesforth growth, Interclick acquisition, and more. 2:09pm: Morse starts talking about finances for the whole year, noting that revenues are down in large part because of the beginning of the search partnership with Microsoft. Morse notes declining costs, but argues that Yahoo isn’t cutting everything — the company spent $250 million on new products. 2:16pm: Morse discusses audience and engagement growth, thanks to content and product launches. “One in six Americans online watched a Yahoo original video in November.” Despite these wins, “Revenue isn’t growing. … We expected better.” 2:19pm: Morse says, “a low- to mid-teens operating margin is not what you should expect from us in the future.” The margin should improve thanks to revenue growth and improved “cost structure.” 2:21pm: Thompson thanks Morse for leading the company through the transition. Then Thompson talks more about his goal of balance. First, he will balance Yahoo’s approach to its customers — which includes users and advertisers. “We will focus equally on both.” Second, he will balance “who we are.” “Yahoo is fundamentally both a media company and a technology company. We need to be great at both.” “So we end the debate about which is more important — we are both a media company and a tech company. We must do both.” 2:23pm: Third, balance between speed and thoughtfulness: “We will get speed back into the equation.” Fourth, balance in how Yahoo’s invests its capital. Majority of resources should be dedicated to current core business. But Thompson also believes in significantly investing in new products, and spending a small but non-trivial amount on technologies that won’t be relevant for at least 12 months. “This isn’t starting from scratch on a new investment cycle.” 2:27pm: Two fundamental building blocks of future plans. One is a focus on customer experiences. “We need to improve the quality of our relationship with these customers and their experiences with Yahoo.” Those improvements can include new interfaces, better content, and faster services. Yahoo will also give advertisers “better tools to increase the effectiveness and ROI of their spend with us.” The second building block, data, is one way Yahoo can improve that experience. “Yahoo has made some real progress in this area but there’s a long way to go to get to that uniquely relevant experience that will really differentiate it.” “Our data may be Yahoo’s single most underrated, under-appreciated and under-used asset.” Data will be “the cornerstone of the next generation of Yahoo products.” 2:30pm: The board has worked systematically to make decisions about Yahoo’s future, whether that’s an acquisition, raising more capital, or selling off part of the company. “It’s important for you to know that the company remains open to anything that would be good for our shareholders.” However, Thompson says he feels strongly that Yahoo’s Asian assets are important — implying that he will oppose a sale. “I’m here because I believe this company can do much more to innovate and disrupt, to build great products, and to leverage great data and technology in ways that the world hasn’t yet conceived.” 2:33pm: Question and answer portion starts. How much will Interclick contribute to Q1 numbers? And can you say anything about search RPS improvements? Morse: There’s about $25 million of cost and $10 million of revenue. On RPS, Microsoft is “starting to get into the swing of things. … We’re definitely closing the gap.” 2:36pm: How significant of a role do you see M&A in terms of the strategy? Does Yahoo need “transformative acquisitions”? And what about the larger economic environment? Thompson: “If we want to push this agenda forward quickly, we’ll have to be fairly aggressive in the market” — so yes, Yahoo will probably be making some acquisitions. Morse on the macroeconomy: “We’re not expecting much of a pickup in the first quarter anywhere, really.” 2:38pm: What about paying out a dividend? And how can Yahoo turn around its display ad business? Thompson: Too early to talk about dividends. On turning around display business, “a lot of my time and attention has gone into understanding what that business is.” Display advertising is “the very highest priority I have in the core business today.” 2:40pm: Can we assume there are no sacred cows going forward? And how are those premium video programs actually doing? Thompson: It’s hard to interpret the first question. “We are understanding and evaluating all options for the business going forward. … I don’t know whether what I just said fits into no sacred cows, but we’re being aggressive.” Morse: In the last month we had nine out of the top 10 shows in terms of original programming on the Web. Yahoo doesn’t disclose revenue or streaming numbers. “I think it’s safe to assume healthy growth there, but we need to do more.” 2:42pm: What are the economics of Electric City, the web video series in partnership with Tom Hanks? Is it just an experiment? Thompson was at CES where Electric City was announced, says he was “fascinated” by the buzz. No details about how that’s going to affect the larger business. 2:45pm: What are some of the broad themes on new areas that Yahoo could pursue? And what can you say about search share and revenue? Thompson: Too early to talk about those themes. “I hesitate to say what picks at this point in time, what strategy we’re going to invest in.” Morse: It’s definitely Yahoo’s goal to grow search share. Thompson: “No winner has shown themselves … as it relates to mobile and search and display and local.” 2:48pm: How would you define Yahoo? Thompson: “This debate is apparently a long-standing debate inside the company. I would reiterate my comments, which is we better be darn good at both.” “We are going to stop this debate.” 2:53pm: What kind of growth rate do you expect to see on “Class 2″ display advertising inventory? Morse: You’re right, we didn’t have enough focus on that segment. That’s what the Interclick acquisition is for, but no numbers. We are investing in this area “in order to meaningfully improve the growth rates and especially the CPMs in that area.”