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Dec 29, 6:59AM
There are no shortages of "predictions"
articles, here I look at a dozen things that won't happen in the world of online video in 2012, even though they should.
1) We Will Have Standards and Definitions (No, we won't) By the end of 2011, the online video industry didn't yet have a common definition and standard for a video view. It also wasn't sure if the click-through-rate or completion rate would become the ultimate yardstick for success. A lot of experts are coming out and
saying that 2012 will mark the year where we define these standards and agree on one. Personally, I think that is wishful thinking, 2012 is the year where we
admit that we have this problem, but it won't matter, as online video advertising continues to grow despite a sea of confusion, smoke and mirrors
Dec 29, 5:47AM
The Gillmor Gang goes enterprise in a conversation with Paul Greenberg, the eminence grise of the CRM, now Social CRM world. Gangsters John Taschek and Steve Gillmor decrypt Paul's latest report from the front.
Dec 29, 3:29AM
"Google+ is about sharing the right updates with the right people - making sharing online just like sharing in real life. Just like in real life, sometimes you just want to hang out with friends. Hanging out on Google+, with your family, your friends, or new friends you don't yet know, is more than just multi-user video chat. It's about eliminating borders and bringing people together around the world. It's about people."
Dec 29, 1:58AM
Blip Networks, which operates
Blip.tv, is raising more money. According to an
SEC filing, the New York City company sold $6 million worth of stock beginning on December 22, 2011 in an offering that could expand to as much as $11.1 million. Presumably, this is part of a Series D offering, since Blip raised a
$10 million Series C in May, 2010, almost 18 months ago. Blip is trying to become a
destination for indie online videos. But it is becoming increasingly hard for any video site that is not Youtube to carve out a niche for itself.
Dec 29, 1:11AM
Local interactive advertising firm
WebVisible has shut its doors. According to a note sent from the company's CEO to employees, WebVisible ran out of cash, and Silicon Valley Bank is shutting the company down. WebVisible's software allowed advertisers to manage local online campaigns on Google, Yahoo, Bing and others. The company's services were offered directly affiliate partners to local businesses, franchisors, and national advertisers Previous WebVisible partners include AT&T, British Telecom, Yellow Pages Group of Canada, EarthLink, and The McClatchy Company, among others.
Dec 29, 12:33AM
Facebook has AppData, Twitter has Twitaholic, and now Google+ has its own independent brand page rankings site:
ZoomSphere. It shows which brands have the most followers, activity, +1s, shares, and comments, and slice the data by time, page category, and country. Oddly, the site doesn't rank user profiles like
SocialStatistics does -- just brand pages. Still, by augmenting its existing charts for Facebook and Twitter, ZoomSphere could become a comprehensive resource for brands charting their own performance, assessing competitors, or scoping for potential partners.
Dec 28, 11:53PM
In many ways, 2011 was the year of the pivot. One startup that successfully switched gears was
Fab, which started the year as a gay social network and ended it a design-oriented e-commerce site. Founder Jason Goldberg created the
Fab Timeline slideshow below to illustrate all the changes the company has gone through, from its pivot in February to raising
$8 million in July, another
$40 million in early December, and
growing all along the way. But one slide in particular caught my eye. It shows Fab's order growth shooting up from just above 20,000 orders in July to about 40,000 in September and then jumping to nearly 100,000 in November. Orders in december continues to climb, Goldberg tells me, and the company is on an annualized revenue-run-rate of almost $70 million.
Dec 28, 10:05PM
Makerbot's Thing-O-Matic is pretty pricey - $1,299 for the kit and $2,500 for the assembled kit - but (and this is my professional opinion) it is amazing and everyone in the world should own one. That said, Fab.com has a special deal on Thing-O-Matics this week - $999 for the kit and $2,000 for the assembled device - one of the first and biggest discounts ever on the entire system.
Dec 28, 9:39PM
Other than Salesforce, no cloud SaaS provider handles more transactions than
Taleo. The stats the company revealed to me about its 2011 are staggering. The Taleo talent and recruitment solution helped enterprises hire 3.1 million people, roughly 15% of the year's US hires. It had 50 to 60 million visitors to the job listing sites and other services it powers. Bootstrapped but now publicly traded, Taleo serves 5,000 customers including half of the Fortune 100. When companies need to hire huge numbers of employees, they come to Taleo.
Dec 28, 9:12PM
As far as web sites go, there's only one site I look at more than Google Reader. You're on it right now. There's nothing technically "wrong" with Google Reader, but when you look at it every five minutes, every day of your life, another RSS reader option is super exciting. Enter
Subpug. It's a new RSS reader that just launched on Christmas and it's pretty slick if I do say so myself. It's aimed toward more of the light news reader, rather than someone like myself with thousands of subscriptions. Still, it gets the job done. You can choose from certain pre-subscribed options like Gadgets, Music, Fashion, and even Geek Humor, or you can build your own/import your Google Reader OPML. The set up process takes all of three seconds and you're ready to read, mainly because there's no sign up or log in of any kind.
Dec 28, 9:02PM
Groupon has continued its (talent)
acquisition spree with the recent purchase of a hot Silicon Valley startup before they even launched - and with extremely little fanfare. We've learned that
Campfire Labs, which was founded by ex-Googler
Sakina Arsiwala (previously Head of International at YouTube) and her husband, social search technology expert
Naveen Koorakula (previously at search companies like Inktomi, Yahoo and Picch), was quietly bought by Groupon.
Dec 28, 8:54PM
Oh, how I love Reddit AMA (Ask-Me-Anything) posts. In almost all cases, the inherent down-to-earth nature of a community-driven interview leads the most interesting of people to open up in genuine, honest ways that they otherwise might not in a one-on-one interview. Plus, they're almost always jammed with all sorts of interesting facts and stats. Take
this AMA with Khan Academy's founder, Salman Khan, for example. Currently the top post on Reddit, Khan has spent the last two hours detailing everything from their recent growth and his workflow to the team's plans for the future.
Dec 28, 8:10PM
A
leaked Windows Phone roadmap made the rounds earlier today, and if its contents hold true, then Microsoft will be going big on hardware when it comes time for Windows Phone Apollo to take the stage. Even though the budget-friendly Tango update will hit devices first, Microsoft has apparently made the development of "superphones" a priority for next year.
Dec 28, 7:32PM
Quick, how many pairs of chromosomes do you have? If your mind just drew a blank — or an image of Ethan Hawke fiddling around with tweezers in GATTACA — then you probably aren't alone. The answer, of course, is 23 pairs, for a total of 46 chromosomes. And it's what the name of well-funded genetic testing company
23andMe, which has raised some
$52.6 million to date, refers to. Despite the reference (which may not be obvious to most people), that name isn't a bad one, as it makes an intimidating topic sound more friendly and accessible. But now the company has another option at its disposal that's a lot more straightforward (and SEO friendly, no doubt):
GeneticScreening.com. As was first
reported by DomainShane, 23andMe cofounder Anne Wojcicki bought the domain for a mere $2200 on Sedo in the last two weeks.
Dec 28, 7:25PM
If you're a
New York Times subscriber -- or
even if you're not -- you may have received that following email this morning, implying that you have cancelled your subscription. Many many people did, it's all
over the tweets. Even though the email was sent from an address that had sent out legitimate emails in the past, "email.newyorktimes.com," it wasn't actually from the
New York Times, as some of their more
tech hipster reporters and their official Twitter account confirmed, "If you received an email today about canceling your
NYT subscription, ignore it. It's not from us."
Dec 28, 7:23PM
It seems like December just can't end soon enough for the folks at Verizon -- we're getting reports that Verizon's data network is
once again on the fritz. Like both other times this month, not everyone is affected, but I can safely say my little part of New Jersey is without data. Users on
Verizon's support forums have reported similar issues in parts of Georgia, Michigan, Oregon, Pennsylvania, California, Virginia, Washington, Texas, and Maryland.
Dec 28, 7:10PM
M-Edge, a small Maryland-based company responsible for many popular Kindle cases, last week filed suit against Amazon. According to the
Wall Street Journal, M-Edge claims that Amazon has repeatedly tried to change the terms of a contract put into place all the way back in 2009, and has bullied the accessory maker each time it fights back. In the original contract, Amazon was to receive a 15 percent commission on all sales that go through Amazon's Kindle store front. Apparently this wasn't enough for Amazon, who later requested an increase in commission to 32 percent and threatened to remove M-Edge cases from the store if the Maryland-based company didn't concede.
Dec 28, 6:59PM
And that, friends, is what we call
seizing the moment. (Meme-ment?)
Dec 28, 6:23PM
We all know that not much happens in the week between Christmas and the New Year. But less well know is how little has happened culturally in the last twenty years. Indeed, so little has happened in this time (except, of course, for all the all-important caveat of technological change), according to the writer and broadcaster
Kurt Andersen, that we are still listening to the
same music, watching the same sort of tv shows, wearing the same style of clothing, driving the same kind of cars and living in the same kind of homes as we were in late Eighties.
Dec 28, 6:06PM
For a young startup, sometimes you want any funding you can get. For an incubator program, sometimes any startup is what you're looking for. Finding each other won't necessarily make either one successful, but more pairings might help overall. Or so believes TechStars, which is
launching what it intends to be the Common Application of the startup world. Called
Accelerato.rs, the application is a standard online form that asks founders basic investor-type questions, and lets them write one version then send it to any of the dozen or so participating programs. Funded by the entrepreneurship-focused
Kauffman Foundation and under development since
earlier this year, Accelerato.rs also lets startups track their acceptance status for each of the programs that they apply to. "One of the big things that a lot of the accelerators are looking for are more applications," TechStars cofounder David Cohen tells me. " Y Combinator, Seedcamp, TechStars and some of the other big accelerators are getting thousands of applications but only accepting a few percentage points."
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