Category: Tech news

Earlier today, Facebook held a special event to unveil a totally revamped Groups product, a new data export option, and a dashboard to help you monitor third-party apps that you’ve linked with Facebook.  In short, it’s a huge day for the company  — the result of a 60-day Lockdown period this summer, during which Facebook employees had their noses to the grindstone even more than usual (the sign above is actually hanging inside of Facebook HQ).

Following the event, I had the chance to sit down with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Justin Shaffer, who founded Hot Potato (which Facebook acquired in August) and is now Product Manager for the revamped Groups. The interview, which you can read in its entirety below, touches on a few topics: the timing of the announcements, which may be a preemptive strike against Google’s upcoming social strategy Google Me; the rationale for allowing users to download their data now, after years of advocacy groups asking for such functionality; and even Facebook’s recently-granted patent on location services, which Zuckerberg hints won’t be used offensively.

 

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Jason Kincaid: My first question concerns the timing on this. There’s been a lot of rumors about Google Me or a Google social network of some kind — how does this play into that? Are these features that have been on the drawing board for a long time and it’s just coincidental that they’ve come out at this point?

 

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah. It’s really tough to time an announcement. Our methodology around this is normally just to work and work, and when it’s ready we announce it. The whole Lockdown thing came about because we saw that we had a bunch of different projects that were about ready to go into their final intense push and get launched in the next couple of months. So we decided to rally the whole company around this  — we said, “we’re going to focus on a few of these things and put all of our energy behind those”. So we tried to launch these in that period, and it turns out it’s a week after, which isn’t a big deal — it’s fine. That’s really the main push. I don’t know what the exact timing was. It might have been that in May there was so much energy around all the privacy stuff that was going on that there was kind of this lull in new development and then there was a big wave of things that were ready to go.

Jason Kincaid: So these could have been pushed back a bit because of Instant Personalization and…(the rest of the privacy debate)..?

Mark Zuckberberg: There may have been something internally.. We were just as a company so focused on getting privacy right at that point that we stopped thinking about a bunch of other things and then once we were done working on that wave of privacy-related things, we had around eight new products that were all on-deck to launch.

Jason Kincaid: And there are still more coming that weren’t part of this suite of products?

Mark Zuckerberg: Yes there will be a few more.. some good ones…

Jason Kincaid: Like a redesign maybe?

Mark Zuckerberg: I don’t know where that rumor came from. It depends on what you call a redesign. I mean, Groups…

Jason Kincaid: My impression from what we’d reported is that Facebook Profiles would look more similar to the Places pages.

Mark Zuckerberg: I don’t know…

Justin Shaffer: Yeah I read that yesterday on TechCrunch and was sort of curious..

Mark Zuckerberg: I don’t think we’re working on an aesthetic redesign. But there’s a bunch of other stuff that I’m pretty excited about that will come out in the next couple of months.

Jason Kincaid: Justin, I know you just joined around two months ago? Am I correct in assuming that the Groups product was already under way at that point or did you ..

Mark Zuckerberg: It was underway but it wouldn’t have gotten finished.

Justin Shaffer: I will take that compliment, thank you *laughs*. But yeah, there was a team that had already come together. One of the things about Lockdown though was that, as Mark said, the whole company really rallied around this. As we’re getting this stuff done — like Places launched and then the Games event two weeks ago — everybody just puts their heads down for whatever it takes to get done. It’s really exciting to be part of a culture and organization like that. I’m having the time of my life. It’s really fun. And so for Groups, the amount of people within Facebook and engineering and product across the company that this touched. We were basically living in the office to launch and everyone was really fired up to get it done. I don’t think you could characterize this as being all me..

Mark Zuckerberg: We have had this interesting strategy, we’re trying to build a really entrepreneurial company and culture. One of the ways we’ve focused on doing that has been just to get people who we think are running really interesting companies to join. That’s why we bought Hot Potato — to make sure you [Shaffer] and a couple of other folks joined. That strategy has worked really well for us so far.

Jason Kincaid: Now a question about this Data Portability announcement.. I know this is something that people have been complaining about for as long as I can remember — what made this possible now? Is it the fact that you have David Recordon on now? My understanding is that there were privacy challenges that made it difficult to do this before and I’m wondering how you cleared those.

Mark Zuckerberg: I think that this is a pretty big step forward in terms of making it so that people can download all of their information, but it isn’t going to be all of what everyone wants. There are going to be questions about why you can’t download your friend’s information too. And it’s because it’s your friend’s and not yours. But you can see that information on Facebook, so maybe you should be able to download it… those are some of the grey areas.

So for this, what we decided to do was stick to content that was completely clear. You upload those photos and videos and wall posts and messages, and you can take them out and they’re yours, undisputed — that’s your profile. There’s going to be more that we need to think through over time. One of the things, we just couldn’t understand why people kept on saying there’s no way to export your information from Facebook because we have Connect, which is the single biggest large-scale way that people bring information from one site to another that I think has ever been built.

Justin Shaffer: It’s crazy as a former Connect developer, you can pull a lot of information out of Facebook…

Mark Zuckerberg: So then all of these people say they want a .ZIP file, so we said, Ok let’s give them a .ZIP file. If it’s meaningful to have it in that format and make it so that you can have it on your computer, then we want to do that. We implemented it on top of the Graph API to show that this is part of the broader Connect program. And we made it pretty too. So it isn’t just a Zip file that sits there — it’s really a cool product. If you download your information and scroll through, it’s pretty mesmerizing. And then think about downloading different copies and look back at how your FB account was at different times in the future.

Jason Kincaid: This goes back to the timing issue. I read some initial reaction to the Data Portability launch, and it talked about how you are so big now that it doesn’t really matter if you let everyone take their data with them. Does that play into this at all?

Mark Zuckerberg: I think we just think it’s the right thing to do.

Jason Kincaid: So it’s more of a fundamental part of the company philosophy that you just hadn’t gotten around to implementing yet?

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah. There’s a lot of stuff that we want to do that we haven’t gotten around to doing yet. It’s something that people here believe really strongly — that you own your information. But it’s interesting, there were questions that I think got to all of the tensions, like “Well isn’t this dangerous? What if someone hacks your computer after you have this file?”

And it’s like — yeah, that’s an issue. But then the question is, what’s better? To build up all these walls so that nothing bad ever happens or to give people control of their information and let all that innovation happen. And I think in reality, philosophically we’re so far on the side of being open and giving people complete ownership and control because it’s their information. And in practice we’re trying to mediate all this stuff and make it as good as possible.

Jason Kincaid: Going back to the Groups, how does this play into the Like button, the Share button. I know Facebook is getting really broad distribution in terms of how people are sharing across the web, and it seems like one thing I would like to do is share a given post with one of my Groups as opposed to everyone’s News Feed.

Justin Shaffer: It’s an awesome use case for social plugins, if you want to control distribution of that action. It isn’t something we’ve built for this first release.

Mark Zuckerberg: Actually I don’t know, I think this might automatically be built into the composer. I’m not sure exactly how this is implemented, but we designed it so that we could build a block that gets inherited into a lot of products. When you write a status today there’s a little lock that lets you pick who you want to share it with — you can just set in that you want to just share with a group.

Jason Kincaid: Does that composer appear when I hit the share button on a third party site?

Mark Zuckerberg: That I don’t know off the top of my head. But if not today, then in a matter of months we’ll have that sorted out. We built the architecture so that it could support that.

Jason Kincaid: One question that is totally unrelated to any of this: this morning there was a post saying that Facebook had been granted a patent on location, in terms of associating location data with a status update. Is that something that Facebook will use defensively or do you anticipate possibly using it as leverage in negotiations with Foursquare, Gowalla, etc.?

Barry Schnitt (Director of Corporate Communications, on Facebook’s PR team): I don’t know of any company thatcomments on their IP strategy.

Mark Zuckerberg: I actually didn’t even know we got that patent.

Barry Schnitt: We have a statement on that, but for lots of reasons that involve the effectiveness of a patent, you just don’t comment on what it will be used for.

Mark Zuckerberg: I mean, you can see what we’ve used patents for in the past.

Jason Kincaid: I can’t remember a time you’ve used…

Mark Zuckerberg: Exactly.

Jason Kincaid: …it offensively.

Jason Kincaid: Ok — and was there anything else you guys wanted to cover on Groups?

Mark Zuckerberg: The thing that is really important to understand about Groups — I think it’s very easy to look at the announcement and say, oh it’s Groups, there’s been Groups products for ten years.

But it’s the fact that we’re building groups as a building block to do all of these other things and I think that’s what is fundamental — I think a bunch of folks are probably going to miss that coming from the announcement, and just say, “oh this is groups”. But I think that this has the potential really be a major step forward for this site.

Jason Kincaid: How are you going to on-board people into this? This sort of fundamentally changes how a lot of people are going to be using the site I’d expect. How are you going to introduce them to this concept?

Justin Shaffer: The messaging is pretty straightforward. We think of these as shared spaces for you and a small group of your friends. Tactically we’re rolling it out very aggressively in the next week or so to our userbase, and you can get access to Groups in one of two ways: you’ll either be someone who is seeded and at that point you won’t have any groups and your left navbar will change. You’ll have a link that says “Create a group” and we’ll give you a contextual dialog that explains what’s going on. And if you are a user who likes to read about it, there’s a lot of information that supports that.

The other, and perhaps more interesting way is that say, I haven’t used the product and Mark adds me to a ‘Facebookers Living in Palo Alto’ group. I get a notification about that and am now part of the product. I can go create my own groups after that. I’m immediately in, I’m seeing content, I’m seeing what’s going on. It’s really simple.

Parenting focused ecommerce site EcoMom, which provides a curated shopping experience for moms, has just received $1.1 million in Series A funding from angels and VCs alike. Investors in the round include Dan Gould (founder of Newroo and Namesake), Cyan and Scott Banister, Dave McClure, Paige Craig, Sizhao Yang and David Pell as well as several angels from Angel List.

Like a Zappos for new parents, the six person company sells things to new moms keeping in mind the following strictures, “Are the products safe?” “Are the products useful?”

Ecomom targets LOHAS or the “lifestyles, health and sustainability” market, which CEO Jody Sherman pegs at $200 billion a year. Says Sherman, “If given the opportunity every mom would make the decision to purchase a product that was healthier for their child or safer.”

Likening themselves to the Diapers.com “Green” section, or Amazon Babies, Sherman says there’s no service currently curating parenting products like EcoMom which, with a network of over 13,000 mommy bloggers (growing at about 100 per month) writing product reviews, aims to be the primary resource for parents shopping for their families. “I hope to one day be as big as Zappos,” says Sherman.

But while Zappos is focused on shoes, EcoMom provides a variety of products, currently stocking an inventory of over 2000 childcare-related items in an attempt to apply the traditional ecommerce model to the social/content driven web.

This financing is a big deal for the bootstrapped startup, which went live last February and initially began with shipments of products on pallets to Sherman’s bedroom. While EcoMom is currently not-profitable, Sherman expects to be in the black before the end of next year, “This money will allow us to grow faster,” he says, planning on using the money for site redevelopment, key hires and acquiring new customers.

“And now this post will be TechCrunched and the Internet will go into an infinite loop and explode from the sheer weight of navel gazing.”

3-2-1 … Nope. No explosions. Nothing.

Yup, still here.

For those out of the (infinite) loop, we just wrote a post about attempting to break into the rapidly exploding and private Yahoo Alumni group on Facebook. And then we did, hence above.

Hiring? Then you should definitely scroll through this impressive recently inaugurated group of Yahoo alumni, currently up to 183 members despite it being less then three hours old. At the rate group membership is exploding, we’re thinking this could easily surpass the 500 mark in the next 48 hours.

No word on whether “Yahoo Alumni!” is the fastest scaling Facebook Group since Facebook launched the feature, but it is probably the most bittersweet, as there is nothing on Yahoo that would currently support this use case and, from what we’re hearing, Yahoo is pretty interested in building a Groups-eqsue product itself.

While the group is private, ambitious recruiters can cross reference the “Members” list with our posts from when it was easier to track such things, “Tracking Former Yahoo Execs – Where Are They Now?” as well as the old Yahoo Alumni Facebook page, which boasts a  whopping 3,168 members (Yahoo has around 14,100 current employees).

We’re also working on getting on the inside, and will update this post with resumes if we get a hold of any.

Update: We’re In! And they like us, they really really like us.

We just noted that Twitter quietly rolled out an entirely new search backend over the past few weeks, and nobody seemed to notice. That’s actually great news, because it means nothing went terribly wrong in the transition. But now comes the real challenge for Twitter: making search useful once again.

Twitter Search has long held the promise of something great. Original born as an independent company, Summize, when Twitter bought them in 2008, it seemed clear that they were about to get serious about search. But as scaling problems continued and escalated, and as the user base continued to grow, search took a backseat. I would bet that if you polled Twitter users now about one thing they’d like to see improved, it would be search.

As it stands, Twitter search is fine, but it’s way too basic. Yes, there is an advanced search area on the stand-alone search site, but few users probably know about it — and even less probably use it. Searches are done on twitter.com, and for those, you’re basically just getting a reverse chronological listing of tweets. Sure, this has been augmented over time by Top Tweets and Promoted Tweets, but it’s still the same basic idea.

But here’s what Twitter wrote today in announcing the new search architecture:

But you might wonder: Fine, it’s faster, and you guys can scale it longer, but will there be any benefits for the users? The answer is definitely yes! The first difference you might notice is the bigger index, which is now twice as long — without making searches any slower. And, maybe most importantly, the new system is extremely versatile and extensible, which will allow us to build cool new features faster and better. Stay tuned!

Key words: Cool. New. Features.

Twitter revealed some crazy stats about search today. They’re now seeing over 12,000 queries per second, which means more than a billion queries per day. That’s a little misleading because things like Trending Topic clicks are searches too — but still, it’s a massive search engine. And while Twitter has deals to send their data to the big boys — Google and Bing — the company has indicated in the past that they may start making moves that move them much closer to the traditional search engines. With each link shared on Twitter now passing through their own t.co shortener, Twitter knows a lot about what is being shared, and that could be very valuable in an improved search.

And, as we’re all very well aware, search is highly monetizable. Twitter clearly has the volume to go there if they want (they sort of are with some Promoted Products). That’s something the new CEO surely must be thinking about.

But most of all, people just want a way to access their entire history of tweets. Sadly, right now, we have to use a third-party tool to do that (incredibly, I’m still using the long-dormant FriendFeed as my Twitter search tool). With this new backend change, Twitter says the index is bigger and twice as long — but we want it all. Hopefully Twitter is finally gearing up to give us just that with search.

A lifetime ago, back in 2004, I became a book publisher: co-founder of The Friday Project, a publishing house that promised to adapt the web’s creative talent into awesome books. This wasn’t print on demand, it was real, live publishing: we paid our authors (including the occasional advance), we partnered with publishing giant Macmillan for distribution and our books could be found in actual book stores.

It’s hard to say if we rode the bloggers-with-book-deals wave or if we helped precipitate it. All I know is, for a brief period starting about five years into the present millennium, every online hack and her dog was being offered a six figure sum to turn her livejournal about love or sex or working in an office or cooking like Julia Child (or all of the above) into the next bestseller. Big online brands got in on the action too with Gawker and Postsecret and every other site north of a million page views being handed a fat check. There were even agents who specialised in blog-to-book deals, most notably ICM’s Kate Lee who achieved her own meta-micro fame by helping high profile bloggers break through.

Twelve months later came the deluge of remaindered books. A couple of the sex books did pretty well, Julie and Julia went on to become a movie, Postsecret still hums along nicely – but the vast, vast majority of the rest sank without trace (the Gawker book is currently trading at about five copies the 1923 Deutsch Mark). The Friday Project was itself remaindered, sold to Harper Collins who have since un-acquired every member of the original team.

The conclusion, in hindsight, seems obvious: just because something makes for a popular blog, doesn’t mean it’s going to be an equally popular book. Books are – duh – a different medium: I might smirk at and retweet a pithy observation on Twitter but would I really pay Barnes and Noble to read it in printed form? And given the size of the advances – Stuff White People Like sold for a reported $300,000 – they didn’t have to just shift copies to be considered succesful, they had to become bestsellers.

Today, generally speaking, publishers have learned to assess online talent for its literary potential rather than being bamboozled by hype. Certainly only a fucking idiot would throw good money at an author – not to mention the associated development costs – simply on the basis of some ethereal web traffic numbers.

CUT TO: A room full of television producers.

The first episode of “Bleep My Dad Says” aired last month. Adapted by CBS from the almost-eponymous Twitter account “Shit My Dad Says” the show was a critical flop, despite the fact that the account’s author, Justin Halpern, is a professional screenwriter. Viewers apparently agreed with the critics: the show lost two million viewers between the first two episodes.

Unperturbed, CBS is ploughing ahead with it’s blog-to-broadcast spree, signing up “Shh… Don’t Tell Steve”, a Twitter stream of things overheard from the author’s roommate, Steve. I shit you not. CBS is clearly trying to own the “things people I live with just said” space. And good luck to them.

Over at ABC they’ve just signed a “script plus penalty” deal with Sony Pictures for a show based on AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com, created by Mike Bender and Doug Chernack. (“Script plus penalty” essentially means that Sony – and the site’s creators – get paid no matter whether a pilot is subsequently made). Quite what a show based on some awkward photographs will look like is unclear – just thinking about it makes my brain hurt – but between the subject matter and the precedent set by Bleep My Dad Says, it’s reasonably safe to say the results won’t be pretty.

There’s a saying, credited to George Santayana, that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Like publishers before them, TV studios are terrified by the exodus of their core audience, particularly the younger segments of it, to the Internet (the fact that many of those escapees are turning to the Internet to watch TV shows like House or Glee doesn’t seem to matter.) In response, producers have decided that the only way to compete with the web is by throwing money at spin-off shows that started life online, no matter how abstract the concept or how high the cost of acquisition. And, like book publishers before them, it’s likely to take them at least a year – and a dozen more dreadful pilots – before they realise the embarrassing error of their ways: that just because something makes a good blog or Twitter account doesn’t mean it will make a successful TV show.

In the meantime, check your local listings for shows like Craigslist: Miami, Celebrity Foursquares and Dancing With Lolcats, coming soon to a TV screen near you…

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A Postscript on AOL/TC…

I should probably clear something up. In my last column I acknowledged the screaming inevitability of me being fired by AOL. Some readers inferred the reverse: that I’d decided to quit in some fit of pique over the acquisition of TechCrunch by (and I quote myself) “America’s number one killer of startups”. My inbox steadily filled up with subject lines like “Have you really quit?” or “Woah!” or “No!” or “Yes!”. I’m no longer on Twitter, but I gather similar noises were made there.

Here – to save my tired fingers – is the answer: no, I haven’t quit AOL-TC – not least because, as I’m technically a contractor (the Untermenschen of the corporate world) no-one from AOL has spoken a single word to me since the take-over. It’s hard to quit a job you haven’t been offered. It’s also incredibly liberating to exist in this kind of limbo.

That said – I’ve made (and will continue to make) no secret of my fear that our new corporate structure will mean the end of TechCrunch as I know and love it. I’ve seen what happens when big dumb companies acquire small awesome ones, and it’s much like what happens when you let a drunk elephant play with a blind kitten. I’d be an idiot to expect otherwise. But at the same time I have a huge amount of affection and loyalty towards Heather, Mike and the TechCrunch team so I’m in no hurry to rush out the door simply because it would be the cool and independent thing to do. TechCrunch is dysfunctional as all hell, but I like it here.

So, like Milton in Office Space, I’m planning on tapping away here for the time being: until either it stops being fun, I stop getting paid (“we. fixed. the. glitch.”) someone revokes my login credentials, or someone in AOL’s New York head office decides to drop by my virtual desk with some helpful suggestions on language and tone.

And while I await the inevitable, the least I can do is to continue sharing with you the amusing things that I’ve been privy to since the takeover. Like the moment last week where an HR person strolled up to Alexia’s desk and asked her “are you MG?” (Alexia claims she’s flattered by the mistake). Or the fact that the quality of AOL’s welcome gifts appears to directly correlate with the reported valuation of your acquisition. Employees of TechCrunch (reported sale value: $50m) received bottles of $7 wine in AOL carrier bags (thanks) while the Brizzly folks (reported sale value: $6m) were given branded staplers. Really. AOL staplers. Isn’t that fucking tremendous?

And I said, I don’t care if they lay me off either, because I told, I told Bill that if they move my desk one more time, then, then I’m, I’m quitting, I’m going to quit. And, and I told Don too, because they’ve moved my desk four times already this year, and I used to be over by the window, and I could see the squirrels, and they were merry, but then, they switched from the Swingline to the Boston stapler, but I kept my Swingline stapler because it didn’t bind up as much, and I kept the staples for the Swingline stapler and it’s not okay because if they take my stapler then I’ll set the building on fire…

– Milton

Now I’m not sure if he was actually paid for this, and it genuinely looks like former Black Eyed Peas artist will.i.am loves Twitter. But something’s up with this 1:27 long entreaty to “Check it out,” which includes such gems as Will tweeting “Can I get a redesign up in here?” and showing off the geolocational features, how to create a list and how to complete a vanity search in case you can’t figure it out. To Will’s credit, #NewTwitter is, admittedly, complicated.

Also bizarre: Samuel L. Jackson yelling “Check this motherfucker out” at the end. I basically can’t get that out of my head now.

While everyone was busy trying out New Twitter or tweeting about how they want New Twitter, Twitter itself was doing something secret behind the scenes. The startup quietly flipped the switch on an entirely new backend for their search, they reveal in a blog post today.

“One of our main goals, but also biggest challenges, was a smooth switch from the old architecture to the new one, without any downtime or inconsistencies in search results,” they write in the post. Mission: accomplished, it seems, as no one outside of Twitter even seemed to be aware that they switched anything.

Twitter notes that they had to build this new backend because they were still using the search technology that they acquired in the Summize deal. Obviously, that tech was great at the time, but Twitter was much smaller at the time of that deal; they’ve grown massively since then. “Scaling the old MySQL-based system had become increasingly challenging,” they note.

So what is this new search? “Since we love Open Source here at Twitter we chose Lucene, a search engine library written in Java, as a starting point,” Twitter notes in the post. But they say that they had to modify it give their demands for real-time search. What type of demands? These types of demands:

Our demands on the new system are immense: With over 1,000 TPS (Tweets/sec) and 12,000 QPS (queries/sec) = over 1 billion queries per day (!) we already put a very high load on our machines. As we want the new system to last for several years, the goal was to support at least an order of magnitude more load.

They also have a goal of indexing a tweet after it’s tweeted in less than 10 seconds.

Twitter says that any custom work they did/do on Lucene will be put back into the open source.

And the new system, which again, has been rolling out for a few weeks now, seems to be working. Twitter estimates that they’re only using about 5 percent of the available backend resources. They say the new indexer could also run 50 times more tweets per second than they currently get. In other words, it will scale.

More: A Billion Queries A Day Later, Twitter Finally Working On Search Again

Located on a nondescript block in San Francisco’s Mission district is HipMunk HQ, a simple townhouse with a dark green trim. The travel startup’s operations are concentrated in just the first two rooms on the first floor— the rest is living space for Hipmunk’s co-founders, Adam Goldstein and Steve Huffman, formerly of Reddit. The approximate 300 square feet is more than enough space for the fledgling flight search engine, which is made up of three full-time employees (including the co-founders) and a couple of part-time workers.

The idea is to outgrow the space as cash trickles in from the site’s flight purchases (according to the team, they’ve been technically profitable since their August launch) and their latest angel round, a $1 million pool backed by investors like Ron Conway’s SV Angel and Paul Buchheit.

As initially reported and later confirmed by Huffman, the last round of financing was highly competitive with “dozens” of prospective investors vying for the Y-Combinator startup. Many gave up when they saw the higher than average valuation (greater than $4 M, less than $10 M) but as evidenced by the final roll call, more than a few were ready to sign the dotted line.

So why the fuss? Why do we care about a stylish, ambiguously hip-ster(?) chipmunk with an obnoxiously adorable periwinkle scarf? TC TV dropped by 75 Sharon St. to find out.

For starters, the “Hipmunk” mascot is a product of Goldstein’s imagination, borne more out of necessity than whimsy. Like many startups in today’s Silicon Valley, Goldstein was struggling to find an apropo domain that was topical and more importantly, available. After dangerously flirting with (and even purchasing) domains like BouncePounce.com and Trot.me, Goldstein’s girlfriend told him to identify a cute mammal that he could build a brand around. Hipmunk fit the bill.

The site itself is designed to be the kernel of a fully formed travel search engine—- when and if Goldstein and Huffman get around to launching new verticals for accommodations, rental cars, international editions, etc. Although much attention has been paid to the visual nature of Hipmunk’s search results— all the results for a query appear on a one-page graph, optimized for the shortest and cheapest flights and color-coded by airline— the founding team says the site is not designed to be a visualization of travel search, just intuitive. Thus the upcoming verticals may look radically different than the flight category but all will follow basic principles of logic, something Goldstein and Huffman say has been largely deficient in this industry.

Borrowing a mantra he used at Reddit, Huffman says Hipmunk’s goal is to be, in two words, “not horrible.”

However, in order for Hipmunk to be “not horrible,” the site will have to quickly expand its database which currently only includes flights from Orbitz.

For a site that aims to reduce agony, and even includes an “agony” button, the last thing a consumer wants is to feel compelled to use Hipmunk in tandem with other sites to compare prices and features.

That hasn’t been an easy battle but doors are opening as Hipmunk’s hype builds.
In fact, when Hipmunk was just starting out, Orbitz was the only one to take their call— many of the traditional carriers ignored Hipmunk or delayed discussion (likely jaded by the slew of travel startups that have emerged in the last decade, all promising to be the next Expedia).  Now, according to Goldstein, they’re taking his calls and Hipmunk is on track to roll out several new partnerships later this year. The team is also renegotiating terms with Orbitz thanks to the steady rise in sales (to date, Hipmunk users have completed “millions” of dollars in ticket sales, according to the founders). Currently, Orbitz pays Hipmunk the standard rate of $3 per flight sold.

See full video above.

Here’s a quick video on the origin of Hipmunk:

PayPal first announced the eventual roll out of a specialized micropayments product in August, which would allow businesses to collect micropayments on the web via PayPal. Today, the company has confirmed to TechCrunch that it will be launching a ‘digital goods optimized product,’ a.k.a. a payments technology for micropayments, in a few weeks at the company’s developer conference, Innovate,. PayPal has also formed a number of high-profile partnerships with companies to implement the digital goods product, which will also be announced at the conference.

In order to best understand how big this feature could be, it’s important to know what PayPal includes in its definition of “digital goods.” According to the company, the new product will include specialized payment support for micropayments for online video, music, games (including the sale of virtual goods and currencies), paid content, books and software.

We’re told that PayPal wants to replicate the act of putting another quarter in a gaming machine to continue to play a game, except in an online equivalent. The company wants to lower the friction point of leaving things, whether that be within a game, while reading content, or watching videos.

While PayPal declined to name its partners for the new product, we do know that the companies who are selling the most in digital goods using PayPal are Zynga, Blizzard, Apple (via iTunes) and Gaia Online. Both Zynga and Apple would be ideal initial partners for PayPal considering the vast amount of transactions that flow through both platform.

This product will no doubt bring in a whole lot of cash for PayPal. In 2009 alone, PayPal processed more than $2 billion in transactions for digital goods (out of $72 billion in total). In the first half of 2010, the company has processed more than $1.3 billion, and is in track to see $3 billion by the end of the year. In fact, over 50 percent of direct in-app transactions for virtual goods within social gaming environments are going through PayPal.

According to the most recent “Inside Virtual Goods” report, the micropayments and the virtual goods alone market is expected to grow by 51 percent from 2009 to 2010. More than $500 million in total virtual goods transactions occurred on social networking platforms in the US in 2009, and this number is expected to double in 2010.

Video content is also a big money maker. Downloaded video content is a $467 million market in the US today; however, Forrester forecasts it will grow to more than $900 million by 2013.

If you want to catch PayPal’s announcement live, you can by tickets to the conference here. And PayPal is running a special promotion until Friday; if you enter the code TWEET between 11am PT on Tuesday and 12 am PT Friday, you will get access to Innovate for only $49.

The third quarter IPO market is like looking at a Rorshach test: You can find data to support that liquidity is getting better or data to support that it’s getting worse.

Here’s the reality check: There is an increase in deals– a big increase if you look at the first nine months of the year and compare it to the first nine months of 2009. And the pipeline is building: 67 new companies entered IPO registration since July, and if they go out, they could be the biggest issues so far this year.

Let’s hope that’s the case because the downside to the news is that deal value is falling substantially year-over-year. In the third quarter of 2010, there were 32 IPOs, compared to just 20 in the third quarter of 2009. But only one was valued at more than $500 million. (All numbers are courtesy of PricewaterhouseCoopers’s third quarter IPO watch.)

That means the deals going out are small and when you’re talking about venture capital returns, the smaller the deal the more thinly it’s traded. In essence, a lot of these “exits” aren’t really exits at all because VCs aren’t getting much liquidity. If they sell their shares, they tank the stock. In practice, some of them may give investors less liquidity than some late-stage secondary rounds out there.

There’s another ripple effect to anemic deal values– it hurts the price of acquisitions because there’s no threat to anyone going public. Think of it like listing a house on a market and getting one bidder. That bidder has all the power.

The quarters when deal values have been higher, the top line numbers were heavily skewed by a few large deals– and most of those are coming from other countries, especially China. Year-to-date, 30 non-US companies have raised $4.1 billion, about 30% of both proceeds and total offerings. And 19 Chinese companies have made up about 20% of the deal volume. Yep, they’ve taken over Japan in GDP, taken over US manufacturing, it’s the world’s largest Web audience and now Chinese companies are making up one-third of own IPO volume.

Get used to it, America. Beyond China, more nascent emerging markets are taking advantage of the overall smaller deal sizes to IPO on more prestigious and stable US exchanges. India’s online travel site MakeMyTrip went public in August and had a 90% first day pop. It has held up well since, opening the door for more mid-sized ecommerce companies from countries under represented on the Nasdaq and New York Stock Exchange. Argentina’s outsourcing firm Globant is still eying an exit in the next year, and there are no doubt some issues coming from Brazil. It’s all about growth when you’re talking about IPOs this small and until a Facebook or LinkedIn IPO steals the attention, emerging markets are the best growth story out there.

Last night, we noted that after a two-month “lockdown” Facebook was emerging with the fruits of their labor today. We heard that the likely result would be a site redesign, but obviously, that didn’t come. Instead, Facebook rolled out a few new features such as a way to download your information, a dashboard for connected apps, and, most notably, a completely revamped Groups feature. That being said, the redesign is still coming, we hear. And it shouldn’t be too long.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg kicked off the event today by acknowledging that they have been in what they call “lockdown” for several weeks. And he indicated that the result of it would be several new launches over the coming weeks and months. One of those will be a redesign, which is meant to unify the look of the site.

If you look at it right now, Facebook has a few different types of looks. Profile pages are different from Places pages and the new Groups pages, for example. Soon, they will all look like Groups and Places, which are Facebook’s two newest products. The tabs you see on your current profile will be replaced by a left-hand nav, we hear. Facebook Chat should also move over the the left-hand side of the screen. And there will likely be several other subtle tweaks to make everything look the same.

So, we apologize for the lockdown redesign premature alarm — but look for it in the coming weeks. And depending on how much you use Groups and Places, it shouldn’t be too drastic.

At the huge Facebook overhaul event in Palo Alto today, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a feature that allows users data portability (Hallelujah). One thing that Zuckerberg kept emphasizing during this talk was that although it’s been a key focus over the past couple of years, Facebook Connect is now one of the two pronged ways that people can use Facebook to leave a footprint on the web. He also kept repeating the key stat that it is now being used on over one million websites.

According to registrar Whois, there are 123,309,807 live .com, .net, .org, .info, .bis, and .us domains on the Internet currently, so we’re guestimating the service is now integrated on less than 1% of all top level domains.

Along with the barrage of news today, Facebook’s CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg said that the social network will start implementing a “social captcha,” to verify identities of members if they are logging on from different places. Specifically, he said that members would have to answer questions about their friends or identify them in a picture to download your data from Facebook.

Apparently, when you choose to “Download Your Information” from your account settings, Facebook will implement the Captcha. Facebook actually filed a patent for social captchas back in September.

However, it’s hard to know how secure the captchas will be until we see an actual implementation for data downloads. The Social Captcha has a number of other use cases, including password recovery. The idea is definitely interesting and probably welcome to some, considering the amusing Captcha-fails we always see.

Photo Credit/Flickr/FredMikeRudy

Here it, ladies and gents. The Logitech Revue. The device’s minisite just went live ahead of the official unveiling at 3:00 PM EDT today and that’s fine by us. The site itself doesn’t talk all that much about Google TV — at least there isn’t anything here that wasn’t on the Google TV minisite — rather it’s devoted to Logitech’s Google TV offering, the Revue.

The box itself is listed as capable of outputing a 1080p@60fps signal, though we’ll see in person how smooth it actually is. The I/O ports are as expected with HDMI 1.3a in and out, along with 10/100BaseT Ethernet, two USB 2.0 ports, S/PDIF, 802.11b/g/n connectivity and the Logitech Harmony IR blaster port. The Revue even ships with a compact keyboard complete with integrated remote and touchpad, HDMI cable, and one IR mini blaster. All good stuff, but it’s the HD camera we’re excited about.