Onetime social-networking pioneer Friendster unveiled a new design on Thursday, and it's focusing on the demographic that has kept it afloat for the past few years: the Asian youth market. And according to Reuters, Friendster may also be sold to a buyer in Asia by the end of the month for at least $100 million.
Yes, Friendster still exists. The first big social network to take off, it was surpassed by the likes of MySpace and Facebook, and its popularity in much of the world quickly faded. Now, it says it has 75 million registered users (no word on how many are active), and that 90 percent of its traffic comes from the Asia-Pacific region. It started offering translated versions of the site two years ago.
New to the revamped Friendster are a suite of features designed to capitalize on the social-gaming craze: a virtual currency, an array of games, and virtual gifts.
Friendster CEO Richard Kimber confirmed to Reuters that the company was shopping itself to buyers, and that investment bank Morgan Stanley had been hired to handle the sale and that the company is working with "a shortlist" of potential suitors. It won't be the first time it's been looking to sell: CNET reported in 2005 that investment bank Montgomery & Co. had been hired for the same purpose.
Kimber, a former Googler, joined Friendster last year right around the same time that it raised $20 million in venture funding in a round led by IDG Ventures.
An orangutan in the Vienna Zoo takes pictures that are uploaded to Facebook. No, she didn't take the self-portrait.
(Credit: Nonja's Facebook page)
She's like the Ashton Kutcher of the ape world: an orangutan in the Vienna Zoo now has a Facebook fan page to showcase the photos she takes with a digital camera. The orangutan, named Nonja, uses a Samsung ST 1000 point-and-shoot that automatically uploads the photos.
When this post was published, Nonja had over 9,000 "fans" subscribed to her page.
But there's a catch: coverage of the camera-toting ape in the U.K.'s Daily Mail explains that the camera has been modified to dispense a raisin whenever the shutter button is pushed. So Nonja is evidently more interested in tasty treats than in artistic endeavors.
The non-orangutan version of the Samsung ST 1000 was released this summer (though not in the U.S.) and is equipped with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS.
Following modifications to its "First Click Free" policy that gives Google News users access to some content that would otherwise be behind a pay wall, Google has released an additional tweak that lets publishers decide whether they want their sites to show up in Google News, Google Web search, both, or neither.
Previously, if a publisher wanted to request inclusion in one or the other, but not both, sending a request to Google was required. This now automates the process.
These updates to Google's news indexing come at a time when media outlets are once again pointing fingers at the search giant as a revenue suck--and in response, Google insists it's good for publishers because it drives traffic. News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch has made concrete threats that he will pull his publications' content from Google and is reported to be in talks with Microsoft to strike an exclusive deal on its Bing search engine.
By offering more flexible options for choosing where exactly news outlets want their content to appear, Google comes across as friendlier and less authoritative--at least on the surface.
Wow. There is money out there: a retail deals site called Groupon has raised a whopping $30 million Series B funding round led by Accel Partners, one of Facebook's early backers. Existing Groupon investor NEA, which led the company's $4.8 million Series A round in January 2008, also contributed.
Here is the gist of Groupon: there are currently editions for 26 U.S. cities. The site advertises a deal each day from a selected local establishment like a restaurant, nail salon, or gym. There's a heavy discount involved. But enough members have to opt into the deal in order for any of them to get it. Groupon takes a cut of earnings if the deal hits the "tipping point" and goes live; otherwise, the featured merchant does not have to pay.
They've been profitable since June, founder and CEO Andrew Mason told CNET. So why raise $30 million? "We want to roll out to another 50 cities or so next year," he said, adding that early in 2010 it hopes to expand to Canadian cities, "so it's just going to help us increase the rate of customer acquisition and focus on building new technology." He wouldn't say what that new technology is, but he did add that the company went from 10 to 120 employees in the past year and planned to continue to grow at that rate.
The company grew out of an existing start-up called ThePoint, which applied a similar "collective" model to community and activism projects, before switching entirely to the retail model.
Something has been rocking the boat over at Twitter, where stability issues on Monday afternoon caused the company to temporarily take down Twitter Lists, a popular and relatively new feature that lets members group Twitter accounts into categories.
"We began experiencing a very high rate of errors and we are working on the underlying problem," a post on the Twitter status blog read. It was later updated saying, "We are now recovering from this unexpected downtime. The Lists feature is temporarily unavailable as we diagnose the cause of the outage."
Many members had reported sightings of the "fail whale," Twitter's error message featuring a cartoon whale, earlier on Monday. It may have been more noticeable than usual because of the day's status as "Cyber Monday," a big day for holiday e-commerce deals--which in this day and age means plenty of people hunting on retailers' Twitter accounts for fire-sale promotions.
Obviously, amid all the seasonal shopaholism, somebody forgot to feed the whale.
Venture firm First Round Capital has led the Series A funding round for start-up SimpleGeo, a buzzed-about new company that has built a product for easy integration of "location" features into Web and mobile apps, according to multiple sources familiar with the deal.
Also contributing to the round, sources say, are Redpoint Ventures, Freestyle Capital, and many of the usual suspects from Silicon Valley's merry band of angel investors: among them are Ron Conway, Digg founder Kevin Rose, ex-Googler Chris Sacca, ubiquitous personality Gary Vaynerchuk, and Delicious founder Joshua Schachter. One detail we weren't able to nail down was exactly how much money was raised, but one source says it's a "small" amount, probably in the low seven figures.
SimpleGeo co-founder Matt Galligan declined to comment, but when we spoke to him earlier this month about SimpleGeo's official launch, he had said that the company was working on closing a round.
Some background on SimpleGeo: The company, based in Boulder, Colo., and co-founded by Galligan and former Digg engineer Joe Stump, originally planned to make location-aware augmented reality games. When they found out how difficult it was to make each game from scratch, they refocused the company on making a set of location-aware features for clients. They sell that in three versions ranging from free to $2,499/month.
Meanwhile, the location-aware market continues to heat up, with game-like services Foursquare and Gowalla poking into the mainstream, as well as the first appearance of Twitter's geolocation feature in the latest version of iPhone client Tweetie. Once Twitter members turn that on, their messages can be tagged with the exact location from which they were broadcast.
UPDATE (10:52 a.m. PT): The company has confirmed the round of funding via Twitter, and added the detail that it's a total of $1.5 million.
Facebook is changing the structure of its company stock to a dual-class system, a move that hints the company may be looking toward an initial public offering--even though it says it has no plans to do so yet.
Here's how it works. Existing Facebook shareholders currently have Class A stock. That'll be converted to Class B stock, which has 10 times the voting power of Class A. Should those shareholders sell their stock when Facebook goes public, they'll be converted back into Class A stock--otherwise, they'll stay the way they are.
The story was first reported by The Wall Street Journal, which added the detail that this stock structure change will give founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg more power unless he opts to sell stock during an IPO. But while Zuckerberg and other executives have said that they eventually plan to take Facebook public, they continue to say that there are no concrete plans for it. Two years ago, Zuckerberg said that it was "years out."
"This revision to the stock structure should not be construed as a signal the company is planning to go public," a statement from Facebook read. "Facebook has no plans to go public at this time."
Professional networking site LinkedIn's platform, previously a closed offering for select partners, has opened up to developers at large, according to an announcement Monday on the company blog.
Well, sort of. Building an embeddable widget on LinkedIn, unlike Facebook's, still requires a stringent application process. But LinkedIn's own code has now been opened up so that developers can integrate it into their own sites. It's launched a developer site for those interested in features that let site users access their LinkedIn profile and contacts externally. They still have to request a key to get into the platform's application program interface (API), which means that LinkedIn widgets likely will not be coming to office prank-calling Web sites any time soon, despite that they could make it much easier to robo-call your boss and ask if his refrigerator is running.
One of the first participants, for example, is desktop Twitter client TweetDeck, which says that it will soon allow users to plug in their LinkedIn contacts' status updates alongside Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace contacts.
LinkedIn has about 50 million users as of last count.
Some looks at the new AOL branding.
(Credit: AOL)It's the media equivalent of moving out of your parents' house, heading to the nearest tattoo and piercing parlor, and yelling FREEEEEEDOM!: AOL has unveiled the "new brand identity" for its post-Time Warner era, slated to begin December 10 when it begins trading on the New York Stock Exchange as a separate company. And there's nary a blue triangle in sight. Instead, there's a plain new text logo presented with various backdrops, from cartoon scribbles to a rock-star hand symbol to a totally adorable goldfish.
The company is currently offering just a preview, and says in a release that a full unveil will come on the spin-off date. Yay, secrets! I love secrets! But we, of course, have many hints: like the fact that CEO Tim Armstrong, who joined the company in March after a long stint as a high-profile Google sales executive, keeps talking up AOL's future as a powerhouse in digital content and publishing. The company's array of niche blogs, which were hatched when AOL purchased Weblogs way back in 2005, are now its centerpiece.
So the new mood? "It's one consistent logo with countless ways to reveal," the release explained. Ooh, sexy!
The release also included a soundbite from Karl Heiselman, CEO of Wolff Olins, which AOL enlisted to help with the transformation: "AOL is a 21st century media company, with an ambitious vision for the future and new focus on creativity and expression, this required the new brand identity to be open and generous, to invite conversation and collaboration, and to feel credible, but also aspirational."
Of course, it's not all sunny: The company is on the verge of significant layoffs, as well as the possible chucking of non-"content" properties like ICQ and MapQuest, as the spinoff date grows closer.
Whatever. Isn't that goldfish cute?
An example of Brizzly's new tweet translation.
(Credit: Brizzly)Web-based Twitter client Brizzly made a dual announcement Friday: first, it's opened up into a full public beta mode (previously, an invite code was required); and second, it can now translate tweets into your default language on the site.
To translate a tweet in Brizzly--which already expands links, videos, and photos posted to Twitter, creating a more visual experience--you can click on a question mark for an instant translation. This is interesting, as Twitter has made its first moves recently in launching translated versions of the service (starting with Spanish), meaning that there will potentially be many more non-English tweets flowing through the system. It uses Google Translate, so needless to say, it's not totally perfect.
