Monthly Archive for December, 2009

Viruses That Leave Victims Red in the Facebook

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SAN FRANCISCO — It used to be that computer viruses attacked only your hard drive. Now they attack your dignity.

Malicious programs are rampaging through Web sites like Facebook and Twitter, spreading themselves by taking over people’s accounts and sending out messages to all of their friends and followers. The result is that people are inadvertently telling their co-workers and loved ones how to raise their I.Q.’s or make money instantly, or urging them to watch an awesome new video in which they star.

“I wonder what people are thinking of me right now?” said Matt Marquess, an employee at a public relations firm in San Francisco whose Twitter account was recently hijacked, showering his followers with messages that appeared to offer a $500 gift card to Victoria’s Secret.

Mr. Marquess was clueless about the offers until a professional acquaintance asked him about them via e-mail. Confused, he logged in to his account and noticed he had been promoting lingerie for five days.

“No one had said anything to me,” he said. “I thought, how long have I been Twittering about underwear?”

The humiliation sown by these attacks is just collateral damage. In most cases, the perpetrators are hoping to profit from the referral fees they get for directing people to sketchy e-commerce sites.

In other words, even the crooks are on social networks now — because millions of tightly connected potential victims are just waiting for them there.

Often the victims lose control of their accounts after clicking on a link “sent” by a friend. In other cases, the bad guys apparently scan for accounts with easily guessable passwords. (Mr. Marquess gamely concedes that his password at the time was “abc123.”)

After discovering their accounts have been seized, victims typically renounce the unauthorized messages publicly, apologizing for inadvertently bombarding their friends. These messages — one might call them Tweets of shame — convey a distinct mix of guilt, regret and embarrassment.

“I have been hacked; taking evasive maneuvers. Much apology, my friends,” wrote Rocky Barbanica, a producer for Rackspace Hosting, an Internet storage firm, in one such note.

Mr. Barbanica sent that out last month after realizing he had sent messages to 250 Twitter followers with a link and the sentence, “Are you in this picture?” If they clicked, their Twitter accounts were similarly commandeered.

“I took it personally, which I shouldn’t have, but that’s the natural feeling. It’s insulting,” he said.

Earlier malicious programs could also cause a similar measure of embarrassment if they spread themselves through a person’s e-mail address book.

But those messages, traveling from computer to computer, were more likely to be stopped by antivirus or firewall software. On the Web, such measures offer little protection. (Although they are popularly referred to as viruses or worms, the new forms of Web-based malicious programs do not technically fall into those categories, as they are not self-contained programs.)

Getting tangled up in a virus on a social network is also more painfully, and instantaneously, public. “Once it’s delivered to everyone in three seconds, the cat is out of the bag,” said Chet Wisniewski of Sophos, a Web security firm. “When people got viruses on their computers, or fell for scams at home, they were generally the only ones that knew about it and they cleaned it up themselves. It wasn’t broadcast to the whole world.”

Social networks have become prime targets of such programs’ creators for good reason, security experts say. People implicitly trust the messages they receive from friends, and are inclined to overlook the fact that, say, their cousin from Ohio is extremely unlikely to have caught them on a hidden webcam.

Sophos says that 21 percent of Web users report that they have been a target of malicious programs on social networks. Kaspersky Labs, a Russian security firm, says that on some days, one in 500 links on Twitter point to bad sites that can infect an inadequately protected computer with typical viruses that jam hard drives. Kaspersky says many more links are purely spam, frequently leading to dating sites that pay referral fees for traffic.

A worm that spread around Facebook recently featured a photo of a sparsely dressed woman and offered a link to “see more.” Adi Av, a computer developer in Ashkelon, Israel, encountered the image on the Facebook page of a friend he considered to be a reliable source of amusing Internet content.

A couple of clicks later, the image was posted on Mr. Av’s Facebook profile and sent to the “news feed” of his 350 friends.

“It’s an honest mistake,” he said. “The main embarrassment was from the possibility of other people getting into the same trouble from my profile page.”

Others confess to experiencing a more serious discomfiture.

“You feel like a total idiot,” said Jodi Chapman, who last month unwisely clicked on a Twitter message from a fellow vegan, suggesting that she take an online intelligence test.

Ms. Chapman, who sells environmentally friendly gifts with her husband, uses her Twitter account to communicate with thousands of her company’s customers. The hijacking “filled me with a sense of panic,” she said. “I was so worried that I had somehow tainted our company name by asking people to check their I.Q. scores.”

Social networking attacks do not spare the experts. Two weeks ago, Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a nonprofit research group, accidentally sent messages to dozens of his Twitter followers with a link and the line, “Hi, is this you? LOL.” He said a few people actually clicked.

“I’m worried that people will think I communicate this way,” Mr. Rainie said. “ ‘LOL,’ as my children would tell you, is not the style that I want to engage the world with.”

Weekly Sparkpr Missive 08/21/09-12/11/09

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Weekly Sparkpr Missive

Week Ending December 11, 2009

What Tongues are Wagging About

Coverage this week

Event Recaps

  • Supernova
    • Jonathan Zittrain’s rant on the dark side of cloud computing; Chris Anderson delivering the first glimpse of his yet-to-be-announced book, Atoms are the New Bits; Tim O’Reilly leading an intense debate on what ZDNet called “The Battle for the Soul of the Web“
  • AlwaysOn Venture Summit
    • All journalist were there; PE Hub, DJ, Bloomberg, Reuters – let’s see what they wrote as there were no news, just optimism from VCs.
  • DiscoveryBeat
    • Venturebeat threw together a half day conference that was jampacked with speakers from the iPhone developer and social gaming elite – included Playfish
    • Reps from RockYou and Zynga were there and admitted that they actually spend MILLIONS to acquire users through paid advertising and have only gone really viral after that base was built. Honest admission that is rare at conferences like this
    • Most of the debate circled around how to get Apple to notice and promote your app and the bottom line was to make a good product and work the virality when it starts to stick with PR and mobile advertising
  • SF MusicTech
    • With sponsors such as Google, IODA, Zannel, Current TV and Pandora, the SF Music Tech Summit was an enormous hit – full of panels ranging from Google Keynote Panel to Convergence Marketing for muic and tech companies. Some of the mot interesting panels:
      • Meet the Press – moderated by Jon Healy, members of the press discussed the changes in the music worlds. This conversation was quite the buzz all day due to the heated debate between the panel and the audience regarding the per song cost of a download.
      • Getting to Popular – moderated by Francis Ten, members of the panel discussed their thoughts on how to make music more wide known.
      • Google Keynote Panel – moderated by RJ Pittman from Google, companies included in this panel were MySpace/iLike, Gracenote, Pandora, Google, YouTube.  The discussion was centered around the shift of music online toward streaming.
      • The conference was concluded by keynote speaker, Stephan Jenkins, who was not 100% on stage.  He looked hungover from the night before (at 6pm).  He stuttered through his presentation and even lost train of thought many times throughout his speech. Several members of the audience got up and left.
  • TEDx Silicon Valley
    • First ever independently organized TEDx event in the Valley. Was packed (about 200 attendees) and they had a waitlist of over a thousand. Event was focused on Innovation for Social Change, and featured a strong list of talked that can be viewed on Ustream: http://www.ustream.tv/tedxsv. Speakers ranged from Reid Hoffman down to spoken word artists.

Press Riffs

Weekly Sparkpr Missive

Week Ending December 4, 2009

What Tongues are Wagging About

  • Group of mag publishers said to be building an online newstand http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/25/business/media/25mag.html?dbk
  • Lots of people are talking about Square just officially announced from Jack Dorsey (one of twitter’s cofounders) for mobile payments: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/01/square-jack-dorsey-launches-paypa/
  • Also the online events networking space isn’t totally dead… plancast.com is buzzing this week with users such as Kevin Rose (digg), Carolyn McCarthy (cnet), MG Siegler (techcrunch), etc all hopping on the bandwagon to make their plans and network online.
  • Layoffs
    • Wetpaint -  more layoffs and strategy shifts… 2 co founders laid off
    • Ning – cleaned house as well. doesn’t sound like this sector is taking off as expected

Client news

  • Index Ventures’ Bernard in CNET story “Open Source: The Money is in The Cloud”
  • AlertMe:
    • Partnered with AMEE to help track the energy and carbon usage of home workers.
    • AlertMe has a new visual tool soon to be announced called a ‘Swingometer’ which shows how people are doing at reducing their energy consumption and carbon footprint, with one quick glance.
    • Pilgrim Beart, speaking on 12/2 at the Smart Energy Conference in London

Event Recaps

Press Riffs

  • USA Today had layoffs on Tuesday
  • MobileCrunch now starting to cover more mobile startup companies, something they’ve never focused too much on before. Ironic, but true.

Upcoming Events

12/7: SFMusicTech: http://sfmusictech.com/ (Spark attending)

12/8: DiscoveryBeat: http://events.venturebeat.com/discoverybeat2009/ (Spark attending)

12/8 – AlwaysOn : Venture Summit 2009

12/8: Ignite Bay Area | Women Innovators

12/9: Silicon Valley Open Doors December 2009

12/9: Mobile Media Investors Conference

12/9: Silicon Valley Rocks! 2009

12/11: Add-on-Con 09: http://addoncon.com/

12/11: Technovation Challenge @Apple

12/12: TEDx Silicon Valley: http://www.tedxsv.org/ (Spark attending)

Weekly Sparkpr Missive

Week Ending November 13, 2009

What Tongues are Wagging About

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10395179-93.html

  • Great Gartner report on mobile apps in 2012:

http://usa.blog.nimbuzz.com/2009/11/20/top-10-consumer-mobile-applications/

Top 10 Mobile Apps:

1. Money Transfer

2. Location-Based Services

3. Mobile Search

4. Mobile Browsing

5. Mobile Health Monitoring

6. Mobile Payment

7. Near Field Communication Services

8. Mobile Advertising

9. Mobile Instant Messaging

10. Mobile Music

Event Recaps

  • PayPal Conference
    • The mood was very good and so was the content and caliber of attendees. The key takeaway is that payments will become a feature that is seemless and doesn’t disturb the app experience. Biometric payments are in the works – you’ll touch your iPhone app with a certain finger to purchase more game points, ecommerce or whatever.
  • GreenBeat
    • Pilgrim from AlertMe was on a high-profile panel, got to see Al Gore, meet an astronaut and get introductions to potential partners.
  • SFNewTech Event
    • Mashable’s Ben Parr interviewed Brian Solis. Made a lot of awkward sexual jokes (left audience cringing!) and didn’t say anything we already didn’t know for Brian’s book Putting the Public Back in Public Relations. Following the Q&A they had companies present which was a total snore fest. Could only sit through first 3 (Itibiti’s NBC.com Communicator, Webvanta, Reframe It) before realizing there was hardly going to be any networking opps involved here.
  • Webby Awards
    • Announced the top 10 most influential online moments. Those included: launch of Wikipedia, iPhone and election of US president Barack Obama

Press Riffs

  • Lost lots of great press this week – shocking to the shocking to the industry and for us who’ve worked with these reporters these past few years:
  • 44% of USA Today readers read the newspaper while they are traveling on business. You know – all those papers outside the hotel room door.  That’s a staggering amount and speaks to their focus on business readers.  A lot of us think of USA Today as fluffy, but don’t underestimate its reach.
  • www.Techland.com just launched from Time Magazine. The site is going to have some super cool content (including an interview with Richard Branson this week!). Peter Ha and Lev Grossman are go-tos for techie products and hope to position this site as the biggest thing in tech and gaming in the next few months.

Weekly Sparkpr Missive

Week Ending November 6, 2009

What Tongues are Wagging About

Press Riffs

  • Forbes layoffs include:
    • Andrew Stone
    • Anita Raghavan
    • Anna Vander Broek
    • Bernard Condon
    • Brian Zajac
    • Chana Zimmerman – left to go back to school
    • Courtney Myers
    • David Serchuk
    • Elizabeth Corcoran – left, wasn’t fired
    • Evan Hessel
    • Jack Gage
    • John Chamberlain
    • Klaus Kneale
    • Lauren Sherman
    • Lionel Laurent
    • Matthew Woolsey
    • Melanie Linder
    • Miriam Marcus
    • Pantanjali Varadarajan – left to go daily beast
    • Peter Beller
    • Rebecca Buckman
    • Richard Morais
    • Scott Woolley
    • Tatiana Serafin
    • Thomas Van Riper
    • Zack Greenburg
  • Fortune Small Business is the latest to shut down: from @futureboy…And so we bid farewell to our dear friend Fortune Small Business. Born: 1999. Shot in the head by short-sighted beancounters: 2009.

Interesting News Tidbits

Event Recaps

  • Open Mobile Summit
    • It was an Android show with a lot of noise coming from T-Mobile and Verizon about their holiday line-up of Android devices.
    • Talked to several people who opined that Palm is, again, severely compromised and not likely to survive given all the wind in Android’s sails right now.
    • Open Mobile Summit in SF this week turned out to be another Android show, dominated by T-Mobile CTO Cole Brodman and news around Droid phone.
    • Still lots of heat around app stores, fragmentation, and what open really means. Apple and Verizon still being browbeaten for maintaining closed gardens.
    • Press attendance was pretty decent: WSJ, FT, Bloomberg, TheReg, Fierce Wireless, Walt Mossberg, Telephony all walking the halls.
  • Four Square’s Quadrangle Conference
    • Major heavy hitters in attendance, including:
      • Barry Diller, Chairman and CEO, IAC; Chairman, Expedia, Inc.
      • Reid Hoffman, Executive Chairman and Founder, LinkedIn Corporation
      • Leslie Moonves, President and CEO, CBS Corporation
      • James Murdoch, Chairman and Chief Executive, Europe and Asia, News
      • Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO, Google
      • Ivan Seidenberg, Chairman and CEO, Verizon Communications
      • Biz Stone, Co-Founder, Twitter
      • Howard Stringer, Chairman, CEO and President, Sony Corporation
  • Churchill Club: “Venture Capital and Private Equity Outlook 2010
    • Panel included:
      • Rich Brenner, The Brenner Group
      • Rajeev Batra, Mayfield
      • Rich Garnick, The ConJoin Group
      • Rich Lawson, Huntsman Gay Global Capital
    • Nothing new was said outside of what we’ve already been reading in industry news
    • They predicted that the number of firms would shrink by 50% in 2010

Weekly Sparkpr Missive

Week Ending October 30, 2009

What Tongues are Wagging About

Press Riffs

  • Heard from lunch with Bloomberg reporter that Bloomberg took 4 floors of their NY office building to add the BusinessWeek staff and that SF BusinessWeekers are going to be moving into the Bloomberg office in San Francisco. He said he doesn’t anticipate that they’ll be making a lot of layoffs. And he thinks that the main emphasis for Bloomberg’s acquisition of BusinessWeek will be for creating a fresh voice for the outlet and leveraging Bloomberg’s international reporters.
  • Economist, Martin Giles working on a special report on social networking for the next five weeks (already spent the day at LinkedIn and is hooking up with the other big networks shortly)
  • Forbes making layoffs – here’s Valleywag’s take: http://gawker.com/5391948/forbes-layoffs-are-here-and-theyre-brutal
  • Top 25 Daily Newspapers Circulations Tumble! http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1004030296
  • Techmeme Leaderboard Rankings: http://www.techmeme.com/lb
  • AllThingsD, Peter Kafka calls out Silicon Alley Insider, Dan Frommer on Twitter for breaking embargo: DUDE THAT WAS TOTALLY EMBARGOED!!!!!!!!!!! RT @fromedome: BREAKING: Social network Zorpia to provide virtual goods via Viximo

Awards

Events
50% off – Innovate09

Nov 3rd – 4th, All Day
PayPal’s Innovate 09 PayPal’s Developer Conference matches the launch of a new Payment Platform.

http://paypal.com/innovate2009

Churchill Club: Venture Capital and Private Equity Outlook 2010

Nov 5th

http://www.churchillclub.org/eventDetail.jsp?EVT_ID=841

NewTeeVee Live: Television Reinvented
Nov 12th, All Day
Register here.

TEDxSF: Creating

Nov. 14th

Cal Academy of Science

TEDxSF seeks to develop and leverage the TED experience at a regional level, bringing together innovators and inspirational speakers in the San Francisco Bay Area. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.  Apply for the group at http://www.tedxsf.org/index.html
The Academy Awards of Cleantech
Nov 17th, All Day
http://www.cleantechopen.com/ app.cgi/events/view/84


Startup Weekend

Nov 22nd – 24th

Hacker Dojo

Join us for 10 Startup Weekend events going on for Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW) this November! Last year they had over 25,000 events, 3 million participants, and over 1 billion media impressions. Startup Weekend is one of the “Featured” events this year!  Meet dozens of entrepreneurs and developers, trade ideas, start a new project, and get motivated by this amazing room of intelligent and inspiring individuals!  More info at http://bayarea.startupweekend. org/

SuperNova 2009

Dec 1st, 2009

http://www.supernovahub.com

Silicon Valley Rocks!

Dec 9th, 2009

The Great American Music Hall

http://svrocks.com/
200 Euro Discount – LeWeb
Dec 9th – 10th

Paris, France

For more information and to get your discount ticket, visit http://www.amiando.com/leweb. html?discountCode=Leweb09

Weekly SparkprMissive

Week Ending October 23, 2009

What Tongues are Wagging About

Event Recaps

The Web 2.0 Report

  • Everyone agreed that this year is already way better than last year
  • Carly Fiorina raised eyebrows with her shaved head, leather outfit and plans to run for Senate. Debates about Annie Lenox vs. Grace Jones abound. ;-)
  • Zynga had a technical fiasco but Mark threw out some big #’s: e.g. $800,000 already spent on virtual tractors since launch of his Farm game a few months ago, $600k for hoes (or whatever) and many other similar examples.
  • Mary Meeker’s preso was very well received: Tech spending will rebound and mobile will be huge in 2010. Here is the preso – very worthwhile info. Theme for 2009 is: “Mobile Internet – Is and Will Be Bigger Than Most Think.”
  • Mary Hodder working on a new wellness mobile company
  • Kevin Maney’s book on why some products succeed and others fair is getting decent buzz/reviews

Press Riffs

  • Ellen McGirt at Fast Company is doing a new online series called “The 30-Second MBA.” Basically they ask CEOs and other leaders straightforward business questions and gather responses in the form of 30-second video clips.  She is also accepting informal pitches for the Fast Company Fast 50.
  • Canaan threw the swank Web 2.0 after-party at the St. Regis with stations for their top 6 portfolio co’s. Press included NY Times, Marketwatch, Economist, TIME and ReadWriteWeb
  • Clare Martine at Reuters trying to get VCs on the record to talk about SValley networking for a Galleon story – no thanks!
  • Ron Conway running around the Canaan party, being the life of the party, as always. ;-)
  • People speculating that Playfish can’t possibly be selling for such a small amount to EA
  • Skype hits 521M users and $185M revenue
  • TechCrunch VC rankings came out based on the latest MoneyTree/NVCA Report – deals were down but there are signs that fundings and M&A will be rebounding
  • Larry Cheng created a Top 100 VC Bloggers bundle here if you want to drop it into your GOOG reader
  • CFP for the 12th MIT Venture Capital Conference, 2009 Startup Showcase open now through 11/8: 2009 Startup Showcase application

Weekly Sparkpr Missive

Week Ending October 16, 2009

What Tongues are Wagging About

  • Mossberg reviewed the two next “iPhone killer” devices, which look like they still won’t compare to Apple. No one still has enough apps. http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20091014/the-cliq-storm2-join-long-parade-of-iphone-threats/
  • Apple announced this week that it’s now letting free App Store apps charge for in-app purchasing (used to be paid apps only). Great news for app developers since they can finally make money.
  • The rise and fall of Raj Rajaratnam where SEC Charges him with insider trading.
  • Mobile geeks are loving the leaked screenshots of Android 2.0: http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2009/10/16/android-2-0-screenshot-walkthrough/
  • MOG news this week as first online music service to include partnerships with the four major music labels — Universal Music Group, EMI Music, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment — along with thousands of independent labels.

Event Recaps

  • CTIA last week:
    • This is the Fall show, the smaller of the two shows held annually, and many folks are openly wishing it would die so only one show remains because it is so operator focused
    • For this reason and the economy, attendance was down and only a third of the convention space used
    • However, the press corps was surprised by all the news. Many Android related announcements were made
    • Lots of talk about Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in Feb. Most everyone sees this as THE show to attend and make major news at so budgets are going to that event
    • Main trends coming out of the show:

1)     Motorola is clearly back in the mobile game with the introduction of the Cliq Android SmartPhone and their software called MOTOBLUR

2)     Microsoft is came out with Windows Mobile 6.5 that should satisfy the enterprise and called the phone Windows Phone

3)     A number of speech-to-text companies are demonstrating that speech recognition for mobility is clearly now set to go mainstream

  • Spark had many clients at the show (INQ Mobile, GetJar, Allopass, EA Mobile) so we rented an oceanfront beach house so we had a place to entertain. About 40 folks came over the last night of the show for beers and fish tacos, including VCs, many press and bloggers, clients and friends of clients. The interactions were deep, and many fruitful connections made since the environment was so casual and conducive to conversation vs. boring corporate dinners and overcrowded, loud parties at clubs.
  • The most interesting Keynote was the exec from Yahoo Mobile, bold move for the company
  • There was a big funeral director conference happening at the same time – very strange seeing ads for coffins everywhere
  • Canaan partnered with VentureBeat to offer an early-stage UNFUNDED startup an opportunity to be showcased at Web After Dark! People submitted favorite company on the VentureBeat site at: http://venturebeat.com/2009/10/14/exclusive-offer-showcase-your-company-at-web-20-summit-after-party/ where the winning company will receive a pass to the exclusive press pre-party and will pitch Canaan Partners in person.

Press Riffs

  • Brian Heater at PC Mag not doing mobile or apps much. Sean Ludwig is your man.
  • Maggie Sheils/BBC is out for next 6 weeks for surgery
  • Index Ventures, TrialPay and Criteo all included in NYT story by Claire Cain Miller, “Closing the Deal at the Virtual Checkout Counter.”

Events

  • MySpace Secret Show on 10/21: “Please be our VIP guest for a MySpace Secret Show in San Francisco on October 21 at 8 pm.  Our Secret Shows pair breaking and established artists with local fans in an intimate venue – we keep the band and exact location a secret until days before the show. If you’ll be in town please RSVP to rsvpsf@myspace-inc.com.”
  • Silicon Valley Rocks on 12/9 in San Francisco at Great American Music Hall

Weekly Sparkpr Missive

Week Ending September 25, 2009

What Tongues are Wagging About

  • Twitter funding news and if it’s really worth $1 billion

Event Recaps

  • DEMO: It is a GIANT spend ($18K just to be onstage) Press attendance was down (no one from WSJ, NYT, Wired, GigaOm, no wires) and it showedLet’s see if/how it recovers. Also, lots of press complained that there was not a whole lot of REALLY new stuff at the show.
  • Mayfield party: About 700 people RSVPd and there was a good crowd. On the way in, guests were greeted by actors portraying innovators – Thomas Edison, Leonardo daVinci, Amelia Earhardt and Albert Einstein. Who’s who at the event included Mayfield Fund partners and past and present portfolio CEOs, as well as other investors like Ron Conway, David Weiden of Khosla Ventures, David Hornik of August Capital, Rob Hayes of First Round Capital. Only a few press were on hand including Becky Buckman of Forbes.
  • Storage Networking World is around the corner (10/12-15) and press/analyst registered list is very small. Only 1 press registered and the rest are analysts; however, this continues to be the biggest storage event.
  • Nice Seedcamp post by Fred Wilson and he tweeted about it too (http://twitter.com/fredwilson/status/4351782048) – he’s got nearly 33K followers!

Press Riffs

  • NYT, Matt Richtel not on his usual tech beat right now – on assignment
  • BusinessWeek, Jon Fine on sabbatical until 9/1

Clients and awards

  • Richard from Moo is #41 for The 50 most influential Britons in technology
  • Awards
  • The Stevies Women in Business (Sent to Boku, Virtualogix and Astley Clark) – Due 9/30
  • PC Magazine Technical Excellence Awards – Due 9/30
  • SearchStorage.com Product of the Year Awards – Due 10/23

Events

Renewable Energy Finance Forum WEST
September 29 – 30, 2009
San Francisco, California
http://reffwest.com/

Future of Web Apps
September 30 – October 2, 2009
London, UK

http://events.carsonified.com/fowa/2009/london/

New York Games Conference

September 30, 2009
New York, New York
http://www.nygamesconference.com/

Forrester’s Business Technology Forum

October 8 -9, 2009
Chicago, Illinois
http://www.forrester.com/events/eventdetail?eventID=2383

Computerworld Storage Networking World Conference/Spring
October 12 -15, 2009
Phoenix, Arizona
http://www.snwusa.com/defaultaspx

VentureWire Technology Showcase 2009
October 13 -14, 2009
Redwood City, California
http://showcase.dowjones.com/Default.aspx?pageid=545

Gartner Symposium/ITxpo/
October 18 – 22, 2009
Orlando, Florida
http://www.gartner.com/it/sym/2009/sym19/sym19.jsp

Digital Hollywood Fall
October 19 -22, 2009
Los Angeles, California
http://www.digitalhollywood.com/LAFall07Agenda.html

RSA Conference Europe

October 20 – 22, 2009
London, UK
http://www.rsaconference.com/2009/europe/index.htm

Web 2.0 Summit
October 20 – 22, 2009
San Francisco, California
http://www.web2summit.com/web2009

Forrester’s Consumer Forum
October 27 -28, 2009
Chicago, Illinois
http://www.forrester.com/events/eventdetail?eventID=2384

Solar Power Conference and Expo
October 27 – 29, 2009
Anaheim,California

http://www.solarpowerinternational.com/

SIIA OnDemand

October 29 – 30, 2009
San Jose, California
http://www.siia.net/OnDemand/2009/default.asp

Economist Innovation Summit
October 30, 2009
London, UK
http://www.economistconferences.com/roundtable/public/con_common.asp?rtid=785&rtRegion=4&area=1

Weekly Sparkpr Missive

Week Ending September 18, 2009

What Tongues are Wagging About

  • Learned BusinessWeek may ink a deal as early as today to be sold and the print pub as we know it will probably be gone in 2 months. Everyone is hoping for a
    package in the meantime. Potential buyers: Bloomberg or private equity firm.
  • News terms of service for Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/tos where Twitter translated some of the jargon into plain language, to lessen the chances that its users might get the wrong idea about what was happening.
  • Index Ventures featured in London Twitter ecosystem story in FT: Twitter branches out as London’s ‘ecosystem’ flies
  • Nielsen Announces August U.S. Online Video Usage Data; Total Video Streams Viewed Online Increase 41 Percent Year-over-Year

Table 1: Overall Online Video Usage (U.S.)

+———————-+————+—————-+——————+
| Metric               |   Aug-09   | Year-Over-Year | Month-Over-Month |
+———————-+————+—————-+——————+
| Unique Viewers (000) |  139,176   |     18.0%      |       2.4%       |
| Total Streams (000)  | 11,363,819 |     41.0%      |       1.5%       |
| Streams per Viewer   |    81.7    |     19.6%      |      -0.8%       |
| Time per Viewer      |   204.9    |     38.6%      |      -3.2%       |
| (min)                |            |                |                  |
+———————-+————+—————-+——————+
Source: Nielsen VideoCensus
Note: Includes progressive downloads and excludes video advertising

Table 2: Top Online Brands ranked by Video Streams for August 2009 (U.S.)
+————————————————-+———–+———+
| Video Brand                                     |   Total   | Unique  |
|                                                 |  Streams  | Viewers |
|                                                 |   (000)   |  (000)  |
+————————————————-+———–+———+
| YouTube                                         | 7,188,638 | 107,730 |
| Hulu                                            |  392,545  |  9,894  |
| Yahoo!                                          |  226,601  | 28,402  |
| MSN/WindowsLive/Bing                            |  180,603  | 17,244  |
| Nickelodeon Kids and Family Network             |  158,790  |  6,376  |
| Turner Sports and Entertainment Digital Network |  151,606  |  7,826  |
| Fox Interactive Media                           |  149,304  | 14,823  |
| Disney Online                                   |  103,992  |  9,524  |
| MTV Networks Music                              |  102,021  |  6,227  |
+————————————————-+———–+———+
Source: Nielsen VideoCensus

Event Recaps

  • TC50: I’m sure you heard the buzz about Calcanis saying this is the last year.  If not, look it up, it’s all over. From one attendee “If I hear about another social media aggregator, I’m going to puke.” Heard there were a lot of companies doing things around real time search. Also heard complaints that all the companies there were a mash-up this or mash-up that, just mushed up features from companies hoping for a quick acquisition.
  • TC50 Winner: RedBeacon
  • TC50 Finalists: Threadsy, AnyClip, CitySourced

Press Riffs

  • An inside look at how NYT handles its blogs, particularly Bits.

Clients

Gossip

Weekly Sparkpr Missive

Week Ending August 28, 2009

What Tongues are Wagging About

Press Riffs

  • Web 2.0 News Sites: Mashable overtakes TechCrunch
  • Here is an interesting graph of traffic from Compete.com which shows excellent growth for Mashable, overtaking TechCrunch.
  • GigaOm and VentureBeat are neck and neck.

US Events on Our Radar

UK Events

Enterprise

Social Media

Mobile

Gaming/ virtual worlds

Developers

E-commerce

Advertising

Music

Weekly Sparkpr Missive

Week Ending August 21, 2009

What Tongues are Wagging About

  • Apple and AT&T both denying to FCC they rejected GOOG voice app
  • Ning beefing up its sales team… Hiring out of Google to go after big media companies.
  • New Facebook millionaires are all going to the first annual millionaires club meeting in Vegas this weekend. (feels like a bad omen)
  • Facebook mobile expects their new iPhone app to be released in a matter of a few days, not weeks.
  • Ethan Kaplan, CTO of Warner Brothers Records is going to run direct to consumer technology at WEA, Warner Music Group’s distribution company which will be building out all of the Artist websites and apps for the Labels.
  • Interesting facts:
  • 70% of US employees don’t reside in the same city as their boss and IT can’t support employee-based environments – home, phone, soccer field
  • 2400 US companies (25% of all public cos) have lost analyst coverage since Oct. No coverage = no buyers. (Expect to see stories out about “What’s the point in going IPO?)
  • How much will you save on sarbox if you delist? $1 – 1.6M for public co reporting auditioning, 8K Q and K reports, and public audit fees. Cost to GO PRIVATE is $13M if you want to get out of being public
  • SF Mayor Gavin Newsom introduces DataSF – a clearinghouse of datasets available from the City & County of San Francisco. http://datasf.org/

Clients and former client news

Event Recaps

  • New mobile blog IntoMobile hosted super-lame meet-up at Tesla Motors. Arrington showed up but it was a bomb
  • Digital Summer event w/ Ubergizmo and Girls in Tech: Huge line out the door. Tons of pretty women there. Coolest companies there were Eye-fi (a SD card with build in wifi that makes any digital camera a wifi enabled camera) and Coveroo which is personalized laser engraving on your gadget or cell phone. The “lash” station was also pretty popular. (that’s fake eyelashes for all you men trying to decipher the acronym ;-)
  • Y Combinator’s summer session: interesting companies though heard from reporters that the standout ones were off the record – reporters were told to actually not write about them! – but of course TC reported regardless.
  • http://MixPanel.com is real-time analytics for user engagement on web apps. nice UI, good demo. founder is ex-Slide.
  • http://DailyBooth.com is “Twitter 4 Pictures”. 3.5M uv/mo, 30% mo-mo growth. (demo by video remote from London!)
  • http://ReThinkDB.com is DB optimized 4 solid-state drives. hard-science startup, russian spkr (loud) has *great* presence.

Press Riffs

  • Interesting NPR 3-part segment: The Business Of Free: A three-part series on how the concept of “free” is changing how companies do business.

PART ONE: Free For All? Profits Can Be Elusive Online by Wendy Kaufman (includes Wired’s Chris Anderson, who, as usual, promotes the idea that info wants to be free, we’ll figure out the business model along the way, e.g., YouTube) http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=111996127

PART TWO: Web Firms Find Paths To Profits: Free Vs. Fees by Wendy Kaufman (highlight a freemium online game publisher Big Fish in Seattle that has a “freemium” business model) http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112042428

  • Eric Eldon left VentureBeat – is vacationing in Hawaii and off the grid for the next few weeks.
  • TechCrunch’s 16 year old reporter Daniel Brusilovsky is still in highschool, drinks soda and doesn’t think he needs to go to college. Says he got the job because his parents are in tech and friends with Arrington. Skeptical kid. Says he takes meetings.
  • Make TechMeme your one stop news source. Techcrunch’s Jason Kincaid says this is the first thing he reads and doesn’t understand why more people don’t realize that is the best place for news. Gabe Rivera, founder of TechMeme, obviously supported his claims.

Events on Our Radar

Dumb and Dumbr

  • Tumblr ripped off StumbleUpon name with a new product called “Tumble Upon” …StumbleUpon has no plans to file litigation, and thinks imitation is flattery