Category: Tech news

It’s a tough job market out there for college job applicants, and students are looking for anything that can help them stand out from the crowd. While an increasing number of students look to apply to jobs online, the information that might give students at improving their candidacy and landing a job isn’t something they want to share publicly, it’s confidential. As a result, most of this confidential information — whether it be recommendations from professors or expiring job offers — is shared offline.

James Ingallinera and Trey Griffith founded Endorse.me last year to give college jobseekers a secure, online platform through which they can share share confidential information with prospective employers, and, in turn, give companies a better way to identify and hire top collegiate talent. Endorse.me is officially launching today at 17 campuses across the U.S., including Stanford, Notre Dame, Cornell, Yale, Harvard, Duke, Dartmouth, UBA, Berkeley and Brown, to name a few, with plans to expand to more colleges in the upcoming academic year.

The fundamental idea behind Endorse.me, Ingallinera tells us, came from his years of experience working in the financial sector. Today, with so many students and recent graduates struggling to find work — and the influx of job applications — the standard, one-page resume is no longer enough. It’s the same philosophy behind services like HireArt and many more.

Ingallinera says that, today, students are looking for ways to stand out in applying for their dream jobs, and to share the kind of information that carries more weight than the standard CV. To do this, students are asked to apply to Endorse.me and, once approved, they can add their resume, recommendations from professors and expiring job offers to their confidential profiles. Students can then create a list of their chosen employers and, after reaching out to professors for recommendations, they can choose the companies with which they share that information.

Endorse.me will then notify those companies of the student’s interest, giving them a complete list of all the students looking to apply to help get their profile information in front of hiring managers. Students can also update their job status on their profile to give employers of interest an opportunity to see interview and job offers they’re receiving — the idea being to allow them to unlock further opportunities once companies see that their competitors are interested.

In turn, students can upload their resume and list the firms they’re interested in, so that they are targeted by them throughout the coming year when new job opportunities arise, regardless of whether the company is actively recruiting at their college.

On the flip side, the more students it attracts, the more value Endorse.me thinks that it can have for employers. Hiring managers can use the platform to view the top-ranked students in their industry, according to their supervisors and professors, which Ingallinera says can be a stronger indicator of on-the-job performance than a one-page resume. By allowing students to express intent and share job offers, Endorse.me allows employers to see where students stand in the hiring process with their competitors, and gain access to and view profiles and resumes year-round.

At launch, the founders tell us, Endorse.me is targeting the financial and technology sectors specifically, but plans to expand its scope in the coming year. That means, at this point, hiring managers from companies like 10gen, Airbnb, Blackstone, Citi, Codecademy, Credit Suisse, Eventbrite, General Catalyst, HubSpot, Indiegogo, Mozilla, Pinterest, Rackspace, Salesforce.com, Spotify, Twitter and Zaarly are currently on Endorse.me and looking for candidates.

Today, Endorse.me is available exclusively as a cloud-based online service, but over the summer, the startup plans to begin developing mobile apps, which it expects to have ready in the fall. The service is currently free for students, employers, and all those intermediaries who choose to write recommendations for students. Again, the service is currently free for employers, but as the startup looks to monetize down the road, it will eventually began charging employers for access to student info.

Endorse.me raised a small round of $300K in seed capital last year, and will look to begin raising its Series A later this fall.

For more, find Endorse.me at home here.

Tonight there came a moment that you might call the end of an era in the U.K. tech startup scene. One of the first of the ‘new wave’ of startups from the mid-2000s lost its last founder, as Andy Young (pictured left), co-founder of the group management startup GroupSpaces, announced he was leaving to join the payments startup Stripe to be a core part of its “expansion into the U.K. and beyond.” Evidently he came to this decision – after seven years of building the startup – that GroupSpaces was not about to fulfill the hopes of its founders as the next big thing in managing group activities, and he has written a long post-mortem to that effect.

His co-founder David Langer already departed last May to start a new venture, called Hasty, in SF.

GroupSpaces was founded by the two young men in their college dorm and went on to raise money from both U.K. and U.S. institutional investors.

Young says GroupSpaces will continue to operate “as a sustainable small business” and while he is “hugely proud of the contribution and impact we’ve made” and remains “dedicated to seeing GroupSpaces continue to thrive and achieve the best it can” he admits that growth had been “slower than we hoped in financial returns” and did not become the “proverbial billion dollar success” as they’d hoped. It will now be managed by existing employees until a new strategy is put in place to partner or exit.

GroupSpaces raised $1.3 million in a Series A round from Index Ventures, 500 Startups and a number of high-profile Angels, including Chris Sacca – and all this during the last Series A crunch of 2008. However, despite reaching well over half a million users, and being used by many professional associations and sports clubs, it never managed to create that high-growth business required by VC investment. It’s something Young pores over in detail in his post.

Some highlights include: how they failed to appreciate “a lack of product-market fit as we moved into new markets,” insufficient focus, a confused strategy, premature scaling and “moving too slowly after we raised our Series A.”

However, they did create a real business that “provides significant value to our many loyal users, and more continue to sign up as customers each day” and who “currently rely on the unhappy marriage of a Yahoo/Google Group coupled with an Excel spreadsheet/google doc for member records, in addition to their own website and other services for events or payments.”

I think many observers would agree with that statement.

Here’s an interview I did with them two years ago:

Picture-messaging sensation Snapchat seems to experiencing some growing pains. CEO and co-founder Evan Spiegel said today that over 150 million pictures a day flow through the auto-destructing photo-sharing service, but as the service gets bigger and gains more attention, the worst parts of the internet are sure to follow.

According to a post on the company blog, some Snapchatters experienced a bit of a spam attack this morning from someone who appears to have created multiple accounts and spam to Snapchatters with accounts marked as public. According to Twitter, that spam seems to be nude-flavored.

Snapchat offers users two security options. You can receive Snaps from “only friends”, which means you’ve accepted them as a friend or added them yourself, or you can accept snaps from everyone.

Snapchat suggests using the private mode for now while the team comes up with a long-term fix for the issue, which is common among social services with quickly growing audiences.

When Snapchat first heard about the spam, the company turned off account creation entirely so that no new users could join the service or create accounts, spam or otherwise. They also shut down snaps sent between public accounts until the problem accounts were terminated.

Obviously, this is a short-term solution to a long-time problem, but the Spiegel owns up to that in the blog post.

Spam is a problem on many services with large audiences. We know spammers totally suck and we’re working on a long term solution to prevent spam from entering your feed. In the meantime, please adjust your settings to determine who can send you snaps. For a spam-free experience we recommend “Only My Friends”

A few months after Snapchat started to gain traction, many labeled the app as a “sexting” service, since the notion of sharing images that don’t last is relatively new. That general concern has died down though, as common sense seems to prove that all 150 million messages sent through the service each day (most of which are sent during the day time) can’t possibly be nudies.

This latest nude spammer, however, does bring up the issue of unwanted sexts as opposed to wanted sexts. And that’s just the latest in a line of distractions for the company, including incredibly rapid growth, potential revenue streams, and a lawsuit from a former Stanford classmate who claims to have come up with the idea.

But distractions aside, it’s hard to argue with a service that has users sending 150 million snaps per day. Consider this: Instagram users post an average of 40 million pictures a day.

Tallygram, a Facebook-based friend finding app created by dating site OKCupid, has shut down, saying that the community never grew large enough to sustain the site. Tallygram, which originally billed itself as “a better way to surf Facebook,” first opened for business in November 2012.

Now the site, in a note to existing users (below) is referring to itself as an “experiment.” Those existing users have an option to export their data from the service by May 15.

With sites like Facebook continuing to build out its own ways of mining its massive database of users and information, such as Graph Search, and many other ways to discover new people (three examples are Badoo, OKCupid and Tinder, which like OKCupid is also owned by IAC) it’s perhaps not too surprising that Tallygram found it hard to pick up traction.

The service, which came out of OKCupid Labs, had a similar concept behind it as OkCupid, founded by four mathematics grads from Harvard: “We use math to figure out who your friends or enemies are. See what they really think,” is how the described itself on its Twitter feed.

That process involved helping identify like-minded souls using algorithms combined with some parameters that users set themselves by answering questions about their feelings about things like cats, patent litigation, and their concept of themselves. It then matched this up with other users’ data and their Facebook profiles to find friends of friends — interesting-enough sounding tech, and relevant to how many interact and meet today, so it may end up somewhere else within the company.

Full statement from Tallygram below:

We’re sad to say that, after working on Tallygram for the past year, we’ve decided to put our experiment to rest. We hope you had as much fun using it as we did building it, but the community never grew large enough to sustain the site. We really appreciate you giving the site a shot.

If you want to keep an archive of the answers you’ve written on Tallygram, we’ve built an exporter so you can download all the questions you’ve answered. The site and archive tool will remain up until May 15, 2013.

While we’re never happy to shut down a product, OkCupid Labs soldiers on. We’re already hard at work on more fun experiments. You can explore the projects that are already live or sign up to be an OkCupid Labs Alpha Tester and be the first to know about new projects. We need your help to go from potential awesomeness to actual awesomeness.

In March, Yahoo made a big splash in its already dazzling list of acquisitions when it acquired Summly, a UK-based mobile startup led by 17-year-old founder Nick D’Aloisio that summarizes long texts to make them easier to read on mobile screens. Today, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer unveiled the first official fruit of that acquisition:

A 160-word summary of her hour-long, 2013 Q1 earnings presentation (original length, 2,000+ words).

So for those of you who don’t have the time or inclination to read the whole results transcript, or one of the many reports covering the earnings, but are still interested in what’s going on at Yahoo, here it is:

I’m pleased with the continued execution I see every day — our teams have been working very hard, especially in Q1. As a result of these initiatives and many others, the talent is undeniable — today, more applicants want to work at Yahoo, and more employees are staying. These teams bring an incredible mix of engineering and technical talent, which will help us accelerate our efforts in mobile development and contentpersonalization.The teams are already moving quickly to amplify the entrepreneurial spirit that’s so prevalent at Yahoo right now.
Designed to be more intuitive and personal, the new Yahoo experience is all about users’ interests and preferences. Yahoo is a consumer Internet company, and the consumer Internet is a growth industry. We’re on course to do what we said we would do — stabilize, and grow with the market.

[Did not make the cut: Yahoo’s advertising revenue declines; the fact that search has outstripped display revenues; and that Yahoo currently has 300 million monthly active users on mobile as it gears up for a bigger push on the platform.]

In addition to Summly, which was acquired reportedly for $30 million, Yahoo in the last quarter also bought Snip.it, Alike and Jybe, “accelerating the Company’s efforts to build world-class technology and engineering teams in mobile and personalization.” That’s in addition to the wider push the company has also made to hold on to its own key talent and appoint a new raft of executives. It now has 11,300 employees on the books.

Read our full Yahoo earnings report here.

With the gash left by the LucasArts shutdown still a bit raw, this one’s either going to feel like salt in the wound or a spark of hope.

Ron Gilbert, creator of LucasArts’ much-loved Monkey Island series, has published a list outlining the sequel he’d make if he could. The bad news: he swears up and down that he’s not making it. Yet.

For those of you who don’t keep track of where legendary game developers end up (Hey! Everyone needs a hobby), here’s what you need to know: after leaving LucasArts in the early 90′s, Gilbert went on to found Humongous Entertainment (remember Putt-Putt or Freddi Fish? That was them), which is now owned by Atari. In 2010, he joined DoubleFine, the game development house which you’d remember as having one of the biggest Kickstarters ever, led by fellow LucasArts alum and industry legend Tim Schafer. Last month, Ron parted ways with DoubleFine to “plot his next move“.

His full post is here (and absolutely worth reading), but to recap some of the bigger points:

• He’s not currently making a Monkey Island Sequel, primarily because he’s “done making stuff other people own.” (Remember: Disney owns the rights to the game and, though they’ve shuttered LucasArts, they plan to license out select properties to other developers) But if he did…
• It’d be called Monkey Island 3a. While Monkey Island games have been made after the two he had a hand in, “games after Monkey Island 2 don’t exist in [his] Monkey Island universe”.
• They’d sell physical copies, not just digital ones, because “sometimes you just want to roll around in all your adventure game boxes”.
• It’d be done in a visually respectful, “enhanced low-res” style. It’d be jam-packed with beautiful pixel art, while still tapping some of the modern graphical tech available today.
• It’d have full, voice-acted dialogue. This is something of a point of contention amongst fans of the classic, many of whom swear by the text-only dialogue of yore.
• He’d build a new engine in the same vein as LucasArts’ SCUMM, with a scripting language focused completely on the rapid creation of adventure games. He’d encourage fans to make their own Monkey Island games, as long as they were clearly fan games.
• His dream team would be less than 10 people large.

Gilbert goes on to suggest that he might consider using something like Kickstarter to get it done. Interestingly, he then prods a bit at campaigns with “fancy videos”, “crazy stretch goals”, “ridiculous reward tiers”, and the accompanying “hype and distractions”… which, you know, sort of describes DoubleFine’s hugely successful Kickstarter down to the tee.

It’s particularly interesting to watch the way Gilbert’s tone begins to shift as he continues through the post. While he starts by dedicating not one, but two points to clarifying that he’s not working on a sequel, he ends with talks of theoretical Metacritic scores and statements like “If you let me do those things, you will love the game.” This is clearly something he wants to do — he just can’t.

The very day Disney announced that they’d acquired LucasFilms (and in turn LucasArts and all of its game properties), Gilbert quite publicly disclosed that he wanted to buy his game back:

Dear Disney: I would like to buy the IP for a game I created called Monkey Island from you. — Ron P.S. I have no money.—
Ron Gilbert (@grumpygamer) October 30, 2012

While he mentions having no money, thats not a problem without a clear solution. If Disney would sell him the IP for anything resembling a sane amount, the fans have already made it quite clear that they’d be willing to throw a small mountain of money his way. (What the hell is Disney going to do with the license, anyway? They’ve already got the similarly piratey but way larger Pirates of the Caribbean property. Plus, Disney could use probably some positive PR surrounding the LucasArts acquisition/shutdown right now.)

Back in December, Gilbert mentioned in an interview with PCGamer that he still wanted the property, and that he planned to contact Disney “at some point”.

Could this be his way of getting that ball rolling?

Streaming set-top box manufacturer Roku has hired a new CFO today, bringing in an executive who had cut his teeth at Logitech and eBay. Erik Bardman, former SVP of Finance and CFO of Logitech International, is joining the company as it seeks to expand globally and also work out more deals with cable and satellite providers.

Bardman has been a part of Logitech since 2009, and plans to leave the peripheral hardware manufacturer at the end of this month. He’s also served as a board member for Trulia, a seat he’s planning to continue holding while at Roku. Prior to his Logitech days, Bardman spent six years at eBay, where he served as CFO for eBay Marketplaces. And before that, he was at GE, in a variety of roles.

The new CFO joins Roku as the seeking to expand not just its product line, but also its availability around the globe. Last summer, Roku raised $45 million in funding from a bunch of strategic investors, including News Corp, British Sky Broadcasting, and Dish. Since then, it’s been working to make a wider variety of cable and satellite TV content available through its streaming set-top boxes.

It’s also working to expand and improve its product line. Earlier this spring, the company introduced the Roku 3, a more powerful set-top box with an improved user interface and universal search capabilities. In addition, Roku is pushing its Streaming Stick as a way to make it easier for device manufacturers to quickly add streaming video capabilities to their TVs, without having to build the technology into the devices themselves.

The company has sold more than 5 million of its streaming devices to date, but it’s probably looking to increase that number. And it’ll probably do so as the big cable companies are trying to lower the cost of their own set-top box deployments. By providing a way for subscribers to stream video to the second or third room in a user’s home without having to introduce a new device into the home.

And, of course, there’s the opportunity to cash in on the number of users who are streaming TV, rather than just watching it through a cable subscription. This is the idea that Roku started with, after all, as a division within Netflix. But as companies like Netflix and Amazon Prime bring on more original programming to appeal to users who don’t pay for TV, streaming devices like Roku’s boxes and the Apple TV are becoming more widely adopted.

Full text of the release is below:

Erik Bardman to Join Roku as Chief Financial Officer
Trulia Board Member and Logitech Executive Brings Strong Expertise as Leading Streaming Media Platform Scales

Saratoga, Calif. – April 15, 2013 – Roku® Inc. today announced that Erik Bardman will join the company as Chief Financial Officer. Bardman was appointed Senior Vice President, Finance and Chief Financial Officer of Logitech International (NASDAQ: LOGI) in September 2009 and will depart the company this month. Bardman was elected to Trulia’s Board of Directors in June 2012 and will continue to hold that seat while at Roku.

“We look forward to having Erik Bardman join the Roku executive team,” said Roku Founder and CEO Anthony Wood. “Roku is a fast-growth company in a rapidly changing industry and Erik brings a wealth of relevant experience to our mission of leading the streaming era.”

“Roku is a dynamic company with outstanding products, a strong competitive position and compelling avenues for growth,” said Bardman. “I look forward to joining the business and helping it achieve significant scale in the years ahead.”

Prior to Logitech, Bardman spent six years at eBay and served as the Chief Financial Officer for eBay Marketplaces, the company’s largest portfolio of businesses. At eBay, Bardman led a large global team focused on financial strategy, acquisitions, resource allocation and performance analysis. Prior to joining eBay, he was with General Electric for 15 years in a variety of roles, focused on consumer financial services, international finance and mergers and acquisitions.

A new startup called Repost aims to make it easy for online publishers to distribute their articles via embedding — the same way I can share a video from YouTube or a document from Scribd directly in a blog post.

Right now, if I saw an article that I thought TechCrunch readers would find valuable — such as this blog post from Repost founder and CEO John Pettitt — I could share a link on Facebook or Twitter. But what if I wanted to share it on TechCrunch itself?

After all, while TechCrunch does plenty of original reporting, we also build on stories that broke elsewhere, and we point readers to announcements that companies have made on their own blogs. In those cases, I could include a link, but according to Repost, there’s only a 2 percent chance on average that readers will actually click. Pettit elaborates:

Yes, there are lots of sharing services. But here’s the thing, they don’t actually share the content. They share links to content. VERY different.

If you want to take an article from one site and publish it on another, you have to find a person, get permission, and then manually copy it. Assuming you don’t break all the formatting in the process, you’re still not in good shape because you still have to worry about search engines seeing it as duplicate content.

With Repost, I can just copy-and-paste an embed code into my post, and then you get the full article, with all the formatting and images preserved. You can see an example at the end of this post. (Update: Apparently there are still some issues with how Repost integrates with TechCrunch’s specific WordPress installation, so what you’re seeing is actually a stripped-down version of the embed.)

That means the original publisher gets their content presented with clear attribution and their own advertising. It also integrates with existing analytics systems, comScore counts the embed views as part of the publisher’s traffic, and since the article is rendered in an iFrame, it doesn’t look like duplicate content to a search engine.

The new publisher, meanwhile, gets to present the full, most up-to-date version of the article to their readers. Since the author is basically saying, “Please share this article!” it should help avoid a lot of the tedious arguments about whether one publication is “aggregating” another site’s content.

In outlining his solution to the content distribution challenge, Pettitt drew parallels with the video world. He said that initially, if you had told the video industry that you wanted to add a button to their content making it easy to embed those videos anywhere, “They would have told you you were crazy.” Yet those buttons are “ubiquitous” today, because video publishers realize the value of broad distribution, and they can monetize that distribution by including their own ads in the embedded videos.

Repost says it already enables embedding for 3 million articles from more than 4,000 publishers, including Fox Sports, PandoDaily, NewsRight, and Tom’s Hardware. On average, Reposted articles see a 5.7 percent clickthrough to the original publisher, and they make readers read three times farther down on the page.

Pettitt estimated that around 75 percent of those publishers aren’t just using Repost as a way to share their content, but also to find outside content worth posting on their own sites. Future plans include adding e-commerce features, such as automatic insertion of affiliate links.

The Repost model could even work for paywalled sites, Pettitt added — in fact, the company is working on a partnership with one such site right now. Publishers could enable Repost sharing for their free content, or sharing of a snippet of their paywalled content.

“Fundamentally, the best ad for your content is your content,” he said.

Pettitt isn’t the only one who thinks this could have a big effect on web publishing. Jeff Jarvis, a well-known media pundit and associate professor at City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism/Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism, recently joined Repost’s board of advisors.

“Repost should end the wars over aggregation and copyright,” Jarvis said in the press release announcing the company’s launch. “The Repost technology changes the fundamental architecture of content distribution on the net, and reinvents and reverses the idea of content syndication.”

Facebook boldly moved to expand its presence in the mobile space with its Android-only replacement last week (with mixed results), but it’s far from the only company who has shown interest in Google’s mobile OS as a springboard for better social connection.

Speaking at the D: Dive Into Mobile, recently installed Twitter VP of product Michael Sippey seemed intrigued by the sorts of experiences others have been able to build on top of Android and confirmed that the company has been mulling over how to improve the process of using Twitter on Android.

“There are a lot of things we’re looking at on Android to make it easier to discover tweets,” Sippey remarked in response to an audience question. He went on to mention that he finds Facebook Home to be “a very interesting product,” and that he “would like to see tweets there.”

As you might expect, Sippey wouldn’t say anything further about what sorts of Android-centric Twitter experiences employees have been fiddling with behind closed doors. He did however point out the importance of Twitter’s internal hack weeks, quarterly events that see cross-disciplinary come together to jam on some interesting projects. Rough though they may be at first, some of those hacks have grown into full-fledged features that have ultimately been baked into Twitter proper (downloadable tweet archives are probably the most notable example).

Given the role that these sorts of wild-eyed hacks can have when it comes to product development — The Verge’s Ellis Hamburger points out that Facebook Messenger’s Chat Heads began as once such “late night hack” — it wouldn’t be surprise to learn that some of Twitter’s potential Android enhancements came about thanks to this internal drive to occasionally cobble things together en masse. For now Twitter is more than happy to keep these cards close to their collective chests, but Sippey stated that the team wants to “build the best Twitter” they can, and taking a tighter approach to integrating into an immensely popular mobile OS wouldn’t be the worst move Twitter could make.

Oovoo has been on a tear of late, tripling its user base in the past year with Jay Samit at the wheel as president. We brought him into the studio to chat about Oovoo’s growth, the video chatting space and forthcoming features on the Oovoo platform. He was surprisingly forthcoming.

He hinted at a feature that would let users preview how they look before they begin a call, explaining that the number one reason why most people don’t video chat is because they don’t like how they look. After previewing your looks, you can also apply a filter to make you look even better. “Think Instagram,” he said.

Samit also hinted at a video voicemail-type feature, which would let users enjoy video chat in an asynchronous way rather than having everyone participate in realtime. After all, not having someone to chat with is a pretty big deterrent in the world of video chat.

The company has almost crossed 75 million users, and Samit attributes much of Oovoo’s incredible growth to the global shift toward mobile. And to him, it’s not just about being available across multiple platforms, as Oovoo is with Facebook, Mac, PC, iOS and Android. It’s also about having the very best quality application at the right value.

Since Oovoo isn’t peer-to-peer like its biggest competitor Skype, the app performs much differently from a user perspective, and thus the usage is quite different from one app to the other.

“Skype was a great technology 10 years ago,” said Samit. “Since we host our service in the cloud, we adjust bandwidth to particular users’ constraints and use 60 percent less battery.”

Because of this, says Samit, users don’t go to Oovoo to triage scheduled international calls or have professional meetings like they do with Skype. Instead, Oovoo users tend to skew much younger and typically leave the service running in the background, chatting with groups of friends as they do other things.

This struck a chord with me, since video chat has never really taken off the way it was expected for that very reason. Though people are used to being able to multi-task on the phone, that freedom doesn’t translate to video chat, and so people tend to steer clear. I asked Samit why Oovoo users feel different, and he said it comes down to age.

“Younger people don’t have the same ingrained habits as older generations,” said Samit. “Voice communication was only a habit after Alexander Graham Bell created the telephone, but for thousands of years before that we were visual people. Since younger generations have used text more than calling, they don’t have the same habits as older people and feel more comfortable in the visual environment of video chat.”

Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer said today that the company is nearing the end of its first “sprint” during her tenure as CEO. That sprint, she said, was focused on “getting people to believe in Yahoo” and making the company an appealing place to work.

Mayer offered a number of comparisons to illustrate that things do seem to be turning around when it comes to talent. She said that the number of résumés that Yahoo received tripled over the course of the quarter. She also said that the attrition rate among “top talent” is half what it was a year ago.

And she pointed to “boomerangs” — Yahoo employees who leave and then return quickly. Fourteen percent of Yahoo’s hires in the past quarter were boomerangs, Mayer said.

On the other hand, it may not be hard to look good in comparison to last year’s numbers, because it sounds like the company lost a lot of people (many of them presumably due to layoffs). The company ended the quarter with 11,300 employees, down 19 percent from the same period last year.

Now that the first sprint is over, Mayer said the company’s focus is shifting. Next up? “Building beautiful products and executing well against our business strategy.” If Yahoo builds beautiful products, it will start seeing more engagement, which will lead to revenue and eventually growth, she said.

Mayer made her comments during the conference call discussing the company’s first-quarter earnings report, which saw flat revenue but higher-than-expected earnings per share.

When Google wanted to get into the game of selling social ads across all platforms, it decided to acquire Wildfire, a company that had the market on lockdown. Since the acquisition last July, little has changed as far as what Wildfire offered, how it offered it and there was little to no impact for current customers.

Today, the Wildfire team has announced that its first major shift is upon us, cutting off standalone campaigns that were a hallmark of its tiered offerings.

Here’s what the team had to say about the “new direction”:

…We’ve decided that we’ll be retiring our Basic, Standard, and Premium promotions after June 30th. We’ll continue to offer promotions as part of our Social Marketing Suite. We understand that some of you will still want to run standalone promotions, so we’re glad to know that there are other companies dedicated to helping you do this. But we’ll be sad to see you go. Of course, we’d love for you to stay in the Wildfire and Google family, so if you want to learn more about the Wildfire Suite, then please give us a call at 888-274-0929.

Basically, Google now wants you to purchase the full suite, which starts at $2,500 a month, according to a member of the Wildfire team in the comment section of its post. The suite allows you to push unlimited promotions, pages and messages. If you still want to do standalone social marketing campaigns, the company is now suggesting that you take your business elsewhere. Where else can you go? Well, Google and Wildfire aren’t endorsing any one service, but suggest that you give them a call with any questions that you might have. Which sounds like a setup for a sales call about their “Suite.”

If you’re already set up to do standalone campaigns under its Basic, Standard or Premium accounts, you can run them until June 30th. If you had planned a campaign that runs past that time, you’re out of luck and better find another service or pay up for the Suite. Luckily, all of the leads that you’ve collected using Wildfire can be exported, and if you’re running on a Basic account, they’ll upgrade you so that you have access to the export feature. That’s nice.

The post itself ends on a nice note, thanking its customers for believing in them. The last sentence, however, makes it sound like Wildfire is ready for people to exit and go elsewhere: “We hope you choose to continue to work with us in the future.” Some had feared that something like this would happen as Google rolls Wildfire’s offering into its own services, but on the bright side, it’s a huge opportunity for smaller companies. Current Wildfire clients aren’t so happy thus far, according to some of the comments:

Nice doing business with you over the past few years and congrats on becoming part of a large and successful multinational corporation. We’ll be with your competition where a-la-carte pricing is still the norm, but if you ever reverse this policy you know where to find us. Been great.

Two services, Votigo and Offerpop, have already reached out to us to claim any wayward Wildfire clients. Know of any others? Share them in the comments.

The Nook HD+ came out last December to mixed reviews. The device had a great screen but problematic bugs caused laggy performance and low scores. The company has come out with an updated version and we took a look.

The 9-inch Nook HD+ is a Retina-quality tablet with a very simple mission – it wants to replace the iPad in the entry-level tablet market. It runs an acceptably fast 1.5 GHz processor that powers a 1,920×1,280-pixel screen. This means images are exceptionally bright on the device and video is more than acceptable. When we first looked at the HD+ in December on Fly or Die, I gave the HD+ a fly even with its limited functionality at the time and its lack of a camera.

The B&N party line is that this device is updated and I suspect there’s a reason they are running through these with a new round of reviews. Because I didn’t write a formal review when it first came out – I was far more impressed by the Nook HD – so it’s worth revisiting this tablet.

As it stands, the Nook HD+ is primarily a “dumb tablet” with a few smart tablet features. You can run a number of apps and games and view Nook Video alongside other video from providers like Crackle and Ultraviolet. This update also improves the speaker (it’s still mono) and improves performance.

Sadly, the quirks that plagued the original HD+ are present here. When turning on the device, for example, you see a brief “scrambled” picture that suggests a problem with either the backlight or the LCD. This “fuzz” appears sometimes while moving through apps and screens but it doesn’t show itself when you’re reading a book.

In terms of absolute performance the Nook suggests solidity but not pep. Switching between screens, at least while reading, is acceptably fast and much faster than it was in the initial launch. As for general app performance I saw a bit of an improvement over the previous software iteration but nothing to write home about. The HD+ is awful in direct sunlight, so don’t even think about going outside with it. This is an indoor ereader.

I think, sadly, the 9-inch tablet market has been flattened by the phablets and 7-inchers of the world. That said, the form factor is still good for folks looking for more screen real estate or larger fonts. For those customers, the HD+ excels. It is almost half a pound lighter than the iPad and even lighter than the Kindle Fire HD 8.9-inch. At $269 it’s priced just about right and, for a brief period, you could get a Nook Simple Touch for free with purchase. That promotion is over but you do get a $50 credit from Barnes & Noble for books and content.

So here’s what worries me: the ereader world has been stagnant since the holidays and the two-for-one deal, while generous, didn’t seem to bode well for B&N. This very slightly updated HD+ is a solid piece of hardware but it’s still not quite up to, say, the standards of similarly outfitted – but not similarly priced – Android tablets. The Nexus 10, is $100 more than the HD+ and, by all metrics, a better device. The iPad with Retina display is a bit more expensive, to be sure, and may not be exactly the device the novice, ereading user is looking for. However, the performance and build quality is far superior.

So who should get an HD+? I think folks who love to read on bigger screens. While there is a plethora of video content available, that’s not the draw here. The three main draws are, in order, price, price, and price. If you’re already a Nook user and you’re looking for a bigger reader, this may be the model for you. If you’re looking for a real tablet, you may need to look elsewhere.

Index Ventures Partner Mike Volpi is our esteemed guest in the TechCrunch TV studio this week for our Ask A VC show. As you may remember, you can submit questions for Volpi either in the comments or here, and we’ll ask them during the show.

Volpi, who focuses on investments in both enterprise software and consumer Internet, joined Index in July 2009. He is on the boards of Path, Sonos, Lookout, Hortonworks, Soundcloud, Big Switch Networks, Zuora, Foodily, and Storsimple.

Prior to his career as a VC, Volpi was Cisco’s chief strategy officer and was also previously the senior vice president and general manager of the company’s Routing and Service Provider Technology Group (at the time, an $11 billion business for Cisco). During his tenure as CSO, Cisco acquired more than 70 companies.

Considering Volpi’s board seats on both consumer and enterprise companies, we’re curious about what his advice is for entrepreneurs when choosing board members. He also should have some interesting views on enterprise data and where the market is headed.

Please send us your questions for Volpi here or put them in the comments below!

There are approximately 11.3 million elderly Americans that live independently in their own homes. Although many seniors choose to live by themselves without any assistance, it can be a challenge for their children to ensure their parents are doing alright.

Lively is an innovative service that helps you keep tabs on the routine activities of your parents or grandparents.

For those of us who have parents that choose to live by themselves, phone conversations quickly spiral into a form of parent-sitting. A phone conversation becomes a checklist of things you want to make sure your parents have done. You ask them they’ve taken their pills, if they’re eating well, or if they’ve been outside today.

“It’s a very long list of things you have to go through,” says David Glickman, COO of Lively, “and it can end up eating a lot time for any meaningful conversation about what’s actually going on in their lives.”

What Lively aims to do is to bring families closer together with a service that offers two different products: LivelyHub and LivelyGram.

LivelyHub is a non invasive way of keeping tabs on the day-to-day activities of your parents or grandparents.

There’s a wireless hub, which resembles a friendly looking router, and six passive sensors that connect to the hub using cellular technology. LivelyHub doesn’t require you to have an existing cellular data plan of any kind. In fact, it doesn’t even need an existing wireless internet connection.

It’s a little like Amazon’s Whispernet in that regard, which allows you to purchase and download books on Kindles over 3G data without needing to sign up for a cellular data plan. All you have to do is plug the LivelyHub into a power socket, and sensors start collecting data automatically.

The sensors are put in places all around the house that your parents or grandparents interact with as a part of their daily routine. For example, you could place the sensors on refrigerator doors, on kitchen cabinets, on a pillbox, or a key chain. These sensors adapt to and learn the day-to-day routine of your parents or grandparents.

There’s a tiny accelerometer inside each sensor, and it simply pings the hub whenever the refrigerator door the sensor is attached to is opened, and so on and so forth. It can’t track your location or do anything like that. If the daily routine of your parents or grandparents seems to differ, it alerts you through Lively’s website or iPhone app.

These notifications are displayed in a very friendly and accessible way. If there’s nothing wrong, you are presented with a row of green smiley faces. But if it’s been a couple of hours since your grandmother took her daily regimen of pills, it alerts you with an orange sad face.

If that sounds a little invasive to you, Lively assures that their pilot test of 30 homes in Florida produced overwhelmingly positive results. “We heard consistently in our pilot test that this was something they wanted in their homes,” says Glickman. “No one ever felt like LivelyHub was violating their privacy.”

LivelyGram is a supplementary service that sends your parents or grandparents a personalized physical tri fold card every two weeks. The card is filled with status updates from any family members willing to contribute.

You can also choose which tweets and Instagram pictures you want them to see, so there’s no chance that your grandmother will come across any pictures or updates she might find offensive or unsavory.

If they don’t find LivelyHub particularly invasive, it sounds like it could be an exceedingly convenient way of making sure your parents or grandparents are doing okay.

LivelyHub and LivelyGram can be had together for $149, with a $19.95 monthly subscription. They’re currently seeking to raise $100,000 over at Kickstarter by May 16.