thecarol's soup

Honestly, it’s impossible to work in these conditions. I’m writing this from the TechCrunch Real-Time CrunchUp; a one-day event in San Francisco celebrating the joys of the ‘real-time’ web. Sounds awesome, right? It is.

I’ve been on stage, heckling participants on the marketing panel, I’ve been Tweeting from the audience, I’ve been following the live-blogging of the panels. Generally I’ve been living the real time dream – which probably explains why I haven’t done any actual work all day. And now I’m twenty minutes away from my deadline, and I still have to read a week of TechCrunch and figure out everything that’s happened this week.

Oh, and to make matters worse, Arrington has filled my work room with dogs.

Welcome, then, to a completely – and appropriately – real-time edition of This Week On TechCrunch.

From first glance, it seems that the entire site has been outsourced to India, with both Lacy and Vivek reporting from the ground. And at one point on top of a camel. On Friday evening Sarah kicked things off with a useful primer on why ecommerce has been slow to take off  in the country, and how travel sites like MakeMyTrip.com are acting as a gateway drug to get Indians shopping online, starting with ex-pats.

Vivek went one stage bigger, asking whether India has the potential to ‘take on’ Silicon Valley. His conclusion: yes. He’s wrong of course, but it’s an fascinating discussion. As Vivek headed back to the US, Sarah headed to Delhi, and the slums made famous by Slumdog Millionaire. But what she discovered couldn’t be more different from what we saw on the big screen: surrounded by grinning children, she met NIIT, a for-profit company that’s introducing the poorest children to computers by, well, leaving kiosks lying around and letting human curiosity take its course.

Meanwhile, back in the Valley, Arrington was starting his working week with rumours that MySpace was on the verge of buying iMeem; a rumour that he gleefully confirmed two days later. A million dollars in cash, with half of iMeem’s 55 employees (27.5 people) moving to MySpace – and the others looking for new jobs.

Speaking of people looking for new jobs, Robin reported on AOL’s appeal for 2,500 employees to voluntarily hand in their notice as the company heads for IPO. The alternative, according to CEO Tim Armstrong? They’ll just be fired. This just a week after the company announced 1000 involuntary layoffs. Cast aside like so many unwanted sign-up discs.

Hey, but at least Don Dodge got a new job.

What else?

In real-real time presidential news, Obama admitted that he has never used Twitter, but – as MG puts it – he’s adamant that  people in China should have the right to.

In real-time celebrity news, Shakira used UStream to stream her new album to 95,000 live viewers and a further 400,000+ watching the reruns over the next 24 hours. (Incidentally this story saw Jason narrowly missing out on the Headline Of The Week award for: “Shakira’s Stats Don’t Lie“. I mean, seriously Jason? “Stats?”. The correct title of course is “Shakira’s Hits Don’t Lie”. Better luck next time.

In real-time things that I’m already bored of even though they’re not launching until at least next year news: Google previewed their new Chrome OS and rumour has it they’re on the verge of launching a new Google phone. It’s ‘very real‘ says Mike. And it may even be VoIP-only. Splendid.

Which brings us nearly to the real-time event. It’s still going on right now, so it’s too early to say what the highlights are – tune in next week, etc – but newsworthy segments include the creator of GMail admitting that he hasn’t used Wave, an interesting discussion on how to monetize ‘real-time’ and, of course, MG’s Headline of the Week: Google And The Amazing Technicolor Search Options.

And that’s just about it. The after-party is calling, and I’m eager to talk to Scoble more about his ‘Super Tweet‘ idea. I have no idea what it is, but it sounds like the future.

Have a great week!

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

For our last discussion at the RealTime CrunchUp, we’ve got a panel on actually generating revenue from these services. Participating in the discussion are some of the Valley’s top VCs and veterans of the space.
Brian Singerman — Founders Fund
Ron Conway — Angel Investor
Dan’l Lewin — Corporate VP for Strategic and Emerging Business Development at Microsoft
George Zachary — Charles River Ventures
Paul Buchheit — Facebook/FriendFeed
Andrew Braccia — Accel Partners
Michael Arrington — Editor and Founder, TechCrunch
Moderated by Steve Gillmor and Erick Schonfeld

ES: We talk a lot about the overflow of information. Lots of interest in geo-stream. Where do the money making opportunities lie here? We have lots of consumer use cases.
GZ: That’s a broad question. We’re investors in three companies now starting to accrue rev. in this space: Twitter, Yammer, and SMSGupshup (Twitter of India). Regarding Yammer: In 0 for marketing, over 10% conversation of the install base for Yammer. The company has around 550k installed enterprise seats in 14 months.
MA: It’s this insidious product where it’s very sticky and you hae to start paying. It’s a good thing.
GZ: It’s a good thing for the company, and investor..
DL: Good for customer too. Company stays around.
GZ: In response to Marc Benioff copying Yammer, we got lots of calls saying Chatter copied Yammer.
MA: There’s 550k installed enterprise seats, over 10% of new seats convert. There’s below 100k paid seats. Near 100k paying users.

GZ: Marc Benioff setting price at 50 per user gives us some room…
ES: What’s yammer’s strategy to ingest other enterprise data systems.
GZ: I think yammer is going to be the future of enterprise messaging. There’s going to be serious competition and we know that.

ES: FriendFeed was the first sig. acqusition in this space. Wasn’t the size of what people were talking about with Twitter, but it’s a milestone. From a founder perspective you were building this system, can you tell us about, what you thought was obviously the future.
PB: Facebook kept talking to us, they were very persistent. We were never looking to sell, even when we did. What happened is we started talking to them more, learning where they’re going. As we put more thought into the future of Facebook it started seeming like an intriguing possibility. The opportunity at Facebook is very substantial. Nobody has ever announced the deal. The biggest component is what is the value is Facebook. I think the value of Facebook is going to be huge. It is going to get more successful.

ES: Brian can you talk about what you guys are interested in?
BS: We’re also in Yammer. We’re also interested in where real time can go in non consumer/enterprise. There’s lots of room in devices, biotech. Lots of cool companies being able to figure out on the fly if there is E Coli in a substance. You can leverage tech to do lots of stuff that used to take a long time.
…
AB: We’re taking a wide approach.

MA: Kimball Musk this morning said there are gobs of money in search. When Twitter bought Summize, I think they gave them like 8% of the company, not sure if that’s been reported, it was a huge part of the company. I think they realized it was still very hard and passed it to Bing/Google. The places where the money is with Yammer, which touches on things like Echange. And search. But where else are people making money. Where are startups making money if not one of those two buckets?

RC: Those are good buckets. I agree, what you’re seeing with the programmable web. Some business is going to take off, we’re seeing things that haven’t been created yet that are going to see a huge amount of value in things being created.

RC: Coupons alone to inventivize users to go to a nearby place, revenues from that alone could be massive. This is going to happen in 2010.

BS: We’ve seen a huge amont of traffic on real-time coupons/offerings.

ES: How does microsoft look at this.
DL: he first thing for us is to build the infrastructure out, and look at the big information flows, like we did for the Twitter relationship. Some of these things will be things we’ll be interested in. We have been and will continue to be inquisitive. It’s been around 20 companies a year on avg. about 10 of those are bubble up like this and become important parts of a broader strategy. RealTime goes way back to the very beginning of data exchange. Who carries the flow, where is the value at what moment in time of the flow of information. These are all indications of inevitability of realtime. What we’ve done with Twitter/Bing those are foundations for much bigger connections. There’s a little company doing math in the cloud, seven guys optomizing POS information. 5k retail points, 20k units inventory in a warehouse.

SG: What do you know about deal with Twitter.
DL: Which deal?…
MA: What’s the other deal?
DL: They did one with us.
SG: Question is licensing of feeds?
DL: Why would I offer details on this.
RC: Yon can tell Dan’l likes this job.
MA: I feel like panelists know the answer to this.

RC: The companies we’re investing in today that TC writes about are indiciation of where the market is going. COtweet. Retime search companies. That’s going to be a hell of a horse race. I think one of the real time search engines that exists today will win out.

AB: Realtime search is a tough space. I think Google does a pretty good job at information retreival. Facebook has search in a different way (more discovery serendipitious). I look at it, if you go back 4 years ago, most of the companies you would see that were web enabled, you could see the same traffic refeeral chart. 30% google SEO. 40% SEM. the rest direct. Today out of nowhere Facebook/Twitter have become huge reffers.

ES: Paul, you’re both a buyer and seller because you’re an active angel investor. To what extent do the companies you invest in fall in this theme.
PB: I don’t know if I’ve invested in too many real time. I think real time is valuable because… basically the word relevance. Search is valuable because it’s relevant. Realtime enables that across a lot of other domains. If right now I say I am sitting right here and I get a coupon, it works because it’s relevant to me. If I got it tomorrow it would no longer be relevant. One of the companies I recently invested in. They do car sales/car business. They look for intention are you looking to buy a car, are you having trouble, that’s a good opportunity to contact them.

MA: There’s another angle to FB search. Forget where you are, what you’ve done. I found when I look people I know, search results are really good. Reason is because they are ranked based on people who have mutual friends. Google doesn’t address that at all. Applies to more than just people. Who you are is really relevant to almost all searches.
PB: Relevance has multiple dimension. Google got keywords. There is time relevance. All are opportunities.

ES: As we look forward at where all this is going. Seems like there are a lot of different approaches. Is there danger of confusion here. Do I build on top of Twitter/Facebook, quasi open systems Google is pushing.

MA: Stocktwits built on Twitter and now they’ve moved almost completely off it. Zynga is doing it with Farmville now.
BS: If you need to move off, all startups pivot. They can pivot. But I suggest starting with something, pick best thing for the job, and don’t be afraid to pivot.
RC: Start with one with cheapest cost, highest number of users, off you go.
AB: I think good entrepreneurs will find their way. Omar at AdMob.. even before iPhone launched he was focused on that as an opportunity for a business. They’ll find their way.

DL: Big question is whether company that rises as a company like Twitter. Or one like Facebook becomes core platform. Pick starting point but it’s hard to argue that anyone can anticipiate which one is going to get lift like a Twitter. Why Twitter and not someone else.

ES: George, maybe you can answer that. Twitter, Facebook, Google each platforms taking different approaches.

GZ: The concept of a social network has been around for a long time.The one difference is twitter is unlike geocities etc. Twitter is an example of a horizontal network. They own namespace, let third parties build it out.

ES: FriendFeed was ultimate twitter client. Paul, you built it partially on back of Twitter. But then when you sold to FB you bet on FB model.
PB: I think both companies have promising future. I don’t see it as once vs other. I don’t know how the future will play out. They’re both incredibly well positioned. I’d love to own either (or both). FB had all these features, for API had to allow access to each, more complex. Twitter only had a few features so it was very easy to build a Twitter client. Set up this whole ecosystem of twitter apps. Everyone filled in the little pieces by themselves. I’m curious if anyone else can do this. They’ve managed to outsource this.

SG: Does anyone have an opinion if lists, RT, etc are going to be plus or minus.
RC: Huge plus. People have been screaming for ecosystem for lists for a year. Whole ecosystem of companies built off lists themselves. Twitter is building a platform. in the next year there will be 100 apps built off twitter lists.

DL: I think most of the money will be made in enterprise communications.

ES: What will be the biggest real time exit next year?
DL: I think a number of things sub 100, 50. One thing that will be a billion dollar thing. Not even sure there will be exists. It think opportunities for big things will be able to stand alone.
GZ: I can’t even predict what’s going to happen next year. I think most of the companies in this space in terms of revenue are fairly immature with the exception of FB. I think more likely for big exists in 2010/2011.
RC: This market is in its infancy. I think a couple max in 50-100. Acquisitions in 2010 will be for IP and great teams.
MA: Do you think Zynga is doing more monthly rev than Facebook?
RC: Interesting question.
PB: I’ve heard rumors of Zynga IPO.
AB: I agree with the panel.

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Today at the RealTime CrunchUp, representatives from some of the top companies involved in location based services came together to talk about the current state and future of geo-based services. I’ll be taking some notes about the top themes to come up during the panel, and we’ll have a full transcript available a few minutes after the panel concludes.

Participating in the panel were:
Matt Galligan, co-Founder of SimpleGeo
Ryan Sarver, Director of Platform at Twitter
Tristan Walker, VP of Business Development at Foursquare
Steve Lee, Group Product Manager Google Maps for Mobile and Google Latitude
Justin Shaffer, Founder of Hot Potato
Elad Gil, CEO of Mixer Labs
Moderators were our own Erick Schonfeld and MG Siegler.

Early in the panel, the conversation turned to SimpleGeo, the new infrastructure for location that was revealed earlier this week. Shaffer spoke about how excited he was about the new service. When asked if anyone could copy what Foursquare was doing,

Walker talked about Foursquare’s efforts to filter content (which is harder to reproduce).

MG then steered the convesation toward briding the gap between social networks and the real world, noting that mobile devices are paving the way for this change. But he wondered how services other than Foursquare (which has a game mechanic) would entice users to share their location on a regular basis.

Lee addressed concerns over Latitude’s continuous location sharing, explaining that you can share your location with certain people who you specify, but that Latitude’s approach to constant tracking leads to the ability to offer interesting services. He says that without continuous sharing nearby alerts wouldn’t be possible (or at least as effective). He says that the check-in model and the continuous model will likely coexist (and that check-in can even help give more context about where you are) but that there’s things you can’t do without continuous tracking. Regarding Checking in verus continuous mapping, Elad Gil says he’s seeing about a “nine to ten” relationship between them.

Galligan chimed in by saying that there will be a point when we know where everyone is, but that the context won’t necessarily be known. Galligan then revealed a new technology called “four dimensions” that SimpleGeo has created, which allows them to compress location and time stamps into a datapoint, allowing apps to look into the past for the same location.

Sarver talked about why Twitter was interested in location, describing how it would help filter through the noise. He mentioned TrendsMap.com as a great way to visualize geotagged tweets.

Shaffer said that HotPotato is looking to integrate location into their service, but that another key element is what brings conversation together. He says that just location data isn’t necessarily enough (he points out that people watching a baseball game may actually be at the game, or watching on TV.)

In terms of advertising, there seemed to be a broad consensus that geo-based advertising had the potential to be extremley successful. Galligan brought up the potential of special ads and deals, and Saffer later commented that it would be a negative for ads to actually feel like ads (instead it would be better for them to feel like deals).

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

At our Real-Time CrunchUp today in San Francisco, we are hosting a panel titles “Media Streams: Are These The Utlimate Marketing Vehicle?”

Panelists include Sean Rad, CEO of Ad.ly; Ryan Amos, co-founder of DailyBooth; Jesse Engle, CEO of CoTweet; Robin Bechtel, a celebrity agent and Philip Nelson, SVP of strategic development for NewTek.

Below find my live notes (paraphrased):

ES: What are celebrities doing to leverage the social streams?

RB: I oversee Britney Spears’ digital properties and we are using Twitter to build up buzz around her concerts. Using Twitter, we were able to get 8,000 people to Times Square all by herself.

PN: Fans can feel like they are an intimate part of your lives. For example, Heidi and Spencer did a live webcast, that we did, from the Bahamas from their hotel room. They had over 50,000 people watching that.

ES: To what extent is Twitter a Marketing vehicle and to what extent is it an entertainment and marketing vehicle itself?

RB: One thing that’s interesting is that we work with Facebook to sell virtual charms for Britney. We just Twittered that we were doing and it was in the press within a matter of hours.

JE: Twitter is the focal point where a lot of elements come together. Twitter is a focal point to stay connected to the public.

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