Category: Tech news

It looks like Verizon has bought the promoted trend “#CyberMonday” to mark the Monday after Black Friday and Thanksgiving when consumers look to the web for exclusive holiday deals. This buy follows another significant Promoted Trend this past Friday, when Target bought “#BlackFriday” on Twitter.

As with any purchased Promoted Trend on Twitter, when users click on CyberMonday, they will be see a sponsored Tweet from Verizon, which states “Starting today, Verizon’s giving you 24 days of Seasonal Surprises! Unwrap an exclusive deal now!” The Tweet contains a link to the company’s “Seasonal Surprises” campaign, which encourages users to Tweet Verizon’s message or post the message on Facebook to unlock an exclusive deal.

It’s unclear how much Verizon or Target spent on the Promoted Trend, but it’s certainly a compelling way to publicize deals during the holiday shopping rush when users are looking online for deals and discounts. And the form of advertising is becoming a visible source of revenue for Twitter as well-known brands flock to buy Promoted Trends.

In general, the key driver of social networking so far is games on Facebook. But most of those games aren’t social in the way that playing Monopoly or cards with your friends and family over the holidays is social. MyYearbook, which is a small but profitable social network focussing on younger teenage users, is going to try to make online games more social by getting its members to play together at the same time. The site has 4.7 million active visitors a month generating nearly 1 billion pageviews. It has about 1 million active users every day who spend a third of their time playing games and using other apps. The company makes its money from virtual currency and in-game offers, and is on track to make about $22 million in revenues this year, according to CEO Geoff Cook

In mid-December, myYearbook will launch a new set of a dozen live games which will combine casual games with live video chat. These are basic games like Warship, Gin Rummy, Chess, Checkers, line of Four, and Tic Tac Toe. MyYearbook is also partnering OMGPOP (which specializes in live online games), Heyzap, and Viximo to bring some of their games into myYearbook with a live video component. These aren’t amazing games. That is not what they are about. They are designed to get people to interact with one another, to make new friends or to flirt. They are games everybody knows and everybody can play.

“Our take on social games is to help you meet new people,” says Cook. He is betting big on synchronous games that can be played live with everyone present at the same time. Most games on Facebook are asynchronous—players take turns whenever they happen to be online and games can drag on for days. Only five of the top 100 games are synchronous. Facebook has the “wrong social graph” for realtime games because the chances that one of your friends is online right now and wants to play a game with you aren’t that great (see slide at right).

MyYearbook takes a different approach, using games as a social lubricant to get you to play with people you don’t know. There are a lot more of those people online at any given time. Gamers will be able to specify what types of people they want to play with using filters to sort by gender, age, and location. In order to avoid the Chatroulette problem of guys exposing themselves over live video, an extensive flagging and moderation system will be in place. Since every member has to be logged in, violators can be blocked from the system. But myYearbook also employs 20 moderators, which will increase to 50 moderators just to police the system.

Another Chatroulette problem Cook hopes to avoid is people constantly hitting the next button to find other players. Players will gain or lose karma points depending on how long they play, and if they get to zero karma points, they will be blocked from playing for a certain amount of time.

For realtime gaming to takes off on myYearbook, however, it will need better games. Partnering with gaming companies like OMGPOP and other developers is the way to make these games more compelling. If myYearbook can become the place where teenagers go online to hang out and play games, plenty of developers will want to create games for the platform.

Psssh. Black Friday. That’s nonsense. Cyber Monday is where it’s at. Well, at least that’s what online retailers would like us to believe. It seems true deals are scarce and instead, there are a whole bunch of standard sales posing as real deals on what’s supposed to be the biggest online shopping day ever. We did manage to dug up a few legitimate tech deals that are worth your time. Curious? Sure you are. Click through for the complete run-down.

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I remember, back in the old days, there wasn’t much on TV during family holiday dinners and we wished we could play Nintendo. We’d go out to my Uncle’s house in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio and we’d watch whatever was on their old CRT – maybe the Yule log on QVC or the same old holiday specials over and over, and we’d dream about playing the NES on that big old box. But we couldn’t. It was too much trouble and the adults, after all, were hopped up on lasagna and beer.

Well I’m here to tell you that this won’t happen to my kids. And it won’t happen to your kids. They’ll get something like this 7-inch portable TV with multiple inputs from Vizio. The screen has 800×480 resolution and and comes to you courtesy of Vizio and Sam’s Club. How do you win? Easy peasy.

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CloudBees, a Java Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider, has raised $4 million in Series A financing led by Matrix Partners with participation from individual investors, including JBoss founder Marc Fleury and JBoss/HP/Bluestone vet Bob Bickel.

The round is said to be only the first in a multi-stage investment to provide CloudBees with the resources to build out a cloud-agnostic, cloud-native Java PaaS that covers both development services and a production runtime for Java.

Gartner’s preliminary forecasts point to a 14.3 increase in PC shipments in 2010 over 2009 as well as a forecast of 409 million PCs sold in 2011. While these numbers are exciting to anyone following the sad-sack IT industry, remember that Gartner estimated 17.9 percent growth in last September for the end of 2010 and 18.1 percent growth for 2011. Clearly “not too bad” is good enough these days.

The report also found that folks are holding on to PCs longer because “because there will be less need to replace them as often” and that there is an increase in thin clients in the enterprise. PCs are also getting it in the knees because Western consumers are deciding to buy tablets (read “the iPad”) instead of a new PC. Emerging markets are helping buoy sales but not by much.

So, whither PCs? The desktop form factor isn’t going anywhere. However, the introduction of low-power “acceptable” chips like those found in the Logitech Revue and many mobile devices, the divide between PC and a general “home computing” experience is lessening. The PC is now like a NAS or like heavy iron in a supercomputing facility: it’s designed to run more complex things and to serve data to the other devices on the network. Interestingly, only gamers need the kind of heavy iron we’re talking about here while the rest of us can get along with a $500 PC stuck in the basement. Even gaming doesn’t require that much firepower these days, provided you don’t want a totally cutting edge experience.

At CES this year we can expect a few things: first, more Google TV devices on the network as well as small form factor PCs for folks who don’t need much power. The tower configuration is cheap and will always be with us. However, many want to hide their PCs away, out of sight, and get most of their media consumption done on portable devices.

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Over 60,000 people have been hit in the past few hours on Facebook by a scam which claims that after installing an app called ePrivacy you can see who checked your profile. Needless to say the app does not work. Instead it just lets the scammer access your profile and post “OMG OMG OMG… I cant believe this actually works!” to your wall, with a link to the app, thus spreading it further.

Sophos is reporting that the application does not work and simply allows the makers to steal your private data and virally spread the app amongst your friends.

Venture capital mega-firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has announced that Mary Meeker is joining the firm as a partner, in another sign that the firm is focusing more on this mobile-meets-social-meets-local-meets-global wave of Web disruption. “Our number one goal is to help the Mark Pincuses of the world build their businesses into Internet treasures, and there has been no greater finder of Internet treasures than Mary Meeker,” said KP’s John Doerr in an early morning call with TechCrunch, just after Meeker broke the news to Morgan Stanley’s technology and Internet practice– a force on Wall Street where she’s made her name over the last 20 years.

In the dot com glory days, Mary Meeker was as famous as an analyst as Doerr was as a VC, so it’s appropriate and seemingly a long time coming that the two would wind up as partners. Meeker said she’d thought about making the change “from the skybox to coaching down on the field,” as Doerr described it, for years. Meeker has been in talks with Kleiner since late September and made the decision to leave Morgan Stanley and join KP the Monday before Thanksgiving. She was swayed finally by a combination of factors including confidence that Morgan Stanley’s tech practice was in a strong place, the opportunity with Kleiner specifically and the stage the Internet is in right now.

It’s a tough market with huge spoils. She spoke about the heady combination of the mobile innovation being built on the iPhone and Android platforms along with the surging billion-person-plus worldwide Internet audience. Add to that a savvier class of entrepreneurs than the industry has seen before going up against CEOs of companies like Google, Amazon and Apple who are smart, paranoid, and not willingly going to cede any ground, and she couldn’t sit on the Wall Street sidelines any longer, she says.

For Kleiner, it is another stake in its reinvigorated Web franchise: First it was the hire of Bing Gordon who did KP’s most brag-worthy Web deal with Zynga, then the iFund, then the sFund and now the addition of Meeker. A few years ago, Kleiner seemed to be deemphasizing the Web to focus more on opportunities in cleantech, but the news today is just another signal of how serious Kleiner is about this market opportunity. “This third wave of disruption of social and mobile has meant that digital investing has taken on a new prominence in Kleiner,” Doerr says.

Chegg’s CEO Dan Rosensweig was one of many pinging Meeker with congratulatory notes this morning during my call with Meeker, Doerr and fellow KP partner Ted Schlein. He described it as “huge news” and a “big coup” for Kleiner. “Mary’s ability to spot the most important trends, evaluate-and-back the most effective entrepreneurs, predict the major pivots in the industry, and do it on a global basis has been unparalleled,” he told TechCrunch via email.

That “global basis” part is key. Meeker will be based in Silicon Valley, but will travel between the Valley and New York and Asia. We spoke a bit about the role Meeker will play between the United States and Asia– given that many venture firms keep their Valley and China franchises pretty distinct from one another. Meeker first dug into China in the early 2000s and was stunned by the deep cultural changes the Web was having in the massive country. “You could take the Internet enthusiasm that was happening in 1999 and 2000 here in the US, and in China it was three-to-five times more ebullient,” she says. “I thought, ‘My gosh, this is not about a garden variety technology change, this is about cultural change.’” Meeker noted that Chinese Web giants and Valley entrepreneurs have their hands full in their home markets, but in the next five to ten years the two will be colliding– or potentially merging– more.

It’s not that Kleiner hasn’t been serious about Asia before. It has an eight-partner team in China. But when DeNA Japan acquired ngmoco and returned the whole iFund, the importance of Asia was certainly hammered home, Doerr says. “Mary is the most eloquent in saying this market isn’t just about social meets local meets mobile, but meets global as well,” he said.

I asked Zynga CEO Mark Pincus what specifically Meeker would bring to Kleiner that the firm doesn’t have already.  He emphasized Meeker’s data-driven approach to championing new markets versus the Valley’s more common gut-feeling, intuitive approach. “She has been the first to call many major markets, showing with data what many of us are pursuing based on instincts,” Pincus said. “In the past year she has called out the social Web and mobile Internet as opportunities of much bigger scale.Facebook’s market valuation probably went up significantly after her presentation at Web 2.0, in which she showed the potential impact of the social Web.”

Kleiner has a history of bringing in big names from other industries– Colin Powell being one of the most surprising and headline-grabbing. It can be a gamble: Venture capital investing is a very specific business and successful executives from large companies, thinkers or politicians don’t always make great investors. Indeed many of Kleiner’s competitors prefer to groom talent from within or plunk an entrepreneur fresh off a big win. But Meeker seems far less of a gamble than your average banker because she has always been so forward looking– a little too forward looking back in the late 1990s some investors would argue.

Longtime technology analyst Mary Meeker is leaving Morgan Stanley for greener pastures at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. She will join the firm as a partner.

Mary Meeker joined Morgan Stanley in 1991 as the Firm’s PC Software/Hardware & New Media analyst. At the investment bank, she served as a Managing Director, and led the Global Technology Research Team that covered Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Microsoft and others. Prior to her role at the investment bank, she served as a Technology Research Analyst at Cowen and at Solomon Brothers.

In a release Kleiner partner John Doerr said: “Mary was an early supporter of some of the biggest technology investment winners of the past 20 years…Her advice and support are already highly sought after by entrepreneurs and in this new role, she will be able to spend even more time providing more direct assistance.”

Meeker is known for her ability to spot and forecast trends in the consumer internet space. Each year she presents a data set at Web 2.0—this year her presentation addressed the future of mobile. You can also see our coverage from Meeker’s presentations in 2008 and 2009.

So we have Seedcamp, Startup Bootcamp, The Founder Institute, Launch48, Hackfwd and various other startup programme across Europe. And we can now add another to that list: Springboard.

But this is not the Springboard we wrote about last year. Then, it was the brainchild of Red Gate Software who were effectively offering a very informal arrangement, helping young startups. It was also B2B focused.

This is a different beast. The new Springboard programme has wisely realised that there is a gap in the European eco-system for the super-early stage startup that really just needs enough cash to create something. That is in the Y-Combinator and TechStars sort of area, which is much more at the hacker/product end of the market.

Yandex, Russia’s search engine leader and the nation’s largest Internet company, is reportedly considering a flotation that would raise around £1 billion or $1.56 billion for the firm, thisismoney reports, citing City sources. The company is said to be mulling a listing in London early next year, although it could still end up picking NASDAQ.

The IPO would follow in the footsteps of fellow Russian Internet giant Mail.ru’s successful listing – the company raised roughly $1 billion.

A Yandex spokesperson declined to confirm or deny the IPO plans, and said:

As a growing company, we continually evaluate various financing and strategic alternatives, but it is our policy not to comment on our plans in this regard.

Founded back in 1997, Yandex has been reported to be preparing an IPO before, with talks dating back all the way to 2006. In 2008, the company planned for an initial public offering but quickly moved to indefinitely delay those plans due to the global economic turmoil.

According to LiveInternet, Yandex’s market share in Russia reached 64,6 percent or about three times that of the number two, Google, in October 2010.

Earlier this year, comScore reported that it had ranked Yandex 7th in the Top 10 world search properties.

Aside from Russia, Yandex has operations in Belarus (yandex.by), Kazakhstan (yandex.kz) and Ukraine (yandex.ua).

In 2009, Yandex’s revenue reached 8.7 billion Rubles (roughly $278 million at current conversion rates). Contextual and display ads accounted for 86 percent and 11 percent of its revenues, respectively. The company doesn’t provide projections for this year, although it’s clear that contextual advertising in the Russian Internet market is growing quickly.

According to research from the Association of Communication Agencies of Russia, contextual ads grew 45% in January-September 2010 compared to the same period last year, reaching roughly 12 billion Rubles or $383 million.

Yandex is among the largest high-tech companies in Russia, with an estimated workforce of about 2,500 employees. Currently, Yandex has branches all over Russia (Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Ekaterinburg, Novosibirsk and Kazan), Ukraine (Kiev, Odessa, Simferopol) and in the United States (in Palo Alto, CA, to be exact).

eBay and PayPal have released their Black Friday sales and usage data and it looks like both the marketplace and the payments platform experienced strong growth in terms of mobile shopping.

eBay sales in the U.S. from its suite of mobile apps nearly doubled over Black Friday 2009. Globally, eBay mobile is on track to nearly triple its sales over last year and is expected to bring in well over $1.5 billion in mobile sales this year (previously, the company had publicly stated that eBay would bring $1.5 billion in mobile sales; it looks like that number has been altered slightly). On Black Friday, eBay saw a 30 percent increase in mobile bidding activity, compared to the previous year. And since the launch of its first mobile application in July 2008, nearly 30 million items have been bought or sold using eBay mobile apps around the world.

eBay owned PayPal reported a 27 percent increase in total payment volume on Black Friday 2010, compared to the previous year. Generally, PayPal saw an approximately 310 percent increase in mobile shopping on Black Friday.

Black Friday 2010 resulted in 21 percent more total payment volume compared to Thanksgiving 2010 and 19 percent more payment volume compared to an average Friday in 2010.

These results are definitely representative of a larger trend considering that PayPal processes 16.5 percent of U.S. eCommerce and 15 percent of global eCommerce.

In preparation for the holiday shopping season, eBay recently launched a new iPhone app that included bar scanning; and PayPal used exclusive deals as incentives to use the payments technology. Mobile shopping is expected to be huge this year and tt should be interesting to see if eBay and PayPal can sustain the mobile sales today on Cyber Monday and throughout the holiday season.

Of course for total retail sales, eBay lost out to Amazon, Walmart and Target who all took the top spors for online retail sales for Black Friday.

Ten years ago, most VCs refused to invest outside of Silicon Valley. Now, most of them have funds in Israel, Europe, India or China– and lately many of those Chinese funds are outperforming the US counterparts. But August Capital is still sticking with the kind of local venture capital that built this industry, and David Hornik explains why in this week’s episode of Ask a VC.

But, Portland? Yeah he’d invest in a Portland company and answers a reader question about what the local ecosystem needs to do to get his and other venture capitalists’ attention.

Hornik also (sort of) answers one of the best reader questions I’ve gotten in a while: What’s the dumbest investment he’s seen recently in Silicon Valley? (Hint.)

It’s Black Friday, which means that many of you woke up this morning at the crack of dawn, shrugged off your Thanksgiving food comas, and made your way to the dreary parking lots of electronic stores across the country. Right about now, you’re probably just waking up from your recovery nap — and there’s nothing better to get your sluggish mind back on track than this week’s episode of OMG/JK.

This week, we talk about The Daily, an iPad-only newspaper from News Corp that will reportedly be launching soon. We also discuss the latest iOS software release, which adds a slew of features to the iPad just in time for the holidays, including the aptly-named AirPlay.

And don’t forget Gingerbread, the upcoming release of Android that seemed like it should have launched this month, but is still MIA. But don’t fret — Google CEO Eric Schmidt did tease us with a glimpse of Near Field Communication, which could well make it worth the wait.

So grab a slice of leftover pie and sit back for a recap of the last week in tech — now with more facial hair than ever!

Here are some recent posts that are relevant to the topics we discuss:

• What Should An iPad Newspaper Look Like?
• Apple Unifies The iOS Line With iOS 4.2 For iPad
• iOS 4.2 Update Wipe Out Your iPhone Music? Try This.
• Google “Nexus Two” Hardware Issue Delays Launch
• Android Gingerbread Supports NFC: Tap Your Phone To Pay With Your Credit Card

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Remember back in 2008 when there was a lot of talk about how the iPhone would flop in Japan? 91 percent of Japanese would not be buying the device, said one survey. By 2009, that talk inevitably turned to how it had already flopped. With some even writing about how the Japanese people “hate” the device. Then something funny happened. That kind of talk abruptly stopped. And for good reason. As it turns out, the iPhone is actually a massive success in the country.

Much like it did in the U.S., the iPhone is transforming the mobile landscape in Japan. Two stories today highlight this. The first, talks about the Japanese iPhone “craze” and details how app developers are rushing to get into the potentially huge market for Japanese iPhone apps. The second story notes how NTT DoCoMo, Japan’s largest mobile carrier, is turning to marketing to make up for the fact that they don’t have the iPhone (it’s sold there by rival Softbank). Marketing involving yes, Darth Vader.

The Vader choice is a very interesting one. You can also see him waving his hand in the commercials and stating matter-of-factly, “there is no iPhone.”

But there is. And despite the early doubts and reports, it has become a massive success in the country. I was in Japan for a few weeks earlier this year, and while I didn’t see a huge number of iPhones at the time, I also didn’t see a huge number of smartphones — most people seemed to have the same flip phone device. Apparently, that’s now changing, quickly.

From The Wall Street Journal’s Japan Realtime blog:

The iPhone accounts for about two-thirds of the domestic smartphone market, making DoCoMo’s efforts even more challenging in image-conscious Japan, where the iPhone is starting to become a must-have personal accessory among many young people.

And while I didn’t see a ton of iPhones, I did see a ton of iPods. And I do mean a ton. I feel like every other person I saw had one. So it makes sense that the iPhone would eventually catch on there. At first, there was talk that it was a matter of getting used to the touchscreen for character input. Again, apparently, that’s happening now.

From the Yahoo story:

Everywhere one turns, on commuter trains and urban cafes, people are tapping away at their iPhone screens in a relatively rare Japanese embrace of technology that isn’t homegrown.

Meanwhile, I can’t recall seeing a single Android device while I was there. Nor did I see any store advertising them (the iPhone, on the other hand, was everywhere). But that’s apparently changing now as well. In fact, Darth Vader’s campaign is actually to promote the Samsung Galaxy S, an Android device. And early sales have apparently been very good.

The next question: can Android use a similar strategy to mimic their U.S. success? Android has risen to power in this country thanks to a plethora of devices on a range of carriers. Many are quick to point to the fact that the single biggest factor of the rise has been that Verizon, the largest carrier in the U.S., put their marketing muscle behind the devices. That’s now what NTT DoCoMo, again, the largest carrier in Japan, is doing. And with The Force, to boot.

How will Apple strike back?

More: Darth Vader Calls Apple About His iPhone 4 Antenna [Video]