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Archive for the ‘Market research’ Category

1st investments for ex-Facebook exec’s venture fund

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Business models, Community, Economy, FaceBook, Intellectual capital, Investments, Market research, Social Networks, Strategy, Venture Capital, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 28, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from SF Gate.

“Chamath Palihapitiya, a former executive at Facebook Inc., made the first two investments for his new venture fund, buying stakes in business-software maker Yammer Inc. and private-stock exchange SecondMarket Inc.

Palihapitiya’s fund, called the Social+Capital Partnership, led a $17 million investment in Yammer, a San Francisco company that makes social-networking programs for businesses.

The fund, which announced both deals separately Tuesday, bought its SecondMarket stake from existing investors. SecondMarket lets investors trade shares of closely held companies before they hold an initial public offering.

After a four-year career at Facebook, where he worked on mobile products and expanded the company internationally, Palihapitiya left this year to form Social+Capital.

The Palo Alto fund is raising about $300 million, with an eye to investing in Internet technology, health care, education and financial services. Before joining Facebook, Palihapitiya spent a year at venture-capital firm Mayfield Fund.

“The things I like tend to have very disruptive elements to an existing established infrastructure,” Palihapitiya, 35, said.

“SecondMarket disrupts the IPO process by giving you completely different alternatives. Yammer is highly disruptive to established enterprise software companies.”

With Tuesday’s investment, Yammer has now raised $57 million. The company, started by PayPal Inc. co-founder David Sacks, provides software to more than 100,000 businesses in 160 countries, serving clients such as Royal Dutch Shell PLC and Ford Motor Co. Existing investors include Charles River Ventures, Emergence Capital and U.S. Venture Partners.

“Social networking is destined to have as significant an impact on the enterprise as it has already had in our personal lives,” Palihapitiya said in a statement.

The SecondMarket deal, meanwhile, involving buying stock from employees and early investors, Chief Executive Officer Barry Silbert said in a blog posting.

Shareholders of the New York company sold about $13 million of stock at a valuation of about $160 million, in what the company expects to be an “annual liquidity event,” Silbert said.

SecondMarket helps investors in privately held companies buy and sell their stock. The company has handled transactions totaling almost $1 billion, Silbert said Tuesday. Shareholders of Facebook, Twitter Inc. and LinkedIn Corp. have sold stock on the exchange.

Palihapitiya was joined by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner and actor Ashton Kutcher in buying the SecondMarket shares.”

Read more here.

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Top Sequoia Partner’s Advice To Startups: SHUT UP

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Economy, Gerbsman Partners, Intellectual capital, Investments, Market research, Strategy, tagged , , , , , , on September 22, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from Business Insider.

“Douglas Leone of Sequoia Partners just finished on stage at TechCrunchDisrupt, and he had some interesting advice for young founders: stop talking.

On stage with Mike Arrington, he gave the following advice for small startups:

Little companies have really 2 advantages: stealth and speed. You [Arrington] come from the world of speed and no stealth.

The best thing for little companies do is to stay away from the cocktail circuit….We at Sequoia have never released a press release in 35 years….Then run like a son-of-a- gun. Don’t say anything to anybody.

Leone contrasted the startups from when he started in 1988 with the companies he sees today. Back then, startups were building infrastructure — like chips — and that took an older founder with some experience at a big company, then a team 15 or 20 people who would lock themselves in a building and spend 12 and 15 months building “fundamental IP.”

Now, a couple of young smart people can create a beta Web site over a weekend and iterate from there. A lot of younger founders “don’t know what they don’t know,” and that creates the temptation to talk too much.

He’s worth listening to: Leone claims that Sequoia has never lost money on a fund, and has returned between $15 and $20 billion to its limited partners on an estimated total investment of between $5 and $7 billion. The company’s early investments include Yahoo, Google, and YouTube.”

Read more here.

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A first look at Google TV’s new apps

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, internet, Market research, tagged , , , , , , , , on September 16, 2011| Leave a Comment »

We wrote about Apple Real TV yesterday, here comes an article regrading Google.

Article from GigaOm.

“Google TV-specific apps have started to pop up on the Android Market in recent days, hinting at an imminent release of the next-generation smart TV platform. Google TV’s new release, which will be based on Honeycomb, is expected to be released before the end of the month. And judging from the apps already available, it will offer access to a wide variety of content from publishers like the Wall Street Journal, CNN, CNBC, QVC  and others.

Perhaps even more interesting is that there are also a number of apps from smaller developers who are trying to push the envelope of what’s possible with Google TV. Take Call Toaster for example, which automatically displays caller IDs and text messages from your Android phone while you watch live TV. Or the aVia Media Player, which allows users to stream local content from any computer or NAS drive within the own network. Heck, there’s even a Frogger app!

Want to take a first look at some of the apps that will be available on Google TV once the Honeycomb update is publicly available?”

For more reading, click here.

 

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U.S. Facebook users clock in 53.5 billion mins.

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Economy, FaceBook, internet, LinkedIn, Market research, Social Networks, Twitter, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 14, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from SFGate.

“Here’s a mind-numbing stat: Americans spent a total of 53.5 billion minutes on Facebook in May, according to a new Nielsen study released Monday.

In fact, the media-measurement firm’s new report on social networking found that Americans spent more time on Facebook than on any other website – and it wasn’t even close. Yahoo was second with 17.2 billion minutes in May and Google ranked third at 12.5 billion minutes.

With Americans now spending nearly one-quarter of their overall Internet time on social networks and blogs, Nielsen said the results show “how powerful this influence is on consumer behavior, both online and off.”

“Whether it’s a brand icon inviting consumers to connect with a company on LinkedIn, a news ticker promoting an anchor’s Twitter handle or an advertisement asking a consumer to ‘Like’ a product on Facebook, people are constantly being driven to social media,” said Nielsen’s first-ever State of the Media report to focus on social networking.

The report took a snapshot of online activity during May and found nearly 4 of every 5 active U.S. Internet users went to social-networking and blogging sites, accounting for 22.5 percent of the total amount of minutes people spent online. Online gaming was next with 9.8 percent, followed by e-mail at 7.6 percent.

In the social-networking and blogging category, Palo Alto’s Facebook was the runaway leader with 140 million unique visitors during the month, with Google’s Blogger blogging platform a distant second with 50 million unique visitors spending about 723 million minutes.

But the up-and-coming blogging platform Tumblr was third with 623 million minutes, edging out both San Francisco microblogging service Twitter Inc. with 565 million minutes and the professional social network LinkedIn Corp. of Mountain View, which had 325 million. Nielsen said New York’s Tumblr Inc. has nearly tripled its audience since May 2010 and is now “an emerging player in social media.”

Also, the report said 70 percent of all adult social-network users shop online. But 60 percent of social-network denizens create reviews of products or services, making them more likely to be influential for online and offline purchases.

And compared with average Internet users, social networkers are 26 percent more likely to post their political opinions, 33 percent more likely to say what they like or don’t like on television and 75 percent more likely to spend heavily on music.

Other Nielsen findings include:

— The profile of the most active social-network user is of a woman of Asian/Pacific Islander descent between the ages of 18 and 34. The majority of social-network users are women, but men are more likely to visit LinkedIn.

— About 31 million people watched nearly 157 video streams on social networks or blogs in May. More women than men watched video this way, but men spent 9 percent more time watching those streams.

— While almost all social-media users access their networks by computer, a growing segment – about 37 percent – now do so with their mobile phones. More than twice the number of Internet users age 55 and older accessed social media on their phones than a year ago.”

Read more here.

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Twitter’s active flock reaches 100 million

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Business models, FaceBook, internet, Market research, Social Networks, Strategy, Twitter, Web 2.0, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 12, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from SFGate.

“Twitter use is growing, with more than 100 million monthly active users around the world and 50 million who log on every day, the San Francisco microblogging service said Thursday.

Chief executive officer Dick Costolo said the number of active users increased 82 percent since the beginning of this year, putting the company on pace to add as many active users by the end of 2011 as the combined 26 million that Twitter added from 2006 to 2009.

The increasing audience size is key to the company’s future because Twitter is now convinced advertising is “the horse they are going to ride” to generate revenue, said analyst Debra Aho Williamson, principal social media analyst for the research firm

“These are all positive trends,” Williamson said. “2011 has been a good year for Twitter in terms of getting more usage, not just awareness.”

Costolo revealed the new data during an informal “state of the union” briefing with reporters Thursday. Williamson was also prebriefed by Costolo on Wednesday.

Twitter has previously said it had more than 200 million registered accounts worldwide. But Twitter watchers had long questioned how many were multiple accounts registered by the same person and how many accounts were actually active.

So Twitter is now focusing attention on its active users, not just the overall base. Facebook uses the same strategy, touting its 750 million users who log on at least once a month.

The number of active users “can be a successful measure of the exchange of information that’s going on there,” Williamson said.

Many press releases

Still, Williamson said many of Twitter accounts are used by “corporations pumping out press releases, using it as a distribution service.” And she notes that media companies like CNN and The Chronicle have multiple Twitter accounts to distribute news headlines and story links.

“While it sounds relatively good that half of active users log in every day, I wonder what percentage of those active users are just entities putting stuff out and not people actively engaging,” she said.

According to Twitter, the data shows:

— An average 230 million tweets per day, up 110 percent from January.

— More than 5 billion tweets per month

— A 105 percent increase in the number of users who log on each day.

— More than 400 million monthly unique visitors to Twitter.com, up 70 percent from January.

— 55 percent are mobile users.

Twitter now has more than 50 percent of National Football League players, 75 percent of National Basketball Association players, 82 percent of members of Congress, 85 percent of U.S. senators, 87 percent of Billboard Top 100 musicians, 93 percent of Food Network chefs and all of the Nielsen top 50 TV shows.

But there’s one potentially negative statistic that sticks out – a huge portion of active users, 40 percent, have not tweeted in the past month.

“If you think of it as a social network, then 40 out of every 100 aren’t even being very social,” Williamson said.

Still, the overall numbers should be large enough to entice advertisers.

Maybe it’s not as big as Facebook, but “if you look at it from an advertising perspective, an audience is an audience,” Williamson said. “Twitter is really proving itself in terms of getting people engaged with the advertising.”

Ad revenue projections

Twitter hasn’t been successful generating revenue by licensing access to its extensive stream of tweets. Microsoft on Wednesday renewed a deal to license Twitter’s data “fire hose,” but Google has not.

Williamson said the company is continuing to learn from its Promoted Tweets advertising platform and has other programs in the pipeline, including a self-service advertising system.

Twitter is still a privately held company, but eMarketer has projected the firm will have $150 million in advertising revenue this year and $250 million next year. Williamson said she is examining how the newest data may change those projections.

“Twitter had a good year and they clearly have a lot of things planned throughout the rest of the year and in 2012,” Williamson said. “They’re hoping the growth trends will continue.””

Read more here.

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