Category Archives: Tech

Word has leaked out about Ben Parr’s latest endeavor and it’s sounding like it’ll revolutionize the future. Well, if what we’re reading is true, that is. A few weeks ago, the former Editor-at-Large of Mashable gave word that he was going to have a series of announcements about what he’s going to be doing now. It was known that he was teaming up with a co-founder to create a startup, but he kept it pretty close to his sleeve, always saying that he’s “not ready to announce yet”. Then, the truth slowly started to come out. First, it was his announcement that he was going to continue writing, but this time it was a weekly column for CNET. And then last week, TechCrunch seemed to let it all out with a post that, if you believe what you read, spoiled the surprise.

So what was this stealthy startup that Mr. Parr has been working on? It’s called the Peep Project and it’s started by both Mr. Parr and his co-founder, Hilary Karis, formerly a senior software engineer for Sociable Labs. The only thing that seems to have been revealed is what the Peet Project is all about: it’s going to be your “intelligent assistant”, which TechCrunch assumed was going to be a Siri wannabe, but Mr. Parr is adamant that they’re “not building Siri”. They further describe the Peep Project being something to “help manage your information universe”. You can get a slightly better understanding of what Mr. Parr and Ms. Karis is doing if you read their AngelList proposal, specifically when dealing with recruiting (they’re hiring for a designer, by the way):

Can’t remember the super-awesome thing you found on the web yesterday? Ever have so many tabs open that you run out of memory? We’re fixing that…We think of The Peep Project as a cause. We’re going to change the way people interact with information. We’re going to change how people use the web.

While they say that they’re not building Siri, what it potentially may seem to be is that they’re expanding on a whole new level of Artificial Intelligence and building upon the platform that created Siri. I’m not saying that the Peep Project will be a voice-activated automaton and I might be totally wrong about what the Peep Project is about, but the fact they’re describing this as an “intelligent assistant” is probably going to be something much more than the next mechanical turk. The age of technology “assistants” is rapidly approaching–Siri was the pioneer in this and the Peep Project might be the one to evolve it to make it much more meaningful (how exactly remains to be seen). Those that I know that have been exposed to the Peep Project say that what Mr. Parr is doing has a shot and I tend to give him the benefit of the doubt (the man has ideas…).

But the Peep Project isn’t the only one thinking about trying to get rid of Siri’s monopoly of being a true virtual assistant. In fact, Google has indicated that they would like to compete with Apple and create their own. In a TechCrunch post written by Alexia Tsotsis, it’s being reported that Apple will be trying to integrate Siri into multiple platforms. So the search engine giant has said they’re working on an assistant program as well and hope to roll it out soon. Perhaps the most poignant part of the post is this analysis from Ms. Tsotsis: “Google has now set its ambitions beyond social and is focused wholeheartedly on building this “Do engine,” or goal oriented search: 2011 was the year of social for Google. 2012 is the year of ‘Assistant.’”

That’s right: 2012 will be the year of the “Assistant” and it seems that Mr. Parr and Ms. Karis have acknowledged this and want to get ahead of the game. We’re no longer talking about just social applications like Instagram, Twitter, Path, Facebook, or Zynga. Instead, the tech industry is slowly moving towards an era where applications and services will be tapping into the awesome API powers of these “assistants”. Maybe that’s something the Peep Project is all about-who knows, we won’t even find out for a while until they fully announce what they’re up to.

The Verge reports that Google’s Assistant service won’t just be a standalone application–developers will be given access to the API in order to integrate Assistant right into their very own applications, but the knowledge would come right from Google’s enormous search engine, not from the application creator’s library. But what Assistant would do is give users the ability to speak to get answers, search results, and more–just like Siri. It will be interesting to see how the Peep Project can differentiate itself from this, but I think that given that only Apple and Google are the two major players who are probably diving head first into this, the Peep Project has a good chance at being a major player and help shape the discussion about this stuff.

Last month, a study was done that indicated that Siri currently accounts for 25 percent of traffic handled by search engine Wolfram Alpha. But compared to how Assistant would leverage the Google engine, the results that Wolfram Alpha would produce for the Apple iPhone is based on data curated by the service, not on algorithms attempting to search the web. In his proposal, Mr. Parr stated that he’s trying to create a product that will focus on “intelligent information”–something that will have us look at information in a different way. Perhaps the service will be about changing the status quo and evolving the information received from Wolfram Alpha or another similar service and building a completely new dynamic that will make things more contextually relevant?

Who knows..we’ll just have to wait and see. Of course, I could be entirely wrong…in which case, he’s probably building a social network for cats.

Photo Credit:
- Ben Parr at work at BlogWorld Expo 2009 by Ken Yeung/Flickr
- Apple iPhones with Siri by Apple

Another week closes and another Internet company hits it big. This time, the winning company was local-review site, Yelp, and they just debuted their Initial Public Offering (IPO) on Friday with their listing on the New York Stock Exchange.  Whether there’s a bubble is probably something worth debating, but one thing is for sure, with the successful IPOs of companies like LinkedIn and Pandora Radio exceeding expectations, investors are eager to dive right in and take advantage of these hot young companies by wanting a piece of the action. Yelp turned out to be no different that the rest–their IPO price started off at $15 a share on Thursday night and then by the close of trading on Friday, it jumped to over 60% it’s IPO price ending up at $24.58.

Using their stock ticker symbol “YELP”, the Internet company helped raise over $107 million in gross proceeds. Yelp’s CEO, Jeremy Stoppelman, said yesterday:

Over the past seven years our team has worked tirelessly to improve the Yelp experience for consumers and local businesses, and as a result there are countless numbers of people who have benefitted from that hard work and the power of Yelp communities all over the world. Today is a time to pause briefly to reflect on how far we’ve all come and to celebrate the fact that Yelp has become a trusted source to connect with great local businesses…

The company is the sixth Internet/tech company to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange–could Facebook be joining them later on? That will remain to be seen, as the social network giant has yet to choose an index. But in the meantime, the latest public Internet darling has certainly got to be Yelp. And it’s definitely been a long time coming. The Wall Street Journal reports that Yelp primarily makes its revenue by selling advertising on its websites to local and small businesses, but while that might be able to sustain them, could one of the reasons for their IPO now because of a need to raise capital to stem losses incurred over the past seven years? Or what about needing capital to help build and innovate faster so that they can avoid the potential competition that Google might offer them in light of their recent acquisition of Zagat? That’s right, Google…the potential elephant in the room that could dump a lot of resources on the table to take out any competitor–if they only had the right solution.

Right now, it doesn’t seem like Yelp has much to worry about the Google/Zagat acquisition. But in the near future, Google will be storming at Yelp’s gates looking for a piece of the action. The search engine giant already is capturing reviews and displaying them in Google Maps as well as many of their other properties. In a September 2011 interview with Reuters, Marissa Mayer, VP of Local, Maps, and Location Services, was quoted as saying that at the time of the Zagat purchase, Google needed to provide more than just directions to consumers seeking information about restaurants and other local businesses.  She went on to say “It’s also (about) getting them a sense of the place. A sense of what to expect.”

The Yelp IPO is a good stepping stone for the company to solidify their infrastructure and product. CNN reports that like most other tech companies that have tested going public, Yelp isn’t profitable and we know that since they’ve been trying to stem the losses from the past seven years. In 2011, Yelp reported a net loss of $16.7 million while receiving sales of $83.3 million. That’s considerably more than in 2010, when they had $9.6 million in losses on $47.7 million in revenue. But if investors are ignoring these problems and paying a premium for Yelp now, does the company (and public) think that they’ll stand a chance or will the prices start to go downward when the market opens on Monday? Yelp’s IPO may have bought them the necessary time needed to make some needed cuts in spending/costs and give them the ability to innovate and deal with potential competitors. I mean, for a company that was initially valued at $900 million only to have it skyrocket to $1.49 billion, that shouldn’t be too hard, would it?

Photo Credit: Yelp rings the ball at the New York Stock Exchange on their first day of public trading via Yelp

Famed reporter and critically-acclaimed author, Sarah Lacy, is on a roll with her new tech publication startup. Within a few months of leaving TechCrunch, she soon announced that she would be starting her own startup publication to report the news she felt it should be done. It wasn’t that difficult for her when you think about it. This hard-working journalist has gone through it all and reported about quite possibly everything in tech that there is–or at least is aware of it. And with $2.5 million in the coffers, there seems to be a sense of freedom to allow Mrs. Lacy to go to town with it to help bring her publication to the level that it needs to be in order to dominate the market.

Each week, it seems that her startup, PandoDaily, is making new strides and bringing in new people, each one more shocking and experienced than the one before. Already she’s amassed an all-star team of journalists, including TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington (who is also an investor), former TechCrunch writers Paul Carr and Greg Kumparak, and a whole slew of contributors. They’ve even started to get the ball rolling on some live events where you can meet the PandoDaily team and connect with like-minded entrepreneurs, developers, designers, investors, etc. Unfortunately, the first one wasn’t up to par what you might expect, but that was surely a fluke–there’s more every month and the next one hopefully won’t disappoint.

But nevermind any of the bad luck that may have befallen PandoDaily, the bottom line is that there’s been some major inroads and a lot of news coming from this little publication, enough to get the notice of bloggers, startups, investors, and even fellow journalists. But who would have thought that it would have led to one of the biggest snags in tech news this year?

Just announced on PandoDaily, a major news figure in the tech industry has just signed on board to build something special. Highly-regarded reporter Kym McNicholas from Forbes will be signing up to join the PandoDaily team to help build a video department within the publication. Most recently, she was an anchor, reporter, and producer at Forbes and was successful in building the West Coast video department from scratch while also writing for both Forbes.com and Forbes magazine. And in a two-for-one deal, Ms. McNicholas will be bringing her long-time cameraman and editor, Anthony Nielsen, along for the ride. But it wasn’t that Ms. Lacy solicited Ms. McNicholas to join. Oh no, on the contrary, according to Ms. Lacy, the experienced journalist called her out of the blue asking to join. Ms. Lacy’s reply? “Dear God, yes! When can you start?”

This is a great snag for PandoDaily since they’ll be able to compete with the current offerings of TechCrunch and their video off-spring, TechCrunch TV. With a powerhouse reporter who has covered a variety of industries including business and technology, the PandoDaily team gains a great asset in someone who is quite familiar in video technology and how to use it in a way that will be sure to impress the socks off of the publication’s competitors.

Congratulations to Kym McNicholas and the PandoDaily team!

The world of social media marketing has just gotten a bit better thanks to a recent announcement by Wildfire about their partnership with social advertising company Adaptly. The global leader in social media marketing is going to get even better thanks to its integration with Adaptly’s social advertising and optimization technology. Now, while Wildfire user, which allows you to design, publish, and manage your own brand content through social media will, for the first time, give marketers full control of both owned and paid social media–combining the best of both worlds in an attempt to “maximize consumer engagement”.

In case you don’t know about Wildfire, this two-time winner of the Facebook Fund and a runner-up at the TechCrunch Crunchies in 2010 is a tech company based here in Silicon Valley dedicated to helping brands discover the marketing power of all social networks, particularly Facebook and Twitter.  What they offer right now is the ability for anyone (and I mean anyone) easily create their own attractive, branded social media marketing campaigns, like sweepstakes, contests, coupons, giveaways, quizzes, virtual gift campaigns, and anything else they desire. Those campaigns are then published on Facebook, websites, and even on Twitter. As you can see, it’s a lot of organic tactics that Wildfire can offer brands. But what they seem to lack is the ability to get the customer’s name and promotion out there into the wild…well until now. Adaptly’s partnership with Wildfire helps give them a well-rounded handle on the marketing industry and substantially increases their offering in an area where companies don’t want to have multiple services to manage their social media marketing. It’s a “one service to rule them all” kind of thinking.

But before we can talk about this marriage of offerings, we must understand a bit more about Adaptly. Since its founding in 2010, this New York City-based company has been working to help change the way brands gain engagement on social networks. How? By helping to “harness the unique value of each social network”. One consolidated platform is all that is needed to complete a social advertising buy across multiple networks including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, StumbleUpon and more!

When asked about this integration, Wildfire’s CEO, Victoria Ransom (a 2012 winner of the General Management TechFellow award), said:

Integrating a brand’s ads with its content is key to maximizing engagement through social media, yet powerful ad management had been a missing piece from social marketing software suites.

We are delighted to partner with Adaptly to bring their innovative advertising optimization technology to our customers. We evaluated many solutions in the market and Adaptly was the clear leader, with a best-in-class technology that is science-based, data-driven, and results-focused. Adaptly is fully aligned with Wildfire’s philosophy of developing highly scalable software solutions that automate social marketing processes to generate maximum impact at the lowest cost and effort for customers.

So what makes this Wildfire-Adaptly partnership so unique compared to simply using something like Facebook advertising? Well for starters, the combination of these two companies will give you greater reach since they’re allowing you to create a bipartisan marketing campaign for multiple networks, not just one. It’s almost like you were doing traditional online advertising: you don’t want to have to manage buys on Google AdWords or Bing or on Yahoo. You just want to have one system to help manage those spends. That’s one of the strengths these two companies will bring. But it’s not just advertising nor is it just marketing–it’s both. According to Wildfire, unlike first-generation ad serving solutions which focus on traditional metrics as CPC, fans, or impressions, Wildfire’s solutions with Adaptly will help optimize social ads not only for costs, but for maximum engagement. With proprietary technology aggregating more than 160 social metrics from a brand’s earned and owned channels, Adaptly will help marketers analyze the impact of their spend in real-time and help you refine your ads to increase engagement at the lowest cost–something marketers really will care about.

This self-optimizing technology that is now integrated into Wildfire offers a few compelling values for brands and their marketers:

• Enable marketers to specifically target & discover new/valuable audience segments
• Enhance performance of social media promotions, brand pages, and messages through high value content
• Gives marketers a real-time view of their advertising, page, and campaign metrics in one interface
• Marketers can optimize their advertising across multiple social networks–no small feat!

Currently available only to a limited number of beta customers, this new integration should be a big prize to the thousands of customers that Wildfire has and will surely lead to better things for Adaptly. Social media marketers have probably been wondering just how can they manage all their social marketing from one platform…and now they have their answer. It just became that much easier thanks to this partnership.

Photo Credit: Technorati

In what may be surprising to many, word broke out just now that TechCrunch editor, Erick Schonfeld, will be stepping down from his role and leaving the tech publication. But before you think that the site is plum for the pickings and going away, you’re going to be sorely mistaken. In his place, Erick Schonfeld will be handing the leadership over to a certainly-qualified individual who has lots of experience leading a tech pub. Current TechCrunch journalist, Eric Eldon, will be leading the charge to help pick the publication off its feet and get it back to its once-former glory (some may say it never left, but others may tend to disagree).

The departure of Mr. Schonfeld adds another name to the growing list of TechCrunch writers and employees who have left the company over the past year or so. He joins founder Michael Arrington, former CEO Heather Harde, writers Jason Kincaid, Robin Wauters, Paul Carr, Sarah Lacy, Greg Kumparak, and others. For many years, he’s served as the co-editor of TechCrunch alongside Mr. Arrington, but after the unfortunate departure of Arrington at the hands of AOL/Huffington in late 2011, he was named the sole editor. No word yet on what lies ahead for Mr. Schonfeld, but with his history of being involved in tech and publication, there’s no doubt that he’ll land squarely on his feet.

At the helm of the “new” TechCrunch is a man named Eric Eldon. For the past few months, he’s been a writer for TechCrunch, but before that has been the editor at two of Silicon Valley’s most prestigious publications: Inside Network and VentureBeat. In fact, he actually founded Inside Network and led it while it was being acquired by WebMediaBrands in 2011. He’s definitely gone through the ranks to get where he is and will surely help resuscitate a revival of the brand and bring a fresh take on the news coverage. Praise from throughout the Twitterverse has been quite positive over Mr. Eldon’s promotion and raised the hopes of its readers that the site can be taken to its next level.

Mr. Eldon’s statement, as reported by PandoDaily’s MG Seigler:

Michael started TechCrunch just writing about random startups that he thought were interesting. He did it before most other people, and he did it amazingly well. He captured the imagination of entrepreneurs around the world, and he made the site the central destination for the modern web industry. He, Heather, Erick — MG, Sarah, etc — did an amazing job building the site to what it is today. Obviously we have a lot of work ahead of us, but the rest of the team and I get what the site is, what it has been, and what we need to do to push it forward.

The folks at TechCrunch are seriously working on making the site better…in their own post, both reporter Alexia Tsotsis and (now editor) Eric Eldon (speaking in the third person), say that they’re putting their heads down and focus on the basics. They’re going to continue building the team in the Valley and report on “entrepreneurs, investors, world-class tech companies, and everyone else that makes this ecosystem that it is.” While not trying to wax nostalgia, their post hints that they’re bringing the Arrington/TechCrunch-era from way back in the day (2005), but they’re going to put a 2012 spin to it.

Congrats Eric (Eldon) on your promotion and sorry to see Erick (Schonfeld) leave. Here’s to bigger and better!

Photo Credit: Erick Schonfeld reacts to on-stage panel while Michael Arrington’s Gobot appears behind him at the TechCrunch Social Currency conference in 2010 via Ken Yeung/Flickr