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All posts tagged ‘widget’

Monday, April 21, 2008

Web 2.0 and the Enterprise: Duller Than Tweets, but More Important

While the tech blogosphere fiddles away on navel-gazing stories–Who are the top tech bloggers? Do they Twitter to get to the top? Or do they FriendFeed? Do they feed friends while tweeting? More importantly, will there be chicken wings?–I’d advise anyone interested in the much more serious issue of making some money from Web 2.0 to take a gander at ReadWriteWeb’s piece yesterday on enterprise spending in the arena.

According to a new report from Forrester Research (FORR) the site references in the post, enterprises will spend much more in the coming years on social networking, RSS, blogs, widgets and such, making it a $4.6 billion market by 2013.

Here is an interesting data table from the ReadWriteWeb post (click on the image to make it larger):

web20spending

Of course, that doesn’t mean that Twitter’s creators should be jumping up and down now that an actual business plan might be surfacing.

In fact, a lot of popular consumer products might not port over to the business market, even if the concept does.

And, naturally, the old grumps in the IT departments loom large over what gets into corporations and what does not, the ReadWriteWeb piece notes, although other enterprise departments like marketing are already enamored with Web 2.0 tools.

Still security and scaling issues remain paramount, and start-ups that have pioneered these apps in the consumer space might lose business to big copycats like IBM (IBM) and Microsoft (MSFT).

I saw real evidence of the shift at an event in Silicon Valley last week, related to Rohit Bhargava’s new book “Personality Not Included: Why Companies Lose Their Authenticity and How Great Brands Get It Back.”

And, although I expected much more of a corporate love fest, since the affable Bhargava is an SVP of digital strategy and marketing at Ogilvy Public Relations, it turned out to be a very interesting discussion of ways companies could embrace Web 2.0.

I was particularly struck with the very sharp questions from the Silicon Valley-heavy corporate audience too, who were savvy but still curious about the potential pitfalls and benefits of such tools.

Such discussions will be even more interesting, as they percolate across the country to places where most people are just hearing the word widget.

You know, pretty much everywhere except here.

Friday, April 18, 2008

Open Season at Yahoo?

According to several sources close to Yahoo, the company will outline in much more detail its open-platform strategy next week, in its efforts to keep its cred as a big supporter of openness and also show it has a clear path to reinvigorate itself despite current turmoil.

Yahoo (YHOO) has been accelerating its open activities of late, mostly related to its search and ad infrastructure.

aribalogh

But, in his appearance at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco next Thursday morning at a keynote speech titled “Yahoo and Open Platforms,” sources said Yahoo CTO Ari Balogh (pictured here) will sketch out a more significant broadening out of its open platform plans, which would touch consumers more directly.

That could include opening up everything from communications tools like mail to content to all sorts of products Yahoo offers its users to third-party developers.

In addition, the company plans to make as much of those and its own offerings more distributed, sending it all back out to the Web.

This kind of conceptual shift is something many have felt Yahoo has needed to do in a bolder manner, as consumer interest in massive centralized portals like Yahoo has waned.

The move, in many ways, has shades of what Facebook did last year when it opened its platform up to third-party developers, but also includes a vision of a more widgetized and social Yahoo, and a Yahoo available everywhere.

While Yahoo will not specify a date when all this will roll out, sources said Yahoo had hoped to have much of it in place by the end of the year.

This increasingly massive job of opening up more and more of the Yahoo platform to third-party developers and make its own products, APIs, code and content more highly distributed is being led by Balogh.

Balogh came to Yahoo from VeriSign, just days before Microsoft (MSFT) leveled its unsolicited takeover bid at the company.

Working with Yahoo Co-Founder and tech guru David Filo, Balogh has been given high marks from many sources I talked to within the company for bringing a faster-paced style than under longtime Yahoo CTO Farzad Nazem, who retired a year ago.

At the time, many felt Yahoo’s technology efforts had drifted under Nazem, whose internal nickname was “Zod,” as BoomTown reported back in June of 2007.

Setbacks in its Panama project to rehaul its online search-ad technology and a slowness in focusing on Web 2.0 distributed technologies have clearly contributed to Yahoo’s current predicament, in which its long-suffering stock declined enough to give Microsoft an opportunity to make its move on Yahoo.

Under that backdrop, Balogh is under intense pressure to deliver on one of CEO and Co-Founder Jerry Yang’s key focuses for Yahoo that he reiterated in a letter he sent on Feb. 14 to shareholders after Yahoo rejected Microsoft’s offer.

Underscoring the need to make Yahoo a “starting point” and a “must-buy” ad platform, Yang noted: “These key strategies will be enhanced by our adoption of new, more open technology platforms that will encourage the development of new applications and the involvement of third-party developers–and help enrich the user experience.”

hadoop

While it does not get the credit it probably deserves, Yahoo has been moved squarely into the open-source space and, in fact, has made a series of announcements since the Microsoft bid from its implementation of Apache’s Hadoop in its search product to its support of the Google-led OpenSocial initiative to its recently announced AMP!, an ad-management software shipping this summer.

AMP!, said Yahoo, would allow “ad networks, through an open set of APIs, to innovate on top of the transparent marketplace.”

Yahoo Technology Evangelist Jeremy Zawodny might have signaled even more announcements in his well-read blog in mid-March, in fact, when he noted that Yahoo was a longtime proponent of open platforms and open-source technology.

Wrote Zawodny, who declined to speak to me yesterday about any further open initiatives, due to its quiet period around earnings next week, wrote on March 14:

“We’ve been on the openness road for a long, long time at Yahoo. And we take it rather seriously. Sometimes it hasn’t been as visible as others, but believe me, the trend is quite clear when you look at all the data. The Open Source adoption and work. The APIs. The way we communicate with users and partners. The Blogs. The RSS feeds…You’ll be reading more and hearing more about openness at Yahoo from me and Yahoo’s much higher up the food chain in the coming months.

Anyone who knows me knows that I come from open source roots and am a big proponent of opening things up more and more. I’d have left Yahoo years ago if I didn’t see it happening.”

Added Zawodny with some mystery: “If you think the last few weeks are big, you haven’t seen anything yet! :-)”

Monday, April 14, 2008

Facebook Pushes Back Profile Rollout–Developers Breathe a Sigh of Relief

On its blog aimed at Facebook developers, the social-networking site said it would push back its massive Profile page redesign, which was supposed to roll out in early April.

It is now set for late spring, although the post specified no specific date.

facebooklogo

Why?

Facebook said it was due to feedback the company had gotten from its legions of developers who rely on the Facebook universe for their oxygen.

"We're still iterating on the design, making sure we get it right. We'll still continue to roll out improvements to Platform as well," wrote Pete Bratach of Facebook. "And rest assured, we will give you a period of time so you can update your applications before the profile is released to our users."

Well, phew, as some big developers have been grumbling to me a lot of late about their many worries about the new look, which is sure to confound them, and more importantly, users no matter how good it is.

“They really have to roll this out perfectly,” said one big Facebook widget maker. “It really is the biggest thing since Beacon, and you know how that went.”

Indeed, the controversial ad program was not the smoothest moment for the social-networking site. But making big changes to what is the heart-and-soul of Facebook is a quantum level of difficulty higher.

It will require almost perfect execution technically speaking, huge educational efforts early and often for users and a total buy-in from third-party developers, whom Facebook made integral to its success when it made the very sharp move of opening its platform to them.

But don’t feel pressured Mark and Sheryl!

You can see some of the previews on this Facebook Previews page here and in the screenshot picture below (click on the image to make it larger).

fbprofile

And, as an added attraction for those developers, here is a video of the lovely Anna Nalik singing her hit, “Breathe,” in an even better “Grey’s Anatomy” video (I am a complete sucker for cheese):

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

RockYou: The $400 Million Widget?

rockyou

RockYou, widget maker, is the latest example of a sane valuation heartbreaker, as it is undertaking efforts to secure an investment from mainstream financing firms that would value the company at between $300 million and $400 million.

First reported by Valleywag last night, the start-up, said one source, “is being squired around Wall Street” by investment behemoth Morgan Stanley (MS), in search of the same kind of deal its rival Slide got in January.

BoomTown broke the news of that deal, which nabbed Slide $50 million and a $550 million valuation with investments from blue-chip investors T. Rowe Price (TROW) and Fidelity.

Thus, RockYou’s motto: Anything Slide can do, we can do slightly smaller!

And, indeed, not to be SuperPoked by Slide CEO and Founder Max Levchin, sources said RockYou Co-Founders Jai Shen (also CTO) and Lance Tokuda (CEO) were quickly on the march for their own payday.

It is, in fact, a quest that a lot of Web 2.0 companies seem to be on, since the sector’s fearless leader–Facebook–got its $240 million and $15 billion valuation from Microsoft (MSFT) last year.

All of this frantic funding activity is, of course, this bubble’s version of going public–grab big cash investments from investment firms and hedge funds, desperate for a good bet on the sector, without the pain of public scrutiny of questionable business prospects that did in Web 1.0 shooting stars.

It’s that or get bought for an ungodly sum by equally desperate Web 1.0 companies (See: AOL+Bebo).

Sources close to RockYou, which has had acquisition feelers put out to it from larger companies in the past, said the company has had several strong offers of funding, but it is trying to select the right partners for the latest round of funding.

“We want our investors to be strategic and helpful to the company,” said one person close to RockYou.

RockYou has so far been funded by Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Partech International.

(Interestingly, Sequoia backs another instant messaging and chat widget maker, Meebo, which is reportedly seeking a $250 million valuation, which I posted about here yesterday).

To be fair, makers of highly distributed third-party apps like RockYou are garnering immense traffic and their widgets are syndicated everywhere. RockYou’s Super Wall, which lets you turbocharge your digital wall, for example, is one of the most popular on Facebook.

Other RockYou apps include: X Me, a communications tool that allows you to “Hug Her, Slap Him, Tickle Them!”; and Likeness, where you can “compare yourself with friends and movie stars like Angelina Jolie, Jessica Alba, Keira Knightley and many more.”

The company has been trying to monetize all this traffic and popularity and distribution, as well as knowledge of user behavior, by offering advertisers new forms of engagement.

But the jury is still out on these interesting but unproven efforts by all the social-networking players.

In any case, the money is apparently still flowing into these start-ups, taking a chance on them being the next big media play.

Here are two videos I made when I visited RockYou’s offices in San Mateo, Calif., last October, after I had called the widget market juvenile and faddish.

The first is my tour of the office, where I was playfully accosted by an infant–oops, a RockYou engineer–in a suit. The second is my interview with Shen and Tokuda.

Friday, March 14, 2008

Is KickApps Next to Board AOL’s Gravy Train?

While a lot of focus yesterday was on the gobs of cash that Time Warner (TWX) shareholders now have to fork over to social-networking site Bebo, which was bought by its AOL division for $850 million in spite of low revenues, sources close to the company tell me another big deal is in the hopper and at another lofty price.

Sources say that AOL has been seriously mulling the acquisition of KickApps, which makes white-label social widgets, apps and communities for various companies and helps monetize them, for a reported price of $90 milion.

ericalterman

The deal was being negotiated by AOL’s vice president for business development and general counsel Ira Parker and KickApps Chairman and Founder Eric Alterman (pictured here) as late as this week, although it has not been signed yet.

Founded in 2005, the New York-based KickApps offers social-media applications on demand to companies, such as a car-search widget for Autobytel and a social community around Time Warner’s CW television network’s “Gossip Girl.”

Its investors include Softbank Capital, Prism VentureWorks and Spark Capital, among others, who have put $17 million into KickApps. Competitors include start-ups, such as Ning, GoingOn and CrowdVine.

Here is a video KickApps has on its site about its 3.0 offering:

Monday, February 25, 2008

SocialMedia’s Seth Goldstein Speaks!

socialmedia
Last week I paid a visit to the Palo Alto, Calif., HQ of SocialMedia and also had a chat with its Co-Founder and CEO Seth Goldstein.

As the start-up describes itself, SocialMedia “is the leading provider of social-platform services. It fuses together three core features–management, marketing and monetization–into a comprehensive package that advertisers and developers can use to grow awareness, and grow their applications on social platforms.”

Translation: It sells the picks and axes and maps and other needed stuff to the widgeteers of this particular digital gold rush around the hyped social-networking space.

And you know who always makes most of the money in a gold rush? The seller of picks and axes and maps, that’s who!

And, in fact, SocialMedia is profitable, by selling its services to help third-party developers on social networks like Facebook. That includes conducting detailed analytics of the activity of widgets and forming an ad network on the space, based on data collected.

While powerhouse companies like Google have recently talked about the difficulty of making money from social networking, Goldstein, a longtime entrepreneur, thinks the market can better be cracked by new companies like his that understand the new medium.

He’s gotten $3.5 million in backing to do that from savvy investors, like former AOLer Jim Bankoff, entrepreneurs Ted Barnett and Marc Andreessen, as well as VC outfits like Charles River Ventures.

I make a lot of fun of widgets–more to come soon!–but I think Goldstein is a very sharp operator and brings much -needed seriousness and business acumen to a very juvenile market. As in: Adult supervision.

Here’s my visit to SocialMedia and interview with Goldstein (who, by the way, is married to another Web exec, Tina Sharkey, who heads BabyCenter and whom we video-visited here):

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

MySpace’s San Francisco Debut in Living Color!

myspace

Last night, BoomTown checked out the new space MySpace is renovating for its soon-to-open San Francisco office. The occasion was a party the social-networking site held for developers as part of its recent platform launch.

In other words, the night MySpace started kissing up to the widget makers with tasty burgers and big techie hugs.

And those widgeteers showed up in full force for the sandbox-themed event (I even brought my kids, who played in the actual sandboxes set up and made quite a mess!), including Slide’s Max Levchin, RockYou’s Jia Shen, Google’s OpenSocial guru Joe Kraus (who apparently did not get to go to Disneyland with the rest of the company) and many others.

Also in attendance were MySpace’s top brass, including Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, as well as its new COO Amit Kapur and lots of other MySpace minions, coming up from Los Angeles.

MySpace –which is owned by News Corp., which also owns Dow Jones, which owns this site–is still the largest social network both in terms of users and page views. But its growth has been slowing and, worse, its thunder has been stolen by the faster-growing and more-hyped Facebook, based in Silicon Valley.

Last year, that competition was in sharp relief when Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckberberg opened its platform up to third-party developers. The crafty move sent widget makers into near ecstasy. (”He likes us, he really likes us!”)

And while widgets were actually on its site for a while, MySpace had not formalized those relationships with programmers and even battled with them, which has been the source of consternation in the development community.

Now, the company is trying to mend those broken links and has built more organized systems for letting software developers build a range of new services for its users. It also partnered with Google in the search giant’s efforts to open up the development process with its OpenSocial initiative.

Time will tell if the make-nice efforts by MySpace will work, but here’s a video of the party (and in the following post here features longer interviews with DeWolfe and Kapur):

MySpace’s Chris DeWolfe and Amit Kapur Speak!

Last night, MySpace threw a party for third-party developers at their soon-to-be-opened office in San Francisco’s trendy SoMa neighborhood.

BoomTown went and did a video of the event here, where the trendy, Beverly Hills-based social-networking site made nice with the geeky widget makers of Silicon Valley.

And we also talked to MySpace Co-Founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe and new COO Amit Kapur:

Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Max Levchin on Slide’s $500 Million Valuation and Other Widgety Issues

levchin

With all the noise about Microsoft’s $41 billion offer to buy Yahoo, I dropped the ball on posting about a chat I had about a week ago with Slide’s Max Levchin (pictured here) about the recent $50 million investment that valued the widget maker at an astonishing $500 million.

To say I was dumbstruck by the market value, given that the profitless start-up has only about $10 million to $12 million in annual revenue and a still unproven business plan, would be wrong.

Incredulous, yes. Gobsmacked, indeed. Feeling like I was back in 1999, most definitely. But not dumbstruck!

Thus, I queried the always voluble Levchin, who agreed to talk to me readily (no Jerry-Yang-cave-dwelling behavior for this 32-year-old Web 2.0 serial entrepreneur!) about the investment by two old-line institutional investors–Fidelity and T. Rowe Price–and its implications for Slide.

Read more »

Friday, January 25, 2008

Scrabulous Hangs On for Now (But It Should Be Hung Out to Dry by Facebook)

Apparently, rumors of Scrabulous’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.

scrabulous1

So far.

Although the popular Facebook widget was supposed to be taken down two weeks ago and then last week–pretty much because it obviously infringed on the rights of the owners of the popular word game Scrabble–it is still up and working on the service and allowing new downloads (I did it last night, for example).

And sources with knowledge of the situation say that it is not likely to go–for now at least–as the parties involved attempt to come to some sort of agreement about its ownership and future. In fact, those sources expect a settlement soon between the many sides involved.

scrabulous3

There are many sides, including its developers, Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla (pictured here) of Calcutta, India; Hasbro and Mattel, the toy and game giants who co-own the rights to Scrabble; and even Electronic Arts, which has the online rights to Scrabble.

Oh, yes, and Facebook, which hosts the offending application, and which has been curiously silent despite its important role here.

Hasbro and Mattel had asked the hot social-networking site to pull it, and had also sent a cease-and-desist order to the Scrabulous creators.

Cue the quiet, behind-the-scenes negotiating.

Of course, there has been a lot of noisier wrangling with “Save Scrabulous” groups going up on Facebook created by its loyal users–there are more than 600,000 active daily ones on Facebook.

scrabulous3

And, of course, they love Scrabulous (a game is pictured above). Why not? It’s fun, interactive and there is a real community that has been formed around it that is passionate.

That’s exactly what social networking should be about.

But, while I might sound like a skunk at a garden party, it’s also pretty amazing that Scrabulous’s creators had the audacity to just steal the famous concept and trademark and run with it. Worse still, its proponents think that’s just great.

It’s not, because it is out-and-out stealing of a well-known brand and that shoplifting should not be the way businesses are formed in the Web 2.0 economy.

Moreover, Facebook should be among the first to crack down on this kind of juvenile behavior (curiously, Scrabulous is an actually useful app, unlike others I have derided on Facebook as more suited for toddlers) all over the service, whether it relates to music, videos or anything else its third-party developers take without asking.

Can you imagine the hue and cry if The Wall Street Journal suddenly debuted a widget called “Monopolicious!”–a rip-off of Monopoly, complete with Park Place–on Facebook?

We’ll see if Facebook will truly do the kind of house-cleaning it needs. I hope so, because it would show a real step in the growth of its corporate culture and would go a long way in creating the kind of mature platform it has the potential to be.

Thursday, January 24, 2008

All Hail the “Maxist” Revolution!

You have to hand it to Slide Founder and CEO Max Levchin, who has just launched a new blog.

maxlevchin

The title of the blog? “You’ve Gotta Be Kidding Me: The Official Press Organ of the Maxist Revolution.”

Very funny, Max! (Here the Ukrainian-born Levchin is pictured in Moscow’s Red Square!)

By spooky coincidence, “you’ve gotta be kidding me” is the working title and guiding principle of a post I am preparing on the recent $500 million valuation for the San Francisco-based widget maker!

More on kooky widget economics soon, but Levchin is a welcome addition to the blogosphere, given his obvious intellect and engaging personality.

He joins other entrepreneurs, like Mark Cuban and Marc Andreessen, who have proved themselves to be most excellent bloggers.

Levchin’s first post is about how to successfully launch a social-networking development platform, which he knows a thing or two about.

I am particularly intrigued by No. 9 and No. 10:

9. Make the No. 1 measurable goal of your PR team the amount of coverage that successful (or just interesting) developers get. People will jump through all kinds of hoops to be in the papers. Double so if the article lists them next to a [your] big brand.

10. Hold frequent developer events and invite leading developers to speak at those. Elevating developers (especially the smaller ones) to a pseudo-celebrity status can create a great deal of good will.

Hoop-jumping to get in papers and pseudo-celebrity status sounds a little Britney Spears for my tastes, but I like the spirit of it!

Of course, he did forget getting a crazy valuation as the best attention-seeking missile of all, and he already had a close-shaved haircut!

Here’s Max doing some Olympic hoop-jumping in one of my video interviews with him last fall, discussing the IPO market for widget companies like Slide:

Friday, January 18, 2008

Slip-Sliding Into a Fortune

slide

It’s Bubble Time!

As BoomTown broke the news in its post earlier today, Slide grabbed a big pile of cash from new investors–$50 million from Fidelity and T. Rowe Price–which puts the value of the company at $550 million.

In our post, we said the San Francisco start-up, whose widgets are among the most popular on Facebook and MySpace, was completing a round of funding that could value it at many times a multiple of its most recent $60 million to $80 million valuation.

The investment from the pair of private equity funds gives them a 9% stake in the maker of widgets and other social-networking applications.

Allen & Co., the media-connected New York-based investment firm, helped Slide execs in raising the latest round.

Don’t think we did not notice that the venture investors already in Slide did not pony up more funds at this–let’s just say it, shall we?–crazy valuation.

kool-aid

But it is noticeable that such mainstream investors are jumping into the giant pool of Kool-Aid that the social-networking industry has been swimming in over the last year.

Slide’s last round–an investment of $20 million–took place in November of 2006 with investors that included Khosla Ventures, BlueRun Ventures, Founders Fund and the Mayfield Fund.

So Slide’s investors, of course, were smart to get in on the ground floor to take advantage of the bubble that is expanding at alarming rates.

The ground-zero of that trend came when Facebook got a $240 million investment from Microsoft that valued the company at $15 billion.

Of course, while garnering revenues, neither Facebook nor Slide has the kind of business yet to deserve being worth this lofty amount, except for the fact that investors are counting in its potential and recent quick growth.

Slide’s business plan includes making money from selling premium versions of its widgets, as well as selling advertisers on its large, although disparate, audience.

The company calls itself the “largest personal media network in the world, reaching more than 134 million unique global viewers each month and 30% of the U.S. Internet audience.”

But the company recently said reports had put that number at 144 million, excluding its 50 million users on Facebook. Its competitors include other widget-makers like RockYou.

Slide makes a wide range of software, called widgets, that have been attracting many millions of users each. They include everything from slide shows to a program called SuperPoke that allows a user to, well, poke another in a super way.

A lot of Slide’s current growth has been through taking advantage of the huge spike in users first at MySpace and now at Facebook, which is promising, but also not certain.

To say that we have seen this story of fast growth, insane valuations and then the inevitable drop-off would be an understatement.

But Slide Founder and CEO Max Levchin and his team consider the company to be a new kind of distributed content and application company that is not dependent on large platforms like Facebook and MySpace and has huge potential.

Minor blogging annoyance: Of course, in a fit of pique since we revealed the funding without their help, Slide hand-fed the details of the deal to the New York Times and BusinessWeek, both of which somehow forgot to link to our post that said Slide was landing the deal. (Brad, Sarah: Please, please don’t tell us you figured it all out on your own this morning over eggs.)

UPDATE: A New York Times deputy tech editor just wrote an email to tell me its reporter already had a “previously scheduled” meeting with Slide about the deal–like I said, hand-fed!–this morning, which “inspired” its post and did not know of BoomTown’s news of the funding (even though it was up since 12:06 a.m. and noticed by everyone else, including Slide). Also, they had the hand-fed details! They did! I admit it! I went hungry, since I did not agree to an embargo! “In light of this we didn’t feel that a link was warranted,” he wrote me.

But we’re not bizarrely ungenerous like that, so here is the link to the New York Times story, in which Slide’s Levchin said his company makes Facebook and MySpace worth using. (And here is the BusinessWeek link too.)

“It’s impossible for social networks focused on scaling the network itself to build all the niche applications that bring people and keep people on these sites,” Levchin said, noting Slide widgets “add the bulk of perceived value to the consumers of these Web platforms.”

He also said he would use the money to expand its repertoire, but said Slide would try to develop in-house.

But others close to Slide said this was not exactly so, and that the company would also look around for good acquisition targets, using stakes in the newly valued Slide as currency.

Slide Gets Big Funding?

Call it the Facebook Funding Effect.

slide

I am still collecting details, but Slide–the San Francisco start-up whose widgets are among the most popular on Facebook and MySpace–is completing a round of funding that could value it at many times a multiple of its most recent $60 million to $80 million valuation.

That would be a large leap from a round that Slide announced in November of 2006 with investors that included Khosla Ventures, BlueRun Ventures, Founders Fund and the Mayfield Fund. Sources said the investment then was $20 million.

Slide is reportedly using Allen & Co., the media-connected New York-based investment firm, to help them in raising the latest round.

The reason for getting more funding, said sources, is to be able to acquire other companies and expand, using cash and the stakes in the higher-valued company, much in the same way that Facebook has done.

The social-networking universe was recently shaken up, when Facebook got a $240 million investment from Microsoft that valued the company at $15 billion.

Slide makes a wide range of software, called widgets, that have been attracting many millions of users each. They include everything from slide shows to a program called SuperPoke that allows a user to, well, poke another in a super way.

The company calls itself the “largest personal media network in the world, reaching more than 134 million unique global viewers each month and 30% of the U.S. Internet audience.”

But the company recently said reports had put that number at 144 million, excluding its 50 million users on Facebook. Its competitors include other widget-makers like RockYou.

A lot of Slide’s current growth has been through taking advantage of the huge spike in users first at MySpace and now at Facebook.

But Slide and its founder Max Levchin, as well as its investors, have grander dreams than riding on the coattails of bigger players.

They consider the company to be a new kind of distributed content and application company that is not dependent on large platforms like Facebook and MySpace.

More to come about the funding, but here is a post of a visit I made to Slide in September of 2007 and also a video interview I did with Levchin:

Monday, January 7, 2008

Kara Visits CES: Jerry Yang Emails It In

yang

How glad BoomTown was to finally see Jerry Yang up close and personal, after our valiant but futile efforts to get near the Yahoo co-founder and CEO in 2007.

No, we’re not stalking him in a restraining-order kind of way, although I did stake a claim to a front-row seat in the intimate theater at the Las Vegas Hilton for his keynote this morning at the Consumer Electronics Show, where Yang couldn’t help but see me.

Like he cared!

Not at all, as he was riveted to delivering his shtick about Yahoo’s mobile efforts (it’s a 3.0 version, according to Yang, which is a good move since Web 2.0–in general and in particular–has not been so kind to the Internet giant), as well as giving the audience a glimpse of some interesting new concepts related to its popular email program.

The front rows were so packed with top Yahoo execs–including President Sue Decker, as well as David Filo, Jeff Weiner, Brad Garlinghouse, Ash Patel, Dave Karnstedt, Bradley Horowitz, Hilary Schneider and even Chairman and former Yahoo CEO Terry Semel–that you had to wonder who was running the show back in Sunnyvale, Calif.

(I mean, say, if Google had decided to launch a sneak attack today with their bicycle brigade, it could have taken over Yahoo without a shot fired!)

Yang maintained a low-key tone throughout the presentation, as is his way (I kept imagining the performance being done by Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, who would have sold it all hard until he popped a vein).

Nonetheless, Yang did get the message through that opening its platform up to third-party developers would be a big push in 2008 for Yahoo.

So, the widgets in the excellent mobile product, called Yahoo! Go 3.0, are laudable and much more innovative than anything out there, even though Yahoo has been too quiet about marketing its Yahoo! Go product until now.

boerries

But at CES, Yang brought Yahoo Connected Life Executive Vice President Marco Boerries (pictured here) out to show off the mobile apps, including one from MTV (Viacom head Philippe Dauman and MTV Networks head Judith McGrath were in the audience) that seemed fun.

More interesting was Yang’s presenting new concepts for its Yahoo Mail product, which will be more social, relevant and integrated. A lot of this functionality is already being used by the open-source email company Zimbra, which Yahoo recently acquired (and whose head Satish Dharmaraj I interviewed last week).

As I wrote in that piece, I love the innovations, including ranking of those you email with most frequently and instant mapping from email, as well as a plethora of great features for email.

So, one vexing part of Yang’s presentation was that this concept needs to become a reality tomorrow. He brought out Co-Founder and interim CTO Filo to basically promise “soon,” but I say: Make it snappy!

I know, we’re pushy when it comes to Yahoo, but it’s because we care!

Well, care is not the right word exactly, but we are certain that a powerful and pioneering company like Yahoo can out-innovate these Web 2.0 newbies who get ridiculous funding to make goofy widgets and have the nerve to call it a business.

Thus, we took the chance and his prone position after the speech surrounded by well-wishers to go up and say hello in person to Yang, whom BoomTown has known for longer than either of us would care to say.

And, miracle of miracles, Yang said it had been far too long since we had gotten together and agreed to meet in 2008, a meeting for which we have been asking and egregiously posting about forever, to no avail.

How much does BoomTown love CES? Not so much.

But if it gets me lunch with Yang, I love it. So, Jerry, it’s officially 2008 and I am waiting by the phone for your call.

Here is my video of parts of Yang’s keynote:

Tuesday, December 4, 2007

And the Zuckerberg-Bashing Begins…

As inevitable as air, Silicon Valley likes to build them up and then tear them down.

Thus, the bell now tolls for Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg.

We at BoomTown have been consistent and persistent in voicing our various worries about the young entrepreneur, from one of our very first posts, questioning (we think fairly) the unproven business underpinnings of the hot social network, the juvenile nature of its much vaunted third-party widgets, the insanity of its $15 billion valuation, its inane legal fights and the problems with its worrisome ad efforts.

We’ve also taken (we think probably unfairly) shots at those flip-flops he wears. And we did call him a toddler CEO, also a low blow, we have to admit.

But now, it seems, a mob is forming, sparked by the issues around Facebook’s controversial Beacon ad program, which can track your purchases on some external sites and send the information back to your Facebook profile’s news feed.

While it made some changes in Beacon last week, Facebook has not given users a global opt-out of the controversial marketing system in which the social network is seeking to link behavior and advertising more tightly for supposedly bigger payoffs.

The mainstream media and blogosphere, which recently were feting him, have now turned and ire has been growing over Beacon, which seems to be focusing everyone on the inexperience of Zuckerberg and the challenges facing Facebook.

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About Kara

Kara Swisher started covering digital issues for The Wall Street Journal's San Francisco bureau in 1997 and also wrote the BoomTown column about the sector. With Walt Mossberg, she co-produces and co-hosts D: All Things Digital, a major high-tech and media conference.

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Ethics Statement

Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.

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