Rafe's Radar

Facebook, the largest photo-sharing site (and social network), announced today that it's buying Instagram, the wildly popular mobile photo-sharing app for smartphones. Quick analysis pegs this as a very strong tactical and strategic move for Facebook.

The key win for Facebook here is mobile engagement. Instagram has rocketed to 30 million users in under two years. Facebook has had a mobile app for years but it doesn't have the user love that Instagram does. By acquiring the best-of-breed mobile app -- at least in terms of audience development -- Facebook both takes out a future competitor and grows … Read more

"It is easier to mine happiness than create it."

--Brian Wong, CEO, Kiip

The concept behind Brian Wong's company, Kiip, is, in my estimation, brilliant. Kiip is a mobile game advertising company, but with a unique twist. It doesn't pop ads up while you're in the middle of a game, or nag you while you're waiting for a level to load. Rather, Brian sells advertisers the opportunity to reward players when they have accomplished certain things, and he makes a set of utilities that developers can use to offer up their players' accomplishment moments … Read more

The news of Yahoo has not been good of late. A patent lawsuit against Facebook turned tech commentators against the company. And then Yahoo announced a massive 2,000-person (14 percent) staff layoff.

Is it all part of a new Yahoo strategy? We'd all like to hope so, but new CEO Scott Thompson has not revealed how these moves serve a broader purpose.

Where does Yahoo go from here? Can it bounce back? Can it co-exist with Google, Facebook, and the rest of the Web?

Our guests today are:

… Read more

When Facebook goes public, an event we expect next month, it will make a lot of young employees very rich.

Billions of dollars of stock (back of napkin: $10 billion) will be distributed to thousands of employees. Some midlevel workers will find themselves sitting on windfalls of millions of dollars. What are they going to do with that money? At least three new Internet wealth management companies will be angling for the business of these newly rich -- not to mention every Wall Street brokerage firm and money manager in existence.

Even though most of the stock going to Facebook … Read more

Today, President Obama passes the JOBS (Jumpstart Our Business Startups) Act, a collection of laws that relaxes regulations on capital raising for startup companies and gives all companies more flexibility in how and when they go public.

It's the "crowdfunding" provisions of the JOBS Act that are getting the most attention, and for good reason. The JOBS Act will allow startups, from taco trucks to mobile apps builders, to solicit the general public for investment -- an activity that was previously illegal. It will allow any individual to invest in these advertised startups as well. The hope … Read more

"It's not a keyboard, it's a movement," Jon Reynolds, the CEO of SwiftKey was telling me, as part of his pitch for SwiftKey 3, the latest version of the product.

No, it's a keyboard, I thought. It's a very nice alternative keyboard for Android that's even better than the built-in autocorrecting keyboard in Android or the one on the iPhone. But it's still a keyboard. And it costs $3.99. To replace a product that's baked into every single phone. Surely it's not much of a business.

"We have … Read more

"Everyone in the Valley uses a Mac."

--Stephen Brady, CEO, Found

I was curious why a desktop software maker would launch its first app on the Mac. Despite its vocal supporters, Apple still accounts for only a small percentage of the global computing desktops and laptops.

Stephen Brady, the CEO of the startup Found (see my review, Personal search app Found scans cloud and local data), explained it to me. Mac users are more engaged, he said. They download more stuff. And then there's the Mac App Store, which just takes a lot of the hassle out … Read more

"There's a lot of cynicism about search," Stephen Brady told me when we first met in August last year. He was working on a new personal search utility, then called BitLev and now called Found, that, he said, would help people find all their stuff, no matter where it was.

People have tried this before, and most have failed. X1, Copernic, and even Google's own Desktop Search app never got mainstream traction. And then Microsoft and Apple built desktop search into their operating systems. They made desktop search work better, but not soon enough. Nowadays, people … Read more

The window for trading pre-public Facebook shares has closed as investors' anticipation for the social giant's IPO ramps up. If you missed the opportunity to grab these shares (or didn't qualify to make a purchase), you must now line up with the hordes of general investors who will be buying this stock on the public exchange.

An e-mail sent to SharesPost customers earlier this week stated that the closing date to buy Facebook shares was moved up. The original planned closing date for the auction was Monday, April 2; it was re-set to today at noon Pacific Time. … Read more