The new site was founded by Timothy Sykes, a controversial financial expert who was named to Trader Monthly’s 2006 “Top 30 under 30″ and had a once-successful hedge fund that shut down in 2007 after taking heavy losses. Since then, though, he’s mounted a comeback and is now one of Covestor’s top ranked traders (though some people aren’t fans of his tactics).

Sykes says that his goal with Investimonials is to help users cut through the spammy and scammy financial sites that litter the web, by offering a comprehensive hub of user reviews for each product. Investimonials will be launching with eight categories, including the top rated Brokers, Newsletters, DVDs, Books, and websites, with plans to have “dozens” over the next few years. At launch the site has 3,000 products ready to review, though the vast majority of them haven’t been reviewed by anyone yet.

Sykes says the primary competitor in this area is EliteTrader, which has been around for a decade and has around one thousand total reviews (the site also looks pretty dated).

Investimonials incentivizes users to write reviews and share their personal contact information by offering ‘iv bucks’, which can be traded in for prizes. Many of these are Sykes’s own products, though there are a variety of prizes from others as well.

Investimonials seems like a good idea, though it’s going to have to be very transparent if it wants to avoid constant accusations of bias. And as with all review sites, it’s going to suffer from the chicken-and-the-egg problem – until it has a lot of reviews about products, few people will have a good reason to use it.

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Featurewise, Thumbtack is a mix between RedBeacon, Yelp, and OpenTable. Like RedBeacon, it lets you sign onto the site and issue a request for a service, which service providers can then bid on. CEO Marco Zappacosta says this portion of the service is nearly identical to RedBeacon, complete with a bidding engine for providers to set pricing. But Thumbtack also offers provider profiles, where these providers can list some of their specialties and price points. There’s also a section where you can book a service directly from a profile page as you would on OpenTable, complete with an availability calendar.

One of the biggest issues with local services like Thumbtack is the chicken-and-the-egg problem. These sites generally launch with a relatively small number of services, which means that users can have a hard time finding what they need (and without users, providers have little incentive to join the site). Thumbtack has tried to address this by spending the last year recruiting providers – at launch, the startup says it already has 10,000 of them, ranging from tutors and handymen to rap teachers and henna artists. Thumbtack is also using some clever incentives to get companies to sign up, like offering discounted business cards and other marketing materials. Zappacosta explains that Thumbtack can order these goods in bulk because they work with so many companies, and then pass the savings on to businesses that sign up.

The other big issue with this kind of site is the creepiness factor – many of these services involve inviting these people into your home (say, to fix a sink) or to a private event (wedding caterers). Along with user reviews, which are standard for this space, Thumbtack is taking a few extra steps. If a service provider is licensed they can post that in their profile, which Thumbtack will verify for free. Thumbtack is also giving providers a handful of premium verification options, such as electing to undergo a background check by a national agency (prices vary from $8 to $49 depending on the level of verification). Providers who successfully pass these checks are rewarded with badges on their profile pages, giving users more confidence in their service. Every provider is also run through the DOJ sex offender registry.

Thumbtack plans to make money by building a payment system off of PayPayl’s adaptive payments API. They’ll take a cut out of each transaction that occurs on the site, and for services that require in-person estimates (like plumbing) they’ll take a lead-gen payment. They’ll also be taking a cut every time a provider elects to get verified through one of the third party background check services. Thumbtack is offering its service nationwide beginning today, but as with RedBeacon their primary focus is the Bay Area, with plans to expand down the road.

Thumbtack is doing a lot of things right with its site – I particularly like the idea of having providers verified through background checks, which helps differentiate it from sites like Angie’s List, Craigslist, and RedBeacon (which lets providers display their licenses but doesn’t do background checks). That said, Thumbtack faces the same challenges that RedBeacon will have. For one, it’s going to have to train users to turn to their computers rather than their yellow pages for these local services. And while 10,000 businesses is a good start, it’s going to take a long time for the service to build up a robust community of users and reviews. The background checks are a nice touch, but they don’t do much for helping users discern which providers offer a high quality service.

For another service that’s taking a different approach to matching users with trustworthy service providers, check out Workstir, which provides suggestions based on your social graph.

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This is actually Ustream’s second application for Android. The first is its Broadcaster app, which allows you to stream video footage live from your phone to the web. The app launching today is for viewing only, but it will let you watch any Ustream feed – be it a red carpet premiere or footage of someone’s puppies – while you’re on the go.

Ustream is timing the app’s launch with a live KISS concert in Los Angeles, which you’ll be able to stream straight to your Android device (you’ll also be able to watch it on the iPhone or the web as usual).

Ustream launched the iPhone version of the viewing app last January, when it was downloaded a whopping 113,000 times in 24 hours. It’s worth pointing out that the iPhone doesn’t have a Broadcaster app, because Apple won’t approve them (Qik and a handful of others have been kept off the iPhone because of this).

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Previously, Dropbox raised a seed round led by Sequoia that was $1.2 million in convertible debt, with Amidzad Partners also participating. They also raised money through the Y Combinator program.

Aside from the not-so-recent funding, Dropbox has been killing it lately. Houston tells us their membership numbers were up 25% in October, spurred in part by their new iPhone app. And the company also managed to gain control over Dropbox.com (previously their service was hosted on the domain getdropbox.com). They’ve also recently hit 3 million users, only two months after they passed the 2 million user milestone.

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WakeMate is one of the few startups we’ve see that actually involves its own physical product (another that comes to mind is FitBit). To use the service, you first order the WakeMate wristband from the website, which costs $50. Then, you download an application for your Bluetooth-enabled smartphone (WakeMate is launching with support for iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Windows Mobile, and a standard Java app for non-smart phones; support for Palm’s WebOS is on the way).

Once you’ve installed the app and paired your wristband with your phone, you set your alarm (more on that later) and hit they hay. The wristband tracks the movement of your wrist through the night, which it can use to analyze your sleep patterns. If you’re raising your eyebrows you’re not alone – this sounded strange to me at first, but co-founder Greg Nemeth explains it’s a well established sleep-study technique called actigraphy.

The WakeMate wristband collects data throughout the night and stores it on internal Flash storage. When it’s time to wake you up WakeMate doesn’t necessarily sound an alarm at exactly the time you set. Instead, it monitors your sleep patterns for the 20 minute window prior to that and sounds your alarm when you’re in the lightest sleep mode, which can help eliminate that groggy feeling you sometimes wake up with. The alarm doesn’t come from the wristband though – instead, the wristband uses Bluetooth to trigger your cell phone’s alarm. It then transmits your sleep data to your phone, which in turn uses its cellular data connection to upload it to the WakeMate servers. You can then browse through your sleep history from the WakeMate website.

WakeMate will be facing off with a number of other sleep devices, including the Zeo Personal Sleep Coach, which was released over the summer. The Zeo consists of a standalone alarm clock that pairs with a headband that measures your brainwaves as opposed to your wrist movements. It’s also quite a bit more expensive than WakeMate, running around $250. Nemeth says he says the Zeo as a powerful tool for people who need to diagnose their sleep problems. But he says that WakeMate has a much broader appeal, in part because of its lower price, but also because it’s more portable.

For example, WakeMate can be used to help you take the ideal nap, even when you’re on the go. The device has modes for both ‘power naps’ (which last around 30 minutes) and ‘full naps’, which range from 60-90 minutes.

WakeMate shows promise, but I don’t love the fact that it requires a Bluetooth handset to trigger its alarm. It seems like it would be easier just to integrate an alarm directly into the wristband, along with a cheap LED display so you can set the time (you could still use Bluetooth to transfer your sleep data via a handset). Co-founder Arun Gupta says they’ve considered this, but that integrating an alarm would make it bulkier, less comfortable, and more expensive. He also points out that some people might sleep with their arm under their pillow, which could muffle the alarm (perhaps they could include a ‘vibrate’ mode).

All of that said, the sleep industry has a broad appeal – who hasn’t wished they could kiss those groggy mornings goodbye? And the $50 pricepoint is low enough to make the product attractive even for people who don’t have serious sleep issues. You’ll have to wait a while to try one though: the site is now accepting preorders (you get $5 off) but the wristbands won’t start shipping until January.

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HilaryAQ

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The new site features a list of top deals, as voted on by the community and chosen by the Deals.Woot algorithm. This will be going head to head against other deal sites like SlickDeals and FatWallet, which have well established communities. Woot already has plenty of fans, but it may take some time to build out a base of deal hunters.

But the very top of the site actually isn’t dictated by users. Instead, it’s dedicated to “Sponsored Deals”. Woot explains that these deals are paid for by advertisers, but that they’re still bargains:

OK, yes, companies pay a little something to be Sponsored Deals. But we don’t allow just any old crap in this section. Sponsored Deals are proposed to us by other retailers, manufacturers, and even other daily deal sites. If we find the deal compelling enough that our members will appreciate us bringing it to their attention, we’ll feature it here. Believe it or not, we have a reputation to uphold.

The site has been available for weeks before now, but was only available until members up until a few hours ago.

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This time they’ve reconstructed the Declaration of Independence, complete with edits and comments from the founding fathers. My US History is a bit fuzzy, but there are plenty of obvious jokes nestled in here, and I’m sure the Googlers have included a few more subtle ones as well. Unfortunately, it looks like you’ll have to have a Wave account if you want to witness the creation of one of the United States’ most important documents. But we’ve tried to grab a few of the key moments in the screenshots below.

As a demonstration of what you can do with Wave, the document succeeds in some respects. But frankly it can still be confusing to tell what’s going on. For example, when the founding fathers are casting their votes, the Wave only says something vague like “Thomas Jefferson edited this message” — it’s up to you to figure out what he did.

According to a tweet a few minutes ago from Wave team member Lars Rasmussen, the idea to create famous documents came from Tim O’Reilly. Hopefully we’ll be seeing more of these soon.

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FlightCaster’s goal is simple: it wants to let you know when your flight is delayed as early as possible. Using a variety of data sources and complex algorithms, the service will alert you whenever it thinks one of your flights will be delayed, along with an explantation of the factors that contributed to its prediction. And so far, it seems to be working — co-founder Jason Freedman says that four hours below takeoff, Flightcaster manages to predict ten times as many delays as the airlines do. And they manage to stay 90% accurate (which is on par with the airlines).

Back when I first wrote about the startup, I questioned how helpful knowing about a delay in advance really was. After all, FlightCaster’s notifications state that a flight will probably be delayed. But sometimes they’re not, so it isn’t wise to show up at the airport a few hours late. Freedman says the FlightCaster team had the same concerns, but that there are two discrete sets of users who value the service. The first group of users (which is where most people fall) just like having a heads up that their flight is delayed, mostly so that they can warn friends and co-workers that they might be late.

The second group loves FlightCaster for a different reason: they will change their plans if there’s a possibility of a delay. Freedman says these tend to be frequent fliers (likely business travelers) who don’t want to get caught in delay limbo and are willing to pay to swap flights even if a delay isn’t certain.

It’s this second group that will likely prove most valuable to FlightCaster. The company is currently in talks with a number of major travel sites (and even some airlines) to integrate their predictions. Freedman won’t get into specifics yet, but he says some of these partners are interested in helping frequent fliers rebook their flights as soon as there’s a delay alert.

Along with the parters FlightCaster is already talking with, other developers will be able to tap into the Flightcaster API for a fee.

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Life360 offers a suite of services related to safety and security, which are designed to help prevent everything from losing your phone to losing your personal identity. One example is the site’s Emergency ID service, which provides parents with cards/bracelets for their children that instructs first responders to call a designated phone number in the event of an emergency. Calling that number will activate the service and automatically blast a message to any emergency contacts.

Other services include a Lost & Found product (you put physical tags on your valuables with with instructions on how to return the item to you) and identity protection. Life360 also offers an Android app appropriately called ‘Tracker’ which can be used to keep tabs on children during the day, though founder Chris Hulls acknowledges this isn’t all that practical yet because many children don’t have smart phones.

The company’s goal isn’t necessarily to provide all of these services itself. Rather, it wants to offer a set of core products built in-house, alongside services that are offered by third parties. Life360 works to integrate these services into their dashboard, and makes it easy to sign up for them because it can pre-populate key information. This seems like a smart play given how fragmented/confusing the privacy and security market can be, though I’m wondering if Life360 might have some trouble convincing well established services to play ball (especially if they’re going to be listed alongside competitors).

We’ve briefly covered Life360 a couple times before, when the company won the first Android Developer Challenge (good for a $300,000 award) and then again when it was part of this summer’s fbFund REV.

Life360 Introduction Cartoon from Life360 on Vimeo.

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This time, Apple is having to battle the news of Facebook’s all-star developer Joe Hewitt quitting the platform, more high profile app rejections, and the rise of Android as an increasingly viable alternative to the iPhone. Schiller has granted BusinessWeek’s Arik Hesseldahl what the publication says is his first “wide-ranging interview on the matter”. Unfortunately, Schiller doesn’t really say anything to quell the growing unrest in the developer community — instead, he’s offered some finely-tuned PR-speak that will placate the vast majority of iPhone users, who are only vaguely aware of the App Store controversies and just need a reminder that Apple is still one of the good guys. But it may only make developers angrier.

The article kicks off with quotes from Hewitt’s recent denunciation of the App Store’s approval process, which he says sets a “horrible precedent for other software platforms” (an assertion I wholeheartedly agree with). The article then transitions into Schiller’s response to the complaints that are frequently levied against the App Store.

None of Schiller’s defenses for the approval process are surprising: he says that Apple has built a store that people can trust, and that between the downloading, billing, and transfering to the phone “it all just works.” Schiller also points out the App Store’s ability to offer parental controls because screeners can categorize apps into different age ratings. Of course, he doesn’t mention that Apple also likes keeping control over the platform because it lets them block anything that could potentially compete with its own products.

As he’s done before, Schiller did admit to some of the App Store’s faults. Hesseldahl asked about the recent Rogue Amoeba debacle, which saw the popular Mac developer’s app rejected because it used some icons that Apple objected to for clearly ridiculous reasons apparently having to do with copyright. Schiller didn’t comment on that case in particular, but addressed some of Apple’s issues with copyright: “We need to delineate something that might confuse the customer and be an inappropriate use of a trademark from something that’s just referring to a product for the sake of compatibility… We’re trying to learn and expand the rules to make it fair for everyone”. The article then notes that Rogue Amoeba will be resubmitting its application with its original icons, presumably with the understanding that it will be approved.

But to developers who have been dealing with the frustrations of Apple’s platform for many months, none of this is particularly novel or encouraging. Schiller has previously stepped in to fix highly publicized App Store blunders, but nothing changes for the vast majority of developers. Likewise, Schiller has previously said that Apple is working on improving the App Store’s submission process, and while I honestly do think they’re making some improvements, their lack of transparency makes it nearly impossible to tell how much progress has been made. And the steady stream of App Store horror stories isn’t showing any signs of letting up.

Even worse, Schiller implies in the interview that developers actually like the approval process:

Most are approved and some are sent back to the developer. In about 90% of those cases, Apple requests technical fixes—usually for bugs in the software or because something doesn’t work as expected, Schiller says. Developers are generally glad to have this safety net because usually Apple’s review process finds problems they actually want to fix, he says.

This is a laughable statement. Developers may like the concept of having an external QA safety net that helps catch bugs, but not one that’s incredibly inconsistent and penalizes them with extended delays and notoriously bad communication.

Schiller’s interview highlights how badly Apple is underestimating the negative impact the App Store is having on its reputation in the developer community, as Paul Graham recently detailed. Apple may not care about losing a handful of developers to Android, but their shortsighted strategy of answering developer complaints with PR spin rather than transparency and action may hurt them in the long run.

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Once you’ve activated Sneak Preview (assuming you have access to it), whenever you create a new event you’ll see a new viewing mode that displays a calendar alongside your event details. This calendar will show the schedules of each of the people you’ve invited to the event (provided you’re a friend or coworker with access to that information), and the proposed time for your event will appear as a semi-transparent blue box so you can quickly see where you might have conflicts. You can click each guest’s name to show/hide them on the calendar if some are more important than others.

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Video by Ustream

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.

Q: Who is Twitter disrupting?
RC: Dick Costolo had some fascinating adjectives. “non tradional” “unique” “organic” “people will love it”. That’s a pretty interesting drum roll.
The next wave of disruption in technology will come and disrupt the big ones.

DL: I think Michael has a POV of our position on the web. Not sure if anyone paid attention to what we announced at our dev conf.

————

Full transcript:

>> So this is the last session that we’re about to start.

And let’s stay here and we can get this one wrapped up on time.

>> So if everyone on the final panel, if they’re not behind there, are they all back there?

Should we give away the

okay.

So at the end of this panel, we’re going to give away the sailing trip again.

So I’m not going to do it now because everyone left.

If everybody who is on this panel can come up.

Brian Singerman, Ron Conway, Dan’l Lewin, Paul Buchheit and Andrew Braccia.

If you’re back stage, come on up here.

>> All right.

We’re going to get started.

Can you find the other panelists.

We’ll have drinks afterwards.

So we’ll get started.

Okay.

Yeah, George, are you giving a demo?

>> He’s around.

>> George Zachary.

You want to come up on stage, guys.

All right.

Ron Conway.

All right.

Someone find Ron Conway.

He’ll show up.

Okay.

>> Let’s have everybody introduce themselves and say a little bit about why they think that

They have an opinion about real time or not.

Let’s start on this end.

>> Andrew Braccia, Accel Partners, have no opinion.

>> Paul Buchheit, Facebook at the moment, I guess, previously Friendfeed, and

>> Facebook, I guess, at the moment?

[LAUGHTER]

>> That came out wrong.

[LAUGHTER]

I was trying to decide whether Friendfeed or Facebook part was more relevant.

They’re both very relevant since obviously I think realize is a big time where we’re headed

In the future.

And in particular not just the technical aspect but the human aspect of how we relate to each

Other.

>> George.

>> George Zachary, Charles River.

I’m known to have opinions.

I missed the question.

I’m sorry I wasn’t paying attention.

>> As it goes, who are you.

>> I’m Dan’l Lewin, I’m with Microsoft.

I’m here in Silicon Valley, and oversee our outreach to the start-up community in general.

>> Great.

Brian Singerman, I’m at Founders Fund.

>> Okay.

So we kind of want to use this panel to, A, wrap up some of the themes that we’ve been seeing

Today.

And really kind of focus on what both the business and investment opportunities are in the

Future.

So we’ve seen talk a lot about sort of filtering this overflow of information that’s being

delivered in streams.

If you would like.

You can be Ron Conway.

We’ve seen that there’s a lot of interest in geo stream information, lots of start-ups working

On that.

>> By the way, the doors were locked and there are a bunch of people trying to get in, they

Couldn’t get in because the doors are locked.

>> Could somebody open the door.

>> In real time, please.

>> All right.

And we’re seeing these streams becoming sort of new distribution mechanisms for both private

And public communications, media content, etc..

So where do the money-making opportunities lie here?

We’ve got a lot of consumer use cases.

Where is the money?

George.

>> That’s a pretty broad question.

Well, we’re investors in three companies that are now starting to accrue revenues in the space.

One is Twitter.

The second one is Yammer a third in India SMS group shot, people in India call the at which

Twitter of India, which is kind of a Twitter and e-groups blend.

>> Can you talk about how well Yammerer is monetizing, it’s unclear.

It would be good to understand.

What percent of customers turn into upgrade into a paid account and what are they paying on

Average?

What’s total revenue?

>> I won’t tell you that level of detail.

But I will tell you

>> Their advantage is being a private company.

>> I will tell you that with a salesperson who is promoted from customer support, no other

Sales infrastructure, in zero four marketing we have over10 percent conversion of the install

Base.

>> They’re paying it

is it $12 a month per user?

I forgot what is it they charge?

>> I can’t remember right now.

>> George

$1 per use per month.

>> You told me in the hall once salesforce announced chatter you started getting a lot of

Calls.

>> Just to partially answer your question without getting a raft of crap from the company.

The company has about 550,000 installed seats up from zero in 14 months.

[APPLAUSE]

So I think

>> Was that David Sacks.

>> Has anyone

who here has used Yammer and uses it

more than what I thought.

>> We started using it after TechCrunch after they won the event.

At some point we moved the paid.

We have to move to paid.

Cleared out old accounts and got control of it.

It’s an insidious product where you get very sticky.

You’re like we have to start paying.

And so it’s a good thing.

>> It’s a good thing.

It’s a good thing for the company and me as an investor.

So to answer your question

>> It’s good for the customer because you’ll be around for a while, then.

>> That’s correct.

To answer your question, you know, post Marc Benioff getting up saying we’ve blatantly copied

Yammer but I’m not going to tell you because we claim everything.

We started getting calls from investment bankers saying since salesforce has chatter I bet

All these other companies are going to want Yammer.

But we haven’t responded to the calls.

>> There’s an interesting thing we’ve noticed at least I’ve noticed in terms of Yammer, as

They keep broadening their platform across different devices, like, for example, when the iPhone

3.0 software came out it supports push notification.

And all of a sudden if you send an at Steve or at Mike or editor, it shows up, if you have

An iPhone still, which Mike doesn’t, it shows up on the, it alerts you.

Literally it pushes to the top of the stack.

>> It synchs across devices which Twitter hasn’t come close to doing.

>> You said there’s 550,000 seats.

$1 a month.

>> 550,000 installed enterprise seats over 10 percent of new seats convert every month.

>> So it’s like 20, 30, 40,000 paid seats.

>> No, it’s below 100,000.

>> And that’s

below $100,000 in revenue per month.

>> Near 100,000 paying users.

>> It’s $1 per month per user.

>> Actually, it’s three to five.

>> Okay.

So it’s actual revenue.

It’s not huge yet but it’s proving it’s a business model.

>> Marc Benioff is setting the price, his price at 50 bucks per user gives us some you mean

Umbrella for

>> But he ties into all this other CRM data, right?

So are you saying that you’re going to

what’s Yammer strategy to kind of ingest other, you

Know, enterprise data systems and make those, you know, alerts within Yammer?

>> That’s correct.

That’s correct.

And just to pick on Marc a little bit, salesforce is a company with more P than E in their

P to E and existing off of CRM is not a good way to maintain the company.

So he has to spread into the space.

And my belief is that the core of all enterprise IT is going to be messaging.

I mean, huge franchises have been built off of messaging, specifically e-mail and Dan’l you

Would know this well, and I believe that Yammer is going to be the future of enterprise messaging.

So I’m very excited about it.

There’s going to be serious competition, we know that.

>> So, Paul, Friendfeed was the first really kind of significant acquisition in the space.

You know, definitely wasn’t in terms of size of what people were talking about Twitter, but

Twitter never sold.

But in terms of the impact you guys are having, within Facebook, I think that it’s a milestone.

And $50 million is nothing to sneeze at.

So to what extent, from a founder perspective, right, you’re building the system, can you tell

Us a little bit about what extent were you sort of off in the woods doing what you thought

Was obviously the future, and at what point did sort of the bigger companies, the acquirers

Start sniffing around?

>> You know, Facebook kept talking to us.

Like from the very beginning.

They’re very persistent.

And so pretty much always there were people looking.

But we were never looking to sell.

Even when we did sell.

It was a surprise even to us.

So but really what happened was that we did start talking to them more closely and got to meet

More of the team and learn more about where they saw things going.

And you know as we started putting more thought into essentially the future of Facebook, it

Started to seem like a very intriguing possibility.

And ultimately that was obviously what we did.

>> So your motivation for selling was primarily what?

>> The opportunity at Facebook is very substantial.

You quoted a number which we’ve never

no one has ever announced the deal, but obviously

The biggest component is the question of what is the value of Facebook.

And I think that the value of Facebook is going to be huge.

It’s a very successful company.

It’s going to get more so I think in the future.

There’s really a lot of opportunity in the whole area of all the social and the real time and

Everything.

And they’re in a somewhat unique position which I think will prove rather lucrative.

>> Brian, can you tell us a little bit about your involvement in real time, what kind of real

Time companies have you invested in?

>> Yes, we’re also in Yammer along with George.

And supporting David for a while.

But I actually think.

>> What kind of revenues is Yammer doing.

>> Last time I saw Mike he asked me exactly what the Facebook revenues were.

I gladly volunteered that information as well.

No.

We’re interested in that kind of stuff.

But we’re also interested in where real time can go from nonconsumer or enterprise apps.

We think there’s a lot of room for real time in devices, and there’s lots of room for real

Time in biotech applications, and everything else.

>> Biotech, like what?

>> Like for instance there’s lots of cool companies doing things like being able to figure

Out on the fly if there’s E. Coli in a given substance.

And stuff like that.

So I know it’s not the exact same type of real time that we’re talking about, but technology

Is able to

you can leverage technology to do lots of cool stuff that used to take a long

Time.

Like how news before

>> It’s real time in the sense that if you find out before you eat the hamburger, that’s good.

>> That’s right.

It’s a lot better to find out beforehand.

>> But there’s an application in India right now, there are huge issues on global health where

People take medicines, drugs, which are purported to be clean and prescribed, but they’re actually

Counterfeit.

And a third of the time you have a chance of dying from taking the drug.

Because it’s not real and it’s not clean.

So there’s a public/private key.

Real time example of you scrape off a little piece of hidden thing like you do on the prize,

And you SMS the code and you get a real time check, is this a real drug or not.

And then you choose to take it and live.

So there’s a ton of examples outside of many noisy things that are real world applications.

in healthcare bio, life sciences, simple things like that.

Lots of opportunity.

>> I agree.

Absolutely.

>> That’s one of those things, it’s one of those areas that’s really exciting to us right

Now.

Just basically taking stuff that used to take a long time and require a lot of capital, making

It not require a lot of capital, and having instant gratification.

Like in general that’s the theme of real time, and we’re huge fans of that.

>> Andrew, can you talk a little bit about in terms of what percentage of pitches that you’re

Seeing now either they use this term or that you

I mean, is this becoming the new Web two

2.0.

Are people using it as a branding mechanism?

Is there something real here?

>> It’s a very popular part of a lot of the presentations.

Both from the perspective of new companies, presenting their ideas, with that lens, but also

With existing companies, you know, pivoting around the trends of what’s happening around real

Time information.

And I think we have a bunch of different thoughts on the space, and I think like Brian was

Talking about, and Dan’l, we think that real time has an impact in just about every business

That we invest in.

You know, whether it be a business that is, you know, in the data storage space, where more

Information, you know, is only growing the need for the next level of data center infrastructure

Around information retrieval and we have a company that we’re investors in with Ron called

Cloudaria commercialization of Adoop, important for the data infrastructure.

If you look at a lot of the advertising business and look at the importance that real time

Is playing in terms of targeting you look at the rise of demand side platforms that are using

Real time exchanges, like right media, double click, Google, OpenX.

Those are areas we’re interested in.

I think you look at the real time communication aspects of social networks, and you look at

Those businesses as next generation platforms for commerce.

If you think about Google, you know, Google organized all the world’s information.

If you look at Facebook in many ways Facebook is organizing humanity, and in many ways people

Are exchanging information and businesses are being built off of that.

If you look at social commerce and you look at the frictionless nature of getting offers in

Front of people and the virality of that and you see it in social gaming and other applications

As well.

So we’re taking sort of a wide purview and wide approach to investing.

>> I think Mike has some ideas about the offers.

>> Social gaming offers?

>> I’m not necessarily talking about those types of offers.

>> If you look at Kimball Musk from OneRiot in the panel this morning said that there are

Gobs of money in search and I think when Twitter bought suchld ummize last summer I think they

Gave them eight percent or something like that of the company.

I don’t think that was ever verified.

I’m not sure if it’s ever been reported.

But there’s a huge chunk of the company that Twitter gave to do search.

I think they realized that it’s still very, very hard and sort of passed it off to Bing and

To Google.

But it seems to me like the only places I’ve seen, maybe you disagree, I’d love to hear if

You do.

The places where the money is a little bit like with Yammer where you’re selling something

To the enterprise and you’re convincing they want it and touching on exchange and that huge

Potential pot of money, and in search where people are, as Kimball said, using his words, people

Are expressing intent right now what they want and you can throw ads against and clearly there’s

Lots of money to be made there, too, but where else are people making money.

You put Facebook in another bucket and they’re so huge now they’re able to make money more

Traditional ways.

But for your start-ups you’re investing in, where are they going to make any money if it’s

Not in one of those two buckets?

>> Those are two pretty good buckets.

Those two buckets are going to be a couple of billion dollars a year.

But they’ll be new buckets as well that are unique.

>> So what are the buckets?

>> I completely agree.

I think what you’re seeing with the whole programmable Web out there with all these APIs out

There and you’ve got a bunch of people on your panels, some business is going to take off that

Uses some of these APIs and very interesting unique ways and we’ll see things that haven’t

Been created yet that generate a huge amount of traffic and a huge amount of value in that

Space to people who are creating these building blocks for the programmable Web.

>> Just the location based opportunity with Twitter doing the location API, which is going

To help people like Foursquare Goola and Hot Potato, these are companies in their infancy,

And they’re huge, huge markets.

>> Can you talk a little bit more about that?

We just had a geo panel.

I know you were in another commitment.

We tried to talk a little bit about this.

But what’s your sense of how

once we get geo data into all these apps, what are the, some

Of the business opportunities that that makes possible?

>> Just couponing alone to incentivise you to go in and replace a business that you’re within

Two to three blocks of, just that in and of itself and the rev share from that could be mass

Ive.

>> And newspapers used to be the Sunday paper was the home of coupons.

And that’s gone.

So there’s an opportunity to be replaced.

>> And it’s a huge opportunity.

This is going to happen in 2010.

You’re going to see it on gooala and Hot Potato and Foursquare and five other companies that

We’re talking to next week.

>> We’ve seen a huge amount of traffic, deal flow traffic on people doing the real time where

You are-based coupons and offerings and doing intelligent targeting based on location on the

Coupons.

>> How does Microsoft think about this in you want to buy companies that are sort of invent

you wait for companies to get critical mass to prove it up?

>> The first thing for us is to build the infrastructure out, which we’ve been doing.

And looking at the big information flows like what we did with the Twitter relationship.

But I think that the inevitability is that some of these things that are bubbling up will be

Things that we’ll be interested in.

I can’t obviously comment on specifics but there’s no question that we have been and we’ll

Continue to be inquisitive.

Generally speaking, if people don’t know, it’s been about 20 companies on year on average,

Probably 10 of those, half of those deals are bubble up like this if you will and become important

Parts of a broader strategy that we’re clearly building out as it relates to the infrastructure.

The enterprise infrastructure is really important to this.

Location, as Ron points out, is fundamental to it as well.

But to me, I think, the biggest picture for the company, I know Lili was on a panel earlier

Today, probably mentioned some of these things.

I’m sorry, I personally missed it.

I had to be off site this morning.

But real time, it goes way, way back in my mind to the very beginning of data exchange and

EDI where who carries the flow?

Right?

Where is the value at what moment in time in the flow of information.

Whether it’s money, or inventory, which equates to money, etc..

So what we’re seeing with the real streams and user-generated content for the most part today

Or from what I’ve heard since the noon hour, these are all indications of the inevitability

Of real time in a broader customer hall sense.

How much will be monetizable and absorbed into infrastructure like a Facebook infrastructure,

Which I think is fundamental as Andrew pointed out, and is mapping a very important space,

Humanity, if you will.

And all of those organizational dynamics around big, broad systems of record, whether it’s

Information that Google organized or Facebook has done or we’ve done with Bing etc., those

Are foundation points for much more rapid connections and the monetization will come about

Where there’s a commercial opportunity.

Create a advertising base.

>> Do you agree it’s those two buckets, the search and what was your other bucket?

>> Search and personal identity and flow, and information flow.

There’s huge opportunity in the

>> Commerce.

>> Huge opportunity in the enterprise.

There’s a little company that we’re working with right now that’s building out seven guys doing

Math in the cloud using Asher we just worked with them at our developers conference this week.

Seven guys optimizing for point of sale information.

5,000 retail points.

20,000 units of inventory in a warehouse.

There’s massive inventory opportunity.

>> Does the coupon thymine as I’m driving by a mini mall 18 coupons are going to pop up.

>> In an ideal world you’ve presented it in a natural way.

>> You want to put the filters in place.

>> You’re already starting to see this with Foursquare, where

>> Exactly.

>> In your hand well since you’re here, go in the store, get this.

>> I would absolutely add commerce to one of the buckets, to one of Mike’s buckets.

I think you have to.

>> Can I go through my top 10 list again?

>> We did that last time.

>> Is it the same.

>> Ron’s going to go through his top 10 list.

>> Lead generation.

Analytics.

I’m going to pass over the repeats.

CRM.

Payments.

User authentication.

Licensing of feeds.

And acquiring followers.

>> Licensing of feeds.

Dan’l, what do you know about the deal with Twitter?

>> Which deal?

>> Wow, they did more than one.

>> You paid a certain amount of money, allegedly.

>> I don’t know

>> Let’s go down this which deal.

>> Well, you’re asking about a deal with Twitter.

>> That deal.

>> I think she answered that question.

>> Ron Conway is like ask him, ask him, what’s the other deal.

Am I disrupting the panel again.

>> It’s your prerogative.

>> I was asking a simple question.

>> Which deal did Twitter do?

They did one with us, right?

>> Right.

The question is licensing of feeds.

That seems to be a pretty big license of feeds.

What are the details of that license?

>> Why would I offer details?

[LAUGHTER]

>> To a conversation that was a private conversation.

>> Okay.

I can try.

>> You can tell Dan’l likes his job.

[LAUGHTER]

>> I feel like the panelists up here know the answers to the questions but it’s like, well,

They don’t want to share it because they’re venture capitalists and this one company we’re

Not going to talk about the fact that they’re

>> We kind of got ourselves into this by putting venture capitalists on the panel.

>> Exactly.

>> So does anybody want to say anything?

[LAUGHTER]

>> The companies, the venture capitalists are investing in today are going to be, you know,

The $100 million companies of tomorrow, or we wouldn’t be investing in them.

So the companies we’re investing in today that TechCrunch writes about are an indication of

Where this market’s going.

You know, we have CoTweet in the corporate space.

We have a whole raft of real time search companies.

And that’s going to be a hell of a horse race, because they’re going to have to integrate more

Relevancy and intent so they deliver better results.

But there will be a big winner come out of that.

>> How many real time search companies do we need?

>> We have quite a few right now.

So I would encourage people to go elsewhere.

>> Nobody’s won the space yet, though.

>> Yeah, there’s room.

>> I think one of the ones that exists today will win out.

Because their IP will mature.

>> Is it going to be Bing or Google?

>> No, no, I’m talking scoopler, topsly, Eller Dale, the scrappy ones.

>> This is the man that invested in Google.

>> Andrew, do you agree with that?

>> Real time search is a tough space.

I think it’s

Google does a pretty good job at information retrieval.

And I think a lot of the real time information that’s being exchanged where relevancy is no

Longer page rank, it’s the people you know.

Facebook does a pretty good job of enabling that.

So

>> Facebook has search?

>> Sure.

>> I think search in a different way, in sort of more of a discovery sArn dip to us way, but

I think I kind of look at it from the perspective of if you go back six

go back three or

Four years ago, most companies are companies that you would see that were Web-enabled and business

Their businesses off the Web.

Literally, you could see the same traffic referral chart for just about every company except

For a couple of well-known destinations.

It was 30, or 33 percent Google, SCO.

It was 35 or 40 percent SCM and 20 percent or whatever the number that’s left over there direct.

And referrals to the website.

You look at today, most of the companies that I see, whether it be existing companies or new

Companies that are popping up, out of nowhere you know, Facebook has become sort of the number

Two or number three referral source for those companies.

Twitter is all of a sudden become a very significant resource for those companies.

So that to me is a lead indicator in many ways of how people are discovering information on

The Web and how that’s changing.

>> So, Paul, you’re both a buyer and a seller, right, because you’re very active Angel Investor.

To what extent the companies that you invest in, fall within this same kind of theme, or do

You diversify away from like what you’re doing?

>> You know, I don’t know that I’ve invested in too many real time companies.

But I think it’s a component of probably most businesses going forward.

In that the reason that I think real time is really valuable is basically the word “relevance”.

Like, the reason that search is valuable is because it’s relevant.

Someone does a search, you can give them a response that’s relevant to what they’re asking

For.

And what real time does is that that enables that across a lot of other domains.

Like if right now I say I’m sitting right here and I get a coupon for the restaurant next door,

That works because it’s relevant to me.

If I got the coupon tomorrow, it would no longer be relevant.

So I think that’s the thing that made search really go.

And I think that same dynamic is going to drive real time.

>> So when we talk about real time search and monetization of it, how much of that opportunity

Is tied to location versus other types of real time.

>> Certainly location is the easier one because of the example of coupons.

But I think if I’m sharing what I’m thinking right now, if I’m thinking about

whatever it

Is I’m thinking about, there’s probably a relevant, some relevant information that could be

Provided to me.

One of the companies that I recently invested in is

I can’t remember if they launched so

I won’t say who.

But they do car

they’re in the car business.

So one of the things they do is look at like, look for intention of are you selling, are you

Looking to buy a car, are you having car trouble, and that’s a great opportunity to contact

That person and say, hey, we can help you get a new car.

>> There’s another angle to Facebook search, in particular, I find really fascinating.

Forget what you’re searching for and maybe even what you’ve recently done on Facebook or even

Where you are, when you query.

I found that when I’m looking up old friends from high school or just people I might know that

The search results are really, really good and the reason they are, even though there’s so

Many people with the same name, is that they’re kind of

they’re ranking it based on people

That maybe have mutual friends or somehow they’re figuring out who I’m probably thinking of

Based on that.

And Google clearly doesn’t address that dimension at all.

But that applies to more than just looking for people, you know.

Just who you are and who you know is really relevant to almost all searches.

>> They do it.

>> Relevance has these multiple dimensions.

Google got it on like the keywords.

But there’s time relevance, what I’m thinking of, social relevance, and all these other elegance.

>> Personalized relevance.

>> Time.

>> So all those dimensions I think are opportunities for revenue.

>> We’re going to start to wrap this up in a few minutes.

So if you want to ask some questions, please come to the mics.

>> So as we look forward where all of this is going, it seems that there are a lot of different

Approaches.

There’s sort of a lot of different platforms that developers can build their apps or their

Businesses on top of.

Is there

is there a danger of confusion here?

Do I build my

do I build my business off of Twitter or on top of Facebook, do I build it

On top of quasi open systems that Google is pushing?

Like stock Twitter todays they built off of Twitter but they’re still called stock Twitter

Todays but they have their own system.

They use Twitter to get all the systems and then moved off.

It’s fascinating.

And Zinga is doing it with farmville.

>> Because they have more control.

>> You can take advantage of these platforms, get being enough and then ultimately, right,

The most value, you can capture enough attention, people to come to use your application or

Come to your website.

You know, ultimately that would be the biggest win, I would think.

>> I would suggest having a pretty good idea of where you want it to start.

Then researching what’s out there to help you.

Like some of these geo APIs that we looked at today.

I know I’m doing a side project right now I’m using one of the geo APIs just because I needed

It and it’s very useful for me.

And if you need to move off. You need to pivot like all start-ups pivot and figure out this

Is what is really working for me they pivot.

But I would suggest starting with something pick the tool that’s best for the job right then

And don’t be afraid to pivot.

>> Start with the platform that gives you the most leverage for the cheapest cost for the

Highest number of users. Build your own brand and off you go.

>> Exactly.

>> I think if you’re fortunate enough to work with great entrepreneurs, they’ll find their

Way, right?

You look at Omar at addmob and it was built off of sort of a WAP.

As soon as the iPhone launched before iPhone launched he was very focused on that as another

Opportunity for that business.

And they took resources.

They moved things very quickly to go and take advantage of the iPhone ecosystem.

Very early on.

And they benefited from it greatly.

So I think when you have great entrepreneurs, great ideas, I think they find their way.

They’re scrappy.

>> Question: Peter.

To me it’s really not a question at all if those platforms like Twitter and Facebook or partner

Companies that built their business on it are going to make money.

The really interesting thing for me would be is it going to be the first route to take the

Low-hanging fruit and in licensing deals, for instance, with Google and Bing and so on, and

Are they going to become co-dependent on those, or are they going to in parallel build out

Their own direct revenue streams, and to see this through, sort of through the end as their

Own companies.

>> I hate to be flip.

But it depends on how long those contracts are.

I hope they’re short.

But who knows how long they are.

>> It’s a very good question.

Very good question.

>> I think that

I mean, that there is money that’s not the question anymore.

I mean, the question is are those companies going to be able to become as big as the ones that

>> Some things are catalysts and they continue to exist and reform.

And other things are catalysts they instigate connections and dissipate and go away.

There’s a big question about whether a company that rises very, very rapidly as a connection

Point between two things and builds their platform up like what Twitter is doing in placing

Their particular bets and someone like Facebook that turns into a phenomena, that it becomes

A core platform around which someone can do something like what ad mob did with a platform

They bet on it in some form and leveraged that point.

You pick your starting point, but it’s hard to I think argue that anyone can anticipate to

Ron and the other investors who place a broad array of ads.

Anticipate which one is going to be the one that gets to live like Twitter.

Why Twitter and why not someone else.

>> Yeah, why Twitter.

Maybe George you can answer that from a perspective of, Twitter, Facebook, even Google, they

All have platform ambitions but they are platforms, taking different approaches, Twitter lean,

They want to take the communication layer and everyone to build on top of it.

Whereas Facebook is more feature-rich on its own.

Tell us from like in your investment in Twitter, so you have a point of view, but how do you

See these different approaches playing out and what’s at stake here?

>> It’s a very fascinating question.

And I’ve thought about this quite a bit.

You know, the concept of a social network has been around for quite a long time.

You could posit that geo cities was a cromagnon version followed by e friends and Facebook

And followed by Twitter.

The one difference with Twitter all the networks are vertically integrated.

They owned the name space for the users and then the messaging and then the features above

Them.

Twitter is an example of the first horizontally distributed network, where basically their

Goal was to own the name space and the messaging and control of that.

And then let third parties take the risk of basically building out products on top of that,

To basically fill out the entire stack.

But it’s a horizontal plane.

And I think it’s a very cost-effective play from an investor perspective.

And as well as user risk perspective.

>> Paul, why does Facebook win?

You’ve got an interesting perspective because in a sense Friendfeed was the ultimate at which

Twitter client.

A lot of people kind of said that.

Half jokingly, but it was also true.

So you built Friendfeed partially on top, on the back of Twitter because that was a very big

Portion of the feed that was going through Twitter or through friend feed.

And but then with the

when you sold to Facebook, you bet on the Facebook model.

So why?

>> You know, I think both companies have very promising future.

I don’t see it as one versus the other.

Obviously I don’t like know exactly how the future is going to play out.

But they’re both incredibly well positioned.

I think that

I would love to have

or both.

>> Right.

But can you contrast the platform like

>> I think there’s a lot to learn.

They have taken very different approaches.

But I don’t know that it’s entirely like a conscious thing.

I think it’s to some extent like a historical accident, the approach that Facebook took original

Ly I think was they looked at

obviously I wasn’t there at the time.

They looked at the apps that they had already built themselves and said how can we enable other

People to do the same thing that we’ve done.

So they basically tried to open up all of the capabilities that the native apps like photos

Or whatever had to third-party developers.

And Twitter, I guess, to some extent did the same thing but they only had a couple of features.

So consequently it was extremely easy to build these Twitter clients who grow the site.

So they didn’t really make any accept to occasionally remove features.

And that

I think that worked out very well for them.

It’s like a wonderful

it’s a great example of like how things can play out differently just

Depending on the initial conditions.

But what that did was it set up this whole ecosystem of Twitter apps, where you have all the

Clients, you have tweetty and Twitter today pick and everybody filled in an amazing example

I’m curious if any other company is able to replicate that, because they’ve managed to essential

Ly outsource the innovation.

>> Does anybody on the panel have an opinion about whether the new stuff that Twitter’s been

Building out lists, retweets, etc., is that going to be, a plus for them, neutral, or a minus?

Ron?

>> It’s going to be a huge plus.

People have been screaming for lists for over a year.

In the Twitter community.

And there’s a whole ecosystem of companies being built on top of the Twitter lists product

Itself.

So people were saying, oh, is Twitter going to go into the list space?

No, they’re building basically a platform and in the next year they’ll probably be 100 applications

On top of

>> It’s kind of a Microsoft play, isn’t it?

>> Twitter lists.

>> It’s kind of a Microsoft play where they build the infrastructure and then let people party

On it.

>> I don’t know

I think of Office and the operating system.

I don’t know the infrastructure products.

>> There’s various ways

people talk about platforms in loose ways, and I think that the

Early stages of the business, Microsoft, I was not there then, but I was at Apple working on

The Mac stuff.

And it’s one thing to build a lower level platform on which for the first generation people

Built content-less productivity tools, office automation things.

E-mail which was talked about earlier as an communication exchange.

Things didn’t take off until there was an appropriate standardization, you could then interoperate

And move mail around effectively.

And then the newer platforms that we’re talking about today in this context, I think, for the

And then either bolting on to infrastructure that exists like what Yammer has done in the enterprise

Infrastructure for monetization, or very high risk, high return bets like what the at which

Twitter guys are choosing to do to partner but at the same time build out and totally open

Up the ecosystem for others to add value on top.

This is a new

it’s a new phenomenon that’s happening in real time and we’ll see the results,

I think, as Ron says, year over year, with some interesting brand new winners that have probably

Already been funded and then many things that will get absorbed into the platform plays like

What a Facebook would do or what Microsoft or Google or anyone else would do that has infrastructure

Upon which this stuff connects and moves.

So it’s happening ever faster.

I think personally, though, to my earlier comment, I think most of the money is going to get

Made in enterprise infrastructure.

There’s just too much money in enterprise to be as inefficient as enterprise communications.

>> To wrap up with predictions.

What’s going to be the biggest real time exit in the next year, in terms of just dollar value?

Where do you expect, like where are we in this stage?

Are we going to see more $50 million deals?

$100 million deals, billion dollar deals?

What’s your expectation and what’s the time frame?

>> You just look at past performance in these areas.

I think there will be a number of things that are sub hundred million in the 50 million dollar

$50 million range, and I think there will be, if everyone’s lucky, one thing that will be a

Billion dollar kind of thing.

That’s typically what

and it’s happening faster, right?

But not even sure there will be exits.

I think the opportunity for the big things will be to stand alone, if they’re really going

To be big.

And witness Ace Book, you were questioning what’s the value of Facebook.

It’s big.

What’s the

who knows.

>> George?

>> Well, I can’t predict what’s going to happen next year in terms of exits.

I think most of the companies in the space are, in terms of revenues, are still fairly immature

With the exception of Facebook.

So I think it’s more likely that big exits will occur in 2011 and 2012, than 2010.

>> I wish that company that you and Ron are putting together could have launched here today.

The one that I tweeted out yesterday or the day before that was going to enrage half the audience

And make the other half want to basically invest, because that’s the one I think

well, it

Either completely fall flat and go nowhere or it will potentially just has such a huge mon

Etization opportunity.

>> This is the one that replaces the U.S. Government.

>> That eventually will.

Amazing.

>> Everyone’s got an option on that.

>> I have to clarify.

I’m trying to invest in that particular company.

George has done all the lifting on that company.

So I don’t want to take any credit.

Exits in 2010.

This market is in its infancy.

I think from 15 to $100 million range.

Teeing up exits, in 2011 and 2012, there could be a billion.

But we have to remember, this is a market in its infancy.

The acquisitions that get made in 2010 will be for intellectual property and great killer teams

Of people.

>> That’s exactly right.

>> And Paul Buchheit’s company is a great example of that.

>> ZInga is doing more monthly revenue than Facebook right now?

>> Wow.

>> I’m not privy to either company’s financials but it’s an interesting question.

>> Paul?

>> Hesitant to make any predictions.

I don’t know if it’s true, but I’ve heard rumors of Zinga’s IPO.

That would be exciting.

>> Andrew?

>> No, I agree with the panel.

[LAUGHTER]

>> He wants to go get a drink.

>> One question from the audience here then we’ll wrap it up.

>> Question: I don’t know too much about, have too much insight into Facebook and at which

Twitter’s monetization models, but it seems to me that Facebook fundamentally disrupts double

Click impression ad model and their dollars come from there.

What market will either be disrupted or created by Twitter, do you think?

>> Who is Twitter disrupting?

>> Well, we don’t know yet.

But Dick Costolo this morning, I thought, had some very fascinating adjectives.

And one of them was that they’re going to

their business model is going to mature in 2010.

It’s going to be fascinating.

Nontraditional.

I took lots of notes.

Unique and organic.

And it was going to be very, very cool and people would love it.

>> Who was it that said that

that’s a pretty interesting drum roll that 2010’s going to

Be a very interesting year in this space.

>> Who said Microsoft is afraid of Google

maybe

is afraid of Facebook, is afraid of

Twitter.

There was somebody that said that quote last year.

I wish I would have thought of it.

It’s sort of true Twitter disrupting Facebook, disrupting Google, I think that’s very real

Facebook disrupting Google and Google disrupting Microsoft because Microsoft still trying to

Figure out the Web stuff.

>> Sprinkle all the little start ups underneath that and one of them is going to

one of

Them is going to disrupt that crowd, the big crowd.

Three years from now it’s going to be

there’s going to be another company.

I hope I invested in it this year.

>> [LAUGHTER]

>> That is the next wave of disruption in technology.

>> You invest in several of those people on that list.

Google.

Twitter.

>> List right there.

>> I missed Microsoft.

>> All but Microsoft.

>> So Dan’l, you were shaking your head.

>> I was shaking my head.

I think Michael has a point of view about our position on the Web.

And I always respect Michael’s opinions, but I don’t know if anybody was paying attention to

What we announced this week down at our developers conference, but I encourage you to take

A look.

>> I think we were still reeling from the Don Dodge layoff.

Hire him back but he’s gone now.

I think that generally we loved him.

So he’s going to be hard to replace.

>> We’ve got to liven up the ending.

[LAUGHTER]

>> So please give the panel a big round of applause.

I’m going to give away a sailing trip, I think, maybe.

[APPLAUSE]

Maybe not.

If nobody is here I think I might give it to Dan’l as a consolation prize.

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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.

Video by Ustream

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 conversation toward bridging 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 they are working on involving four dimensions of geolocation 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, pointing to Yowza as a great example. Saffer later commented that there’s a fine line that these services have to work with — it would be a negative for ads to actually feel like ads (instead it would be better for them to feel like deals).

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We recently took an in-depth look at the service, but for those who haven’t seen it yet, here’s a recap: Rippol looks at your video watching activity on the site, as well as that of your friends and people in your demographic. It then looks at meta data from video content ingested from sites like YouTube and Hulu, and uses machine learning to identify videos it thinks you’ll like. From there you can browse through various genres to look at recommended videos

But the site also has a social component, allowing users to identify each other as friends by importing their social graphs from services like Facebook and Gmail. You can use Facebook chat to talk with these friends in real-time. And today, it’s launching a new feature: Friendcasting, which allows users to share a interesting video in real-time with your friends on the site. There’s also a ‘global view’ that lets you see a stream of videos that are being watched by other users on the site, which helps surface content your friends haven’t come across.

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Urban says that while some other services offer embeds, you’re generally responsible for building your own branded site to insert those in. That’s where VideoLobby comes in: the site helps you build your own custom video portal, and then allows you to include streams from services like Qik, Ustream and Justin.tv. The company calls itself the “Blogger for real-time video”.

The service doesn’t just make your page look nicer, though — it can automatically pull in comments from Twitter and Facebook, and also allows users to submit questions directly from the show’s page. Stream administrators can use a management system to heck off their questions as they answer them. And the service is completely free.

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With services like Ustream.tv, Justin.tv, Kyte, and Qik bringing live video streaming to the masses, the web is turning into a viable competitor to television for real-time content. But while all of these services are great for bloggers remotely broadcasting footage,or streaming live events, but they come with a few problems: video content isn’t optimized for search engines, and unlike TV, there’s no closed captioning. PlyMedia is looking to change that.

The company is launching a service that will offer real-time captions and super-fast transcriptions to suit the needs of live streamers. Transcriptions are performed by a human (capable of typing quite quickly, naturally) who listens in to the feed and transcribes in real time, anywhere in the world. To help achieve a true real-time experience, PlyMedia is actually teaming with some live streamers to integrate a slight delay (say, two or three seconds) to give the transcriptionist enough lead time to generate captions in time with the video. Those transcriptions can then be sent to the site hosting the video, where they can be posted to help with SEO (and to give readers a chance to skim through the content to decide if they want to watch the movie).

PlyMedia transcribing the Realtime CrunchUp in realtime in our Ustream video. The realtime transcription service will be used by UStream, Livestream, and the Wall Street Journal.

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In effect, Status.Net is to the StatusNet platform as WordPress.com is to WordPress. Status.Net will offer a free package for very basic use, and will then offer a number of premium packages that give access to premium features. We first heard about the upcoming product last month when StatusNet raised $875,000, but until now they haven’t introduced the platform to the public.

Status.Net remains in private beta for now, but we’ll let you know when it’s available to the public. Also worth pointing out is that Status.Net is launching a new real-time search feature powered by Collecta powered by that company’s recently-released Site Search platform.

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To win one, just tweet out your favorite moment of the RealTime CrunchUp so far, and include the hashtags #CrunchUp and #Cloud in your tweet (#CrunchUp is the conference hashtag, and #Cloud will let us know who’s entering the contest).

We’ll announce the winners in this post later today, and you’ll be able to pick up your signed book at the front table. Obviously you’ll have to be present to win.

Here are the winners:
Christianhobbs

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Costolo didn’t divulge many more details, though he did mention that it wouldn’t be tied into the site’s retweet feature. When TC editor Michael Arrington tried to clarify by asking if the ads would be integrated into the Tweet stream, Costolo said that “he didn’t say the ads would be mixed in with tweets”. But he didn’t say they wouldn’t, either.

Costolo closed out the topic by saying that the message he wants to send is that “Twitter will have an advertising business, ready in the near future, and available to partners.”

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First, a few caveats: we didn’t create the Chrome OS build ourselves — it was downloaded from BitTorrent. In theory it could possibly have been tweaked by some malicious hacker to steal your Google account information (this is unlikely, but who knows). There’s an easy fix if you’re worried though: just go make a throwaway Gmail account, and use that to play around with the OS. Also note that because this is running in a virtual machine, you’re probably not going to be seeing great performance (like that 7 second boot time). But it’s more than good enough to get a feel for the OS for yourself.

First, you need to get an image of Chrome OS. You can do that using this torrent. You can also try out the build that GDGT has uploaded, which worked fine in our test as well. If you get the torrent version, you’ll see it’s in a .BZ2 format. You’ll need to extract it. Macs should be able to do this automatically, but for Windows you may need a tool like Win Rar.

Once that’s done, download a version of VirtualBox for whatever OS you’re running on here and install it. After registering (or declining to) you’ll be met with a screen like this. Click the button that says “New” in the upper left hand corner. We’re going to be making a new virtual machine.:

You’ll enter a wizard like this. Hit next.

Go ahead and title the OS whatever you’d like. For the operating system, choose Linux, with Ubuntu as the version (other setups could potentially work, but this is the only one we’ve gotten working).

Choose how much memory to allocate to this virtual machine. This will be dependent on how much memory you have in your computer. The more, the better, but if you choose too much your real computer will become unstable/very slow.

Here’s the tricky part (fortunately it isn’t very tricky). You don’t want to create a new hard disk, instead, you want to use an existing hard disk. Don’t choose one from the drop down menu either — you’re going to want to hit the folder icon just to the right of that to enter the ‘virtual media manager’.

Hit the ‘Add’ button.

Now you have to find the Chrome OS image you downloaded earlier. This is probably on your desktop or in your downloads folder. Once you’ve found it, hit ‘Open’.

Hit ‘Select’ once you reach this window.

Almost there. Make sure ‘use existing hard disk’ is checked. Hit next.

Hit ‘Finish’

You’re done! Hit Start. Hopefully the screen will go black, but only for a little while (this could be anywhere from 10 seconds to a minute or so, depending on how fast your computer is).

Once you’re in, you’ll see a splash screen for ‘Chromium’ (which is what Google calls dev builds of Chrome). To login, you’ll need to enter a valid Google Account ID. Your standard Gmail account should work, but as we said before, this build of ChromeOS came from bittorrent, so you may want to use a throw away account like we did in the screenshots below (you can make one here).

You’re in. Now time to explore. To be honest, everything looks quite similar to Google’s Chrome browser, but there are a few key differences. Note the battery life indicator and options menu in the far upper right. Also try playing around with the ‘New Window’ functions — you’ll find that it’s difficult (if not impossible) to navigate between multiple windows. And be wary of the Bookmarks manager. As far as I can tell, there’s no easy way to get out of it — you’ll have to manually create a new bookmark, which will kick you back into the browser mode once you click it. Oh, and good luck finding the ’shut down’ button, because we sure can’t.

You probably won’t need it, but the shared user password for this install (which you’d need for functions like sudo) is ‘chromeos’ according to the torrent’s listing on ThePirateBay.

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Check out the video below.

And here’s a video Google just posted showing off Chrome’s UI:

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SimpleGeo is akin to an ‘Amazon Web Services’ for location: developers looking to integrate location based services (LBS) can plug into some simple APIs and SimpleGeo will do most of the legwork for them. The startup originated as a gaming company, but after spending four months building out their location platform, Stump and Galligan realized they had stumbled across an opportunity: location is soon going to become an expected feature in many applications, and there’s no reason developers should have to reinvent the wheel every time they want to include the feature. SimpleGeo is looking to do it for them.

I spoke with Galligan last night, who says that one of the ways SimpleGeo could help spur radical change in location based services has to do with real-time (incidentally, he’ll be speaking at our Real-Time CrunchUp tomorrow). Galligan says that the technologies currently used to process real-time data can’t cope with the rapid read/write operations required as a LBS scales. In other words, these technologies simply weren’t built with real time in mind (he says this is one reason why companies like Foursquare have partitioned their users by city). SimpleGeo, Galligan says, was built from the ground up to support real-time on a much broader scale.

SimpleGeo is currently in a private beta (you can apply to join from a form on their homepage), with plans to roll out broadly early next year. The service will be available for free to apps just getting started, and paid packages will kick in as they hit scale (the more API calls you use the more you’ll pay).

For more details, check out the slides below.

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Some of the conclusions aren’t surprising. The “most attractive” women receive five times as many messages as the average female does, with 2/3 of all male messages going to the top 1/3 of women. And women tend to favor the most attractive men, though the ratio is less extreme.

But there are a few interesting phenomena. For one, men on the site tend to be more generous than women when it comes to rating attractiveness, leading to a nice bell curve with the bulk of ratings falling around ‘average’. But despite their fair ratings, they tend to ignore many of the women they find reasonably attractive and primarily target the most attractive females.

Women, on the other hand, are harsh with their ratings. According to the study, they rate a whopping 80% of men on the site as ‘below average’. My first guess was that there was an issue with self-selection here (i.e. unattractive men congregate on the site for whatever reason). But the study includes photos of four pretty normal looking guys who were all rated to be unattractive. And perhaps more telling: women don’t seem to be opposed to actually contacting these men that they’ve just deemed unattractive.

From the post:

“As you can see from the gray line, women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium. Very harsh. On the other hand, when it comes to actual messaging, women shift their expectations only just slightly ahead of the curve, which is a healthier pattern than guys’ pursuing the all-but-unattainable. But with the basic ratings so out-of-whack, the two curves together suggest some strange possibilities for the female thought process, the most salient of which is that the average-looking woman has convinced herself that the vast majority of males aren’t good enough for her, but she then goes right out and messages them anyway.”

That last bit seems like a stretch (women could just as well have more interest in a man’s personality/profile than his photo). But an interesting trend nonetheless.

For more, including the message open rates as they vary by attractiveness, check out the OkCupid post here.

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Yes, you’ve always been able to name a list whatever you want, but that usually involves creating ugly titles like ‘tech-people-I-think-are-smart’. Take for example, TechCrunch’s list on Tech (check it out if you haven’t already). The word ‘tech’ is probably what most people would search for if they wanted a list related to technology, which is why we chose it. But it’s also ambiguous: that list could be a stream of stories from the top tech blogs, breaking news, or tweets from the people behind the stories. Now that Twitter is rolling out a description field, we’ll be able to keep the succinct title while more effectively describing what the list is about.

In a followup tweet, Dornfest gave instructions on how to add descriptions to lists you’ve created:

Adding a description to an existing list is as simple as: visit list page, click “Edit” (top-right), add a description, and save.

And if you’re looking for some lists to follow, be sure to check out the rest of our lists here (we’re always updating these so let us know if you thikn you should be added).

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Assuming the new site does well, we can likely expect Zynga to port its other games to their own standalone portals down the line.

Zynga has recently been in the headlines lately over our reporting on its use of scammy offers to help monetize its games (other social gaming companies are guilty of the same practice). Zynga removed those scams promptly, but then they reappeared. Finally Zynga announced they were gone for good, but that isn’t the end of the story: now there’s a class action lawsuit against Zynga and many other companies who allegedly engaged in these scams.

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