After selling Bubbleshare — the photo-sharing service that he co-founded in what was either his third or fourth startup (I’ve lost count) — Toronto entrepreneur Albert Lai moved on to a new project that he was fairly secretive about, but which has since been revealed to be Kontagent, a new analytics platform for social networks such as Facebook. From the description given by Nik Cubrilovic at TechCrunch IT and at the newly-launched Kontagent.com website, it sounds a lot like Google Analytics, but designed for social-networking apps like the ones developers have been cooking up for Facebook ever since the site launched its F8 platform. Kudos to Albert and his partner Jeff Tseng on the news — sounds like a service that could fill a growing need.
JKOnTheRun joins the GigaOm family
Congratulations to my friend Om Malik and to the founders of the jkOnTheRun mobile blog for what sounds like a match made in blogging heaven. James and Kevin get to continue doing what they have been doing for some time now, which is focusing on great mobile-related content, and the GigaOm network expands to cover another market niche with some talented writers. It’s a win-win, as they say on Wall Street. No financial details attached, but a nice solution for both sides I would think. Mike Arrington — who has yet to acquire any blogs or bloggers — thinks this is yet another example of the great blog roll-up strategy he described earlier this year coming to pass. I don’t know about that, but it sounds like a great deal for both Om and the jkOnTheRun guys.
Digg this: Google to gobble Digg?
Maybe it’s just the summer heat getting to people, but TechCrunch swears that this time it’s for real, and Google is on the verge of buying Digg for “around $200-million.” Yes, this is pretty much the same rumour that was going around earlier this year, but Mike Arrington says the talks are back on (apparently Marissa Meyer lost interest in the company for awhile). But does it make any sense for Google to do such a thing? Eric Eldon wonders why the Web giant wouldn’t just build its own Digg, just like Yahoo did with Buzz and AOL did (with somewhat less success) at Netscape, which was later relaunched as Propeller.
I think this rumour has some legs, not because I have any kind of inside contacts at Google, but because I think a combination of Digg and Google News would make for a pretty attractive property in a lot of ways. It didn’t seem like a great fit when Digg was mostly just tech-focused, but as the service has broadened its appeal I think it has come closer to something Google would be interested in, although how much Digg has really expanded its readership is open to debate. The Internet behemoth has an obvious interest in the social side of content delivery (when you think about it, PageRank is a form of crowd-sourcing) and it might juice things up a bit at Google News — or even the search side, where the company is apparently testing user input on search results.
It goes without saying that even if the two are talking about a deal, it could go off the rails at any point over issues like price, control, etc. But all in all I think that a combination makes some sense. If nothing else, I’d like to see what would happen if Google combined Digg with Google News or turned the Digg algorithm loose on search.
Firefox Tablet — I would like one too
If you read through the various comments and blog posts about it, Mike Arrington’s proposal to crowd-source the development of a $200 Web tablet with a touch screen — in effect, an iPod Touch with a larger screen and a solid-state hard drive — is nothing short of total lunacy. Dozens of people have said that it will never work, that it can’t be done for that kind of price point, that Apple is likely already working on one, etc. All of which is probably true. That said, however, I can understand Mike’s frustration; I’ve been waiting for that kind of tablet ever since I saw them using one on Star Trek. Put me down for one 🙂
Yahoo board battle over; war continues
Update:
Looks like Carl Icahn has managed to strike a deal with Yahoo to avoid an all-out proxy battle over board members. According to a news release this morning, the two sides have agreed to a settlement that involves expanding the Yahoo board so that two Icahn representatives and Icahn himself can have seats. This effectively negates the need for the settlement proposed by Eric Jackson, which is described below — although as Charles Cooper at CNET notes, this has given the fox a seat on the board of the henhouse. So while the current battle may have ended, the war over Yahoo’s future continues.
Original post:
Before activist shareholder and billionaire takeover artist Carl Icahn got involved with Yahoo, and not long after Microsoft started making overtures towards the company behind the scenes, a disgruntled shareholder named Eric Jackson was already trying to marshal support for some big changes at the Internet company, including the departure of CEO Terry Semel, who eventually wound up leaving. Using his blog, YouTube videos and an aggressive lobbying effort aimed at institutional shareholders, Jackson managed to get a substantial amount of support and press for his campaign. Whether his efforts helped to force Semel out or not is open to debate, but it certainly helped crystallize some of the dissatisfaction surrounding the company.
Eric, who formed an activist investment fund called Ironfire Capital as a result of his efforts, is still pushing for change at Yahoo, and this morning he launched a forum on Agoracom.com, a small-cap investor-information portal based in Toronto and founded by George Tsiolis. Jackson wants an alternate slate of Yahoo directors, but not the slate suggested by Icahn; instead, he is proposing a middle-of-the-road solution, in which several Yahoo board members get to keep their spots, but others are removed to make way for some of Icahn’s substitutes (but not Mark Cuban; sorry Mark). Shareholders are encouraged to mark their voting cards as described in a statement by Eric and posted on Agoracom.
Jackson says that some investors are uncomfortable with Icahn’s proposed slate because it would remove every Yahoo board member, raising concerns about continuity and the possible triggering of a poison-pill style compensation package. The activist shareholder says that his proposal “will maximize the change so desperately needed” at the Internet company without any of those drawbacks. According to a news release issued this morning, Eric says that his “Plan B” group of Yahoo shareholders includes 150 members, who own 3.2 million shares in Yahoo! worth over $70 million. Yahoo’s annual meeting is August 1.
Podtech failure: Scoble’s lessons
Not long ago, Podtech was a video company with a bright future — or at least so it appeared. Run by John Furrier, with some high-profile social media types like Jeremiah Owyang and Robert Scoble on board, the company had high hopes of being a new video-content provider. And then the train left the track at some point, and now the company’s assets (whatever’s left) have been sold for just $500,000. Owyang left to join Forrester and Scoble left to go to FastCompany, and John Furrier was effectively forced to resign. So what happened? How did $7.5-million worth of VC money get vaporized so quickly?
We may never know the complete answer to those questions, until someone like John chooses to talk about it (Update: He has posted a comment on FriendFeed), but we can draw some tentative conclusions from what Robert Scoble has said on FriendFeed. Among other things, he says:
“Podtech was screwed up by a number of decisions. Everyone played a part, but I sure learned a lot about how a company can screw up big time. Major learnings for me? 1. Have a story. 2. Have everyone on board with that story. 3. If anyone goes off of that story, make sure they get on board immediately or fire them. PodTech did none of the three and I’m sorry for my part in not making the three happen.”
And then, apparently unable to resist adding more details, he says:
Henry Blodget raises some money
Apparently, congratulations are due for Henry “I used to be a famous Wall Street analyst” Blodget and the rest of the team over at Silicon Alley Insider: the site has apparently raised about $1-million or so in venture capital. PaidContent has the news — although Rafat and the gang at PC (who just got their own windfall of $30-million or so from Guardian Media Group) seem a little miffed that their scoop was broken by SIA itself, after Henry blogged the funding news. Alley Insider is part of a Web 2.0 holding company of sorts called Alley Corp., which was created by former Doubleclick execs Kevin Ryan and Dwight Merriman, and recently launched two new properties: Clusterstock.com and The Business Sheet.
Geek alert: Andreessen suggests new tag
I can’t remember where I came across this. For some reason I think it was on FriendFeed, but now I can’t recall who posted it (if it was you, let me know and I will give you a shout out — Update: It was FriendFeed intern Dan Hsaio, who got it from Philipp Lenssen). In any case, it is right off the geek-o-meter, but I felt compelled to take note of it anyway, in part because it illustrates just how far things have come in a relatively short space of time — just 15 years or so. Now, we’re worried about how things will render on our iPhones with their multi-touch interface, or how many video clips we can pack into the gigabytes of memory we have, or if the Ajax and Flash on a website is annoying or useful.
In 1993, Marc Andreessen — who was then working on a little piece of software called Mosaic while working at the NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign — suggested a new tag that could be used in HTML: the IMG tag, which could be used to (wow!) display an image on a page. Bonus points if you follow the thread: Tim Berners-Lee, who has since been knighted by the Queen for his contributions to technology by effectively inventing what we now know as the World Wide Web, doesn’t seem to like Andreessen’s suggestion much. He says he’d much rather use the existing HREF tag and put image attributes in it.
Yahoo: what to do with all those eyeballs
My friend Om Malik has an interesting post about Yahoo — and not about the interminable Yahoo vs. Microsoft-plus-Carl-Icahn takeover, which has become the beast that refuses to die, but about the kind of thing Yahoo should arguably have been focusing on instead of trying to compete with Google on search. As he describes it, one of the blog posts at Web Worker Daily got a spot on Yahoo’s home page, and then got voted up by users of Yahoo Buzz, a Digg-style feature. As Om says:
In a few hours, the story … was viewed over 200,000 times and attracted over 350 comments. Now that’s a lot of traffic — but more importantly, a gigantic amount of engagement displayed by Yahoo visitors. The traffic sent our way by Yahoo was many times the traffic we get from, say, Digg or StumbleUpon.
As Om notes, it’s not so much the sheer volume of traffic that is impressive, but the engagement of the audience. Even during the biggest Digg storm or Stumbleupon flood I’ve ever experienced, I’ve never gotten more than a handful of comments. As beaten-down as it is, Yahoo still gets a ton of traffic — but Om is right that it needs to find better ways of taking advantage of and leveraging that traffic, instead of just trying to go head-to-head with Google. Should it sell off its search arm to Microsoft? Perhaps. At least then it could concentrate on what makes it different from Google, instead of trying to duplicate it.
The Twitter API: Giving away the store?
One of the interesting things to me about Mike Arrington’s interview with Twitter founder Evan Williams isn’t so much the discussion of business models (although that’s obviously something the company will have to deal with eventually) but the debate that seems to be going on inside the company about how it handles API access to Twitter’s data. As Mike notes, the service only gives four outside companies full access to the entire Twitter data feed, and one of those is Summize — which of course is now part of Twitter. The others are FriendFeed, Twittervision (which overlays Twitter posts on a map) and Zappos, which is an online shoe retailer that makes extensive use of Twitter.
The ability to get access to that “firehose” of XMPP data was what allowed Summize to produce @ replies from Twitter when users couldn’t get access to those replies through Twitter itself, one of the features that I think drove interest in Summize over the past few months — although it would arguably still have been a useful service even without Twitter’s repeated downtime issues. But while Summize used it to build something that made sense as an adjunct to Twitter, a service like FriendFeed.com is using the data firehose to build something that is closer to being a very real competitor. Like some other people, when Twitter was having its issues, I effectively duplicated the most important part of my Twitter follow list by following or creating friends in FriendFeed.