Category: Tech news

Since launching in November 2010, social travel startup Gogobot has been on a mission to remove the shoddy design and link farm tendencies from the old world of online travel discovery. Because travel research should be a visual experience, from the get-go Gogobot focused on collecting and curating quality photos from the world’s many travel destinations.

Supporting its visual approach, Gogobot founder Travis Katz says, Gogobot wants to be Lonely Planet 2.0, a mobile and online publication that functions as a resource for trusted travel advice, both from experts and friends. In pursuit of this goal, today Gogobot is announcing that it will be teaming up with Travel + Leisure to bring its 2.5 million registered users a streaming feed of the publication’s best photos, reviews and destinations.

Gogobot has already built out a social foundation, allowing people to write their own reviews of their favorite destinations — using their real identities to add a layer of trust. By teaming up with Travel + Leisure, Gogobot is building out the other half — content and recommendations from experts and trusted names in the travel space.

Katz says that, thus far one of Gogobot’s most popular mobile features has been its digital postcards, which provide a visual look into top travel destinations by way of its repository of user-generated images — and through a partnership with Flipboard. Now, Gogobot will be doing the same with Travel + Leisure content, posting a stream of digital, thematic guides culled from T+L’s content.

Travel + Leisure will also be posting their picks for the best and hotels and destinations into Gogobot via mobile and will allow users to follow them to keep track of their picks or check out those thematic guides. On top of that, their reviews of hotels and resorts will begin appearing on Gogobot’s topic pages alongside user reviews. Again, this allows Gogobot to complement the crowdsourced travel knowledge and content from its 2.5 million users with a trusted editorial perspective.

The collaboration with Travel + Leisure follows Gogobot’s addition of realtime hotel pricing, OpenTable integration and 360-degree looks via Google Street View integration, which enables users to check out restaurants and neighborhoods at a potential travel destination both from the outside and the interior. More in our prior coverage here.

Lema21, an e-commerce startup that sells quality designer eyewear online, has raised $1.6 million in funding from The Social+Capital Partnership, Micky Malka, Graph Ventures, and Luis Mario Bilenky, ex-president of Fototica, Brazil’s second largest optical chain and the CEO of an established international eyewear company.

Similar to the way Warby Parker has disrupted the eyewear market in the U.S. Lema21 is hoping to provide an alternative retail site for eyewear in Brazil. Founded by Jon Assayag and Naomi Arruda, the startup offers designer prescription frames with anti-reflective organic lenses for one standard price.

Warby Parker has achieved success in part by cutting out the middlemen in the manufacturing process; subtracting the high licensing fees and bypassing the high-prices of optical shops. Lema21 will also offer consumers the ability to give back to the Brazilian community with a “buy one, donate one” model, where for every pair of glasses sold, Lema21 donates the cost of a simple pair to a local non-profit helping the visually impaired.

Assayag explains that the current Brazilian eyewear is a $9 billion industry, so the opportunity is massive. While Lema21 will officially launch in January 2013 for business, the startup will offer a virtual mirror where users can try on frames using a webcam. Purchasers can also receive sample frames to test out what works with their face. And users will be able to get their frames with prescription lenses. And the startup has ambitions of selling to the entire Latin American market.

Jimmy Fairly offers a similar ecommerce site in France.

Kontagent, an analytics provider that specializes in mobile and social gaming, just put out iPhone and iPad apps to cater to executives on the go. They found that many studio heads wanted to check basic, key performance indicators continuously throughout the day and often when they weren’t at their desks. They also wanted to dogfood their own mobile analytics service through an app of their own.

“We have a persona that we’re targeting with these products,” said Jeff Tseng, who is Kontagent’s CEO. “We found that more and more executives were using the phone and tablet as a mechanism to do work. People want data on the go.”

The app is free and lets Kontagent clients look at data on unique visitors, mobile app downloads, average mobile session length, mobile marketing campaign performance and average revenue per user. They can show data in selected date ranges. Deeper data functionality and manipulation is still limited to the desktop product though. The iPhone and iPad apps exist to give a basic top-level look.

He added that more than 50 percent of the company’s newer clients are mobile game developers (rather than web or Facebook platform-focused game developers).

Unlike other analytics companies, Kontagent is specifically focused on game developers and counts about 200 of the biggest freemium game developers like EA, Nexon and Kixeye among its clientele.

They have a basic free version available to mobile developers through a partnership with Tapjoy. But for the premium version, they’ll do custom enterprise deals.

The company, which started out five years ago, has raised more than $17.5 million in two venture rounds led by Altos Ventures and Battery Ventures. It’s not yet profitable, but they have 120 employees.

“If you look at most SAAS (software-as-a-service) companies, you have to invest a lot on the sales and marketing side. But because it’s a recurring business model, you make up the dollars over time,” Tseng said.

While it may look like other soundbars out there, GoldenEar’s new SuperCinema 3D Array charts a slightly different course than its rectangular relatives.

We carried several quivers of hardware up to Squaw Valley, riding each board both on its intended terrain and across the rest of the mountain.

Editor’s note: Ben Horowitz is co-founder and partner of Andreessen Horowitz. He was co-founder and CEO of Opsware (formerly Loudcloud), which was acquired by HP, and ran several product divisions at Netscape. He serves on the board of companies such as Capriza, Foursquare, Jawbone, Lytro, Magnet, NationBuilder, Okta, Rap Genius, SnapLogic and Tidemark. Follow him on his blog and on Twitter @bhorowitz.

I do this for my culture
To let them know what a nigga look like when a nigga in a Roadster
Show them how to move in a room full of vultures
Industry is shady, it needs to be taken over
Label owners hate me, I’m raising the status quo up
I’m overcharging niggas for what they did to the Cold Crush
—Jay Z, Izzo (H.O.V.A.)

Ask 10 founders about company culture and what it means and you’ll get 10 different answers. It’s about office design, it’s about screening out the wrong kinds of employees, it’s about values, it’s about fun, it’s about alignment, it’s about finding like-minded employees, it’s about being cult-like.

So what is culture? Does culture matter? If so, how much time should you spend on it?

Let’s start with the second question first. The primary thing that any technology startup must do is build a product that’s at least 10 times better at doing something than the current prevailing way of doing that thing. Two or three times better will not be good enough to get people to switch to the new thing fast enough or in large enough volume to matter. The second thing that any technology startup must do is to take the market. If it’s possible to do something 10x better, it’s also possible that you won’t be the only company to figure that out. Therefore, you must take the market before somebody else does. Very few products are 10x better than the competition, so unseating the new incumbent is much more difficult than unseating the old one.

If you fail to do both of those things, your culture won’t matter one bit. The world is full of bankrupt companies with world-class cultures. Culture does not make a company.

So, why bother with culture at all? Three reasons:

1. It matters to the extent that it can help you achieve the above goals.
2. As your company grows, culture can help you preserve your key values, make your company a better place to work and help it perform better in the future.
3. Perhaps most importantly, after you and your people go through the inhuman amount of work that it will take to build a successful company, it will be an epic tragedy if your company culture is such that even you don’t want to work there.

Creating A Company Culture

In this post, when I refer to company culture, I am not referring to other important activities like company values and employee satisfaction. Specifically, I am writing about designing a way of working that will:

• Distinguish you from competitors
• Ensure that critical operating values persist such as delighting customers or making beautiful products
• Help you identify employees that fit with your mission

Culture means lots of other things in other contexts, but the above will be plenty to discuss here.

When you start implementing your culture, keep in mind that most of what will be retrospectively referred to as your company’s culture will not be designed in, but will evolve over time based on the behavior of you and your early employees. As a result, you will want to focus on a small number of cultural design points that will influence a large number of behaviors over a long period of time.

In Jim Collins’ massively successful book Built to Last, he wrote that one of the things that long lasting companies he studied have in common is a “cult-like culture.” I found this description to be confusing because it seems to imply that as long as your culture is weird enough and you are rabid enough about it, you will succeed on the cultural front. That’s related to the truth, but not actually true. In reality, Collins was right that a properly designed culture often ends up looking cult-like in retrospect, but that’s not the initial design principle. You needn’t think hard about how you can make your company seem bizarre to outsiders. However, you do need to think about how you can be provocative enough to change what people do every day.

Ideally, a cultural design point will be trivial to implement, but will have far-reaching behavioral consequences. Key to this kind of mechanism is shock value. If you put something into your culture that is so disturbing that it always creates a conversation, it will change behavior. As we learned in The Godfather, ask a Hollywood mogul to give someone a job and he might not respond. Put a horse’s head in his bed and unemployment will drop by one. Shock is a great mechanism for behavioral change.

Here are three examples:

Desks made out of doors – Very early on, Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com, envisioned a company that made money by delivering value to rather than extracting value from its customers. In order to do that, he wanted to be both the price and customer service leader for the long run. You can’t do that if you waste a lot of money. Jeff could have spent years auditing every expense and raining hell on anybody who overspent, but he decided to build frugality into his culture. He did it with an incredibly simple mechanism: all desks at Amazon.com for all time would be built by buying cheap doors from The Home Depot and nailing legs to them. These door desks are not great ergonomically nor do they fit with Amazon.com’s $100+ billion market capitalization, but when a shocked new employee asks why she must work on a makeshift desk constructed out of random Home Depot parts, the answer comes back with withering consistency: “We look for every opportunity to save money so that we can deliver the best products for the lowest cost.” If you don’t like sitting at a door, then you won’t last long at Amazon. 

$10 per minute – When we started Andreessen Horowitz, Marc and I wanted the firm to treat entrepreneurs with great respect. We remembered how psychologically brutal the process of building a company was. We wanted the firm to respect the fact that in the bacon and egg breakfast of a startup, we were with the chicken and the entrepreneur was the pig: we were involved, but she was committed. We thought that one way to communicate respect would be to always be on time to meetings with entrepreneurs. Rather than make them wait in our lobby for 30 minutes while we attended to more important business like so many venture capitalists that we visited, we wanted our people to be on time, prepared and focused. Unfortunately, anyone who has ever worked anywhere knows that this is easier said than done. In order to shock the company into the right behavior, we instituted a ruthlessly enforced $10/minute fine for being late to a meeting with an entrepreneur. So, you are on a really important call and will be 10 minutes late? No problem, just bring $100 to the meeting and pay your fine. When new employees come on, they find this shocking, which gives us a great opportunity to explain in detail why we respect entrepreneurs. If you don’t think entrepreneurs are more important than venture capitalists, we can’t use you at Andreessen Horowitz.

Move fast and break things – Mark Zuckerberg believes in innovation and he believes there can be no great innovation without great risk. So, in the early days of Facebook, he deployed a shocking motto: move fast and break things. Did the CEO really want us to break things? I mean, he’s telling us to break things! A motto that shocking forces everyone to stop and think. When they think, they realize that if you move fast and innovate, you will break things. If you ask yourself, “Should I attempt this breakthrough? It will be awesome, but it may cause problems in the short term.” You have your answer. If you’d rather be right than innovative, you won’t fit in at Facebook.

Prior to figuring out the exact form of your company’s shock therapy, be sure that your mechanism agrees with your values. For example, Jack Dorsey will never make his own desks out of doors at Square because at Square, beautiful design trumps frugality. When you walk into Square, you can feel how seriously they take design.

Why Dogs At Work And Yoga Aren’t Culture

Startups today do all kinds of things to distinguish themselves. Many great, many original, many quirky, but most of them will not define the company’s culture. Yes, yoga may make your company a better place to work for people who like yoga. It may also be a great team-building exercise for people who like yoga. Nonetheless, it’s not culture. It will not establish a core value that drives the business and help promote in perpetuity. It is not specific with respect to what your business aims to achieve. Yoga is a perk.

Somebody keeping a pit bull in her cube may be shocking. However, the lesson learned — that animal lovers are welcome or that employees can live however they want — may be societal values, but they do not connect to your business in a distinguishing way. Every smart company values their employees. Perks are good, but they are not culture.

The Point Of It All

In How Andreessen Horowitz Evaluates CEOs, I described the CEO job as knowing what to do and getting the company to do what you want. Designing a proper company culture will help you get your company to do what you want in certain important areas for a very long time.

“A location service only gets interesting when you get to a certain scale,” and Foursquare isn’t there yet, says Josh Williams. His check-in app Gowalla wasn’t either, but it was bought by Facebook where a quarter-billion people tag locations each month. In an interview, Williams tells me how the Nearby feature he launched on Facebook today shows you that data “through the lens of what’s around you right now.”

“It’s been a year since we’ve been here [at Facebook]. We joined at this time when location services were growing at a pretty amazing rate, but outside there wasn’t much public awareness about just how much people had been using location tagging for checking in and tagging photos and status updates.”

Then Williams dropped a bomb. “Now we’re seeing 250 million of our users tagging locations on a monthly basis — a bit over 800 location tags per second.”

That means in some ways Facebook is about 10 times larger than Foursquare. And for comparison, Yelp has a total for 33.3 million reviews and 83.5 million unique monthly visitors. Facebook’s scale has Williams positively giddy. The CEO and co-founder came from “building a service for a couple million users at Gowalla. We had a density that worked in Austin on good days, or in San Francisco or New York City, but not necessarily everywhere.” If you’ve ever looked at Foursquare for friends or suggestions outside of big, early-adopter cities you know the whole value-proposition breaks down and you can feel a tad alone.

Without data to make helpful recommendations, nobody uses the app, and it doesn’t build its data set. Facebook solved this chicken and egg problem of starting a local discovery service with no users or data by simply building the vacuums to suck in geo-tags first and waiting years before starting to use it for recommendations. “Here [at Facebook] there’s this amazing wealth of photos and stories and checkins that start to paint a picture of what the world is like through your friends’ eyes,” Williams says.

So over the last year, Williams and his squad have set out to build “what a modern location aware service would look like” and it goes way beyond the check in. Williams explains that while Facebook has the data, there was no way to browse it from the perspective of discovering places instead of where friends were currently. “Check ins would hit the news feed and matter for some amount of time, but then they would fall off the feed.” Locked inside these checkins are strong signals for what your friends might enjoy after you leave.

Williams tells me he joined up with some of Facebook’s “internal champions” of location and discovery to form a new team focused on organizing all this location data into something actionable. First, they had to make sure that data was spic-and-span. The team made it easier for users to flag and remove duplicate Places, that way all your friends’ check ins, Likes, and reviews are on the same page.

There was also a tough decision to be made about whether to show more popular but well-known places or more hidden gems. Williams says “You’re always trying to find a mix. If I’m coming to New York I want to see what someone says about the MOMA, but I also want to know if a friend found a great place down some alleyway. We’ll find a balance between a fun and easy to use product and serendipity going ahead.”

Considering this is v1, the team did a pretty remarkable job. You can read my full hands-on review of Nearby here, but the takeaway is that it’s tuned well to the mobile use case. You rarely have to type to browse tons of categories of places which are all intelligently ranked based on both ratings and reviews from people you don’t know, and the checkins and Likes of your friends. The killer value-add is that these data sets combine to help you discover great places that are exactly your style.

For example, Williams explains that if you and your friends all have children, seeing that a bunch of them Like a family restaurant and one wrote a recommendation that “this is a good place to take your kids” means you’re confident you can bring your screaming spawn there.

As people use Nearby, its algorithm will improve and Williams says his team is just getting started on features. “We like to joke at Facebook that things are 1% done — but actually we take it pretty seriously. There will be steady updates and improvements in the months to come to tie in some other pieces.”

I’m looking forward to being able to discover Facebook Events in Nearby. “That’s not something we’re bringing out on this pass, but you can imagine how it’d look if you baked it in.” Yelp and Foursquare might know venues, but they don’t know events, or which ones your friends are going to.

Facebook also plans to use its status as a platform for third-party apps to pull awesome content into Nearby. Williams says that “We will continue to give people more ways to discover places by including information shared about places from other applications.” That means Nearby could pull in Instagram photos to give you a look inside a place you might visit, or a park’s page could display popular running routes from Nike and RunKeeper.

Williams says “I have a lot of respect for what Dennis and the crew at Foursquare have been doing. It’s a fun community that I think will continue to exist and thrive, and Yelp has a really unique community itself of people who love gourmet cuisine. These are unique viewpoints.” But Williams wants Nearby to be chameleonic, able to give people recommendations no matter what they’re into. It could make Foursquare seem constrained to just the hip early adopters and their bar-going, while trapping Yelp in a box for foodies.

That’s not the to say the fight will be easy. Both competitors have hardcore users who meticulously review everywhere they go. They also have much more granular search, that lets you find “cocktails”, or “pasta” not just bars or Italian restaurants.

But Facebook’s power comes from its scale. Most everyone’s friends are on Facebook, adding geo-tagged posts of all sorts. Few people have lots of friends on that check in on Foursquare or that write Yelp reviews. That means wherever you are Facebook can show you what’s next door, courtesy of who you know.

“The tab has always been called ‘Nearby’, even though it hasn’t always lived up to that feeling. This isn’t just about checking in. It’s about hearing people’s stories through the restaurants they go to, or the museums they visit with their friends. We should be able to help you plan what you’re doing this weekend. Hopefully this is the first step in that direction — a little bit of the here and now where you’re at home or abroad.”

We told you about the super-simple and super-sticky voting app Polar for iOS a few weeks ago, and since then, the app has taken off quite nicely. When you use it, you’ll instantly see how people are exploring the platform to learn what they think about the things that they’re interested in. Sure, it’s a “polling” app, but calling it just that is selling it short. It’s quite addictive in a “Hot Or Not” way, to boot.

The best part is that the app collects all types of fun data to start building out a friend and interest graph for you that can match you up with like-minded people. Yes, there are already companies doing that, but not in such a speedy way.

We spoke with its co-founder Luke Wroblewski about the 30 percent faster increase to 1 million votes than the half-million milestone it had hit before. He told us that Polar has had an average of 60 votes per user per day in the past seven days. That’s engagement. On this impressive feat, Wroblewski told us:

Interesting because I talked to an exec who used to run a popular desktop web contest/voting site and they were getting 20. So we’re 3x. I think it’s because of mobile and optimizing product for mobile.

Since Wroblewski is a self-professed data addict, he tells us that of the people who downloaded the app, 84 percent of them voted on a poll. Basically, this means that the onboarding for Polar is a snap, and users are getting it right away. He says that this shows the power of a “mobile first” strategy, which some say might not be so valid.

To further support this, Wroblewski shares that 99.3 percent of the votes are coming from its iOS app, even though its landing pages on the web are pretty awesome and lightweight. That means that people are jumping right to downloading the app, rather than voting from the web. Sure, Polar could be an edge case, but it’s fascinating, regardless:

It illustrates what engagement on iOS is like. As many have pointed out – it’s huge. Again likely because people have their phones always with them, always on, and use them in little bits throughout the day. We designed Polar for this environment.

It’s a breath of fresh air to speak to an entrepreneur that isn’t so secretive about the numbers within his app. In fact, Wroblewski has shared quite a few insights with us, and not to show off, either. He truly enjoys using his own product and seeing what his users like and do.

With 50 percent of its polls having over 80 votes each, the information below is quite interesting.

Based on similar polls, Wroblewski has shared some tech-related trends based on Polar voters. Regarding the huge Google Maps for iOS launch last week:

• 70% trust Google Maps over iOS
• 26% personally had a problem using iOS maps
• 15% did not upgrade to iOS6 because of maps
• 77% would not have paid for Google Maps on iOS
• 80% don’t think Steve Jobs would have released Apple Maps

When it comes to what people do in the morning when they wake up:

• 75% grab their phone before their partner in the morning
• 71% get on mobile device before they get on toilet in the morning
• 88% check Email before Twitter in the morning
• 70% check eMail before Facebook in the morning
• 89% think Han Solo (not Greedo) shot first

With this type of traction, especially on a mobile-first product, I was intrigued to find out how the feedback from the community, other developers and potential investors are feeling about what Polar is doing.

TechCrunch: Are you surprised by the engagement and quick start of the app?

Luke Wroblewski: Everyone knows mobile is a big deal and people use their phones all the time and everywhere. But we explicitly designed for this new reality — by focusing on “everyday q&a.” So we had some confidence that our approach to the problem would work well in this environment. Despite that, we’ve been thrilled with how much people have embraced the format. Honestly, I did not expect the interactions to be this “addicting.”

TechCrunch: What feedback have you heard?

Luke Wroblewski: Polar is for collecting and sharing opinions. So it’s been awesome to see people using the product to give and collect feedback about the app itself. We get a few polls each day about Polar — suggesting new features, promoting different ways to use the service, asking questions, etc. We actually made an internal tool for tracking these kinds of questions so we can respond to them. For example:
http://polarb.com/13900-is-there-a-way-to-get-polar-notifications
http://polarb.com/11061-what-is-polar
http://polarb.com/10990-when-do-you-polar-the-most
http://polarb.com/11117-polar-make-the-option-to-have-multiple-choices-as-responses

TechCrunch: Have you been approached about funding, or are you looking for any?

Luke Wroblewski: We’ve gotten inbound interest, but we’re still focused on the next set of iterations for the product. Once we’ve gotten through those and seen the impact, we’ll look up and assess the need for funding. So far everything we’ve done has been boot-strapped.

TechCrunch: What are some plans heading into 2013 for Polar?

Luke Wroblewski: We’ve got two big areas of focus right now: increasing relevance and the Web opportunity. As more and more people have come to the app, they’ve brought their own areas of interest with them. We’re in the midst of tuning things to connect people with questions and other users that are the best fit for for them. As I mentioned in the stat above, 99.3 percent of all votes are coming from the iOS app. That leaves a lot of opportunity open on the Web. We’ve got two projects in the works to address that. Stay tuned.

———

What you’re seeing with Polar is that new mobile apps are doing well, if designed the right way and as long as it taps into a native function of what we do on a daily basis. The key for Polar is that it continues to listen to its community, keep the app fast, and not bloat it with too many features.

A company like Facebook or Google would love to get its hands on the type of data that Polar is collecting, if only to learn things about what people like, or help introduce brands to new users in a way that’s not completely off the wall. You know, based on what they really like.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Clouds, clouds, everywhere there are clouds. Here’s one more to file in your cloud list from Infochimps that’s all about big data.

Infochimps Enterprise Cloud is the kind of service you won’t see any time soon from an enterprise behemoth like Oracle or most of the enterprise big boys. Why? Because it’s self service. You don’t need three weeks of training and a background in programming, analytics, and computer science to use the service.

Infochimps data scientists and engineers developed the platform so they could collect lots of data and perform complex analytics along the way. A customer can pull in data from CRM systems and any of the other app silos where data pools then combine it with the data from Facebook, Twitter, and other services. The data flows into Infochimps’ data-delivery service and is cleaned up along the way. Data gets enriched, as needed, with other pieces of information such as demographic data.

The service works with any kind of database. Infochimps can implement any combination, including relational for SQL-like queries, and NoSQL for Hadoop jobs and big data storage. Analysis tools on the back-end provide the capability to create visuals and reports.

Infochimps is one of a growing ecosystem of companies that are programming the knowledge of data scientists, statisticians and programmers into applications that businesspeople can use.

The new enterprise cloud from Infochimps reminds me of Prior Knowledge, a company that debuted at TechCrunch Disrupt, and was recently acquired by Salesforce.com. The Prior Knowledge team had spent years learning the art of statistics. They built that knowledge into the software so companies can actually use the data that they have.

It’s crazy expensive to hire teams of data scientists and big data teams. Infochimps and a host of other companies are showing that you really don’t need to do that to get the analysis you need.

Sequoia Capital filed a form with the SEC today, indicating a $700 million raise for a fund titled Sequoia Capital Global Growth Fund, L.P. While Sequoia declined to comment on the filing, our sources tell us that this fund is actually separate from the international funds that Sequoia raised money for earlier this year.

According to what we’ve heard, the Global Growth Fund was created in the past year to allow the firm to partner with larger companies on a global basis on investments. The $700 million noted in the filing is new money raised for the fund over the past months.

It’s unclear what types of companies Sequoia would be partnering with on these investments, but this sounds like it will be an international venture. These could be larger funding opportunities if they are in partnership with multinational companies.

Sequoia has made it clear that it will be doubling down on international. In August, we reported that Sequoia raised three separate funds for U.S., China and Israeli investments, including $450 million for a U.S. venture fund, $325 million for a China venture fund, and $200 million for a fund for Israel-based venture investments. Brazil is also an area where Sequoia has an interest.

Dan Primack of Fortune wrote in May that he heard a fourth fund could be offered, so perhaps this is part of that report. If and when we hear more details, we’ll update this post.

When a new measurement called the Nielsen Twitter TV Rating was announced this morning, neither company provided a lot of detail about what specifically they’d be measuring. So I got on the phone with Steve Hasker, Nielsen’s president of global media products and advertiser solutions. He was still pretty vague about the product, but he did offer some thoughts on who will use it and the advantages it will have over other social analytics tools.

In the press release, Hasker said the new rating could be used by advertisers who “create integrated ad campaigns that combine paid and earned media [i.e. advertising versus organic social conversation around a show or campaign].” But he told me that’s just one of three likely customer groups.

On the ad side, he said the ratings should be useful on more than a campaign level. Ad executives could also use it to identify shows that don’t necessarily have the best traditional ratings, but that get a lot of support on Twitter. It could also be used by TV producers and programmers who want to understand the social engagement around their show and how it might be improved. For example, he said they might want to look at the Nielsen Twitter TV Rating to try to understand why one episode got a huge response on Twitter and why another one fell flat.

“For the first time, engagement … will come out of the shadows,” he said.

So why focus on Twitter in particular? Hasker said it’s a combination of factors, including the conversational nature of the updates, the real-time nature of those conversations, and the fact that tweets are mostly public. Plus, of course, there’s Twitter’s enormous reach.

As for what this new rating will offer that isn’t already available through existing social analytics services, Hasker says the real distinction is measuring reach. In other words, he said, this will be the first “robust measure” that shows you not just how many people tweeted about a show or an ad (or the kind of engagement those tweets saw), but also how widely those tweets were seen.

Nielsen will be sharing more details in May so that people in the ad industry “have a good sense of what’s coming,” Hasker said, before the commercial launch next fall.

New Zealand-based startup Booktrack launched last year to provide e-book readers with something that they’ve been missing: soundtracks to go along with what they’re reading. To push that idea forward, the startup has raised $2 million in Series B funding from Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures, Park Road Post Production, Weta Digital GM Tom Greally, Sparkbox Ventures, New Zealand Venture Investment Fund, EFU Investments Ltd., Stephen Tindall’s K One W One, and others.

The idea behind Booktrack is to make e-books more engaging by providing background music and sounds that go along with what you’re reading. According to founder Paul Cameron, it’s like providing the soundtrack to complement the text. Readers who try it out seem to like it — about 27 percent of customers who download a free sample purchase the book, and about 40 percent of those downloaded end up being read cover-to-cover.

Booktrack has been working with authors and publishers to create e-books that have soundtracks built in, creating a more immersive experience for readers (and listeners). Users can purchase and download these e-books through Booktrack’s web site and mobile applications today, but it’s looking to expand both the number of titles available and the distribution outlets that sell them.

So far, the startup has published soundtracks for books from the likes of James Frey and Salman Rushdie, and recently also released a soundtracked version of the Bible. But the key to its success will also depend on its ability to work with major publishing houses, which it’s already starting to do. It’s had books from Random House and HarperCollins, among others.

Distribution on other platforms and e-book stores will also be key to its growth. For that, it’ll need to work with distributors like Amazon to deliver to Kindles natively. Booktrack uses the ePub format for publishing, so Cameron believes that it shouldn’t be hard to get its files to convert and work on other platforms.

With the new funding, it’s also working to roll out a self-serve platform to enable more authors and publishers to build soundtracks for its books. Today, it relies on audio processing at Post Road Post Production in Wellington, New Zealand — the post-production house founded by Peter Jackson. But it wants to make it simple so that anyone can create their own e-book soundtrack using its tools to sell on its website and through its apps.

It’s been a weird year for hardware: the biggest, most news-worthy launches haven’t come out of Cupertino or Tokyo but out of small Kickstarter campaigns that have, in the end, raised millions of dollars. Makers, in other words, are finally getting their due.

In this short Gift Guide episode of Makers I talk about a few of the cool toys that have crossed my transom over the past few months including an Arudino starter kit from Make Magazine and the Raspberry Pi.

If you’d like to hack with the kids, I’d recommend picking up something like Super Scratch Programming or Getting Started With Arduino, two beginning programming/hardware books for kids and the adults who love them. Then there’s always Minecraft, a sneaky way to teach kids about architecture, programming, and servers.

Lastly, I’m a huge fan of Solder: Time. I like the original kit – it’s a bit more analog (although it isn’t, really) and it’s a great way to teach kids about soldering and electronics. I was able to put it together in a few hours with my son and he had “98% fun,” which is a pretty big amount of fun for him.

Like Scrooge after discovering the True Spirit Of Christmas, AOL is offering a shiny half-crown (worth $1,056) to the little boy (its employees) as thanks for bringing the prize Turkey from the Poulterer’s this holiday. The $1,000 cash bonus is a celebration of the company’s $1.056 billion patent sale it made earlier this year.

I rarely, if ever, comment on internal AOL stuff but this is a nice gesture at the right time. The company is doing well in the markets and traffic is up for its properties. Patch, the hyperlocal news organization of the future, has shown its true value in the wake of recent news in Connecticut and, in the end, AOL is still trucking even after many wrote it off.

I wish, in my heart of hearts, that “Tiny” Tim Armstrong would appear before the gathered employees and do a quick, Mary-Lou-Retton-style tumbling routine like in Scrooged, but perhaps I’m dreaming too big.

AOL closed at 30.94 today with a high of 31.

This week’s Ask A VC series features a slew of awesome guests in the investment world. Tomorrow, we have True Ventures’ partners Tony Conrad and Puneet Agarwal in the studio, and Thursday, Shasta Ventures’ co-founder Rob Coneybeer will be in the hot seat.

Remember, you ask questions either in the comments or here and we’ll ask them of our VC guests.

Coming off True Ventures’ new $205 million third fund, there’s a lot to talk about with Conrad and Agarwal. And the firm now has $600 million under management.

Conrad is the Founding Venture Partner at True Ventures where he serves on the Board of Directors of Automattic (WordPress), appssavvy, Coffee & Power, Quarterly, StockTwits, RescueTime, PastFuture (GDGT), KISSmetrics, 20×200, Smarterer, Qualaroo, Trippy. A serial entrepreneur, Conrad co-founded about.me (acquired by Aol in December 2010) and Sphere which was acquired by Aol in April 2008.

Agarwal, who is a General Partner at True Ventures, started his career as a Product Manager at Crossworlds Software, an early integration software startup sold to IBM. He also spent time in the investment banking world, at BEA in product management, marketing roles and more.

Shasta Ventures’ Coneybeer co-founded the firm in 2004, started his career working in the Astro Space division of Martin Marietta, where he helped build the first EchoStar spacecraft. Later he moved into venture capital at New Enterprise Associates and then founded Shasta.

We’ll be asking Coneybeer, who focuses on investments in mobile and wireless startups, about the firms’ latest bets on collaborative consumption, his thoughts on the current fundraising climate, and more.

Check out our latest Ask A VC interview with Kleiner Perkins’ partner Megan Quinn.

Please send us your questions for Conrad, Agarwal or Coneybeer here or put them in comments below!