Ok, maybe you’re not thinking that. But it doesn’t change the fact that 25-year-old American entrepreneurs Anton Bernstein and Joshua David hopped the Atlantic to launch Groupon clone Lookingo in France.
Friday, January 28, 2011
Huh? Two 25-Year-Old Americans Launch A Groupon Clone…In France?
Zynga Acquires Social Game Developer Area/Code; Launches New York Office
Based in New York City, Area/Code has developed a number of games on Facebook and for mobile, including CSI: Crime City with partner Ubisoft, Facebook game Parking Wars and Drop7 for the iPhone. According to the startup’s site, the developer focused on highlighting “the connections between the interactive systems and imaginary landscapes inside of games and the real world around them.” These connections could include, “online games that respond to broadcast TV in real time,” “game systems that explore real-world social issues,”
“urban environments transformed into spaces for public play,” or “game events driven by real-world data.”
Area/Code was co-founded by Frank Lantz and Kevin Slavin, and interestingly Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley was the third partner in the startup in between leaving Google and starting Foursquare.
Area/Code general manager Demetri Detsaridis and Lantz will be General Manager and Creative Director, respectively for Zynga New York.
This is Zynga’s 9th announced acquisition in 8 months, including, Texas-based NewToy, XPD in Beijing, Unoh Games in Tokyo, Conduit Labs in Boston, Dextrose AG in Frankfurt, Germany,Challenge Games in Austin, and Bonfire Studios in Texas.
PostUp Acquires UberTwitter, Renames Itself (Again) To UberMedia
In addition to the acquisition, PostUp has another piece of news: it’s changing its name to UberMedia. This is the third name for the company, which was originally called TweetUp, but changed its name last summer to PostUp as it added support for Facebook and LinkedIn.
So what is UberMedia’s strategy here? The company now has a new homepage, which includes the following description:
UberMedia is the leading independent developer of applications and web-based services that make it easier for users to find, follow and communicate with others on Twitter and other social media platforms. The company is focused on driving innovation in user experiences across a range of online and mobile platforms. UberMedia also provides advertisers and brands with new ways to engage and communicate with consumers via Twitter through its family of apps.
In other words, it wants to offer a variety of third party services that are complimentary — and in some cases, directly competitive — with what Twitter offers.
MyNines Relaunches Private Sales Aggregator With New UI, Sales Calendar And More
Launched in March of 2010, MyNines aims to help consumers sort through the daily flash sales sites. MyNines aggregates products from various online sample sale sites and allows shoppers to find them all in one location. Users can search and filter by designer, category, highest discounts, as well as deals ending soonest, most viewed items, deals under $100, and newly listed. MyNines currently aggregates from over 80 sites, including eBay’s Fashion Vault.
With the relaunch, MyNines has rolled out a complete redesign of the site and a new feature called “Boutiques,” which includes sets of products from various sample sale sites curated by stylists, fashion bloggers and celebrities (this is very similar to Google’s Boutiques.com).
One of the most useful additions to MyNines is the sample sales calendar, which will aggregate the sale events from pretty much every sample into a calendar format to see which designers are featuring their sales on flash sale sites each day. You can also subscribe to the Sample Sales Calendar via Google Calendar, Outlook, or Apple iCal and you can set sale reminders for specific sales and MyNines will email you when those sales start.
While MyNines does aggregate actual products from a massive number of flash sales sites, some of the biggest players in the space, like Gilt Groupe, have not signed in to be included in the site’s feeds (although Gilt’s sales are included in the Sample Sale Calendar). The site’s founder, Apar Kothari, seems optimistic, however; that eventually all private sales sites will sign on to give MyNines a feed of their daily sales. Kothari adds that MyNines will soon start rolling out more personalized shopping features and will suggest certain sales and items to members based on what sales they click on.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Google: Spam Really Has Increased Lately. We’re Fixing That, And Content Farms Are Next
Today Matt Cutts, who heads Google’s search quality team, has written a blog post stating that there has indeed been a “slight uptick of spam in recent months”, and he details what Google is doing to fix it.
First Cutts goes into some of the tweaks Google is making to its algorithms to specifically address the recent increase in spammy results:
To respond to that challenge, we recently launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly. The new classifier is better at detecting spam on individual web pages, e.g., repeated spammy words—the sort of phrases you tend to see in junky, automated, self-promoting blog comments. We’ve also radically improved our ability to detect hacked sites, which were a major source of spam in 2010.
But Google isn’t going to stop there. Now, finally, it sounds like they’re going to do more to take on sites that just repurpose content from other sites (hopefully including the countless sites that repost TechCrunch articles verbatim):
And we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content.
The most interesting part of the blog post is Cutts’s discussion of so-called “content farms” — those sites that consist primarily of low quality content, typically produced specifically because it will rank well in search results. It’s not clear if this would impact ‘professional’ content farms (like Associated Content and Demand Media) or if it’s going for smaller-time outlets, but it could be a big deal.
As “pure webspam” has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to “content farms,” which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. In 2010, we launched two major algorithmic changes focused on low-quality sites. Nonetheless, we hear the feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content. We take pride in Google search and strive to make each and every search perfect. The fact is that we’re not perfect, and combined with users’ skyrocketing expectations of Google, these imperfections get magnified in perception. However, we can and should do better.
Cutts does say a few things to defend Google’s search quality. For one, he says that English-language web spam is appearing in results less than half as often as it was five years ago. He also notes that, despite some theories to the contrary, Google will take action against spammy sites that feature Google ads (the theory goes that Google makes money from these ad-loaded content farms, so it isn’t incentivized to remove them).
As Rummble’s CEO Is Ousted, The Story Of A European Startup Unravels
Rummble, one the UK’s oldest location-based reviews and social network which actually pre-dated Foursquare, has had its CEO removed by the board and now faces a radical shift away from it’s consumer-facing service of four years towards a Business-to-Business future.
What we know on the ground right now is that CEO Andrew Scott has departed the company; the existing staff remain in place and Rummble, while maintaining its web site and smartphone apps, is set to move forward towards a B2B strategy which is not white-label, but based on leveraging its core technology.
Over the past week TechCrunch Europe has been delving into the story of why Rummble ended up in this situation, and where it goes from here. I have been covering Rummble for over 5 years. I had them pitch at startups events even before I joined TechCrunch and I’ve written about 45 posts mentioning them in the last three years. So I guess I feel I know the company quite well.
So – to be blunt – what the hell happened?
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Groupon CEO Andrew Mason: I’m Following The Arnold Schwarzenegger Guide To Leadership
Our own Michael Arrington kicked things off by asking about Groupon’s press release for its recent funding round, when it “Raised, Like, A Billion Dollars“. Groupon and Mason have long had a very amusing and irreverent sense of humor. But how long can they keep that up before it causes a deal to fall through, or something else undesirable to happen?
Mason replied that he’s taking the Arnold Schwarzenegger approach to leadership. That is, he’s taking the first part of his career and doing everything stupid he can think of, so people have no expectations for him down the line (then again, he did just win CEO of the Year, so he’s not setting the bar too low).
Michael followed up by asking if Groupon had selected Morgan Stanley to lead the company’s IPO. Mason responded, “We are talking to bankers about the possibility of going public…. We have not made any decisions about whether to go public or who to do it with”.
Finally, Michael asked about Groupon’s revenue — could it do $4 billion this year? To which Mason responded, “Which one’s the revenue?”
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Etiquetas:
Andrew,
Arnold,
Following,
Groupon,
Guide,
Leadership,
Mason,
Schwarzenegger
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