Category: Tech news

SparkLabs, a new startup accelerator, launched today in hopes of developing South Korea’s next wave of entrepreneurs.

Serial entrepreneurs Hanjoo Lee, James Kim and Bernard Moon, who have all known each other since college, co-founded the accelerator. Moon said they are all Korean or Korean American and want to be a part of the changing entrepreneurial landscape in the country.

Moon says they see more young entrepreneurs looking outside South Korea and wanting to be global companies, not just working to be acquired by a regional company. They want to build a network to advise these companies on launching outside of Korea to the U.S., Japan, China and more.

“We’re really focused on helping Korean entrepreneurs grow and develop their business outside of Korea,” he tells me.

SparkLabs opens applications for its inaugural class of 4-8 companies on August 30th. The program will launch at the end of November, with the first class graduating at the end of January and the second class beginning in March.

Moon says they looked at some of the most successful accelerators, like Y Combinator and TechStars, when modeling SparkLabs. Like most of its peer institutions, SparkLabs will provide startups with free office space and mentors, among other benefits. Each company will get 5-6 mentors, who will have a hands-on role in guiding the startup.

Moon says Mark Cuban and Vint Cerf, the accelerator’s high-profile advisors, will provide “high-level advice and big picture guidance,” possibly attending events or speaking sessions with the classes; however, he admits that having them also just helps to lend SparkLabs credibility.

SparkLabs is a member of the Global Accelerator Network, a group of independently owned accelerators around the world, including charter member TechStars. SparkLabs is the Network’s first member in Korea.

Moon says he and his co-founders don’t see themselves in competiton with other Korean accelerators, as they want several in Korea to develop an ecosystem.

Tonight, Twitter quietly rolled out another feature — one that may seem simple and straightforward at first glance but could actually have big implications. The company said via its very own Twitter account that users can now click on stock (or “ticker”) symbols in any tweet to view search results for those stocks and companies.

To make this possible, Twitter is essentially introducing a new hashtag — or what is being called a “cashtag.” Instead of the ubiquitous “#”, the addition of the symbol “$” added in front of any ticker will instantly provide context for that stock, aggregating all tweets that use the ticker under one label. Twitter gives the example of “$GE” — General Electric’s ticker symbol — although this will obviously work for any company, like Apple ($AAPL) or Google ($GOOG), allowing users to peruse conversations happening around those stocks in realtime.

Now you can click on ticker symbols like $GE on twitter.com to see search results about stocks and companies

— Twitter (@twitter) July 31, 2012

Drew Olanoff of The Next Web was the first to notice Twitter’s new feature, and pointed out that Twitter’s new feature closely resembles functionality that StockTwits has boasted for some time now.

This similarity was not lost on StockTwits co-founder and CEO Howard Lindzon, who as Drew pointed out, recently sold the remainder of his Twitter shares last week.

In fact, Lindzon said that Twitter’s new feature “hijacked” StockTwits’ own use of the “$” symbol to structure their internal data, even though he says that the company had told him that this was not functionality they planned to add.

In a blog post entitled “The Twitter Hijacking of Stocktwits $ … The Cashtag,” Lindzon says:

It’s interesting that Twitter has hijacked our creation of $TICKER ie. $AAPL. It only took four years to ‘fill‘ this hole, though a few months back they told me in a detailed email it was not a hole they wanted to fill.

The CEO continued on saying that the curation features Twitter is beginning to test out are similar to those that StockTwits has been thinking about for more than four years and has implemented, joking, “Twitter is about advertising dollars. They have $1 billion of venture money on the line. Lot’s of pressures I am not interested in … I wonder how well that will do for $FXCM (buying ads on twitter) converting hits from rappers into FOREX accounts.”

Lindzon said that he was “disappointed of course that Twitter is hijacking our idea and time,” and in the comments responded to fans saying that he had, to this point, seen no attribution from Twitter anywhere in regard to this feature. As to what kind of recourse is left for StockTwits, Lindzon said that they will continue to push on, taking stock (!) in the fact that Twitter has a lot of pressures and a lot of breadth (he cites its social graph and product), but StockTwits has the community, and depth and a unique approach, where Twitter so far has none.

Lindzon concludes:

I am disappointed of course that Twitter is hijacking our idea and time (will only confuse the masses), but Stocktwits moved beyond that basic functionality 4 years ago. In a dirty way, it’s the ultimate compliment so we will take it as such for the moment and keep rolling out functionality that makes us the best real-time communication platform for people that love stocks and markets.

We definitely have not heard the end of this issue as it relates to StockTwits, in particular, and Twitter’s new clickable “$” really that just scratches the surface. As Drew points out in a follow-up post, cashtags could be just the tip of the iceberg.

Unstructured data leads to a poor user experience, and Twitter has unstructured data in spades. To begin offering a search mechanism that is actually useful, the company may begin employing other symbols to use as secondary hashtags. This could do wonders for the company in a number of obvious ways, but whether directly in this way, or in other ways as it decides whether it’s a media company or a technology company, it’s not the last we’re going to see of Twitter stepping on the toes of startups (a la StockTwits).

When Yahoo acquired IntoNow last spring, the “technology powered media company” sought ways to connect users playing around with their iPhones and iPads with content that they were watching on TV. Today, about 80 percent of users watch television with some sort of mobile device in their hands. But mostly what they’re doing is checking email and playing Angry Birds. Now if only there were some app that could get them to pay attention to TV-type stuff while commercials are on. That’s what IntoNow and other second screen apps are all about.

Anyway, the newest IntoNow release — the company’s third major update — takes a step back from earlier versions, which were focused on TV discovery and sharing metadata with users. It found that users were getting little actual utility out of those features, and they weren’t coming back for more, according IntoNow GM Adam Cahan. So the team set about re-imagining ways it could promote more interaction with the app.

So what’d it come up with? For one thing, the new app also has a new TV and music sync function, which lets people know which songs are in the background during the middle of a show or as the credits roll. That doesn’t just apply to studio songs, but it can also help identify covers and live performances. So when you hear a song you like on American Idol, you can find the original. Users can then purchase a song on iTunes or watch the music video on YouTube.

But the biggest new feature is probably the addition of CapIt, which lets users capture and share photos from the TV shows that they’re watching. When watching a TV show with the IntoNow app, users can choose to CapIt during memorable moments, and the app will let them choose from multiple images that occurred prior to doing so. Users can then pick an image and share it with friends on Twitter, Facebook, or IntoNow. Users can also add captions, using the Meme-worthy Impact font, to add their own humor to screen captures.

On the backend, CapIt works by capturing one image per second of pretty much all the moments that happen on screen, and then holds them for a week. That’s more than 15 million images a day, according to Cahan. So even if you’re watching something on DVR, it will be able to match your image, as long as it’s been over the past week.

IntoNow also has rolled out a new group chat feature that will let users interact with each other. The function allows users to see which friends are available, so they can easily create chat conversations with each other. Friends can also create recurring conversations live when new episodes of their favorite shows air.

Frankly I’m not huge on second screen apps, but adding functionality like CapIt could give IntoNow a huge boost. With more than 3 million downloads, it’s already doing pretty well. But giving users an easy way to meme-ify TV could win over a lot of interest, if the right crowd catches on.

The future is in apps you don’t open.

“We’re going to move away from the era of ‘I have hundreds of apps but never think of using them’ towards ‘I have these cool apps and they take care of me’”. This is David Lieb, co-founder and CEO of Bump, on the sea change in design philosophy that underpins Pay With Square and his company’s new photos apps Flock.

It centers around the idea that apps shouldn’t force us to add new behaviors. Instead, they should strip away needless, interruptive steps from themselves and the way we live our lives, until the solutions to our problems become irreducible.

Bump was originally conceived in a quest to reduce friction in meeting new people. Lieb and co-founder Jake Mintz found it archaic that, with all the sensors and communication channels embedded in our phones, people were still fiddling to type in each other’s contact info rather than continuing their conversations. Bump lets people physically touch their phones to instantly exchange all their email addresses and phone numbers, then get back to truly interacting.

Lieb and his Bump co-founder Jake Mintz tell me the philosophy behind Flock was crystallized by a conversation about parking meters with Slide founder and app design godfather Max Levchin. The pair were wondering aloud how great it would be to get out of your car, open their app and Bump the parking meter, then walk away. Levchin replied, “What’d be cooler would be if you just pulled into the parking spot and walked away.”

Over the past few years, there’s been a trend of building standalone apps instead of cramming more features into a single app. Facebook broke out Messenger and Camera from its bloated primary app, and Google offers a suite of standalones for Gmail, Earth, Voice, and Translate. When you open these apps, you find they’re dedicated to nailing a specific function or use case.

But the next phase of design eliminates opening the apps altogether. As we download more and more, they become harder to find on our devices, and we become more likely to forget about them. Folders and in-device search may not make things much easier.

What we need are apps that know when we need them. Pay With Square (formerly Card Case) is a pioneer in this movement. When you go to pay a merchant using the service, your name and face appear on the merchant’s checkout app verifying your identity, and you’re done. You don’t swipe a card or even pull your phone out of your pocket, meaning instead of adding a behavior to the payment experience, it actually eliminates one.

Bump’s new app Flock follows the same mantra, removing the need to ask “Can you send me that?”

Install Flock and take photos with whatever app you want, but instead of interrupting your moment with friends or in front of a beautiful sight to share them, you just put your iPhone away. After you’ve left the geo-fenced area, Flock sends you a push notification leading to a pre-populated album of your photos. It scans the photo libraries of your Flock-using Facebook friends for people who also took photos at the same location, and suggests you share with them. Then they get a push, and can add their own photos to the collaborative album.

For now, developers are limited by the sensors built into our devices and the data they transmit, including GPS, accelerometers, and microphones. Combined with social APIs from the likes of Twitter and Facebook there are already plenty of existing apps that could be made simpler. And as we build connectivity into more dumb devices, and as our smart phones get smarter with technology like near field communication, even more opportunities will emerge.

Apps needn’t merely translate physical activities into ones and zeroes. Developers should look deeper at the challenges we face each day, the little frictions, the wastes of time.   The shortest path between Point A and Point B isn’t necessarily a straight line or a series of steps. Sometimes it’s folding the universe to erase the distance until the space between the problem and the solution becomes irreducible.

–

I was so impressed with Flock that I asked David Lieb and he’s agreed to come talk about it at TechCrunch’s Facebook Ecosystem CrunchUp this Friday.

It looks like Amazon.com is expanding its Lockers program, which allows customers to have their deliveries sent to, yes, nearby lockers.

The idea was first reported last fall. It may seem like an inconvenient alternative to home delivery at first — until you think about some of the headaches that can come up, like worrying one of your neighbors will swipe the package as it’s sitting on your doorstep, or making sure you’re at home to sign for it. With Amazon Lockers, the package sits securely at a nearby pick-up station, until you come by at your convenience (well, as long as it’s within three days of delivery) and open the locker up with a special code.

Anecdotal reports suggested that at least one of the early lockers in Seattle didn’t result in a stampede of new customers. However, Amazon continued to expand the program — the site now lists Seattle, New York, Washington, DC, and London as participating geographies. And our own Ryan Lawler just saw that there are Amazon Lockers available for delivery in Silicon Valley — three, to be precise, at 7-Elevens in San Carlos, Palo Alto, and Mountain View.

I haven’t had a chance to drive down to the Valley to see the lockers for myself (bad journalist!), but I was able to order a book for delivery to the San Carlos location, so they appear to be up-and-running. The interface for delivering to a locker is a bit wonky right now, because you can’t set an Amazon Locker as your default address, so you have to go in and manually select it each time. That, along with the limited locations, suggests this is still very much an experiment. But it’s an experiment that’s growing.

I’ve also emailed Amazon for comment and will update if I hear back.

Dalton Caldwell made some serious waves earlier this month when he announced “an audacious proposal” to refocus his company App.net to build a real-time feed API and service that would essentially be a new, more open version of Twitter.

Perhaps the most unique thing about App.net’s new direction is that it aims to be something that users will pay for, rather than being another ad-supported social platform. Dalton has set up a Kickstarter-like fundraising effort to attract $500,000 in necessary backing from some 10,000 potential users of App.net’s service. App.net has a self-imposed deadline of August 13th to meet its funding requirement. With two weeks to go, they’re a little over a fifth of the way there in terms of money raised — so the pressure is certainly on.

It’s always fun to hear about big ideas like this, so it was great to have Caldwell stop by TechCrunch TV last week to tell us in person about App.net’s new mission and clear up some common misconceptions about what they’re up to. You can watch our whole conversation in the video embedded above, and below I’ve excerpted some of his points.

Electricity, Water, And The Social Web

Caldwell says that if social web services like Twitter want to be treated like platforms for an ecosystem (which they clearly are, as evidenced by the freakouts that occur when Twittter goes down), we should get used to paying for them like we pay for other infrastructure services:

“If you think about things we take for granted that are infrastructure — electricity, water, cell phone plans, phone plans, you name it — these are things you pay for, and you expect that when you turn on the faucet the water comes out, and that it is what you expect.

…My thesis is that if you are a social platform, platform being the imperative word, you are telling developers to build their businesses on top of you. You are telling websites to link into you. You’re telling them, hey, I’m going to enable social interaction and communication, and I’m going to be a rock-solid thing that you can depend on. My thesis is that if you purport to be a platform, your business model needs to reflect your platform-ness. Because if you instead have an ad business model, and you’re not making enough money, you can end up slaughtering your ecosystem.”

Millions Of Dollars And Users Not Required

If App.net is thinking so big, why is it only asking for $500,000, a relatively small amount of money by modern web standards? Caldwell explained it like this:

“We chose the number $500,000 because of a Paul Graham post. Paul Graham wrote in this post called “Really Ambitious Startup Ideas” that if you built a search engine, a Google competitor, that was used by the top 10,000 geeks… even though it’s really nerdy and will only appeal to those 10,000 geeks, you can build something that will ultimately displace Google. Because when you think about Google displacing Yahoo, [at the time] Google was only used by 10,000 geeks. It was made for power users and trickled down.

If I can build something that appeals to a relatively small number of people, but make them passionate about it and make them believe in it, then that will validate that this market actually exists.”

Will It Actually Make It?

In short, Caldwell says, maybe yes, maybe no:

“If you look at the people who [have invested in] Join.App.net — John Gruber, Marco Arment — people that I look up to have pretty impressively supported this and agreed with it. And that’s been inspiring. So I think it’s gone quite well. But I have no idea if we’re actually going to get to 100 percent [of the funding needed to take App.net forward]. I think that a lot more needs to happen.

..There’s a great deal of skepticism, and again, I am completely sympathetic to that. Remember Diaspora? …It captured people’s imaginations, and then they weren’t able to do the thing that they said they would. So I actually really relate to and understand people’s skepticism.”

Network Effects Work In Mysterious Ways

The most common misconception Caldwell says he’s heard is people saying App.net is ignoring the phenomenon of “network effects,” where services go up in value as their user base grows. Caldwell says he definitely gets that concept — but that he’s seeing the potential for it to work in unique ways:

“People seem to think that I don’t [understand] network effects at all, and that I’m just totally crazy… Look, the way I think about this is that if you have a sustainable business on a small user base, that will give you the time and momentum to get you where you need to go. Look at the iPhone: Very small market share out of the gate, but had runway to build the momentum of the platform, despite the fact that it was very expensive and very esoteric when it came out.

And the other thing is, I would argue there is such a thing as negative network effects, where as communities get larger the quality of the community gets diluted. And if you look at what a lot of the people that built large social networks previously are doing now, it’s smaller, more curated communities.”

It’s no secret that the mobile app landscape has become extremely competitive. Over the last few years, this has led to an incredible amount of innovation and progress, but the cost of visibility — of acquiring new users — is also on the rise. In fact, Fiksu found that the cost of acquiring users hit a record high in December. While December is a critical month for app discovery, it remained to be seen whether or not this trend would continue.

Today, W3i, the monetization and distribution network for app developers, released new user acquisition figures for the first half of 2012, and the results tell the same story and are worrying for developers. Assessing hundreds of millions of mobile users from January to June 2012, W3i found that the average cost-per-install (of CPI) of mobile apps increased by 70 percent on Android and by 56 percent on iOS.

By June, the cost-per-install on Android had risen from $0.30 to $0.51, while iOS CPI has increased from $0.59 to $0.92.

W3i attributed this increase, in part, to mobile gaming giants like DeNA have entered the U.S. market, a prime example of the fact that, for the first time, billion-dollar companies are now competing with small to mid-sized developers. As free-to-play giants leverage their huge marketing budgets to help attract new users, the overall cost of user acquisition has increased — making it increasingly difficult for developers who are trying to make a living in apps.

“The entire user acquisition market is undergoing a sea change that will require mobile developers to re-think how they obtain and monetize their users,” said Robert Weber, co-founder of W3i. “This could be the ‘innovate or die’ moment for a lot of developers as the competition for mobile users continues to heat up.”

Many were surprised when popular Mac and iOS email client Sparrow recently exited to Google. Considering that the Sparrow team was widely respected, the app had risen to popularity, and the team had raised a seed round from some notable investors, it seemed a somewhat disappointing result.

The team behind iOS development startup, AppCubby, recently penned a post talking about what it called “The Sparrow problem” and the challenges facing indie mobile developers.

Here’s an excerpt:

… Things have definitely changed and Sparrow is the proverbial canary in the coal mine. The age of selling software to users at a fixed, one-time price is coming to an end. It’s just not sustainable at the absurdly low prices users have come to expect. Sure, independent developers may scrap it out one app at a time, and some may even do quite well and be the exception to the rule, but I don’t think Sparrow would have sold-out if the team — and their investors — believed they could build a substantially profitable company on their own. The gold rush is well and truly over.

AppCubby’s conclusion, mixed with this news from W3i, points to the hard truth that, going forward, developers will likely have to consider new alternatives to marketing. W3i recommends that developers focus on designing apps for strong monetization to optimize their ability to compete, along with making paid buys during focused time windos to magnify chart rankings. And, since cost rises with volume in this market, there’s still hope for beating the average rates by producing titles in less-saturated areas.

Meanwhile, W3i said that, for the most part, social app discovery is still an unproven method for developers, with Facebook’s App Center still new to the market and Apple’s App Store becoming increasingly competitive. But social mechanics will become increasingly important going forward.

Iris Shoor also recently penned a post for TechCrunch talking about the approach she and her team took to marketing their app, and how they used non-traditional marketing tactics to get to 10 million downloads, including getting customer stories and testimonials and creating direct channels to their users.

W31 also noted that, like we saw from Fiksu’s analysis in December, the value of new users jumps even more during long weekends. Unsurprisingly, the company found that holiday weekends are high in advertiser demand, with rates increasing by 65 percent over the 2012 Memorial Day Weekend, for example, with some CPI rates even more than quadrupling the industry standard.

Oracle said today they have bought a company called Xsigo that leverages the growing popularity of software defined networking (SDN) — an emerging virtualization technology that is shaking up the way we view IT and the cloud.

The acquisition points to a shift in the market that will eventually make Oracle the loser. The cloud is opening up while Oracle is folding inward. Network virtualization is serving as a catalyst for a federated infrastructure that will make the open cloud more viable for an organization than a vertically integrated stack that needs to be managed by teams of IT engineers.  Oracle is rejecting that premise and will use Xsigo to strengthen its own proprietary environment.

It’s a losing game that Oracle is playing. Corporate run data centers are going the way of internally managed corporate utilities at the turn of the century.  The industrial giants of the time realized they had no business being in the electricity business. Now companies are realizing the same thing about data centers.

And in this shift, open environments will win. The infrastructure will be built on open source infrastructures such as OpenStack, Eucalyptus and CloudStack. Infrastructures that interoperate will become the norm. Amazon Web Services, Windows Azure and other more proprietary environments will open up to integrate with federated environments. I don’t think Oracle will follow that path.

Oracle wants to control it all. From the infrastructure level to the top of the stack – Oracle sees itself as the king of IT. There’s just one problem. The kingdom is not what it used to be. And King Larry is not having much luck quieting the rebellion.

The Xsigo acquisition points to Oracle’s “control it all,” strategy. Oracle plans to use Xsigo as a way to virtualize the network that is managed through its Exadata servers. These are giant data warehouse machines for corporate data centers.

The purchase follows VMware’s acquisition last week of SDN vendor Nicira for $1.26 billion. We don’t know what VVMware will do but Nicira is a key player in OpenStack. The question is if VMware will embrace OpenStack with Cloud Foundry and build apps on top of that or compete with a proprietary platform.

Oracle is developing its own virtualization solution that will compete with the VMware hypervisor technology. Oracle’s hope is to leverage its massive installed base of database customers. With Xsigo, Oracle can now virtualize its own virtual machines and essentially try to shut everyone else out.

SDN puts us closer to a point where networking goes to the app instead of the other way around. It means everything will become programmable. Our networks will come to the apps on our smartphones, in our cars – anywhere imaginable.

IT will no longer be centralized from one place.The CIO will become a service provider to individuals. Workers will manage thousands of business relationships who they communicate with using apps and mobile devices over distributed networks in collaborative environments. The CIO will need to adapt to enterprise networks where these relationships coalesce and people collaborate among teams.

VMware now has to make a choice. Will they embrace OpenStack and differentiate with Cloud Foundry, its innovative platform as a service? Or will they go the way of Oracle and create their own proprietary stack?

Oracle will lose in the end.  For VMware, the choice should be pretty clear.

GoDaddy CEO Warren Adelman has stepped down after less than eight months on the job. Adelman replaced the beleaguered elephant-killing former CEO, Bob Parsons, and will be succeeded by Scott Wagner of KKR Capstone, a major GoDaddy investor.

“I am proud to have been part of a team that has built a terrific business. I’ve spent close to a decade with Go Daddy, and it has been an amazing and rewarding time in my life. As much as I have enjoyed my roles as CEO and formerly as President and Chief Operating Officer, I have reached a juncture in my life when I would like to spend more time with my family,” Adelman said in a release.

GoDaddy has lost its luster with the geekier set for supporting SOPA and bringing a certain brosephian swagger to the act of domain name registration. That hasn’t hurt revenues, however. The company reported $1.1 billion in sales and just hit the 10 million user mark.

Wagner will act as interim CEO while a permanent head is found.

Microsoft continues to make in-roads into open source development. Early last year it open sourced several development related tools, including NuGet and several libraries for its ASP.Net language. And by the end of the year the company announced sponsorship of projects to port both the Node.js development platform and the big data analytics tool Apache Hadoop to Windows. It’s even making Linux available on Azure, the company’s cloud computing platform.

And now it has open sourced Entity Framework, a framework that helps developers simplify data manipulation.

Entity is now part of Microsoft Open Technologies, a subsidiary launched earlier this year to house open source projects. You can find the source code for Entity on Codeplex, Microsoft’s answer to GitHub.

It’s another step in the right direction, but it’s nothing earth shattering. Microsoft is continuing to put its open source efforts into low risk developer tooling projects. Although representatives Microsoft’s partners in porting Node.js and Hadoop (Joyent and HortonWorks, respectively) have spoken highly of Redmond’s involvement in those projects, I’m not sure how community involvement the other projects have garnered. I’d still like to see Microsoft open source something bigger, something more core to the company’s business.

Ever wonder what those mysterious government service fees on your cell phone bill go to fund? Part of it goes toward a newly launched $415 million plan to provide 400,000 rural netizens with some broadband goodness. The Connect America Fund, a Obama administration-supported plan for universal broadband, is part of a larger $4.5 billion mission to connect 19 million homes to bit-torrent streaming speeds by 2020. As with any major government rollout, the project is dogged by bureaucracy and industry backlash, but is nonetheless moving forward.

Broadband has gone from being a luxury to a necessity for full participation in our economy and society,” writes the FCC, arguing that public money will go toward expanding an essential part of the economy, ultimately resulting in more revenue for the federal government.

Not everyone is thrilled with the plan: South Dakota Public Utilities Commission Chairman Chris Nelson says the government’s project has halted private sector plans for his state, “Rural phone companies are completing their broadband infrastructure expenditures this year but are making very, very few plans for next year and literally nothing the year beyond that because of the uncertainty the order has caused,” Nelson said to Businessweek.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski argues that Connect America will make expansion more evenly distribute. “What our programs do is level the playing field so that an investor can look at a rural landscape and say, ‘OK with a lower population density and this investment from the federal government, now I can make a business work in rural South Dakota,’” Genachowski said.

The FCC had planned on augmenting the fund with some private-sector cash from the big telco players, but Verizon and AT&T have politely declined part of the $300 million pot. Verizon spokesman Ed McFadden said the decision was made “in order to focus resources and capital on our own wireline and wireless broadband deployment plans.”

Regardless, the plan is still moving forward. Readers can play with an interactive map from the FCC below:

[Photo Credit: Telegraph]

Over the next few months, anyone still refusing to voluntarily switch to the Timeline profile redesign will be automatically migrated, Facebook tells me. Users could choose to adopt the redesign starting in January, but there have been some hold-outs who didn’t want their whole life becoming easier to access, or just hated change.

Soon they won’t have a choice, though. Facebook revealed to me it plans to complete the Timeline rollout by this fall as part of its photo revamp this morning. By waiting to minimizing the number of users it’s forcing to switch, and doing it all gradually, Facebook will have successfully avoided the wildfire protests that characterized its early years.

Before the end of the year, those still on the old design will see a prompt upon their next login telling them about the switch to Timeline. They’ll then have seven days to curate their old posts and voluntarily publish their Timeline before it automatically goes live and becomes visible to their friends.

Some users have already been required to switch, though this last push will make sure all 955 million users are using the same profile format. Facebook tells me over the last few months its been rolling out Timeline to some who originally, but the migration will likely going to accelerate in hopes of getting everyone switched over by fall. Facebook’s reasoning? To give everyone a consistent experience.

There may be some other motives, too. Timeline comes with the “Recent Activity” box that calls out the apps you use, helping them grow and attracting developers to Facebook’s platform. There’s also the revamped Photos section that encourages more browsing and tagging. [Want the scoop on what Facebook’s building next? Come to our Facebook Ecosystem CrunchUp this Friday]

Surely there’ll be some users dreading the switch. Older people I know say they still come across plenty of un-timelined profiles. These users may have come aboard Facebook during its high growth years around 2009 and 2010, and had just gotten used to the simpler previous design when Timeline debuted.

Others might be worried about their entire archive of Facebook content becoming more readily accessible. Timeline doesn’t change your privacy settings, plus it includes Activity Log, a much more powerful way to control the visibility of one’s content. It does allow much speedier navigation to posts from years ago, though. Skimming those posts to hide embarrassing or inappropriate photos or status updates is a bit of a chore.

However, curating Timeline is important. Featuring and hiding different content lets you present a more faithful online representation of your current personality and attitude, rather than being just the exact sum of your past. Also, the definition of “friend” has expanded in the eight years Facebook has been around to include bosses and family, not just peers.

Some might say an uncurated Timeline is more accurate, but I think we all deserve a chance to keep racy jokes or party pics visible only with our close friends, and not everyone we’ve friended who might misinterpret and judge us by them.

So if you (or your friends) still aren’t on Timeline, don’t be scared. Go tell the world who you are, not just who you were.

After Scott Thompson’s unceremonious departure from Yahoo’s CEO spot earlier this year, Ross Levinsohn took over as the company’s interim chief executive — and for a while there, he was widely expected to eventually be named Yahoo’s permanent CEO.

But, of course, that’s not what ended up happening. This month, Yahoo announced that longtime Google executive Marissa Mayer would take the CEO spot.

And now it’s official that Levinsohn will not be sticking around to see how it plays out. His last day is tomorrow.

The news was first reported in a post today by AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher, which was followed this afternoon by Yahoo filing regulatory documents officially confirming that Ross Levinsohn will leave Yahoo, effective July 31.

Though his ego may have been bruised by Mayer’s appointment as CEO, he will not be walking out empty-handed: In the document, Levinsohn’s departure is classified as “termination without cause,” which makes Levinsohn eligible for a pretty nice severance package per his contract. This includes a cash payment equal to his annual base salary, his target annual bonus, and accelerated vesting of a number of his stock awards and options. Before he became Yahoo’s interim CEO, Levinsohn worked at Yahoo as an EVP and head of global media. Last year, his base salary was $700,000.

Yahoo has issued a separation agreement signed by Marissa Mayer, which details boilerplate clauses such as non-disparagement and non-compete. In the end, just before Mayer’s signature, is a terse valedictory: “I wish you good luck in your future endeavors.” Levinsohn’s executive background is solid, and he’s quite well-respected in the worlds of both tech and media — so it will certainly be interesting to see what those endeavors are.

Rafat Ali, founder of paidContent, sold his company to The Guardian for roughly $12.5 million in 2008. Then he spent two years traveling the world, in a “quest for isolation after eight clamorous years.” Now, he has built “the homepage for the travel industry” to inform your travels.

Ali and co-founder Jason Clampet, who ran Frommers.com’s original content efforts, aim to disrupt the enormous travel industry with a site that offers a combination of original media content and data tools to users, especially business travelers.

As they explain on the Skift site, “Skift.com is our worldview on how broadly we look at travel, and it informs how we’re building the company…Whether it’s through news, insight, data, and services, we aim to be the pervasive brand when it comes to travel information.”

Calling it a “new breed of media company,” Ali compares the site to Politico, explaining that it is “designed to appeal to insiders as well as a large consumer base.” The site’s content will be a mix of pure aggregation, curation, licensed and original reporting.

“We have lot of competitors in bits and pieces, in various sub-sectors of travel, but no one who’s bring it all together, no one who’s using data strategically to scale, and certainly no one who’s building a larger consumer brand out of it the way we plan to,” Ali tells us.

Accompanying the site’s multi-targeted audience is a multi-pronged business model, as they aim to combine advertising, freemium and premium subscription models depending on the type of user.

“Maybe the travel industry won’t be ready for the kind of cut-across-the-silos brand that we’re trying to build,” Ali says, discussing the challenges he and Clampet face. “We’re also trying to tackle the consumer side, aimed at business travelers, which is risky to do along with the B2B side, and few media companies have tried that. We think we know all the right questions to ask as we grow, [but] we don’t have all the answers yet.”

They have raised a “mid-six figures” angel round from a number of high-profile investors, including Chris Ahearn, Luke Beatty, Gordon Crovitz, Craig Forman, Jim Friedlich, Tom Glocer, Vishal Gondal, Jason Hirschhorn, Peter Horan, Alan Meckler,Mohamed Nanabhay, Sanjay Parthasarathy, Amol Sarva, Chris Schroeder, and three additional investors, whose names were not disclosed.

The founders say they are currently building a team of editorial staff, developers and data and product heads. Ali says they are building a data warehouse of publicly available travel industry information first, then building services on top of that; they are working on developing the consumer side over the coming year.

(Updated with quotes from Ali)

Facebook is still huge and growing — it added another 50 million users this past quarter, and it’s about to break the one-billion-humans mark. But it still has to figure out how to survive on mobile. So we’re focusing on Facebook and its developer ecosystem at our annual CrunchUp event this Friday in Redwood City, Calif.

Our aim is to detail what’s working and what’s not, so entrepreneurs can better strategize how to think about Facebook when building their companies.

Get your Facebook Ecosystem CrunchUp tickets now! They can be found here.

Some mobile-savvy startups are getting big growth from Facebook’s platform. One of them is the music game SongPop. It now has more than 2.7 million daily active users and 11.4 million monthly active users via Facebook, and it’s also a top free app in the Apple App Store. I’ll be trying to get all the secrets to its success out of its creator, Mathieu Nouzareth, this Friday as part of our panel on Facebook’s platform.

But mobile has yet to kill the web — if that bit of hyperbole ever becomes reality. Meanwhile, Facebook has become more central to how other startups are gaining traction on their own sites.

Airbnb, for example, has built Facebook into its identity system, to help people renting out their homes get more social context around who they’re letting in. Did this Facebook data turn Airbnb into a market leader? Joe Zadeh, product and innovation lead for the company, will answer questions about whether Facebook APIs can help startups win.

You’ll have to show up this Friday to hear about all the details. You’ll also have to buy one of these tickets to get into the awesome August Capital party that evening, because the other tickets are all sold out.

So, those Facebook Ecosystem CrunchUp tickets? Get them here.

Bios from the guys, below, followed by the agenda.

Mathieu Nouzareth
CEO, FreshPlanets (SongPop)

Mathieu Nouzareth is a serial web entrepreneur. He started his career at 23 by co-founding WebConcept, one of the first e-business consulting company in France in 1995. WebConcept was later sold to IconMedialab of Sweden in 1999, still today the largest internet consultancy company in the world (NYSE-Euronext : LBI). He was subsequently CEO of IconMedialab France until 2001.

In 2001, Mathieu and his brother Romain started Boonty.com, one of the leading game digital distribution company. Operating in more than 30 countries with over 180 co-workers, the company has been sold to Nexway of France in 2008. They also founded Is Cool Entertainment in 2006, a leading social casual game publisher. Is Cool is now listed on the NYSE-Alternext market (ALIS) and has become of the largest European Facebook game company.

In 2009, Mathieu and his brother Roman have started another game company, FreshPlanet, based in New York. FreshPlanet is the developer and publisher of SongPop. Mathieu is a graduate of the Grenoble School of Management and holds an MBA from Pace University in New York. He is a frequent panelist at tech conferences such as LeWeb Paris, CES Las Vegas, GDC, Casual Connect.

Joe Zadeh
Lead of Product & Innovation, Airbnb

Joe Zadeh (a.k.a. “Joebot”) is Lead of Product & Innovation at Airbnb, a community marketplace for people to list, discover, and book unique spaces around the world. Much of his efforts are focused on keeping engineering and design tightly integrated to enable world-class online and offline experiences.

He joined the company as an engineer when the entire product development team worked out of a bedroom in a San Francisco apartment. In a previous life, Joe was a research scientist and holds a Ph.D. in Bioengineering from Caltech and a B.S. in Computer Science from Northwestern University.

Facebook Ecosystem CrunchUp

12:00 PM Registration and Lunch

1:00 PM Welcome

1:10 PM Fireside Chat with Mike Schroepfer – Vice President of Engineering – Facebook

1:40 PM Product Tour – Peter Deng – Director of Product Management – Facebook

1:55 PM Panel: Designing and Growing A Modern Mobile App

2:20 PM Break

2:40 PM Product Tour – Doug Purdy – Director of Developer Products- Facebook

3:05 PM Panel: What’s Next For Facebook’s Platform

3:30 PM Panel: Social Ads: What’s Working, What’s Not, and Where’s Everyone Else?

4:00 PM Office Hours and Happy Hour with Facebook

August Capital Summer Party

5:30 – 9 PM Join us for another fantastic event with networking, drinks and fun at August Capital, 2480 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park CA