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Accel Sold Big Chunk Of Facebook Stock At $35 Billion Valuation

Sometime in the last week or so, we’ve heard from multiple sources, Accel Partners has sold very significant chunks of Facebook stock. So significant, in fact, that their ownership percentage has dropped to a point where they are no longer the largest venture shareholder in the company.

Prior to the sale they had somewhere around 10% of Facebook. They paid just $12.7 million for that stock, in 2005. Our understanding is they sold somewhere around 20% of that position, meaning they own 8% or so of Facebook now.

So who bought it, and what was the price?

One source said TCV purchased some $200 million of the stock. And another source says Andreessen Horowitz purchased $80 million in Facebook stock out of their massive new fund.

The price? A year ago Elevation Partners bought $90 million in Facebook stock at a roughly $9 billion valuation. Then earlier this year they invested $120 million more at a $14 billion valuation.

We’ve heard these current trades occurred at a $35 billion valuation from one source. Another said $40 billion, and yet a third said “way lower.” Whatever the price, it’s likely half a billion dollars or more that Accel is taking off the table. Our guess is the valuation is somewhere between $20 billion and $35 billion.

To be clear, we haven’t confirmed some of this. But it’s pretty clear Accel is selling a lot of Facebook stock right now, and that at least Andreessen Horowitz is one of the buyers – they confirmed to us that they have begun buying shares, but won’t comment on price or number.

Update: More information from a new source with knowledge of the deal. Accel has sold a substantial amount of stock Something less than 20% of their total holdings, and the sale(s) are occurring at a $35 billion enterprise valuation. That’s a 247x return on Accel’s initial investment. Our best guess is it was total sale of around $500 million. It’s still unclear if Accel or DST is now the largest venture shareholder of Facebook.

Andreessen Horowitz confirmed that they purchased stock from Accel, but it was just a fraction of the total stock sold by Accel.

It’s also worth noting that Accel Partner Jim Breyer’s personal stake in Facebook is worth some $350,000,000 (minus dilution for subsequent venture rounds and employees since 2005) at this new valuation. He purchased 1% of Facebook for himself at the time Accel invested. Not a bad day at the office.


Two Chinese Online Video Sites Going Public: Which Should Investors Buy? (TCTV)

Bill Bishop, an investor and consultant based in Beijing, joined me via Skype to talk about this white-hot Chinese Interent IPO market, that’s even welcoming unprofitable companies into the Nasdaq. “It’s been a crazy couple months, and it looks like it will be crazier through Christmas,” he says. “The goldrush is back.”

One of the most interesting corners of that goldrush is online video. Between dozens of competitors, soaring bandwidth costs, piracy issues and government crackdowns, this has been one of the harder areas for Chinese upstarts to succeed and more than a dozen have died. A lot of Silicon Valley money has died with them. But left standing are YouKu and Tudou and both have filed paperwork to go public.

They are frequently called the “YouTubes of China,” but both are actually becoming the home of more premium and even original scripted content. These companies may have started with a user generated content bent but are more like a Hulu than a YouTube now, or even an HBO or AMC. It seems UGC is hard to monetize everywhere.

With hundreds of millions of uniques per month– they are sucking up insane amounts of bandwidth. The two leading companies Tudou and YouKu have raised more than $300 million between them and only Tudou is close to profitable. Some IPO cash would help them dramatically, as would the marketing event that goes along with a successful IPO.

But with two companies with roughly the same user base and roughly the same revenues both getting ready to file– which one should investors buy? Bishop helps us make sense of the market.


What’s New At Tumblr: Funding, Hires, Office, Board Member, And A Focus On Fashion

For the past several weeks, there’s been a lot of talk about a large new round of funding that the social startup Tumblr was raising. That culminated today with a report in Fortune with numbers on the round. We had been hearing very similar numbers — around $25 million on a $100 million pre-money evaluation — but it turns out those numbers were likely low, we had heard from sources close to the funding.

But while the numbers are still a bit up in the air, we do know that as Fortune and Business Insider reported earlier, Sequoia Capital is leading this new round. And we’ve heard that previous investors Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures are on board once again. Further, like Business Insider, we’re hearing that Sequoia’s Roelof Botha will join Tumblr’s Board as a part of this investment, which will likely close in the next couple of weeks.

We spoke with Tumblr founder David Karp earlier today, and while he declined to comment on any of the funding news, he did offer up some other details about the company, and where they’re heading.

First of all, Tumblr just opened a new office in New York City. For the past several months they were working at capacity at their old office, with a team of 12. But with the new space that Karp says is roughly four times as big, they’ve already expanded to 16 people now. And they’ll be at 20 employees before the end of the year, Karp says.

Given the growth Tumblr is seeing, it’s pretty incredible that they’ve been able to keep up with only a team of 12, but Karp admits that it has been a challenge. And they’re now putting the focus on ramping up hiring to make sure they can keep pace. He expects they’ll be at 30 employees by early next year, most of them engineers, essentially tripling the size of the company in just a few short months.

If you’re wondering how they’re paying for this hiring spree, see: above.

Karp notes that he worked really hard to keep the team small up until this point, to keep everyone focused, but says that they now have so many directions that they want to go in, that they need more people. One of those is a new Director of Product, Derek Gottfrid, who they nabbed from The New York Times, as we first reported last week.

Another new hire is Rich Tong, a co-founder of Weardrobe, which sold to Like.com in late 2009. Tong is Tumblr’s first specialized community director, leading the fashion community. This is a key area of focus for Tumblr going forward as this community makes up a full 16 percent of Tumblr’s most popular sites, Karp says.

He notes that in the next few months, a huge focus for Tumblr will be how to better cater to the creative communities they’ve attracted. Fashion, film, photography, these are all hugely important to the platform, he says. Karp believes that focusing on them will help separate them from that other social network, Facebook, which has not done a good job of handling these specialized communities so far. In fact, Karp considers Facebook to be “arguably hostile” towards them.

Tumblr wants to be “the best place in the world for the best creative communities,” Karp says. He wouldn’t give any specifics about what they’re thinking about doing here, just that it’s a key area of focus.

Karp declined to disclose any sort of revenue numbers, but does say that they’re making a good amount just from the theme community alone. Tumblr currently sells customized themes, created by the community, at a variety of prices. They split the revenues with the theme creators at an “App Store-like split”, but it is a tiered system. The more expensive the theme, the more generous the split is, he says.

When the new money comes in, you can probably expect Tumblr to continue to focus on scaling and the product short term, rather than any big money-making schemes, is what I’m hearing. You know, the Twitter model.

[photo: flickr/David Karp]


Q&A Site Formspring Lands Another $10 Million

Q&A site Formspring, which raised $2.5 million in Series A funding back in March, reportedly closed its Series B this morning in a $10 million round led by Geoff Yang at Redpoint Ventures. This most recent financing pegs the company at a $45 million dollar valuation.

Formspring is yet another player in the Q&A space piquing investor interest. Since its launch in November, the service now boasts over 16 million registered members, 40 million monthly uniques and around one billion questions answered. Quora, another buzzed about Q&A site, is much much smaller at a modest 200,000 monthly uniques.

Formspring plans to use the cash to focus on building out more social integration into its service. Its first financing round attracted such hot angel investors as SV Angel, Travis Kalnick, Kevin Rose and Dave Morin.

Information provided by CrunchBase


The TechCrunch Guide to the Web 2.0 Summit

The seventh annual Web 2.0 Summit wrapped up yesterday after an exciting week of panels, interviews, and discussions at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. The star-spangled lineup for this year’s events included Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski, and big-ticket investors like John Doerr and Fred Wilson.

For Web 2.0′s theme this year, conference co-organizers Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle chose “points of control,” explaining, “Fifteen years and two recessions into the commercial Internet, it’s clear that our industry has moved into a competitive phase—a ‘middlegame’ in the battle to dominate the Internet Economy. At this year’s Web 2.0 Summit, we’re focusing on these shifting points of control—strategic chokepoints on an increasingly crowded board.”

According to the event’s symbolic map above, territorial rivalries have begun to manifest in the technology world — as have areas of conflict. A conversation between New York Magazine’s John Heilemann and VC big wigs John Doerr (Kleiner Perkins) and Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures) exemplified this, as the group argued over meaty, contentious issues like whether the tech industry is in a bubble or boom cycle, innovation on the East Coast versus the West Coast, the state of investing and more. TechCrunch writer MG Siegler found it to be one of the highlights of this year’s event; check out his coverage here.

Mark Zuckerberg spoke about Facebook’s new mail client, known as “Facebook Messages,” which the company hopes will reflect the transition to “Next Generation Messaging,” as younger generations move away from using email. He also spoke about Facebook’s recent conflicts with Google, its proposed role as an “enabler” of innovation among small start-ups hoping to disrupt traditional verticals, and, perhaps most interestingly, discussed why focusing on “points of control” overlooks the most critical territory in the industry’s landscape — its “uncharted” waters. Watch the video and read Alexia Tsotsis’s take here and Jason Kincaid’s in-depth review here.

Other points of interest include Twitter Founder Evan Williams’ discussion of the company’s complicated relationship with Facebook and how Twitter has been secretly assigning each of its individual users a “reputation score.” Eric Schmidt also showed off a “Nexus S” and said that we might expect the arrival of Gingerbread in the “next few weeks.” Just in time for Christmas? Peep Devin Coldewey’s analysis here.

For more in-depth TechCrunch coverage, check out our complete list of posts below:


In The Giving Mood, Amazon Also Unveils MP3 Gifting (That Can Magically Become Amazon Gift Cards)

Earlier today, we noted that Amazon unveiled a new way to give people Kindle books as gifts. They’re also launching the same functionality for their Music Store as well, with MP3 Gifting.

To be honest, it’s a little surprising that Amazon didn’t have this feature before. But it comes with a nice little bonus that only someone like Amazon can offer: if you receive an MP3 as a gift and decide you don’t want it, you can instead opt for an Amazon credit for the same amount, which you can use towards any product they offer.

Just as with the Kindle book gifting feature, you simply have to enter a recipients email address, add a message, and choose the MP3(s) you want them to receive. Then you pay for it, and you’re done. They’ll get a message that an MP3 gift is waiting for them and a link to download it.

Amazon says the process takes less than 5 minutes. And because Amazon’s MP3s are DRM-free, they’ll work anywhere.

Information provided by CrunchBase


Anonymously Chat With Other College Students On HowRandom

HowRandom, a site for college students, launches today with one core feature — the ability to anonymously chat with people from other schools. There’s no photo uploading, file sharing or video capabilities, just a text entry line and a chat widget.

The student on student communication happens on two levels, a test function where you casually enter in your school (warning, you have to type the full word “University”) and a verified function which allows you to type in your .edu address in order to get “Verified” as a bona fide college student.

Explains founder Jon Cook, “It’s a way for guys at Harvard to meet girls at Yale, etc. And it’s not intrusive. HowRandom has a very solid viral loop. It has the Facebook-like .edu exclusivity. And it’s extremely simple to use.”

Cook and co-founder Jason Humphries think of HowRandom as more of a social experiment than a business. They hope it will mirror the randomness of life and “foster real-world meetings and interactions between two people that might otherwise never meet. ” Like a text-based Chatroulette with no penis problem, there’s also a next feature in case you don’t like who you’re chatting with.

Cook says he wants to keep evolving the app through user feedback, and is considering including limited profile option along with the “Verified” logo.

Facebook initially restricted its users to college students with .edu addresses and that element was crucial to its success, this is also HowRandom’s hook. Colleges are hotbeds of virality in more ways than one, and starting off there is a good move for any social app.


Resolute Marine Wins Startup Open, Converts Wave Energy To Clean Water And Power

Resolute Marine Energy— a Boston startup whose technology harnesses wave energy for power generation, and transports seawater to on-shore desalination facilities— won Global Entrepreneurship Week’s inaugural Startup Open, the competition’s directors revealed today.

As their prize, co-founders and core team members of Resolute Marine receive an all-expenses-paid, one-day trip to the island owned by Sir Richard Branson where they will embark on a Maverick Business Adventure. These events draw groups of entrepreneurs together to network while engaging in some crazy activities, like cage diving with Great White sharks, off-road racing or kite boarding.

The Startup Open was run by the Kauffman Foundation, the Kansas City organization dedicated to the study and promotion of entrepreneurship, using iStart software (formerly StudentBusinesses.com) to receive, review and process applications.

Unlike typical business competitions, there was no final pitch event, judges did not meet to review applications, and winners were selected based on compiled judges’ scores. Winners were picked from a pool of 50 finalists. The competition received 144 qualifying applications.

The chief operating officer and co-founder of Resolute Marine, Olivier Ceberio, spoke with TechCrunch about his company and the win. The following is a condensed version of the conversation.

Q: What does your company do?

A: Basically, Resolute Marine Energy uses the incredible power of the ocean to produce drinkable water and electricity.

William Stady who is my co-founder and chief executive, and I really wanted to solve a serious global problem. Over one billion people today lack access to safe drinking water. Over thirty percent of people, meanwhile, are living within 100 kilometers of the ocean according to a study we read by the Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center.

People who lack access to safe drinking water also usually lack access to the power grid or affordable power. Our small scale system converts energy from the waves into electrical power or into pressurized seawater, so we can provide both drinking water and clean, more affordable power.

Q: How does your technology work?

A: Our engineering team led by Cliff Goudey and Allan Chertok have been working on a wave energy converter that’s not portable, but easy to ship and set up. It’s somewhere between two and three meters of width. One power plant and desalination processor for a community of about 30,000 people would have fifty of these, perhaps.

The wave energy converter is like a pedal. It is attached to the bottom of the sea, or the seabed. When a wave starts, the pedal moves back and forth. It extracts energy from the wave, and we use that to produce either electrical power or pressurized sea water. It can produce one or the other. We send those to the shore to drive a desalination system. The technology transports energy, or it can transport pressurized seawater, which is an input to the desalination processing systems on-shore.

We have not created a desalination processing system ourselves. For that, we will partner with other companies. We have begun talking with some of the world’s largest providers of small scale desalination systems.

Q: Who are your customers? Are your systems out on the market yet?

A: We have an early stage customer with whom we plan to do a commercial product installation by the end of 2012 in South Africa. We’re considering that as our launch market. When we do our commercial pilot, the idea will be to install our wave energy converters, and a desalination processing system, then let it work for a couple of months producing water in a self-sustaining, off-the-grid way.

When we are ready to commecialize the system and install it, the wave energy converters will be in situ for 10 years or up to 20 years, and we will provide maintenance over that lifetime.

We have to test our system out before the commercial pilot, probably in New England most likely in Maine. In the U.S. three states that are very active in wave energy research are Maine, Oregon and Hawaii. But worldwide, the core of the wave energy industry would be in Scotland, and Australia with some others in Europe where governments really want to find and use renewable energy. I feel that U.S. has been somewhat behind in this.

Q: How will winning this competition effect your business?

A: Anything that can help us get to commercialization as soon as possible is helpful. These competitions are critical for us. They help you get endorsements, press, [access to new] networks, feedback on your projects and from the community beyond the cleantech professionals you know.

We competed at Ignite Clean Energy in 2009, which is now a part of the Cleantech Open, and at Masschallenge this year where we were among the finalists. We got in-kind services but no major cash prizes. We have also won several government grants. Surprisingly they are not near enough to pay for everything a cleatech startup needs.

We will be raising private capital to finance all the aspects of our business from intellectual property protection, to rent and marketing. We will also continue along the competition circuit, and hope to compete and win prize money from some that are focused on water technology.


Peter Thiel: Facebook Co-Founder Eduardo Saverin Did A Poor Job, Got Rich Anyway

As far as I know, and my Web searching skills can take me, early Facebook investor Peter Thiel hasn’t yet publicly commented on the role of Eduardo Saverin, who co-founded and initially bankrolled ‘thefacebook’ back in the early days.

Well, Thiel did exactly that, on Big Think (video below). Asked who Saverin is, Thiel says he was “affiliated, quasi-employed at Facebook in 2004″. The fun doesn’t stop there.

If you’re familiar with the origins of Facebook, whether or not you call yourself familiar with it because you’ve seen the movie The Social Network or not, you’ll know that Saverin was pushed out just when things got rolling for the fledgling company.

This happened around the time PayPal co-founder turned investor Peter Thiel and Napster co-founder Sean Parker got involved. Saverin famously sued Facebook and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in April 2005, and prevailed. He still owns 5% of Facebook (which means he’s worth over $1 billion nowadays)

Thiel chides Saverin for not being cut out for his role and that he wasn’t remotely doing his job at the time, which was supposed to be selling advertisements for Facebook. Ultimately, Thiel says, Saverin did well for not doing much.

He also says The Social Network was “wrong on many levels”, and the Hollywood’s “caricature of capitalism”.

Update: We spoke to Peter Thiel today who felt his comments on Saverin were taken out of context and exaggerated by Big Think. He clarified, “I don’t have a strong opinion on his work performance, but I do think that he did very well during his very short time at Facebook. I didn’t mean it to be a hit on him.”

The full transcript is copied below the video, which can also be watched here.

Question: Who is Eduardo Saverin?

Peter Thiel: He was a student at Harvard who was affiliated, quasi-employed at Facebook in 2004.

Question: What kind of capitalism is it that cuts Eduardo Saverin out of Facebook?

Peter Thiel: Well, it is the kind of caricature of capitalism that one sees in Hollywood where, I think the movie was wrong on many levels. It was basically a description of sort of a zero sum world that is mainly the way Hollywood works where people gained at the expense of other people. You know I think Face… the story of Facebook has been one where it’s been an incredible positive sum gain for everybody involved for the investors, for the employees, and for the world at large. All the stakeholders have really gained tremendously.

You know, I don’t think… I don’t think that Eduardo was cut out. You know, he was not doing his job and therefore you know. His job was to sell advertisements for Facebook and he was not remotely doing that job. You know, he ended up making a lot of money because he was partially involved and had helped in some small financial ways in getting the site started at the very beginning at Harvard. But I think the overall context of it was that it is a story where he did extraordinarily well relative to what he had done and I think there’s a very… there’s a very different.


For Cycling Geeks, Garmin’s Edge 800 Is Must-Have Kit

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Halfway across Ohio on my American autobahn extravaganza from NYC to Southern California, I hatched a plan. Garmin, the global GPS innovator had recently introduced the Edge 800, the world’s first touchscreen GPS cycling computer.

The week before my departure I’d been told there weren’t any editorial test units to be had. But Garmin’s HQ was just south of Kansas City, a short detour from my planned march across the Midwest and I figured if I showed up, they’d have a tough time saying no to my genial, yet persistent, requests.

The next morning, I rolled into the Garmin complex, road bike locked atop the car, ready for the grand tour and fully expecting to leave with some new, as-yet-unavailable-to-the-public navi-goodies. An hour or so later I was again heading west on Highway 70, much wiser about the ways of Garmin and with a pre-production version of the Edge 800 on the passenger seat.

Once I hit Colorado, which took forever because Kansas goes on for eons, it was time to do some test ridin’.

Like its most recent predecessors (Edges 705 and 500), the 800 was no disappointment. The form factor of the latest iteration follows the curvaceous lines of the 500, but is more of a rectangle and slightly larger, owing to the bright color touchscreen. My road bike already had the Garmin sensors onboard, so once the 800 was powered up and locked on the satellites, it immediately recognized my bike’s speed and heart-rate sensors. All I had to do was punch in my personal data — age, height, weight — and give the bike a name. Less than five minutes after power-up, I was rolling through scenic Colorado.

As it has grown, Garmin seems to have really focused on creating a user experience that’s increasingly friendly on the front end, yet amazingly robust under the hood. One of the obvious beauties of the 800 is how it masterfully blends the mountains of metrics that serious cyclists crave with an ease of use that keeps you feeling in control without the compulsion to constantly ape the screen.

However, if aping is your thing, Garmin has more than enabled you. The 800 has five main readout screens. The first is the color map for location and navigation. The second is a graphic and numerical pacing screen that shows your pace against a target. The final three are designated for the numbers and can display as many as six unique metrics per page. The data can be staggering.

Navigation with the 800 is very simple — just input an address or merely tap a location on the screen and it quickly calculates a turn-by-turn route with audio prompts along the way. If you take a wrong turn or merely meander, it quickly recalculates for you.

After you’ve climbed every mountain and forded a few streams, you’ll likely want to see your stats. Garmin Connect is the maker’s web way station for digi-crunchers and a place to share ride routes with other Garminites. Hook up the device to a computer with a mini-USB, log into the site, upload your activities and then slather yourself in it. If Shakira were a mathematician, she’d be singin’ it too — the numbers don’t lie.

Users can also share their data and routes with the world or merely with a chosen few. If you’re hankering to do a famous climb or some obscure route, it’s likely in the Garmin database. Upload it to your 800’s memory and follow the yellow brick road.

Quite honestly, the Edge 800 is a no-brainer — it gives you the convenience and peace of mind of never getting lost and knowing your performance stats every second of the way.

WIRED Quick, easy to set up. Bright color touchscreen. Intuitive user interface. World-class navigation functionality and oodles of performance metrics.

TIRED We’re living in a golden age of touchscreens. Should this one have a pinch-and-zoom function?

Author’s Note: Garmin recently acquired MetriGear, a company developing power meters implanted in the pedal spindle. Pedal-based power data makes the technology easily portable between bicycles and makes Garmin an end-to-end solution for cyclists who want to not only know where they’re going, but also OD on performance metrics. Garmin’s lips are sealed about when that technology might make it to the public, but we’d say you’re almost certain to see it in 2011.

Ditching Your ISP and Switching to Clear 4G

The concept is pretty clear: If you had high-speed internet in your pocket, chances are you would dump your home service provider, rethink your wireless plan and even hang out at Starbucks less often.

That kind of massively disruptive scenario defined the trajectory for the telephone. Landlines are on a death spiral, because phone calls went into your pocket. And then maybe, just maybe, you realized that your mobile phone worked just as well in your living room as it did in your travels.

The ‘Bring Your Own Internet’ business isn’t new. USB sticks and brick-like portable hotspots have been available for a long time. And, with an Android or WebOS handset (or a jailbroken iPhone) you already have yourself a personal hotspot you can share with other devices.

The trouble is that you probably don’t have an unlimited mobile-data plan (grandfathered iPhone owners notwithstanding). And you almost certainly don’t have 4G — the very new broadband standard which as a practical matter is every bit as good as the Wi-Fi to which you are accustomed.

So imagine how empowering it would be to have limitless 4G in your pocket. You could tell your cable or satellite company that all you need is TV, thank you very much. You wouldn’t have to depend on the kindness of Wi-Fi strangers on the road. You wouldn’t have to buy a separate data plan for your portable device. Heck — you may not even need a smartphone at all.

Keep imagining. We aren’t there yet, but we are slouching in that direction. And leading a very credible charge is Clear, a venture between Sprint and Clearwire that is expanding into three major tech-heavy cities: New York this month, Los Angeles and San Francisco in December.

It will take a while for 4G to become ubiquitous enough for lots of people to break old habits. But if you are lucky enough to live, work and or play in a Clear 4G coverage area you might begin to start questioning your faith for all the right reasons.

Coverage is the rub, of course. There are strangely located “not-yet-serviced” pockets on the Clear map, though the service automatically toggles to more-widely available 3G. Deep within an office building, like here at 4 Times Square, signal erodes. If you are near a window, though, it’s very clear sailing. And for those of us who commute out of the city, well, don’t make me laugh.

But I had an opportunity to actually need BYOI this past weekend when I visited a relative on Manhattan’s Upper West Side who doesn’t even own a computer. An amazing thing happened: Rather than bemoan the mixed blessing that my 3G USB stick always is, the Clear USB dongle that I was prescient enough to bring along served me up a blisteringly satisfying experience.

Webpages loaded as fast as on my home (wireless) or office (corded) networks. So, this is how cocky I got: I decided to watch my Slingbox. But first, I decided to update my Slingbox firmware. The update was working, though I had to leave my computerless kin before it could complete. But I watched TV with Slingbox and Clear 4G later.

Besides coverage, price will determine BYOI’s future. Clear’s plans range from $25 to $110 a month. It’s a bit complicated: There are plans with speed (but not usage caps), plans that are only for “Apple mobile devices,” plans that are meant for heavy home users, plans that include phone (VoIP) service. On most plans you can go month-to-month, but you have to buy your 4G device. With a two-year commitment the cost of the device is included. There are a range of devices, with some tied to specific plans. We tested the Clear 4G+ Mobile USB (Series S).

Bottom line: This is already a credible all-purpose internet option for some (read, single people). Your decision will depend on whether you can tap into 4G where you do most of your internet-ing — just the way you picked your wireless provider (iPhone devotees excluded).

WIRED Portable 4G has a cool factor that only the first cellphone users can appreciate. And there’s no better pick-up line than “Wanna tap into my 4G?”

TIRED Three things. Coverage: We know this is complicated. But until you can blanket at least the most densely populated areas, takers may be as spotty as a bad coverage map. Plans: Too many choices are a turnoff. Think Apple, not Dell. Prices: The sweet spot is $60. Just sayin’.

See Also:

First Look: Zynga Takes On Rivals With CityVille, A Casual Virtual Metropolis

It’s time to meet the latest Zynga game that’s destined to join the ranks of Facebook’s most popular applications: CityVille. It’s SimCity meets FarmVille, and it’s got plenty of competition. CityVille isn’t quite finished yet — Zynga says we can expect it to go live globally in the coming weeks — but I got a chance to see a 45 minute demo, which was enough to get the gist of what users should expect. When it does launch, the game will be internationalized in German, Italian, Spanish and French, which will mark the company’s first global launch.

Zynga’s entry into this genre isn’t a surprise: Digital Chocolate’s Millionaire City has 12.6 million monthly active users, making it one of the top games on Facebook; other competitors include Playfish’s My Empire, Crowdstar’s Hello City, and Playdom’s Social City, along with many others. But despite the fact that it’s joining the fray months after its competition, CityVille is sure to see at least some success, because Zynga will be able to steer players of its existing mega-hits to the game.

So does it look any good? Before I get into that, I should make it perfectly clear that I’m not the sort of person who enjoys FarmVille or FrontierVille — I like my games to involve a bit more strategy and thinking. And, from what I can tell, CityVille comes a little closer to what I’m looking for. It’s no Civilization or SimCity, but this is probably Zynga’s ‘smartest’ game yet.

If you’ve played SimCity or any of the aforementioned social city building games, CityVille will feel pretty intuitive. After firing up the game you’ll be walked through a series of introductory missions the instruct you to lay down roads and plot out your first houses and businesses. As your population grows you’ll see an increasing number of people wandering around your town, and you’ll gradually gain access to new, more impressive looking buildings that will help you evolve your town into a virtual metropolis.

And you can’t just start arranging your city willy-nilly, either. Well, actually you probably can, but if you put some thought into it, you’ll find it grows more quickly. That’s because each building and decorative item you place can affect the value of the area around it. There’s also some basic micromanagment around each business’s supply chain. And from a visual perspective this is Zynga’s best looking game — buildings are rendered as 3D sprites, and you can rotate them depending on where you want to place them (this is the first Zynga game to use 3D).

Zynga claims this is their most social game yet. As with Zynga’s other games this social element is still asynchronous (i.e., you aren’t actually playing the game with a friend in real-time). But there are a few additions that boost your interaction with friends. The biggest is the ability to allow a friend to run a business located in your city. They have to ask for permission, but once you’ve granted it, your friend will control that business’s operations. I’m told that they can’t really run the business into the ground (it will still do fine even if they never log in), but if you work with friends who are especially attentive, you’ll benefit more. You can also exchange goods with friends using the game’s transit system, which includes trains and ships.

One thing that’s interesting to note: in FarmVille and most of Zynga’s other popular games, you get punished when you don’t log into the game frequently enough (in FarmVille your plants start to die off). CityVille isn’t employing this kind of punishment mechanic — your city won’t grow as quickly if you aren’t tending to it often, but it doesn’t start falling to shambles over time, either.  That sounds less stressful, but it could possibly lead to less engagement over time. One thing I’ve learned from my experience with other city simulations is that once you’ve achieved a decently high level — enough to access most of the more impressive buildings — the appeal of the game wears off quickly.

But Zynga has a few tricks up its sleeve to keep gamers interested. The biggest is a mission system — from the moment you start playing the game, you’re given tasks to complete. These run from the very basic (build a coffee shop) to much more involved — one story arc involves an archeological dig, which of course requires you to revamp the layout of your city.

One last, completely hilarious, thing to note: Zynga says CityVille will let you uproot trees and plant them somewhere else on your plot of land instead of demolishing them, allowing for a more eco-friendly experience than FrontierVille, which only lets you chop them down. I think they’re serious.

Information provided by CrunchBase


Twitter Has A (Secret) Reputation Score For Every User

Whoah. Onstage at Web 2.0 Summit, Twitter founder Evan Williams revealed, when asked by interviewer John Battelle “How do you pick ‘Who to Follow’?,” that Twitter has a private reputation score for every user.

According to Williams, Twitter’s “science and math people” have systems which gauge who you follow and who the people you follow follow and try to find ‘Who to Follow’ relevance in that overlap. He didn’t make it clear how individual user reputation score was measured.

“We might make it public,” he said regarding the score, “But it has to evolve more.”

You can watch the rest of the talks here.


Twitter’s Williams On Facebook Relationship: We’re Talking To Them Often — So Far, Nada

Today at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams sat down with host John Battelle. Battelle asked Williams about Twitter’s relationship with Facebook. As you might expect, it’s complicated, according to Williams.

Battelle asked if Twitter was open to doing more integration with Facebook. “I think you’d have to ask Mark [Zuckerberg] that. But you missed your opportunity,” Williams joked (Zuckerberg was interviewed on stage yesterday). Williams noted that Battelle also didn’t ask Zuckerberg why they blocked Twitter’s contact integration.

Williams says that he’d like Twitter users to be able to tap into Facebook to make their experience better. And he said he understands their position in that they see their social graph as their core asset. But he clearly doesn’t think it’s the right idea to block them. Facebook’s reason is that they like to have formal relationships in place for deals with large companies. It’s the same reason they blocked Apple’s Ping service.

“We’re talking to them often”to see if there’s a way to work together,” Williams said of Twitter. “So far, neither side has figured out a way to do that other than what we’re already doing,” he continued.

Yep. It’s complicated.


Hastings On Hulu Plus: If They Become A Competitor, That’s Probably Healthy For Us

Today at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and Peter Chernin sat down with New York Magazine’s John Heilemann to talk about the state of the video content business. A question from the audience asked Hastings about the news today that Hulu was cutting their prices.

Hastings noted that Hulu was still mainly an advertising play. And he said that Netflix has actually long been an advertiser on Hulu. “Hulu Plus may grow into a competitor over time, but that’s probably healthy for us,” he said. Notice he’s saying that he doesn’t consider them an actual competitor just yet.

He said that the space is growing so quickly and that there will be a lot of other players, not just the two of them.

Hastings also said that a streaming-only plan would be coming to the U.S. “shortly”. The service is currently offering such a plan in Canada.

When Heilemann asked him about further expansion, Hastings said that the plan is to be everywhere in 3 to 5 years — but said that the order they expand in doesn’t matter much. That will be dictated by the availability of broadband, he said.

Heilemann also asked Hastings if given Netflix’s fast growth, he worries about bandwidth problems going forward? Hastings noted that just 10 years ago the majority of the U.S. was accessing the Internet via AOL-type dial-up. Now we’re all on broadband. In 10 years, he envisions a world where we’ll have 100 Mbps upstream and downstream connections, and we’ll all be doing video conferencing in realtime.

“It will follow Moore’s Law,” Hastings said noting that technology will keep coming along to make things faster. In other words, he’s not concerned about growth.