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Attention: The social-web IPO window is now closed

This isn’t how things were supposed to unfold with Facebook’s IPO. The social network’s public offering was supposed to be a once-in-a-lifetime moonshot, triggering a frenzy of interest in other social-web companies who would then ride that wave of demand to equally successful IPOs. At least, that’s what plenty of venture investors seemed to be thinking as they pushed up the private-market valuations of Facebook — which was supposedly worth $100 billion not long ago — and every other company with a social component, including Twitter.

Now, Facebook’s share issue looks like a disappointment at best and a train wreck at worst, and the doubts that investors have about it as a growth business are likely to trigger broader doubts about the viability of every other social-web business without a rock-solid monetization model.

The reality of Facebook's limited ad model and plateauing growth is setting in. Scary stuff in internet social land. google.com/finance?q=FB


Steve Cheney (@stevecheney) July 27, 2012

It’s not just Facebook’s fault, of course. Groupon was the first major disappointment associated with the social web (although many have argued that it isn’t really a technology or web-based company, and that it isn’t all that social either). Nevertheless, the group-buying service’s IPO was one of the first to test the waters for a technology-related offering, and by most accounts it appears to have failed miserably: the shares are down by more than 65 percent from their initial issue price, and the company’s financial performance has been lackluster, with few signs that it will improve in the foreseeable future.

The other player that should share some blame is Zynga — although its poor performance is directly connected to Facebook, since the two have a symbiotic relationship: more than 90 percent of Zynga’s revenues come from the social network, and more than 10 percent of Facebook’s revenues come from Zynga-related payments. Shares of Zynga have fallen by about 70 percent from the initial offering price, and while insiders have cashed out to the tune of about $500 million, regular investors are still left holding the bag. As a result, anyone who was counting on the Facebook platform to be a cash-cow monetization scheme for social apps and other web services is likely revising their financial models by subtracting a few zeroes.

Is Facebook just a moderately successful ad platform?

And now we have Facebook, which is down by more than 50 percent from its initial offering price after what the market seems to have decided was an unimpressive quarterly earnings report. Although the company met estimates, those estimates had already been reduced during the run-up to the IPO, and there were enough question marks in the results — especially in the critical area of advertising revenue and the mobile market — that investors seem to have gotten spooked. Facebook’s market value is now hovering around $51 billion, which is barely half the $100 billion it was allegedly worth before it went public.

As Om described in a recent post, there has proven to be an uncomfortably large gap between what private markets think these kinds of businesses are worth and what public investors think they are worth. So who is right? Regardless of where you come down on that question, public markets have the upper hand — since venture investors require some kind of liquidity event like an IPO to see a return on their investment. Even if they manage to pump a company’s valuation up and get out quickly after it goes public, the risk of miscalculation is still severe, and each lackluster offering makes it harder for the next.

The biggest issue with all of these companies — and the thing that makes this a much broader issue than just Facebook — is that their financial performance hasn’t even come close to the expectations that many seemed to have for social-web businesses, and that raises questions about the assumptions that venture investors have been operating on. What if Facebook isn’t a dramatically new kind of social-web business, but just a moderately successful advertising platform and/or payment service? As one venture investor put it:

“Zynga has been crushed, Facebook payments are effectively dead — Facebook is just a mediocre ad company with a ton of traffic”

Pressure to prove the social web can be monetized

Of course, Facebook could come up with some dramatically profitable new monetization method: some kind of e-commerce offering perhaps (although there is still much scepticism about that as well) or a way of making virtual payments work for something other than Zynga games. Or it could start charging for features like API access or some other aspect of the platform — but that would also be a substantial risk. And so investors are left waiting for the company to show that its social ads are going to generate enough revenue to make its valuation look reasonable, or that mobile is going to be a big moneymaker. But we are a long way from that now.

There is likely still room for some technology-stock offerings to do well, judging by the response to IPOs from companies like Kayak — the online travel service — and Palo Alto Networks. Both are web-enabled businesses, but they don’t rely on the same kind of advertising-based business model that Facebook and its ilk are shackled to. As a result, their monetization methods are a little more tangible, and therefore easier to value. But even some of those kinds of companies are seeing valuations get reduced, as Square and others have found.

In hindsight, a lot of the assumptions about Facebook and what it was going to do for both social-web valuations and the technology sector in general were aggressive, to put it mildly. And while much of the fallout may take place behind the scenes, in the offices of venture capital investors and the boardrooms of private money managers, there will definitely be an accounting for those ambitious expectations — and the pressure on companies like Twitter to prove that they have a solid path to monetization will be ramped up even further. If you don’t like where that is taking the company, prepare to be further disappointed.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Sarah Korf and George Kelly


from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/2012/07/27/attention-the-social-web-ipo-window-is-now-close...

3D printer cuts vinyl, mills, draws, fits comfortably inside a briefcase, is generally fab

Image

Is there anything this tool from MIT's Ilan Moyer and collaborator Nadya Peek can't do? Probably, but that list seems likely to be shorter than the list of those it can. So far, Popfab has been shown doing a little printing during a brief video, but Moyer has promised a lot more to come, telling Core 77, "we also have toolheads working for vinyl cutting, milling and drawing," all of which promise to show up in subsequent episodes. The tool (which has other fans) has apparently already made its way around the world in the form of carry-on luggage, helping fulfill its creators desire to support "the nomadic designer" -- just a briefcase, a power source and a dream.

Continue reading 3D printer cuts vinyl, mills, draws, fits comfortably inside a briefcase, is generally fab

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3D printer cuts vinyl, mills, draws, fits comfortably inside a briefcase, is generally fab originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 27 Jul 2012 16:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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from Engadget http://www.engadget.com/2012/07/27/popfab-3d-printer-briefcase/

BuddyTV Guide adds Olympics 2012 quick list to help viewers find the events they want

Over 200 million US viewers are expected to tune into the London Olympics, which starts with the Opening Ceremony tonight. NBC alone has over 5,500 hours of Olympic coverage planned on its multiple cable channels. For a TV viewer, that's a lot to sort through. But there's an app out there that can help you quickly find the events you want to see: BuddyTV Guide.

BuddyTV Guide is a free mobile channel guide and social TV app from BuddyTV. The company provides listings for cable and satellite TV providers in the US, including Comcast, Cablevision, Time Warner, Verizon, DirecTV, Dish and more.

Users with AT&T U-verse receivers, DirecTV DVRs, Sony Internet TV with Google TV, Logitech Revue, TiVo Series 3, TiVo Premier, and any devices controlled by Google TV and Samsung Smart TVs can also use the app's remote control capabilities.

The latest version of BuddyTV Guide has added a new quick list feature that allows Olympic viewers in the US to quickly and easily find the events they want to watch. Using the app, you can add your favorite events to watch lists so you never miss an important moment of the games. The app also allows you to share your favorite events with Facebook and send text messages about the event to your friends. BuddyTV Guide is a free download.

Continue reading BuddyTV Guide adds Olympics 2012 quick list to help viewers find the events they want

BuddyTV Guide adds Olympics 2012 quick list to help viewers find the events they want originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 27 Jul 2012 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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from TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog http://www.tuaw.com/2012/07/27/buddytv-guide-adds-olympics-2012-quick-list-to...

Twitter Confirms Removing Follow Graph From Instagram’s ‘Find Friends’




Twitter has confirmed the removal of its follow graph data from Instagram, disabling the "Find Twitter Friends" feature in the photo app. Users can still find people from their phone's contact list and Facebook friends list.

"We understand that there's great value associated with Twitter's follow graph data, and we can confirm that it is no longer available within Instagram," Twitter spokeswoman Carolyn Penner told Mashable.

On Thursday, Instagram users began noticing a pop-up message (see above), which says the app is unable to find users’ Twitter contacts because of API tweaks on Twitter's end. However, the feature appears to still work for some users.

This is Twitter's sec…
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More About: Social Media, Twitter, apps, instagram, mobile apps, social networking


from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/07/27/twitter-instagram-find-friends/?utm_source=fee...

The Economist lays it out: Europe’s entrepreneurial crisis goes back decades

There’s a must-read piece on the crisis in European entrepreneurship in The Economist this week. But before you go and pore over it, I’ll warn you: brace yourself, because it’s not going to leave you entering the weekend with a warm and fuzzy feeling.

It’s stuffed with factoids that may well induce depression. For example, not only were most of Europe’s biggest companies were built out of the industrial revolution but in fact continental Europe has produced just one of the world’s top 500 companies over the last 30 years (California alone, by comparison, has produced 26).

Europe produces plenty of corner shops, hairdressers and so on. What it doesn’t produce enough of is innovative companies that grow quickly and end up big. In 2003, analysing Europe’s entrepreneurial gap, the European Commission cited a study which showed that during the 1990s, 19% of mid-sized firms in America were classified as fast-growers, compared with an average of just 4% in six European Union countries.

[…]

If Europe were more entrepreneurial, says everyone from the commission down, it would not have been such a poor producer of big businesses. And it would have produced more successful new technology firms. Entrepreneurship doesn’t have to be channelled through the tubes of the internet, but over the past few decades a great deal of it has been. That an economy so copiously provided with the technically educated as Germany’s has not produced a single globally important business-to-consumer internet company suggests a big problem with entrepreneurship.

So why exactly are things so dismal?

The article identifies a set of familiar problems: Europe suffers from a lack of risk-taking; its entrepreneurs have an inability to access larger funding rounds; there are more restrictive labor laws.

But it also identifies a few bright spots, such as the fact that governments are actually starting to take a more activeand actually helpful — role in promoting startups.

Go, read!


from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/europe/the-economist-lays-it-out-europes-entrepreneurial-cr...

Twitter has a garden, now it’s working on the walls

We’ve written before about how the evolution of Twitter from a real-time information utility into a full-fledged media entity is causing some friction with developers, and also raising competitive issues with traditional media outlets. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal about the company’s future, CEO Dick Costolo made it clear that Twitter wants to play a central role in media events such as the Olympics — where it has a new partnership with NBC Universal to run a real-time news hub about the Games — and also wants to become more of a Facebook-style platform inside which developers build applications. But can the company find a balance between competing with media partners or third-party providers and working alongside them?

Costolo told the Journal that Twitter wants to help its users make sense of messages around major events, and wants to “more closely tie the shared experience on Twitter to the actual event that is happening.” Although he didn’t mention the Olympics partnership with NBC or the company’s recent NASCAR editorial effort, those are clearly models for what Twitter hopes to achieve with other similar events — but as we’ve pointed out, the kind of curation and filtering function that Twitter is working on for the Olympics is also pretty clearly an editorial function, the kind of thing that is making the company more and more of a media entity.

Is Twitter a partner or a competitor?

Should media companies be wary of these kinds of moves? I’ve argued that they should (and so have others like blogging pioneer and developer Dave Winer), if only because Twitter is effectively building a multibillion-dollar media operation using their content — whether it’s through deals like the Olympics partnership with NBC or through features like “expanded tweets,” which displays added content from media outlets inside Twitter’s mobile and web clients. As the company builds on its already successful advertising model, the overlap and potential competitive issues with media companies are going to become more obvious.

Costolo downplayed these kinds of issues in his interview with the Journal. The Twitter CEO has repeatedly resisted attempts to label the company a media entity, and told the newspaper that he sees it as “a technology company in the media business.” It seems obvious that the company is trying to emphasize the fact that it can be a partner with traditional media players rather than a competitor — but as it expands the editorial aspects of what it does, that position may become harder to defend. If Twitter is a technology company in the media business, there are plenty of media companies that need to get into the technology business, and in that kind of environment partners can quickly become competitors.

birdhouses

The same dynamic is playing out with Twitter and its developer ecosystem — or what used to be its ecosystem, before the company started acquiring third-party services and ratcheting down controls on what others could do with its formerly wide-open API, driving away both developers and potential investors in Twitter-based services. Recent statements from director of product development Michael Sippey have made it clear that Twitter intends to continue that process; those comments triggered a wave of concern in the startup community and sparked at least one attempt to build a subscription-based alternative to the service.

Will Twitter’s walled garden be appealing enough?

In his comments to the Journal, Costolo said that Twitter wants to encourage developers to add specific kinds of features and services — such as tools that companies could use to analyze the sentiment within tweets — instead of duplicating the tools or applications that Twitter itself has. He said the company wants to move away from a situation in which developers and companies “build off of Twitter, to a world where people build into Twitter.” Sippey said something similar in his blog post about potential restrictions to the API, telling developers that Twitter wants them to “build applications that run within tweets.”

But the comparisons Costolo used in describing this evolution are revealing: he told the Journal that Twitter wants to become a platform on top of which other companies build like Facebook and Apple, two companies that are well known for being “walled gardens,” in which they control every aspect of what outside developers do. Twitter is no doubt hoping that this approach will result in the same kind of financial windfall that both Facebook and Apple have experienced by controlling their gardens, but it remains to be seen whether they can convince enough developers and services to play that particular game — especially given the atmosphere of uncertainty and suspicion that has developed in the tech community.

As John Borthwick of New York-based incubator Betaworks noted in an interview with Om at paidContent 2012, Twitter faces a challenge as it tries to move from being a kind of distribution system for real-time information to a walled garden, where the focus is no longer on sending people away but instead on keeping them within Twitter’s sphere of influence as long as possible. Facebook’s garden is huge and Apple’s garden is a very lucrative one for developers — what will Twitter be able to offer in order to convince outside services that it is a partner rather than a competitor? And will users want to stay within the company’s garden?

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Giuseppe Bognanni and See-ming Lee

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from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/2012/07/24/twitter-has-a-garden-now-its-working-on-the-wall...

Twitter May Launch Reality TV Shows [REPORT]




Twitter, the next big reality TV platform? The social networking site is reportedly talking to Hollywood producers and networks about launching several reality TV shows that would stream on its site.

According to an AdWeek report, serious talks are already underway for the initiative. A source close to the matter said content would be similar to popular MTV reality shows such as The Hills and Real World.

Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.

The move would be a part of a greater effort to enter the broadcasting world. It's been recently reported that the company is partnering with NBC during the 2012 Olympics to serve as a hub dedicated to covering the event. Meanwhi…
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More About: TV, Twitter

from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/07/26/twitter-reality-show-repor/?utm_source=feedbur...

One day after DC police's reasonable camera policy, phone still taken

On July 20, just 24 hours after a new camera policy was enacted by the Metropolitan Police Department of Washington, DC—you guessed it—the cops still took a guy’s phone. The new policy forbids the confiscation of cameras and cameraphones, and disallows police from ordering citizens to stop filming or taking photos of police action.

According to a local Fox TV affiliate, Earl Staley, a 26-year-old local resident started trying to record officers who were punching a man who they were arresting.

"So I go and grab my phone and start trying to record it," Staley told Fox 5 News in the District. "And once I do that, another vice cop reaches over my back and grabs my phone and tells me he's not giving my phone back."

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from Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/07/one-day-after-dc-polices-reasonabl...

How I Work: Tim Rowe of the Cambridge Innovation Center

Inspired by a great post by Brad Feld about how he structures his day, we decided to ask a number of folks in the Boston startup community a simple question: How do you work? Last week we heard from Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital. Below, hear Tim Rowe’s answer.

How do I work? I guess these days I’m a kind of human switchboard. A lot of what I do is connecting other people. That could translate into being on email ALL the time. But I want to spend as much time as possible in face to face, electronic intermediation free communication. So my day is usually just that: meeting and chatting with people.

Fortunately, CIC is physically convenient to get to, so a lot of my meetings with outside folks end up at CIC. I can go through an entire day without looking at email. This creates an email problem, of course. I have (like most people like me) a HUGE load of inbound communication. Like 200 messages a day just looking at what Gmail categorizes as Priority. I never read anything but what Google thinks is priority, in fact. I have a terrific Aide de Camp, and she and I live together in my inbox. Either of us may see an email when it comes in. The goal is for her to handle as large a fraction as possible.

When the backlog gets big, my brain wakes me up at 5AM (no alarm clock). I creep out of the bedroom trying not to wake Amy, and I plow through it. This usually keeps my head slightly above water. I skip the stuff that isn’t urgent.

Then, every few weeks my aide schedules a “work retreat” day. This is a quiet day, with no meetings. The goal is to catch up on email, and also to do lengthier projects, such as writing projects. I’m on one of those right now, which is why I’m responding to this.

I like to escape to the Atheneum Library in Boston: a beautiful place that harkens back 100 years, and blessedly which bans cell phone use. Here I can usually knock off 100 of the more important emails that have backed up, plus do a few real writing projects.

I never attend work things on weekends. Really never. Weekends are for my kids. If I have to catch up on emails over a weekend, that’s in the 5AM – 7AM window. Does it work? It works OK. Sometimes I think about doing an email moratorium. I wonder if anyone does that.

While I don’t get home every night for dinner, we now have a plan: I’m home for dinner (almost) without fail twice a week, and go out with my wife one other night during the week.  I end up getting to read to my kids about 3 times a week during the week, and usually on the weekends.  Mondays is my night to cook, and I usually do that with help from OfCourseMeals.com (a startup I am helping that delivers all the ingredients + a recipe to your door, so you can cook without the hassles).  Life could be a lot worse.

from BostInno http://bostinno.com/2012/07/24/how-i-work-tim-rowe-of-the-cambridge-innovatio...

Quickly Set Your Mac's Default App for Opening a File with the Option Key [Video]

Setting the default app for a file can be accomplished in a number of ways, such as getting info on the file in the Finder and making your selection. If you want to save yourself a little time, however, just right click on the file and choose "Open With" while holding the option key. This will change the command to "Always Open With" so whatever you choose will be the default app for that particular file. When you make your selection, it'll also open the file in that app so you don't waste a few extra clicks you don't need to make. More »


from Lifehacker http://lifehacker.com/5928690/quickly-set-your-macs-default-app-for-opening-a...