Author: Blancer

We’re hearing from multiple sources that Twitter is in talks to acquire Y Combinator-backed key word bidding platform AdGrok, in a deal that is less than $10 million. It’s still unclear where exactly they are in the closing process or whether this is a tech acquisition or an acqui-hire.

AdGrok itself automates the process of bidding on contextual keywords on Google AdWords; Perhaps Twitter could find some use in this for its own Promoted Trends/Tweets?

Twitter seems to be in acquisition mode, most recently dropping $40 million on pro-client Tweetdeck.

Fun fact about this particular grab: The last person Twitter corporate development executive Jessica Verrilli followed on Twitter was AdGrok co-founder Argyris Zymnis. Co-founder Antonio Garcia-Martinez has yet to return my calls.

Status update: It’s complicated.

Garcia-Martinez has changed his title on his Facebook profile to Product Manager at Facebook. I have no idea whether this means Facebook won some acquisition battle or that Garcia-Martinez left the rest of the AdGrok team independently. In any case we’ll find out soon enough.

A few days ago, Facebook held a tech talk at their headquarters. The topic of the talk was pushing changes — bug fixes, new features, product improvements, etc. Every day, Facebook engineers push hundreds of these; some big, some little. Most of the 600 million-plus users never notice a thing. And apparently, we’re even less likely to notice changes due to a special feature Facebook has. The “Everyone But TechCrunch Can See This” feature.

As Facebook engineer Chuck Rossi details around minute 23:00 in the video, Facebook has a tool they call “Gatekeeper” which allows them to be in control of who can see what code live on the service at any given time. As Rossi points out, right now on Facebook.com there is already the code for every major thing Facebook is going to launch in the next six months and beyond! It’s the Gatekeeper which stops us from seeing it.

And I do mean “us”. While some of the Gatekeeper parameters are obvious — filter by country, age, data center — one is really interesting. “One of my favorite ones is an ‘everyone except people from TechCrunch can see this’,” Rossi says. He’s serious.

What Facebook has done is likely just put all of our personal profiles on a list of people never eligible to see hidden code. Of course, that doesn’t always work. But it’s also the same type of feature that allowed them to “launch” a new faxing service with us, even though no one else could see it. Funny stuff.

We appreciate Facebook’s attention to detail in keeping us out of their code. Of course, now they’re really asking for it. Do they really think you can’t make a fake account on Facebook? Sure… Stay tuned for the next six months of features coming from Facebook…

The whole talk is excellent and worth watching, we’ve embedded it below.

[thanks Almir]

Twitter has been completely emphatic about where developers should stake a claim, with Twitter Platform Lead Ryan Sarver warning the ecosystem to stay away from building “client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience.” 

Well if Sarver stays true to his word the Twitpics and Yfrogs of the world can just give it up now. According to multiple sources, Twitter is on the verge on announcing its own built in Twitpic competitor. Like tomorrow, if things go according to plan (naturally this post might change that).

This shouldn’t really come as a surprise to anyone,  as photosharing is the next logical step of Twitter expanding its in app experience. It’s basically grabbing at low hanging fruit.

Twitter is flinging money around; It just spent $40 million on power user client Tweetdeck which represents 13% of its userbase. It’s only natural that they would spend more resources on photosharing, especially considering how much money is being poured into the white hot space and that images were the crux of the success of competitor Facebook.

I’ve got no details on what exactly the photosharing URL shortener will be if any (Twitter has owned Twimg.com for a long time) or what the Twitter for Photos product will look like. Just that it’s coming, soon. And if they’re smart they’ll put ads on it.

Pew Internet, a think tank that regularly publishes research reports about technology, has released a new study today showing the steady growth in using VoIP and phone services online. According to the organization’s report, a quarter of American adult internet users (24 percent) have placed phone calls online. That amounts to 19 percent of all American adults. On any given day 5 percent of internet users are going online to place phone calls, says Pew.

And Pew says that usage has grown significantly from a few years ago. For example, Pew found in February 2007 that 8 percent of internet users (6 percent of all adults) had placed calls online and 2% of internet users were making calls on any given day. At various points during the 2000s, Pew held similar surveys and found that at most about a tenth of internet users had ever used the internet to place calls and the daily figure never rose above 1 percent of internet users.

Pew also broke out its findings by demographic as well. Internet users between the ages of 18 and 29 years of age had the highest percentage of users who made calls online amongst age groups, with 27 percent of the age group reporting that they’ve made calls online. In terms of household income, 37 percent of users whose household income is above $70,000 have made a phone call online, compared to 13 percent for users whose household income is less than $30,000.

Considering Google’s presence in the market, and Microsoft’s $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype, we know the big players see strong potential in the market. But it’s certainly interesting to see data on just how common internet calling and VoIP services have become.

This is guest post by Ian Hogarth, co-founder of Songkick, relates how 45 startups in London’s East End got tired of being over-shadowed by the financial sector in London and created their own event to lure wanna-be startupers.

Sunday 15th May was a significant event for the London start-up community. 45 start-ups from across London gathered in one room with a single purpose – preventing banks and consultancies hiring the best UK engineering and computer science talent.

In the Bay Area the biggest recruitment challenge start-ups face is how to stand out from the crowd, with so many start-ups and a hiring boom. In London the start-up ecosystem has a different problem – developers aren’t aware start-ups exist. Most UK graduates in computer science assess their options via the ‘Milkround’, a giant careers fair held every year on university campuses across the UK. Banks, consultancies, Google, Microsoft and others spend tens of millions advertising to graduates and without the density of Silicon Valley, smaller start-ups are drowned out.

In this episode of Founder Stories with host Chris Dixon, Reddit Founder, Alexis Ohanian takes Dixon back to his college days at the University of Virginia where he and co-founder Steve Huffman bonded over video games and began plotting ways to avoid taking a real job after graduation.

Not wanting to be holed-up in a cubicle for 50 years, they submitted an idea to Y Combinator, the idea got rejected, they got accepted, and together began building around the concept of “people deliberately trying to find and share new and interesting stuff online” says Ohanian.

Joking about “competitive analysis” Ohanian tells Dixon he wasn’t even familiar with Digg until “about a week or two after we had launched” and says interestingly enough, “it was this classic example of alright, you’ve launched, it turns out there is someone else who is in your space, who has already got a significant advantage, and you know, that is not time to quit, that is just time to keep doing what you are doing.”

The boys kept on doing, and did quite well. Less than two years after launching they sold Reddit to Conde Nast and Ohanian says Reddit is currently tallying “1.3-billion page views per month.”

Make sure to watch the full episode for additional insights.

In the below interview, Ohanian offers thoughts on the future of Reddit from his vantage point as a consultant and tells Dixon how Reddit makes money.

Past episodes of Founder Stories with such leaders as Fred Wilson, Perry Chen and Lauren Leto are here.

According to several sources Airbnb is in the process of closing a whopper of a funding round: $100 million or more at a $1 billion-plus valuation. The round is being lead by Andreessen Horowitz, and includes participation from DST, say our sources.

That’s a big increase from the company’s last funding round of $7.2 million, which included Sequoia Capital, Greylock, SV Angel, Ashton Kutcher and Youniversity Ventures (Kutcher broke the news that he’s an investor in AirBnB at TechCrunch Disrupt last week). The company, which launched via Y Combinator, has raised just $7.8 million to date.

No surprise, it was a hotly contested deal. The service has exploded, growing more than 800% last year and booking 1.6 million night stays in other people’s homes to date. On any given night in New York there are more people staying in homes via Airbnb than there are rooms in the biggest hotel in Manhattan.

Airbnb has become the sleeper hit of the startup world. It’s one of those companies plenty of well-heeled investors passed on in the early days, because they thought no one would want to open his or her home to strangers. Out of twenty angels he pitched in 2008, founder Brian Chesky said half didn’t return his emails and most of the others told him it was an awful idea. Even Paul Graham hated it, but he liked Chesky and backed him hoping he’d change the company. TechCrunch’s own hotel expert Paul Carr was a cynic too.

Now, the fear of missing another Airbnb is palpable in the Valley, and one of the reasons GetAround became the darling, audience choice and winner of our Disrupt conference this week.

Earlier in the week, I sat down with Airbnb founder Brian Chesky to talk about this reversal in fortune and how the business is going, although at the time we hadn’t heard the details of the deal he was busy negotiating. Check it out below.

If you’re in the United States, you’re probably tired of hearing about Spotify, the on-demand music service that lets you to listen to any of 13 million tracks as often as you’d like on both your PC and mobile phone. The service still hasn’t managed to close deals with the major music labels over here, but it has developed quite a following in Europe, with over 10 million users and 1 million paid subscribers. And when it finally does come stateside it might turn into an even bigger hit.

And it all started with one main business idea: make a music service that’s more convenient than piracy.

That’s one of the highlights from a presentation given by Spotify engineer Gunnar Kreitz at KTH Royal Institute of Technology last month (many of Spotify’s engineers came from KTH). Unfortunately I’m not seeing a recording of the presentation anywhere online, but Kreitz has posted the slides to his website, which you can find embedded below. The slides outline some of the key technical attributes that make Spotify what it is, many of which revolve around one key factor: speed.

According to the slides, Spotify has a median playback latency of only 265 ms, which Kreitz says “feels immediate” and avoids Spotify’s forbidden word, “Buffering”. Only 1% of songs streamed have buffering issues. In other words, the Spotify player is every bit as fast and reliable as, say, iTunes, and it’s a hell of a lot faster than finding the latest album release on BitTorrent.

Here are some of the interesting datapoints from the presentation:

• Development is done in three week sprints, called the ‘scrum methodology’
• Spotify uses a proprietary protocol that was designed for on-demand streaming, with most streams at Ogg Vorbis q5 @ 160kbps
• While Spotify streams music on demand, caching is very important. The player caches your most-recently listened to tracks, and a lot of them: it uses 10% of your disk space by default (you can adjust that figure). Most Spotify users have a lot of data cached, with 56% over 5GB. And the strategy works: over 50% of data is served from the local cache, which saves a lot of bandwidth
• When you listen to a song, the first ‘piece’ is immediately streamed from Spotify servers, and the player switches to P2P whenever possible (if P2P isn’t working, it will switch back to Spotify’s central servers).
• P2P makes it easier for Spotify to scale, and leads to them needing fewer servers. It can also provide better uptime.
• Mobile clients, as you’d expect, aren’t participating in P2P streaming.

Ashton Kutcher started dabbling in tech startups a few years ago, but he is no longer a dabbler, as his his Disrupt interview with Charlie Rose last week made clear. Kutcher is an investor in a dozen tech companies, including Skype, Foursquare, Path, and Kevin Rose’s Milk. In this backstage interview with Sarah Lacy, he reveals that he is also an investor in AirBnB (whose CEO Brian Chesky was also at Disrupt) and why he thinks the company is different.

Kutcher talks about his approach to investing in startups. At first it was very much a leraning process for him. “I became an apprentice” to other tech investors, he says, because “I don’t like to fail.”

Will investing become more of a hobby now that he is about to start a full-time job replacing Charlie Sheen on the CBS sitcom Two and a Half Men? Not at all, he says. Sitcom hours are much more predictable than movie-set hours. You can expect Kutcher to keep investing.

IAC-owned Match.com has set its sights on Europe’s largest dating site, Meetic.com. Match Match.com has put in a public tender offer to acquire all of the outstanding shares of Meetic for €15.00 per outstanding share in cash (that’s $21.42 in U.S. dollars). That’s a 11.6 percent increase in value from the closing price of Meetic shares on May 27, 2011 (€13.44) and values the company at nearly $500 million.

Match.com actually already owns approximately 27% of the outstanding shares of Meetic, which it obtained when it combined its European businesses with Meetic in 2009. Back then, IAC sold 100 percent of the stock of Match Europe – the entity that houses Match.com’s European operations – for an approximate 27 percent stake in Meetic, plus a 5 million euro note.

Marc Simoncini, Meetic’s founder and Chairman, has agreed to offer Match.com approximately 3.7 million shares, representing approximately 16% of the total number of shares outstanding. Simoncini will retain the balance of his stake (approximately 1.6 million shares, representing approximately 7 percent of the total number of shares outstanding) and intends to remain on Meetic’s Board. The two companies say that Meetic’s executive committee supports the decision.

This would probably be one of the dating site’s largest acquisitions to date. Match just recently dropped $50 million to acquire online dating site OKCupid. And the company bought People Media for $80 million in 2009.

So why does Match want Meetic? On paper, the site sees to be expand the company’s reach and revenue. The site is available in 16 European countries, in 13 languages. In 2010, Meetic posted total sales of $266 million, and has a market cap of $437 million. Match’s offer values the company at nearly $500 million. In comparison, Match.com’s core revenue came in at $93.3 million in first quarter 2011 (up 18 percent), and subscriber are up 22 percent.

Match says that it plans to file offer with the French Securities Regulator within two to three weeks. Match does not intend to de-list Meetic, which is listed in Compartment B of Euronext Paris of the NYSE Euronext, following completion of the tender offer.

Here’s a video of Simoncini speaking at LeWeb in 2008.

Seems like it’s Sub-Saharan Month around here: first Sarah Lacy went to Nigeria, and now here I am in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital and Africa’s fourth-largest city. It feels like a boomtown. There are cranes and construction sites everywhere, throwing up gleaming new glass-and-steel buildings full of shops selling computers and mobile phones. The major thoroughfares throng with people making, trading, repairing, unloading, selling, and generally hustling.

Don’t get me wrong: this is still a poor country. Electrical outages are regular occurrences, the taxis that patrol the city’s broad avenues are rusting Ladas, and the side streets are harrowed dirt strewn with garbage, lined with tin shacks, and patrolled by beggars and feral dogs. But I’ve only seen occasional pockets of the poisonous stagnation I’ve found so often elsewhere south of the Sahara. This feels like a place where things happen. It’s a city and country that could be on the cusp of a genuine transformation, catalyzed by technology—were it not for a single, gigantic roadblock: its own government.

“Oh, they’re great,” Jörn Schultz deadpans about Ethio Telecom (ETC), the government monopoly that controls all phone, mobile, and Internet service across the nation, and everyone in the room bursts into laughter. He shakes his head. “No, no. They’re terrible.”

It’s not just the censorship, though that’s bad enough: the entire blogspot.com domain is blocked, along with various Facebook pages and newspapers. But it’s not what most angers the people here at iceAddis, the new “innovation/collaboration/entrepeneurship” space modelled after Nairobi’s legendary iHub. (I’ll tell you more about it in a separate post.) What upsets this crowd is ETC’s sheer incompetence.

A very brief acquaintance with Ethiopia’s Internet cafes will confirm everything they say in a hurry. Connection speeds are highly variable, trending towards painfully slow, if and when you can connect at all. Ethiopia still hasn’t linked up with the SEACOM fiber that brings broadband to East Africa, explains Markos Lemma, another iceAddis founder; as a result, the entire nation has only 1.2 gigabits of bandwidth for its 85 million people, more of whom are coming online every day. You do the math.

If you have a connection problem, things get even worse; by all accounts, ETC’s customer care makes Comcast seem like Rolls-Royce. Fitsum Assalif, a security hacker and penetration tester (“white-hat only,” he assures me with a grin) grimaces with disbelief, remembering: he also works at a large NGO, and the last time they had a serious connectivity issue, “I had to go to (Ethiopia Telecom’s) data center and fix it myself… They send their workers to China for training, but I don’t know what they get.”

But surely a place like iceAddis could end-run around the problem with a VSAT dish? Lemma (who has set up an entertaining “ETC sucks” Facebook page) shakes his head: “There’s no VSAT, it’s impossible.” The government forbids them for all except the most powerful of organizations; he estimates that there are fewer than half a dozen in the country, for places like the UN, World Bank, African Union. The red tape doesn’t stop there: you need a permit to import “anything with an IP number,” which takes a month—and they usually say no.

This is a proud nation, and with reason: Ethiopia is the only African nation which defeated their would-be European colonizers and remained independent throughout the colonial era. But they need to start looking to the rest of Africa as an example. “They’re so far ahead of us in Kenya,” Assanif says forlornly, meaning the fierce competition among mobile and Internet providers there, and the access and innovation that has thrived as a result.

It’s ironic that Ethiopia’s current government are the same people who overthrew the brutal Marxists called the Derg twenty years ago; alas, they seem to have inherited some of their archenemies’ fondness for monopolies, protectionism, and bureaucracy. I believe mobile Internet access is a transformational force that could turn African nations into economic lions to rival Asia’s tigers—but only if it’s fast, cheap, and ubiquitous. And that will never happen here while every bit of Ethiopia’s Internet is controlled by a dinosaur monopoly with no competitive incentive to improve.

Seth Sternberg is the CEO and Co-founder of Meebo. He previously worked in M&A at IBM.

I love talking to aspiring entrepreneurs—I do it once a week at minimum.

I often get asked “what’s the role of a startup CEO?” Sometimes people are curious about the pre-launch “CEO” and ask if a startup really needs one. If that CEO isn’t an engineer, what do they do anyhow? Other times people wonder what I do today as CEO of a 180 person company. In this post I’ll cover the pre-launch role, and in a follow-up, I’ll get into the role post-launch.

So what does the CEO, who at the beginning is really the general business person, do at a pre-launch startup?

Let’s go back to the beginning of Meebo, circa April, 2005.

Co-founders Sandy Jen, Elaine Wherry and I met every Wednesday night and all day every Sunday in an effort to get Meebo off the ground. We’d never meet in my apartment—it was always either at Sandy’s or Elaine’s. Why? Because they had the better computers and the faster internet connections. Frankly, that’s pretty emblematic of one’s role as the “business person” pre-launch. I’ve touched upon this topic before in a Founder Stories interview with Chris Dixon (embedded below), but it is worth elaborating on.

For most consumer internet products, there’s not a whole lot the business person can really do pre-launch. All of the company’s value will come when the team builds and launches a product, so that should be the primary focus. There aren’t any partnerships to be struck yet, as the product has yet to build any credibility in the market. There aren’t any folks to interview, as you can’t afford to hire a full team, and you’re wasting your time looking for pre-launch financing—a controversial statement these days, I know, but that’s a topic for another post. So what can you do if the most important thing is simply to minimize all distractions in the pursuit of getting the product launched?

Buy sandwiches.

Well, really, the business person’s job, until the last 2-3 weeks before launch, is to be supportive.

When we got together on Sundays, I really couldn’t contribute very much real work. I could make the sandwich runs to the Andronico’s down the street (I still have the “buy 10, get the 11th free card” in my wallet). I could also take care of the mundane tasks like buying the domain name and paying the server bills. Heck, I could even suggest “that button might look better over there.” But that was about it. I was the support.

I began to wonder, “Should I even be here?” Frankly, it didn’t feel very good to sit there and watch Elaine and Sandy working away while I did comparatively little. I could just as well have been playing Frisbee.

When I wondered that aloud, the feedback from Elaine and Sandy was pretty clear: if you’re going to be part of this team, then we want you here.

We were all equals with our own skills that we each brought to the table. My presence, at some level, was moral support. At another level, it contributed to the team bonding that you need pre-launch. Post-launch, things will tend to get crazy, fast, so pre-built trust is critical. At the end of the day, it’s the team that really makes the startup. Strong teams—as Sandy is quick to point out—survive multiple ideas.

Let’s fast-forward to the 2-3 weeks pre-launch, however, where the business person begins to get a job.

First, go and line up the right law firm to get incorporated.

The standard deal, at least at the time, was $20K in legal fees deferred until you raise your series A. I don’t think much has changed. Make sure you get advice on which firm and partner to work with—the way your company gets incorporated can save you a lot of pain down the road. (Watch a relevant chat between Chris Dixon and Erick Schonfeld here). Do not work with a firm inexperienced in setting up startups. Rather, work with Fenwick, Wilson Sonsini, OMM, Gundersen, Orrick, and the like. And even in those firms, ensure you’re working with the folks who have startup creation experience—all partners are not created equal.

Second, figure out your launch strategy.

Do you want to line up a bunch of friends to test your product before launch? Do it. Then corral all of their feedback and help prioritize it for your co-founders. Do you need to find a couple of folks who can introduce you to a blogger or two to write about your launch? Find them and go pre-brief those bloggers. Make sure you also line up your friends to give you some social media mojo—get them to Facebook and Tweet your launch.

Third, find a good mentor or two.

It’s important to find someone who is passionate about what you’re up to and who genuinely wants to work with you and your team to help you create an awesome product. Someone who is perhaps 2-4 years ahead of the process from where you sit, who has seen good and bad, and who can guide you toward good choices and help you avoid potentially painful early mistakes. Ironic, but when you have the least experience is also when you make a bunch of choices on how you set up your company—choices which will potentially burn you or save you years down the road.

In a future post, I’ll get into the business person’s role post-launch. But before we end, one more thing: do you even need a business person pre-launch since they do seemingly so little?

The answer is yes, for three basic reasons.

First, post-launch, the business person’s job becomes very important. You want them there for their actual work product (beyond their amazing ability to remember your sandwich order) post-launch. You don’t want to go through the pain of finding this person post-launch when things get nutty. Rather, you want them lined up and ready to go from the start.

Second, just like it’s unbelievably hard to find great engineers, it’s also unbelievably hard to find great business people. Just like a bad engineering co-founder can help ruin a company and a good one can help make a company, the same goes for business folks. Once you find a great engineering co-founder, hold onto them as tight as you can. And once you find a great business co-founder, do the same.

Third, team bonding is really important. The more time you have to do this, the better. I’ve argued that there’s nothing more important in getting a company off the ground than finding and putting together the ultimate founding team. This bonding is super critical in the early days because you will likely spend years together. It’s hard to explain ust how important it is that you understand and trust each other, implicitly. The sooner you get together as a unit, the better off you all will be.

Photo credit: Flickr/FotoosVanRobin

Ever since my first TechCrunch meetup in Berlin in 2008 and 2009 I’ve been keeping a watchful eye on this city as I travelled around Europe covering startups and explaining the scene to anyone who would listen. But since then it’s quite clear that a couple of things have happened. The whole European scene has improved massively. There are now startup events, activity and fundraising across Europe in an ongoing manner. Sure, it’s not Silicon Valley (I’m sorry, but who cares?) – in fact we should really be comparing ourselves to our own progress, not to other places. And the news is good. The ‘Valley Virus’ has spread, and Europe is now starting to boast some amazing startups.

Continuing our series of interviews with companies in the “Silicon Roundabout” area of London (we’re calling this The Roundabout Tapes), we interviewed Clearer Partners.

Clearer is a specialised tech/media consulting company but is also doing a startup. The soon to launch Frameblast is aimed at SOHO companies who want to handle video in a smarter way along the lines of Media Silo. Companies can upload their archives into the cloud and use it like a Google search engine for their archive, with tags galore.

I’m a creature of habit, of habits I create to push myself forward. When Twitter appeared, I knew it was a habit that would grab a hold of not just my generation but many others. In fact, it grabbed a hold of the notion of generations and twisted it into something special: a generation of the now.

The other day we were in Las Vegas, in a hotel that like all of Vegas stank of cigarettes and losers, which by definition included us for being there. We sat at a sushi restaurant, or what started with sushi and ended with samba — three kitchens with little crossover from latin to salmon. And so we sailed across the generations, talking music and the history of salesforce, and arriving at the movies. And in particular Citizen Kane.

Orson Welles’ defining moment, the intersection of melodrama and politics, of the end of the age of controlled media and the dawn of what we now call social media. The story of Charles Foster Kane, a stand-in for Hearst who started wars when there was a dearth of headlines. We saw him in a fake newsreel standing on a balcony with Hitler, saw the arc of his life at the center of the Golden Age where Washington and Hollywood were two sides of the same coin. And as we were swept along in the daring pop media that the film invented, we became a generation of one.

Go look for Kane on Netflix and it’s not available, at least not for streaming. That’s because the owners of the film can still wring a handsome sum out of the 1941 release. Black and white, but stunning in its visual quality, the experiments of cinematographer Gregg Toland who flooded the sets with enough light to allow perfect focus with infinite depth of field. In enabling the dramatic perspective shots, Toland had ceilings constructed, anticipating the move to location filming when faster lightweight cameras were developed.

The story-telling was equally elliptical, with flashbacks tracing various stages of the great life, and in the process opening the picture up with the passage of time and intersecting impressions from a wide range of family, friend, and foe. Like the Godfather films a generation later, history and personal drive stood side by side, informing each other. Like the Kennedy assassination and the ascent of the Beatles, two polar opposites that defined the culture in ways that still are being played out.

And then there was the conceit of the enterprise: the idea Welles had that he could create a self-contained world, or universe even, where the natural laws of ambition and power met forces even greater. Kane was a hurricane without peer, a modern king who took his birthright and assembled a Xanadu to house the treasures of emperors and dynasties alongside the stars and leaders of the day. And Welles drove the picture through the force of his will, co-writing, starring, producing, and directing a film that would easily have won the Academy Award it was nominated for if not for the vendetta Hearst held against Welles and his team for the rest of his and their lives.

In the early Eighties, the computer revolution began to take shape, fostered by the space program and the spirit of the Kennedys and the Beatles. Apple synthesized the two threads with its choice of a name, and the Web birthed a generation of Kanes that has yet to subside. Viral wealth creation and the culture of the virtual king-making machine may still be playing out, but as the old saying goes in Hollywood, they don’t make stars like they used to. As Zuck and Ev and even Larry and Curly attest, the era of the studio system has come to an end.

But the spirit of Kane is alive and well, and the proof is in the social wave. Just look at the entropy of Windows, the power of realtime building a head of steam as it reworks our language like the Front Page remade our dialogue, like the West Wing suggested we could carry on big decisions while getting plenty of exercise, like Twitter begat Foursquare begat Groupon begat the App Internet. We’ll argue about all this across the realtime stream, claiming winners and losers and revenue in between. But we’ll do this as one generation, united by the breathless mothers of invention, those who like Welles dared to produce a wave of innovation that will shape our lives far into the future.