Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘FaceBook’

Facebook’s Places raises more privacy debate

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, FaceBook, Market research, Social Networks, Technology, Web 2.0, tagged , , , , , , , , , on August 23, 2010| Leave a Comment »

From SF Gate.

“Facebook‘s latest move to add “where” to the list of personal information members share with the world gives the social networking firm yet another tool in its march to become the Internet’s most dominant destination.

And yet predictably, the new Facebook Places check-in feature has ignited a new round of debate over whether the Palo Alto firm is doing enough to safeguard its members’ privacy.

Facebook Places began rolling out Wednesday night to the company’s members in the United States with an upgraded application for the iPhone and iPod Touch that includes an icon that resembles a Google Maps location pin.

Launching the app lets members share their current location, which is automatically plotted by their phone’s GPS technology. They can tag Facebook friends who might also be there and use a “Here Now” function to see who else might be in the area. On Facebook.com, the Here Now map is powered by Google-rival Microsoft’s Bing Maps.

Tapping into trend

Places taps into the same social sharing game of “check-in” that has caused technology pundits to declare startups like Foursquare and Gowalla as part of the latest hot tech trend. This year, microblogging service Twitter also launched a location-tagging feature to its tweets and online recommendation service Yelp enabled check-ins on its mobile application.

But Facebook vice president Chris Cox said Places represents more than just a game, because it uses virtual technology to connect people in the real world. Over time, locations can accumulate stories and memories that later generations can access, Cox said.

San Francisco’s Ocean Beach, for example, could be tagged as the place “where your parents had their first kiss,” Cox said. “What starts to happen is the physical reality we’re in comes alive with the human stories that we’ve told there.”

Facebook worked with other location-based services to integrate their apps with Places.

“This basically validates that we’re on to something, that this will be something much, much bigger going forward,” Holger Luedorf, vice president of mobile and partnerships for Foursquare, said during a Facebook news conference.

But analysts say Facebook’s entry into the location-based services could blow the others out of the water because the social network has such a broad reach with mainstream audiences. Worldwide, Facebook has more than 500 million active members who span all age and marketing demographics. Foursquare, by comparison, has at least 3 million members and is growing quickly.

Working with Facebook may give companies like Foursquare “a little advantage, but the advantage is minimal and it’s not going to last very long,” said Susan Etlinger, a consultant with the Altimeter Group of San Mateo. “My Aunt Sue might not be on Yelp, but I know she’s on Facebook.”

Places also completes the public picture of members, who are already encouraged to share who they are, what they are doing and when. Facebook has become one of the Internet’s top destinations for finding news, viewing photos and watching video. And according to Internet researcher eMarketer, Facebook is on track to bring in $1.28 billion in online advertising in 2010, up from $835 million this year. The company is also developing its own virtual payment system, Facebook Credits.

Facebook officials sidestepped questions about how the firm plans to generate revenue from Facebook Places.

But analyst Augie Ray of Forrester Research Inc. said Places enters Facebook into the emerging mobile advertising space.

“There is no question that knowing where people are and what places they visit will be valuable data for Facebook and its advertisers,” Ray said. “It will permit Facebook to better understand individual’s likes and dislikes, not simply based on what buttons they click, but on their actual real-world behavior. And knowing where an individual is at a given moment will permit Facebook to serve better and more relevant ads based on user location.”

ACLU raises questions

But the San Francisco office of the American Civil Liberties Union immediately questioned whether Places has again left Facebook members open to privacy problems.

“Facebook made some changes to its regular privacy practices to protect sensitive location-based information, such as limiting the default visibility of check-ins on your feed to ‘Friends Only,’ ” the ACLU’s Nicole Ozer wrote in a blog post. “But it has failed to build in some other important privacy safeguards.”

In a sharply worded rebuttal, Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt said Places “sets a new standard for user control and privacy protection for location information. We’re disappointed that ACLU’s Northern California office ignores this and seems to generally misunderstand how the service works.””

Read more here. 

Read Full Post »

Ning will make all users pay

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, boic, Business models, Economy, FaceBook, Investments, LinkedIn, Market research, Social Networks, Strategy, Web 2.0, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 12, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Here is an article from SF Gate.

“Ning Inc., the social-networking site co-founded by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, did what many young Web companies only dream of: It got customers weaned on free services to start paying.

Since telling users in April that it would stop offering the means to build and operate social networks for free, Ning’s paid user base tripled to 45,000, with memberships starting at $2.95 a month. The privately held Palo Alto company is adding paying subscribers at the rate of 5,000 a month, three times what it was before.

“A very large percentage of economic activity is shifting online, and it makes sense that there are more services that are going to charge,” said Andreessen, the co-founder of Netscape Communications Corp., who serves as Ning’s chairman. “It also means there are going to be more people willing to pay.”

Few are charging

Ning is one of the few social-media sites charging users, following a path cut by media and entertainment providers, which have experimented with fee-based services. Founded in 2004, the same year as Facebook Inc., Ning failed to turn a profit with its original strategy: offering most services for free and charging a monthly fee for extra features. Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Gina Bianchini resigned in March, and 42 percent of the staff was laid off in April.

Social-networking tools on the Web are widely available for free. Facebook, which has more than 500 million users, is expected to generate at least $1.4 billion this year, mostly from the sale of ads, two people familiar with the matter said last month. Twitter, with more than 100 million users, began running ads on its site this year.

With a large population of Web users relying on Facebook for basic social services, like keeping track of close friends, there’s an opportunity for other sites to charge for more unique services, said Lou Kerner, a social-media analyst at Wedbush Securities Inc. in New York.

“Facebook has won the free social media race,” said Kerner. “What you’re seeing in the marketplace is folks who are trying to find out business models that are more niche-oriented.”

For Jive Software Inc., that niche is business. The startup, also based in Palo Alto, sells social-networking and online collaboration tools to corporations, including Nike Inc., Intel Corp. and Charles Schwab Corp. Jive’s services start at $100 per user per year, and many customers pay for at least 10,000 users to start.

“The use of social software in the consumer world has no doubt fueled the interest level” among business users, said Tony Zingale, Jive’s CEO. The company, which received a $30 million investment last month led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, expects bookings of as much as $25 million in the last three months of the year, he said.

Paying subscribers are an attractive asset to venture capitalists, who are often asked for money from Internet startups planning to cash in on advertising.

“Ad-driven is a lazy model,” said Dave McClure, a startup adviser and venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. “If there is value, then there probably is a paid relationship that works there at some point,” he said.

Business networking site LinkedIn Corp. generates some revenue by selling professional services, like tools for finding and recruiting job candidates. Meetup Inc., a service for coordinating social events, charges organizers a fee.

The “freemium” model of charging a portion of users is nothing new. One of the earliest examples is PayPal Inc., founded in 1998, which made its payment service free to buyers of products and services so that many people would use it.

“You need free users to enhance the overall value for the product,” said David Sacks, one of the founders of PayPal, who now runs enterprise social-media startup Yammer.”

Read more here.

Read Full Post »

Google Secretly Invested $100+ Million In Zynga, Preparing To Launch Google Games

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Economy, FaceBook, google, internet, Investments, Market research, Social Networks, Strategy, Technology, Venture Capital, Web 2.0, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 13, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Here is some news from Techcrunch.

“Google has quietly (secretly, one might say) invested somewhere between $100 million and $200 million in social gaming behemoth Zynga, we’ve confirmed from multiple sources. The company has raised somewhere around half a billion dollars in venture capital in the last year alone, including $150 million from Softbank Capital last month and $180 million late last year from Digital Sky Technologies, Tiger Global, Institutional Venture Partners and Andreessen Horowitz. The Softbank announcement was never officially confirmed by the company, however, and the Google investment was likely part of that deal as well.

The investment part of the deal closed a month ago or so. A larger strategic partnership is still in process.

The investment was made by Google itself, not Google Ventures, say our sources, and it’s a highly strategic deal. Zynga will be the cornerstone of a new Google Games to launch later this year, say multiple sources. Not only will Zynga’s games give Google Games a solid base of social games to build on, but it will also give Google the beginning of a true social graph as users log into Google to play the games. And I wouldn’t be surprised to see PayPal being replaced with Google Checkout as the primary payment option. Zynga is supposedly PayPal’s biggest single customer, and Google is always looking for ways to make Google Checkout relevant.

And there’s more. These same sources are saying that Zynga’s revenues for the first half of 2010 will be a stunning $350 million, half of which is operating profit. Zynga is projecting at least $1.0 billion in revenue in 2011, say our sources. This blows previous estimates out of the water.

Zynga continues to work on high level strategic business development deals. The reason these deals are so attractive to companies like Yahoo and now Google is this – Zynga allows them to rebuild the massive social graph, currently controlled by Facebook. For whatever reason people love to play these games and get passionately addicted to them, coming back day after day. That’s helped Facebook become what it is today. Google, Yahoo and others want some of that magic to rub off on them, too.”

Read the full post here.

Read Full Post »

U.S. Facebook growth sputters in June

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on July 9, 2010| Leave a Comment »

What goes up must stall and… Here is an interesting article on Facebook´s growthfigures from SF Gate.

“The number of new Facebook users in the United States dropped dramatically in June, with the popular social networking site losing more than a quarter of a million regular users between ages 18 and 44, according to figures collected by a market research website.

Inside Facebook, which analyzes user data that the social network provides to advertisers, noted that in the last 31 days Facebook registered 320,800 new active members – first-time users and those who logged into Facebook for the first time in over a month. The figure is notably low compared with the astronomical 7.8 million new active users registered in May, which represented a 6.7 percent monthly growth.

According to the latest company figures, Facebook has 500 million registered users.

“In terms of the overall trends in Facebook’s U.S. growth, this was a flatter month than usual for Facebook, which has seen about 3 to 4 percent monthly growth in the U.S. on average over the last year,” said Inside Facebook founder Justin Smith.

In contrast, June’s monthly growth was only 0.3 percent.

What’s more, 253,840 American members ages 18 to 44 didn’t even log on to Facebook in the same 31-day period. The largest group – more than 100,000 – was women ages 26 through 34.

Analysts believe it’s too early to say exactly what these numbers mean because a month’s data is not enough to detect patterns. The decline might be something as simple as a glitch, a reporting mistake from Facebook or a seasonal fluctuation.

Ray Valdes, an analyst with market research firm Gartner, said many people travel, graduate and get married during the summer, which may keep them away from their social networks.

“Less excitingly, the negative growth could simply be a blip. But in the years we’ve been tracking the demographic data, we’ve rarely seen a dip like this, so we would tend to favor the idea of a root cause,” Inside Facebook’s Chris Morrison wrote on Tuesday.

The data could also be a reflection of the saturation of the U.S. market, which Smith said they have been anticipating for some time. According to Inside Facebook, the social network giant had achieved a 41.1 percent market penetration as of the end of last month.

And there’s even less room to grow among young adults in the United States, said Josh Bernoff, an analyst with technology research firm Forrester.

“It certainly wouldn’t surprise me if we have seen growth among users between ages 18 to 34 reach its maximum,” he said. “Of course, once you do that, the only way to go is down.”

Bernoff said the decline in new active users might be a calculated consequence of a shift in Facebook’s growth strategy. For one, given the saturation of the young adult market, Facebook has been focusing on attracting users in older demographics.

“Growth among people 35 years old and up is always accompanied by a decline among people 18 to 34,” he said. “The reason is quite simple: Once your dad is in there, it’s not cool anymore.””

Read more here. 

Read Full Post »

Andreessen Horowitz To Win The Foursquare Investor Badge

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, boic, Business models, Economy, FaceBook, google, Investments, Market research, Microsoft, mobile 2.0, Social Networks, Strategy, Technology, Venture Capital, Web 2.0, Wireless 2.0, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 27, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Here is a good Techcrunch article about Foursquare.

“A months long fundraising process for Foursquare is in its last stages, we’ve heard from multiple sources, and Andreessen Horowitz looks to be preparing to check-in to Foursquare to take an investor badge.

The company has delayed committing to new venture capital as they considered buyout offers – negotiations went deep with both Yahoo and Facebook, and possibly Microsoft. The Yahoo discussions ended weeks ago, and Facebook passed on an acquisition earlier this week, we’ve heard.

That means the company is raising that big new round of financing. And a slew of venture capitalists, including Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Spark Capital and First Round Capital were all rumored to competing heavily for inclusion despite the $80 million or so valuation, say our sources.

Andreessen Horowitz, despite rumors that they were pulling out of discussions with the company weeks ago over concerns that too much information was leaking to the press, is the last venture capitalist standing. The fact that founding partner Marc Andreessen is on the board of directors of Facebook, a key partner or competitor of Foursquare, may be the factor that put them over the top.

Existing investors OATV and Union Square Ventures will also participate heavily in the new round, we’ve heard. In the meantime they’ve likely already loaned additional capital to the company.”

Click here to read the original post.

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »