Category: Tech news

It appears that Salesforce has just acquired enterprise chat startup Activa Live. We’ve confirmed the acquisition with Salesforce.

Activa Live develops Activa Live Chat, an enterprise, on-demand live chat software for customer service, support and online proactive sales interactions. The software allows companies to monitor, identify and engage with online visitors in real-time, helping increase sales and customer satisfaction.

The software also includes a feature that reveals what a visitor is typing before their message is sent and helps live chat agents find the best answer for customer questions without searching through libraries of canned responses.

Activa is available in both a browser-based version and a desktop version for all platforms. The company’s technology is used by Best Buy, American Apparel and a number of other high-profile brands. It looks like Activa also offered an app on Salesforce’s App Exchange. While details are still unclear, we’d assume that Active Live Chat will be integrated into Salesforce’s Service Cloud, a SaaS customer service platform.

Recent Salesforce acquisitions include Sitemasher, and Jigsaw.

And I thought our new office was big.

It turns out, we have nothing on Zynga, the social gaming juggernaut that is moving practically right next door. (And it is actually right next door to the San Francisco Design Center, where we’re holding TechCrunch Disrupt starting next Monday.) Their new office at the Townsend Center at the corner of Townsend St. and 8th St. is reportedly 270,000 square feet, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.

I repeat: 270,000 square feet.

According to the Chronicle, that’s about half the size of the Transamerica Pyramid (the iconic building you see in San Francisco skyline pictures). And it’s enough room for over 2,000 workers. Currently, Zynga has about 1,200 employees — which is already insane. Facebook itself, for example, is listed as having about 1,700.

Apparently, this is the biggest new lease signed in San Francisco in almost four years.

And clearly Zynga has the money to make this move (they currently have a series of offices in the Potrero Hill area of San Francisco). Their revenues are exploding — they may surpass $500 million this year. And then there’s that massive investment from Google, which they still won’t fully confirm.

Zynga will apparently be redesigning the interior of the building and working on the exterior as well before they move in. During the dot-com days, this building housed Macromedia and Sega of America at various points.

Welcome to the neighborhood, Zynga. Prepare for a turf war.

[Photo: Michelle Gachet / The Chronicle]

Apple, no doubt, has a history of creating commercials that resonate with consumers. And with the recent Facetime ads, Apple has taken it one step further, appealing to the human emotion. But honestly, sometimes the best commercials are not produced by a big-name agency or a famous director. TechCrunch reader Paul Sanduleac sent us this video of his four-year-old brother using an iPad. It’s nothing short of impressive.

Not only is the little boy able to swipe on the device, but he’s taped playing various with apps, including a Keyboard app and a few games. You can see he’s having the time of his life, while also interacting with the content and learning alphabets and colors as well.

Since Apple first introduced the device, the iPad has been lauded as being a revolutionary way for kids to interact with apps and media. But sometimes it takes a simple video to remind you just how effective the device is for tots.

Mike Hirshland is a great sport. He filled in at the last second, taking the Ask-a-VC hotseat the week his industry erupted in scandal. In this video we talk about the “AngelGate” controversy and how Hirshland is dealing with the very real problem of rising valuations.

He also answers reader questions about applying to DogPatch Labs, how it’s different from traditional incubators, how much equity entrepreneurs should have give up per round, what really motivated him to become a VC, and the good and the bad of media-training.

I’m not sure who the guest will be next week, but I plan to nab someone at Disrupt for a live version of the show. Given our absolutely ridiculous lineup of speakers, I have plenty to chose from. Send me your questions now at AskaVC(at)techcrunch(dot)com. Feel free to tell me the VC you want the answer from too. Maybe I’ll do a group show.

A week after announcing the acquisition of U.S. mobile social gaming studio, Gameview, Japanese gaming giant DeNA is making a strategic investment in another U.S. gaming company, social game studio Astro Ape. The investment amount was not disclosed by the companies.

Based in Edison, N.J., Astro Ape creates social game titles for the iOS platform, including Office Heroes, an iPhone app simulating a game within the corporate world. As part of the investment, Astro Ape will develop titles for DeNA’s MiniNation mobile platform, DeNA’s subsidiary in the smartphone market.

DeNA has been actively looking to expand its footprint in the U.S. via acquisitions, investments and partnerships. In fact, this is the fourth American social gaming investment by the company over the past year. The company purchased game studio IceBreaker and invested in gaming platform AuroraFeint last year.

This year, DeNA has created a new gaming portal with Yahoo, and launched a $27.5 million social gaming VC fund. Financially, DeNA is on track to create $1 billion in revenue this year, posting strong first quarter earnings a few weeks ago, fueled by the company’s entry into the American market and debut on iPhones in 2010.

Palo Alto based Opzi, a stealth Y Combinator startup that will debut at TechCrunch Disrupt next week, has closed an impressive first round of financing – nearly $1 million from SV Angel, First Round Capital, Naval Kavikant, Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech VC, Hadi Partovi, Ali Partovi, Paul Buchheit, Fritz Lanman and Raymond Tonsing.

That’s quite a syndicate. And equally impressive is founder Euwyn Poon. Poon graduated from Cornell University at the age of 18 and subsequently received a J.D. from Cornell Law School in 2007. He then practiced law for two years. Now, all of 25 years old, he’s founded one of the hot startups of the year.

What is Opzi? You’ll have to wait until next week to see when they debut on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt.

Well, this is bizarre. Minutes ago Paul Berry, CTO of the Huffington Post, tweeted that “google analytics chrome 6 bug is going to be big news”. After a little digging, we think he may be right: Chrome 6 (and the more recent Chrome 7, which is still in beta) is causing issues with Google Analytics, causing traffic data to be seriously skewed for visitors using Chrome’s browser. The number of Unique Visitors reported by Analytics is jumping up, but the average number of pages viewed by each user is dropping off a cliff. Update: See below, Google says that there was an issue, but that it has been fixed in the most recent Chrome update.

Here’s how one site administrator describes the issue on a Google support forum:

With the release of Chrome 6 we’ve seen a huge jump in Unique Visitors and Visits, which would show that the issue (some sort of Cookie “dropping”/overwriting) happens during the visits as opposed to in between the visits. This also pushes the Avg. Pageviews per Visit down, so we know that those really aren’t just extra visits that we receive. Looking at the Avg. Pageviews per Visit by each of the version (5, 6, 7), I can see Chrome 5 has a healthy ~20 pageviews per visit average, while 6 & 7 have around 3 pageviews per visit, which points to session (cookies) being cut down all the time.

It looks like this has been going on for weeks now, too. We’ve just delved into our own Google Analytics logs and are also seeing similarly odd behavior from Chrome browsers starting at the beginning of September. Chrome 6′s release date with September 2.

We’ve reached out to Google for more information. Update: Google has given us this statement.

‘A bug in Google Chrome’s JavaScript engine reported the wrong type of some JavaScript objects in a very specific case, which caused Chrome to incorrectly execute Google Analytics’s JavaScript, providing an artificially high visitor count. This bug has been fixed in the most recent releases of Google Chrome and all users have been automatically updated with the bug fix. While we believe this issue is fixed, we’ll be closely monitoring over the weekend and beyond.’

In venture capital, there are three people who rule Silicon Valley: John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins, Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital, and Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures. All three will be speaking at Disrupt. (There are still a few tickets left). We’ve already mentioned Doerr and Moritz, and now we are pleased to announce that Khosla will be completing the triumvirate.

Khosla, of course, was the first CEO of Sun Microsystems back in the 1980s before he joined John Doerr to embark on a storied career as a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins. At Kleiner, he had a string of huge wins, including Nexgen (which was acquired by AMD and formed the core of its ability to take on Intel), Juniper Networks, and Cerent (which was sold to Cisco for $7 billion). In 2004, he created Khosla Ventures to invest his own money and began to dive deep into greentech, while still keeping his hand in infotech. Always known for being a risk junkie and identifying big opportunities early, he started to build one of the deepest portfolios of greentech investments in the Valley. Last year, he finally took outside money, raising $1.1 billion for two new funds, including a seed fund.

Khosla will give us the lay of the land in greentech. His greentech portfolio covers everything from power generation, batteries, and advanced hydrocarbons to water, plastics, and chemicals. It sounds almost like a future General Electric, which is why we paired him up with Kevin Skillern of GE. Skillern leads GE’s energy-focused venture capital arm of GE. In July, GE launched a $200 million Ecomagination fund with leading VC firms to fund new greentech startups. Whereas Khosla tends to invest as early as possible, GE wants to identify those technologies ready to be commercialized. The conversation should be fascinating.

Glam Media, a top-ranked women’s media network, is announcing a number of new hires today for its technology, brand sales, engineering, and product teams.

Chris Murphy joins Glam as the Sr. Director of Platform Solutions after five years working in advertising at Yahoo. Murphy originally joined Yahoo when the company acquired ad exchange RightMedia. Manuel Ponce De Leon, Glam’s new Program Manager for Media Products, joins the company after serving as the lead for the rich media product team at Google. Lindsey Frankenfield, a former ad exec at Technorati, is joining as Program Manager for Ad Serving & Data Products; and Ryan Bowermaster, Program Manager for Ad Platforms, joins Glam from Yahoo, where he worked on RightMedia’s Display Platform API. These employees will be working on Glam Adapt, the company’s recently launched new ad serving technology.

In terms of sales, Glam is bringing on Christine DeMaio as VP of Sales Development Brand Advertising from Condé Nast Digital, where she was the Vice President and Group Publisher of the entire Condé Nast Digital sales team. Another Conde Nast transplant, Dana McGovern joins Glam as the Advertising Director for the East Coast.

As the company expands internationally and continues to grow in terms of traffic, Glam is on a bit of a hiring spree. Earlier this morning, Glam announced that it was tapping former Microsoft exec Adam Roston as its new M&A head. In May, Glam poached Bruce Jaffe from Microsoft as CFO (possibly in preparation for an IPO). And Glam has been steadily bringing over talent from Yahoo; last Fall the company nabbed Yahoo’s top ad exec Josh Jacobs.

According to comScore’s latest data from August, Glam Media is now the sixth most trafficked web property in the U.S., coming in just behind AOL, and is moving into providing male-oriented content as well. Glam founder Samir Arora says that as the network continues to grow, he expects to hire more staff, increasing its existing 250-member team by 100 new employees over the next year.

Back in June of last year, a report in The Washington Post stated that the U.S. Department of Justice had begun a probe looking into the hiring practices of some of tech’s biggest companies. The probe was at its early stages at that point, but they were specifically looking into if any companies had agreements in place not to recruit one another’s workers. In August of last year, we reported that two of those companies, Apple and Google, did have such an agreement in place — and we even obtained an email that seemed to confirm it. Neither Google nor Apple responded to our request for a comment on the issue. Of course, they couldn’t sidestep the DoJ so easily. And today, the government is announcing a settlement on the issue.

Specifically, the DoJ is saying it is settling with six companies — Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, and Pixar — ensuring that they will not enter into no solicitation agreements for employees going forward. In the complaint and settlement proposal they’re filing today, the DoJ is saying their findings indicate that there were agreements in place between a mixture of these companies over the years that prevented poaching. Here’s how they outlined it:

According to the complaint, the six companies entered into agreements that restrained competition between them for highly skilled employees.   The agreements between Apple and Google, Apple and Adobe, Apple and Pixar and Google and Intel prevented the companies from directly soliciting each other’s employees.   An agreement between Google and Intuit prevented Google from directly soliciting Intuit employees.

Again, Apple and Google is the one we reported on.The DoJ says:

Beginning no later than 2006, Apple and Google executives agreed not to cold call each other’s employees.   Apple placed Google on its internal “Do Not Call List,” which instructed employees not to directly solicit employees from the listed companies.   Similarly, Google listed Apple among the companies that had special agreements with Google and were part of the “Do Not Cold Call” list.

That’s pretty much exactly what we had heard for our source on the matter. Here’s the key part of the email we obtained back then when someone from Google accidentally did cold call an Apple employee:

Google has an agreement with Apple that we will not cold call their staff.

Further, we heard that when Google CEO Eric Schmidt stepped down from Apple’s Board of Directors in the Summer of 2009, that agreement (which was of the under-the-table variety among executives at both companies) may have been called off. As we’re all well aware, the companies began to be at odds with one another at that point. You’ll note that the 2006 timeframe when the DoJ believes the agreement began is when Schmidt first joined Apple’s Board.

Even more interesting in the DoJ’s findings may be that Apple and Adobe actually had an agreement in place not to poach employees as well. Yes, the two companies that hate each other. From the DoJ report:

Beginning no later than May 2005, senior Apple and Adobe executives agreed not to cold call each other’s employees.   Apple placed Adobe on its internal “Do Not Call List” and similarly, Adobe included Apple in its internal list of “Companies that are off limits”

The Apple and Pixar agreement should be no surprise given that Apple CEO Steve Jobs has led both companies in the past.

The DoJ notes that the settlement still has to be accepted by the courts (but you have to believe it will be) and that it will put these new competitive rules in place for five years. Here’s the key:

Although the complaint alleges only that the companies agreed to ban cold calling, the proposed settlement more broadly prohibits the companies from entering, maintaining or enforcing any agreement that in any way prevents any person from soliciting, cold calling, recruiting, or otherwise competing for employees.  The companies will also implement compliance measures tailored to these practices.

The DoJ also notes that this complaint/settlement is a part of the larger antitrust inquiry into employment practices by high tech firms. And it says that they’re continuing to investigate other claims.

Update: And further confirmation from Google on the matter:

In order to maintain a good working relationship with these companies, in 2005 we decided not to “cold call” employees at a few of our partner companies. Our policy only impacted cold calling, and we continued to recruit from these companies through LinkedIn, job fairs, employee referrals, or when candidates approached Google directly.

[photo: flickr/mackz]

Jack Ma– CEO of The Alibaba Group and president of the Carol Bartz fan club– was on Charlie Rose this week, and while he didn’t offer any more insight into the Yahoo situation, he said a lot of interesting things.

Ma is a force. He’s going at half-normal-speed in this video. I saw him speak at the World Economic Forum last week in Chinese and the translators couldn’t keep up with him. They kept tagging in-and-out because he exhausted them so quickly.

Ma says three things are at the core of his company and business philosophy, calling them “his religion” on the show. The first is that technology isn’t Alibaba’s core competency, rather it’s the company’s culture. That first bit is the surprising part– Ma goes on and on about how untechnical he is. That’s something I’ve never heard any executive of a tech company say, even if they aren’t technical. Ma says “I know nothing about technology,” adding he can’t write code and the most he can do is send and receive emails. That takes some confidence as a leader to be so bold about what you don’t know.

The second element of his “religion” is that shareholders come last– the most important groups are customers and then employees. He says matter-of-factly that customers are the ones who pay him and employees are the ones who stick with him but shareholders come and go. (Note: There’s some interesting subtext, whether it was intentional or not. The largest shareholder is Yahoo, who Ma would very much like to go.)

The third element is that “Small is beautiful”– strange coming from the guy who built one of the largest Internet companies in the largest online market in the largest country in the world. Few things are “small” in China and fewer still are praised for being small. But Ma’s platforms are powered by millions and millions of small business people who couldn’t do business any other way in China. He says that in the US, real world business infrastructure is so good that ecommerce is “dessert” but in China it’s “the main course.” He thinks the future of China is empowering lots of entrepreneurs in the classic, small-business-man sense of the word. What China needs most he says are hundreds of millions of jobs, and he thinks lots of small businesses are the answer not more giants like Alibaba.

Technology is merely a tool; shareholders are the least important constituency; and small is better than big. This is how Jack Ma views the Internet and the world differently than a typical Valley CEO. Given he’s built the largest ecommerce and online payment platforms in China while most Valley companies have failed to get off the ground, the difference in mindset might well be part of the reason why.

The full video is here, and there’s a clip below.

Facebook Pages — the public profiles that the site offers to brands, businesses, celebrities, and other public figures — launched in 2007, got a revamp around eighteen months ago and have quickly picked up steam. Some of the most popular pages, like Lady Gaga, have tens of millions of fans. And Facebook wants you to follow more of them.

Today, it’s officially launching a Page Browser that suggests Pages you may be interested in, with an interface somewhat reminiscent of Netflix that allows you to filter by category. Suggestions are tailored based on pages you’ve previously ‘Liked’, and following a new Page simply entails clicking on its icon.

As Inside Facebook reported, the feature actually launched a few weeks ago, only to be shut down shortly thereafter (it looks like they’ve added a few more Page categories, like ‘Movies’, in the mean time). Also worth pointing out: Facebook’s blog post says this was built by a team of two people — Facebook frequently likes to play up the relative impact of each employee, compared to larger companies like Microsoft and Google.

This isn’t the only thing Facebook does to encourage you to ‘Like’ more pages. In July it launched a new-user flow that includes a Suggested Interests List, which ensures that novices have stories populating their News Feed. And as you browse the site you’ll often see both ads promoting Pages and recommended Pages Facebook thinks you might be interested in.

When Google Instant debuted on September 8th, the search company touted its efficiency. As TechCrunch has previously reported, Google Instant saves web users time by delivering results more quickly than other engines, and Google’s earlier search products. Marissa Mayer Google’s vice president of search products and user experience, estimates Google Instant could save a collective 350 million hours of search time over its first year.

But how will Google Instant impact the company’s own data centers, operations and energy efficiency? Does it increase network traffic and power consumption by an end users’ local PC, by the network or through additional processing by Google servers?

A Google spokesperson told TechCrunch:

It’s too soon for us to know exactly how this will impact our power consumption. Of course, as our business grows, we want to make sure we minimize our environmental impact. We’re taking every step we can to implement innovative and responsible environmental practices across Google to reduce our carbon footprint, ensure efficient computing and help our employees be green.

He also referred to pages at Google’s corporate website detailing the company’s efforts to become carbon neutral.

Google has increased its efforts to be environmentally responsible over the years. It has invested in renewable energy businesses, and committed to purchasing power from renewable sources for example.

Its products — Google Earth and Google Maps in particular — advance a wide range of environmental research. A couple of examples are the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s study of water and air quality around the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and the African Wildlife Foundation’s study of elephants and other conservation projects in the African Heartlands.

Google also took a pledge devised and promoted by the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, to cut the energy consumption of computers in half.

However, Google keeps details about its infrastructure and energy use secret, viewing them as a proprietary and competitive issue. Twitter, Facebook and other technology firms also conceal details about their data centers and energy consumption in aggregate for the same reasons. Regulated stock exchanges, and the U.S. government don’t compel internet service and IT companies to report more details about their environmental impact, today.

Green IT and sustainability researchers worry that the computing power required to run Google Instant makes the feature more of an energy sucker than an energy saver on balance.

The chief executive of 1E, a global green IT software and consulting firm, Sumir Karayi explains:

“At the base level Google is doing more processing up front [with Google Instant]. Because of that, it is highly unlikely that this solution itself could have any positive impact on the environment, or save energy costs for Google, even if it has a very positive impact on the productivity of the end-user.”

At the same time, Karayi also thinks Google Instant is “incredibly sensible.” With it, he says “Google is addressing one of the biggest areas of waste in IT, the amount of time PC users, and IT professionals waste on doing things that are not required and that can be automated. If you can save a few minutes or milliseconds, cumulatively, that amounts to a huge number of work minutes, even if these are not directly energy-saving or easily quantifiable.”

According to a comprehensive report by Energy Star (a joint program of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy) data centers used 61 billion kWh of electricity in 2006, comprising 1.5% of the nation’s electricity consumption at the time, and costing approximately $4.5 billlion. Energy Star estimated that national energy consumption by servers and data centers would nearly double by 2011 to more than 100 billion kWh, representing a $7.4 billion annual electricity cost.

By setting new standards and offering new tools to measure and rate the efficiency of data centers and servers, the government agencies hope they will drive IT and internet service companies to voluntarily do things like calibrate their buildings, equipment and software, or use non-hydrocarbon energy sources to power their data centers, thereby curbing their negative environmental impact and those aforementioned electricity costs.

TechCrunch Disrupt starts Monday – just three days from today. And we’ve just gotten word that Google CEO Eric Schmidt will be speaking. We’ve added him to our amazing list of speakers. Schmidt will join Disrupt on Tuesday at 10 am.

This is a surprise guest. We’re not quite sure what Schmidt will talk about. Will it be about that new social layer Google is adding to its services? Will it be about how Google is doing in mobile with Android? Will it be about the forthcoming Chrome OS? Whatever it is, it will be interesting. Come to Disrupt to find out. (Yup, there are still a few tickets left).