Facebook is in what’s called a recruiting sweet spot right now. Out of control growth in users and revenue and a nearly certain IPO run in the near future. That’s when employee growth expands at the greatest rate for a company as it grows from hundreds to thousands and then tens of thousands of employees. And with low priced private stock as currency, companies in that position can generally get anyone they want.

Yahoo of course does more than its fair share of feeding the beast, but they’re everyone’s favorite recruiting pool right now. But plenty of Googler’s are heading to Facebook, too – LinkedIn is tracking 118 of them to date. For some Googlers, it’s paying off just to go get an offer from Facebook and then tell their employer – a counter offer is almost sure to come, and it may be stratospheric.

One recent Googler, we’ve confirmed, was recently offered a counter offer he couldn’t refuse (except he did). He was offered a 15% raise on his $150,000 mid level developer salary, quadruple the stock benefits and…wait for it…a $500,000 cash bonus to stay for a year. He took the Facebook offer anyway.

Sources close to Google tell us that about 80% of people stay when they’re offered a counter to a Facebook offer. But some still leave. Part of that may be that Facebook is quietly telling people, never in writing, that there’s no reason their stock won’t hit $100 billion in total valuation over the next couple of years. No guarantees, yadda yadda, but hey if you get 1/10 of 1%, that’s $100 million in stock. Now it’s a party.

Google isn’t making these kind of counter offers to everyone, but it’s not a one off, either. It seems to me that every Google engineer at least should be taking a personal day to go collect a Facebook offer. Even if it’s just to get a counter offer from their current employer.

Art: Audrey Fukuman

Most of us at Boxee are Apple fanboys. If it is silver and it has the Apple logo on it, we pre-order it. If there’s a line around the block, chances are we’re in it.  And everything stops at Boxee HQ while we unbox the latest gadget to come out of Cupertino.  We were incredibly excited when a couple of developers in the community made it possible to run Boxee on Apple TV (as hundreds of thousands of users have done) and the Boxee Remote for iPhone remains one of the most popular interfaces people use to interact with Boxee. Plenty has happened since then.

Now there is a new version of Apple TV coming out and the Boxee Box is launching in November.

We think people want to be able to watch anything that they can watch on their computer, only on their bigscreen TV.  There is an overwhelming consumer expectation that the content we can consume in our cubicles, our dorm rooms, and in our laps should be available in our living rooms, in full 1080p with a gorgeous interface.  It’s a simple premise, but the challenge is to do it in a way that makes sense in that space, so you can put your feet up, grab a remote and start watching. No keyboards, mice, windows or labyrinthine menus. It should be calm and it should be beautiful. And it *must* be open.

We all watched the Apple announcement. We walked away feeling strongly confident about the space it left for Boxee to compete. We have a different view of what users want in their living rooms.  We are taking different paths to get there. The Boxee Box is going to be $100 more expensive than the Apple TV, but will give you the freedom to watch what you want.

We think it’s worth it.

Service providers are a lynchpin in VMware's strategy to extend its virtualization technology into the cloud.

If the strategy works, VMware could become the leader in providing hybrid cloud infrastructures. It's a test for VMware's new foray into the cloud. And it has its risks. VMware is looking to provide an end-to-end platform that extends from the enterprise data center to the public cloud environments managed by the service providers.

How the technology performs will come to define VMware's position in the vast network of service providers that work with the majority of enterprise customers.

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Verizon is one of the companies that has opted to begin using VMware vCloud Director. This has to be VMware's highest profile partner. But in cloud computing, it is not well known.

But Verizon is making a play into cloud computing. It calls its platform Computing-as-a- Service (CaaS).

Its latest enhancement to its CaaS platform is built on VMware vCloud Datacenter. It uses VMware's cloud infrastructure technology including VMware vSphere, the new VMware vCloud Director and VMware vShield security solutions.

Verizon is using the VMware technology to provide customers with both performance and security that can be audited. Verizon is banking that VMware will help enhance its security features such as layer 2 isolation and LDAP integration.

Verizon will launch the service initially with the Intercontinental Hotel Group. It's a wordlwide field trial and a test to determine how the VMware platform will perform in the demanding and dynamic world of the hotel business.

The service providers are critical to VMware's success. Verizon will be a test to see how well the new VMware technology performs in a demanding environment.

Verizon is offering a sophsiticated service. The goal is to extend its service with VMware across the enterprise and public clouds. If they can do that it will help show how VMware can help service providers provide hybrid cloud environments for its customers.

Discuss

People are increasingly sharing different types of information on Twitter. For example, Tweets point to web pages, photos, videos, hashtags, people, check-ins, and more. Exploring Tweets is a great way to discover new and interesting information. And with devices of all shapes and sizes connecting to the Internet, we’re constantly looking for new ways to make this easier. To date, we’ve created applications for a variety of mobile phones, giving you instant access to Tweets and great content when you’re on the go.

Today we are bringing Tweets to a device that really lets content shine - the iPad. Twitter for iPad takes advantage of the iPad’s fluid touch interface, letting you move lots of information around smoothly and quickly – without needing to open and close windows or click buttons. There are a few things we want to point out that make this app a really fast and fun way to read real-time content.

Panes: Tapping on a Tweet opens a pane to the right. Depending on the content in that Tweet, you’ll see a video or photo, or maybe a news story, or perhaps another Tweet. You can continue tapping on Tweets, opening new panes, and getting new content as long as you’d like to. And, it’s really easy to move between panes by swiping to the right or left.


Media: When you tap a video link or open a web page with an embedded video, you can play that video inline. And, let’s be honest, video is great but sometimes it can take some time to load. The panes in Twitter for iPad let you look through your timeline while a video is loading, and then you can just swipe back to the video when it’s ready to play. You can also pinch on a video to watch it fullscreen.

Gestures: You can pinch on a Tweet to quickly view details about the author and to take actions on a Tweet, such as reply or retweet. Put two fingers together and pull down on a Tweet to peek at the replies, showing the entire conversation leading to that Tweet.

Apple announced on Wednesday a cornucopia of new hardware and software: sleek iPods, a brand new Internet-enabled video streaming device and new versions of its iOS software and iTunes 10. However, the most impressive to me by far was Ping, the music-only social network that Apple is opening up its 160 million existing iTunes users.

No, I’m not blown away by the 160 million number. What I’m impressed by is the thinking behind Ping.

Ping may function like a cross between Facebook and Twitter for iTunes by allowing you to follow celebrities, create social cliques and get artist updates via an activity stream. I think it could have tremendous impact on social sharing and commerce.

From a content perspective, there are three different types of media we love to talk about: movies we see, music we listen to and books we are reading. These are accepted social norms. In fact, many relationships are made on the basis of collective love of a movie and many friendships have started with mixed tapes.

It makes perfect sense for a music service to be social. I’m not alone: The popularity YouTube, the fast-growing MOG and the sadly defunct iLike and Imeem show that people gravitate towards music as a common, collective experience. A recommendation from friends on Last.fm often resulted in me buying many-a-few music tracks. My friends who listened to Thievery Corporation turned me on to The Broadway Project and Chris Joss, which I ended up buying on the iTunes store or via Amazon’s MP3 store.

This click-and-go-somewhere-to-download model of affiliate links can never match a unified experience. Amazon, for example, encourages bloggers and others to link to things they like and then get a piece of the action. This separates social from commerce and treats them as two discrete activities. On the post-Facebook Internet, I don’t think anyone can afford to keep these two actions distinct.

Ping, from what little I saw during Steve Jobs’ demo, allows a similar level of social interaction. It can tell me who my friends think are cool and the top 10 favorites of people in my social graph. Some of my friends are famous deejays. Others just have eclectic musical tastes. They can collectively sift through over 10 million songs and help with the discovery of music. This social-powered discovery is part of the biggest theme of our times: serendipity. About two years ago, when I wrote about serendipity, I said:

The problem is that there’s too much data coming online too quickly, and the traditional method of search that involves first finding and then consuming the information is not going to work for much longer. There just won’t be enough time for us to do that and still have a life. It’s a problem, and therefore solving it is an opportunity — a very big opportunity.

My belief has only been affirmed by growth in the amount of data available. With 12 million songs and 250,000 apps, the best way for Apple to enhance the iTunes store – aka its shopping experience — is through the use of social. Back in 2007, I argued that social networking was merely a feature that had to be embedded into applications to enhance their value. Apple has done a great job of that, but it’s also gone one step further, not only by adding a social networking layer to iTunes, but by meshing it with its commerce engine, the iTunes Store. And it’s made this experience available on both the desktop and its devices.

Apple received much of this social capability with the acquisition of Lala, an online music service, which as a standalone company used sharing of social objects to drive folks towards paid music downloads. Now Apple is only closing the loop by further sharing what users bought. I wouldn’t be least bit surprised if sales of music on the iTunes store rocket upwards, thanks to social discovery.

Amazon, which recently started experimenting with Facebook Connect, has similar ideas, but its implementation leaves a lot to be desired. On Amazon, I’m reduced to reading reviews from absolute strangers for music. I have a handful of friends who have impeccable taste in non-fiction business books, are all members of Amazon, and they already use email to share new book suggestions with me.

What if they too could share their likes and dislikes via a social layer inside Amazon.com? Or what if I could follow my favorite authors and get updates on their books? Much like Apple, Amazon owns book-based social service, Shelfari, and should find ways to embed the social layer inside of all Amazon products and connect its tens of millions of users.

Like Apple, Amazon too has a lot more data about its customers and their behaviors and could create a compelling discovery experience. I believe with tens of thousands of products in its store, the retail giant needs to figure out ways to surface content and other offerings smartly.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Why Google Should Fear the Social Web

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Is a cloud utopia possible? The idea being that someday everything will be elastic. Services scale up and down based on usage. You would never have to worry about updating an application on your laptop. Security would be taken care of and devices would be smart enough to know what data to process and what should be rendered in the cloud.

Sure. We are already seeing some of these scenarios unfold. But it's not common. In reality, the builder has a big job ahead.

Intel is here at VMWorld with a message about how this plays out. In their view, it comes down to three factors. The cloud and correlating devices should be federated, automated and client-aware.

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Federated Cloud

A federated cloud means an open cloud. It's a cloud that can be connected. Virtual machines work in the enterprise as well as they work in the data center. Communications, data, and services can move easily within and across cloud computing infrastructures. Identity is seamless. Interoperability is without question.

Automated Cloud

An automated cloud means cloud computing services and resources can be specified, located, and securely provisioned with very little or zero human interaction. This is a data center with intelligence. It does not have to be as manually operated as it is today. It allocates resources and is optimized in terms of its utilization and power efficiency.

Client-Aware

This represents one of the most significant challenges and in many ways represents the emergence of the intelligent network. In this scenario, the device and the cloud are optimized to work with each other. The client-aware chip technology know when to process on the device or in the cloud. In today's world we do see some level of data intelligence but for the most part the service provider looks for the lowest common denominator. That's why it is often difficult to use services on a handheld device because they were written for a PC, not a mobile phone. The trick is to know the device attributes that include location, policies, and connectivity. Security is taken care of in this scenario as the device and the cloud are synchronized to meet policy requirements.

Developer Challenges

A developer always has to choose a platform. Once the platform is chosen, the developer then has to consider what different versions are required for the various devices on the market. This is increasingly complex as the types and total number of devices continue to multiply. A client-aware scenario could mitigate the issue. Further is the issue about when to use the cloud and when to use a device for processing. For example, should a video be rendered on the device or in the cloud? It all depends. But client-aware technology could help bring a level of data intelligence that would mitigate the issue. It would be capable of determining if the video should be rendered in the cloud or on the device.

Is this all far off into the future? Intel says the disruption in the enterprise market is helping advance innovation. As the impetus for moving to the cloud increases, so should the advancements in these various scenarios.

We may never reach a utopia but at least we may find some ways to make it a bit easier for the builder trying to optimize the relationship between the cloud and the devices people use.

Discuss

We’ve confirmed that wunderkind Jessica Mah is one week away from closing a hotly anticipated round of seed financing for her banking startup InDinero. Confirmed investors in the round (which still has three open spots reserved for valley VIPs like SV Angel) include 500 StartUps‘ Dave McClure, Microsoft’s Fritz Lanman, and YouTube’s Jawed Karim.

Part of the YCombinator class of 2010, InDinero aims to be the Mint for small businesses and is off to a running start as this latest round is set to close between 1 and 1.5 million. We’ve heard reports that she had to turn investors away, and Mah promises that more “juicy details” about the story behind the funding are yet to come.

Perhaps the closest we’ve got to a female Mark Zuckerberg, Mah founded her first startup at age of 13, and entered into the Computer Science program at Berekley at 15, where she started internshipIN.com. In raising over a million at twenty, the serial entrepreneur’s got a ways to go before she gets jaded.

Here’s recent video of her explaining InDinero’s usefulness and simplicity.

Following is a post on super angels I wrote yesterday for PEHub.

In the beginning, there were angel investors. And it was good. As individual angel investors made more and more investments, they became super angels. One day a super angel woke up and thought to himself, “Gosh, I could do a lot more investments if I had a fund.” And so the super angels became micro-VCs (or “institutionalized super angels”). Everyone was excited and on the seventh day they did another deal instead of resting.

I’m a huge fan of the super angel movement. Some of my best friends are super angels and I’ve put my own money where my mouth is in funds like Chris Sacca’s, Dave McClure’s, Jeff Clavier’s, Roger Ehrenberg’s, and David Cohen’s. Not only am I an investor in these super angels, I love to have them on board with our investments at Foundry Group. And whenever they bring me something they’ve been working on, I always pay attention–as I know they know what I like to invest in.

But recently the super angel mantra of “traditional VCs suck” has reached a fevered pitch. What started out in Silicon Valley as a new wave of angel investors has evolved into a belief that “VCs are lousy seed investors” and “no one needs a VC–just raise your money from super angels and go to town.”

Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures recently wrote an excellent blog post titled “The Expanding Birthrate of Web Startups.” As with many of Fred’s posts, the comment section was as useful as the post, and early-stage investors such as Mark Suster, Charlie O’Donnell, Roger Ehrenberg, and Anonymous Coward weighed in. The comments ranged from the now cliche-ish “VCs suck” to “What happens when super angel-backed companies need a new round” to “Companies will never need more capital. It’s a new world out there.” As I read through the comments, I kept pondering the same thought: “What happens in five years?”

Let’s consider a few situations. Take a typical super angel. Assume success. Investors (LPs and individuals like me) want to invest money with the super angel. The super angel probably creates a fund and raises a lot more money. Now the super angel is a micro-VC. Continue to assume success. More money is able to be raised. Now the micro-VC is a mini-VC. Does this keep scaling, or does the mini-VC succumb to the same challenges that $200 million funds ran into when they turned into $1 billion funds?

Now, take a super angel with a 20-company portfolio. The super angel is hyper-connected and works closely with the entrepreneurs he/she invests in. Suddenly he/she has 100 investments. Are the entrepreneurs getting the same attention from that angel–especially when they enter year three of their life, hit a bunch of speed bumps and need a lot of help? Or does this super angel just turn his/her back and say, “Well, that’s the breaks.”

Finally, take a super angel who is used to making $25,000 to $100,000 per investment. He/she becomes a micro-VC, raises a bigger fund, and now invests $500,000 per deal. Is there a difference in his/her behavior with regard to the $25,000 investments vs. the $500,000 investments?

I think the super angel movement is awesome, but the generalization that all VCs suck at seed investing doesn’t make sense to me. Correspondingly, the idea that entrepreneurs only need super angels doesn’t make sense either. There’s a renewed focus and interest in early-stage investing going on in the United States, and it’s being stimulated by a lot of factors. It’s a powerful thing that will continue to evolve, change and challenge all of the participants.

The World Economic Forum has announced its list of 31 Technology Pioneers for 2011. The Technology Pioneers are its list of up-and-coming startups. Last year’s list included Twitter, Playfish, and Boston Power. The year before, Mint, Etsy, and Brightcove were named.

Joining the pantheon this year are foursquare, Knewton, Layar, Scribd, and Spotify. However, greentech is equally strong on the list, particularly with smartgrid companies such as OPower and Tendril. Below is the full list of infotech companies that made it, with links to their Crunchbase profiles for more information:

Aster Data (big data)
Atlassian (product management)
Foursquare (Geo-location)
GetJar
Knewton (adaptive learning)
Layar (augmented reality)
NetQin Mobile (mobile security)
OpenDNS (domain names)
ReputationDefender (online reputation monitoring)
Scribd (online documents)
SecondMarket (private securities market)
Spotify (streaming music service)
Vortex Engineering (low-power ATMs)

iTunes 10 is now live and available for download. It comes bundled with its own killer feature: music-centric social network Ping.

Announced just this morning, the new iTunes/Ping one-two combo pack a mighty punch. But can this dynamic duo deliver on its promise to revitalize music-based social networking? And will Ping be the MySpace killer all the tech pundits are speculating about?

We don’t have all the answers, but we do have a few first impressions to share with you. We were definitely met with a few surprises and even some disappointments when firing up the app for the first time. Here’s what we think so far; be sure to share your opinions with us in the comments.

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Signing Up and Getting Started

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First, download the new iTunes. Once it’s installed, you’ll notice a new link under the iTunes Store tab on the left side of the iTunes interface. The Ping tab is inconspicuous as it is exciting.

The service is opt-in, so you’ll have to turn Ping on and sign in with your Apple account and agree to a new Terms of Service. After that comes a simple profile form that gives you the opportunity to upload an avatar and write the standard social media “About Me” section. Additionally you can “like” up to three genres.

Our first nose-wrinkle moment with Ping came right here: We only get to pick three kinds of music? Almost everyone likes a few more than three genres. Still, this will force those pesky “I listen to everything” types to get specific, so we can’t complain too much.

After that, you get to make some privacy choices. You can specify how music you like, rate and review is displayed on your profile; you can also decide whether or not people can follow you and if they need your approval to follow you. Even if you don’t allow others to follow you, you can still follow anyone you like. It’s a fairly common asymmetric friendship model, much like Twitter’s.

You can also choose to connect your profile on Ping to your Facebook profile, if you wish. Once your accounts are connected, you can also follow your Facebook friends on Ping, too.

Ping already has some “Artists We Recommend You Follow,” among them, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Linkin Park and U2. These don’t seem to be connected in any way to individual users’ purchasing habits or iTunes library contents. In the “People We Recommend You Follow” section, you’ll find luminaries such as Def Jam head Rick Rubin and radio DJ Jason Bentley. It’s a shame these recommendations aren’t based on available user data yet; we’re hoping that as more artists enable Ping profiles and more users sign up and begin to exhibit certain behaviors based on demographic and psychosocial factors, the recommendation quality for first-timers will improve.

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Playing With Ping: UX/UI

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Once you’re in and set up, you’ll see a stream of recent activity. You can think of it in a couple ways. First, it’s a music-only version of your Facebook news feed. Second, it’s a huge recommendation — one that might work pretty well if your friends, or at least the people you follow on Ping, have similar taste in music.

You can comment on and like others’ activities. When you click through to another user’s profile, you’ll also see a run-down of his or her recent activities.

Navigation is a bit awkward; don’t expect Facebook’s plethora of tabs and menus. You’ll get a search bar and simple back and forward buttons in addition to the traditional iTunes navigation bar at the top of the screen. On another look-and-feel UI note, it’s new and jarring to have to use a web app from within a desktop app, but it’s something that Ping users will apparently have to get used to.

The other part of running a social network inside a desktop app is that it’s cripplingly slow — something that might seriously inhibit the platform’s growth. If there’s anything end users hate more than sites that constantly go down, it’s sites that run slowly.

You can search for artists, people or both. Either the search function is purely busted, or iTunes hasn’t got a large enough repertoire of artists on board with Ping yet. Artists have both their iTunes Store pages and Ping profiles. Ping search takes you to the former, which isn’t quite intuitive.

The artist Ping profiles show an activity stream as well as upcoming concerts and a few other links. And of course, the entire Ping artist interface contains built-in music-selling features.

Artists can also upload photos, videos and text updates, something we haven’t yet been able to do as non-artists. As for uploading content other than reviews, regular users are limited to comments on your and others’ activity only for now.

One interesting section of Ping is its Charts, a sort of recommendation engine that delivers a brief list of songs and albums popular among people you follow. It shows purchased music only, not liked, rated or reviewed items.

Other sections of your Ping profile might not be as easy to understand; for example, don’t expect to be able to write a review when you click on “My Reviews;” you’ll have to go elsewhere in iTunes for that. Controls for the interface are small and, shall we say, specific. In other words, you’d better be pretty accurate when clicking on that five pixel-wide arrow, or you’ll end up on a wholly different part of the site and have to start all over again.

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Is It a MySpace Killer?

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The big question for music fans, musicians, digital collateral creators and millions of other people is both simple and complex: Can Ping replace MySpace as the go-to marketplace to find and socialize around entertainment?

We pondered this question at length earlier today, when we were confident that this Apple-backed MySpace alternative, with its baked-in connection to the iTunes Store, would be a surefire success.

However, while testing the app this evening, we see that Ping has a long way to go if it’s going to be a better alternative. All the reasons that users have largely abandoned MySpace — the emphasis on gaudy customization, the constant stream of shallow user-to-user communication, the veritable sea of band-spam — have been avoided to a perhaps detrimental extreme. We love minimalist design as much as the next guy, but we also love self-expression, music-sharing and communication with friends. Much of that is curtailed here.

Moreover, the interface is still buggy and slower than molasses in January at the North Pole during a legitimate Ice Age. And that slowness is a big turnoff and an inherent factor of working within iTunes.

We don’t love Ping yet, but we don’t hate it, either. We suspect that much of the network’s value will be a wait-and-see proposition. Wait and see what happens when there are more artists, more curators, more well-known DJs and music bloggers, and more of your own friends on Ping. Wait to see what changes Apple makes in later iterations. But for now, it’s definitely an app worth watching.

What are your first impressions of Ping?

More About: apple, Apple Ping, itunes, itunes 10, itunes ping, Ping

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Twitter for iPad is now live in the App Store, Twitter announced in a tweet at midnight Eastern Time this morning, Sept. 2, 2010.

Twitter wrote in a blog post:

Today we are bringing Tweets to a device that really lets content shine - the iPad. Twitter for iPad takes advantage of the iPad's fluid touch interface, letting you move lots of information around smoothly and quickly - without needing to open and close windows or click buttons.

Read More...
More on iPad

If I were MySpace, I would be shaking in my boots.

Earlier today, Apple launched iTunes 10, the latest rendition of its wildly popular music software. Really though, iTunes 10 is just a vessel for Ping, Apple’s new music-centric social network. Available immediately to iTunes’s 160 million+ users through the desktop, iPhone and iPod touch, Ping is a social network where users can follow their friends and their favorite artists.

As Apple CEO Steve Jobs described it, Ping is Facebook + Twitter for music. It centers around a newsfeed of what your friends are listening to and watching through iTunes. It provides custom song and album charts, as well as 17,000+ concert listings and, of course, deep integration with the full library of iTunes content.

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Ping’s Potential Effect on MySpace

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It’s no secret that MySpace is on the decline. Facebook won that war more than a year ago and continues to flourish. In a bid to stay relevant, MySpace has been rolling out new features and pivoting its strategy towards a younger generation with a focus on entertainment and music content.

But why go to MySpace Music when you can go straight to the source?

MySpace has become a destination for music lovers to follow their favorite artists and get the music and video content they crave. Artists in turn are on MySpace because it’s still a good distribution channel for their work.

But why should an artist spend time on MySpace when they could potentially make a lot more money with Ping?

MySpace may have a new homepage, but Ping has iTunes, and that’s the key to why it’s such a threat to MySpace. Unlike most of the web’s socially-inclined users, artists haven’t abandoned MySpace. Ping will make them reconsider.

Artists want to get their music out to the masses, but they also want to make money. To make money on the web, they have to use their web presence to sell digital songs and albums. While 50 Cent has a great MySpace page, you should quickly note where he directs you to preorder his new album: iTunes.

Wouldn’t it be easier to get people to preorder right from within iTunes? Yes, and that’s what Apple is hoping will happen. By getting people to interact with artists in iTunes, it hopes to sell more digital records. Artists have the same goal, and deeper integration with iTunes will surely help them achieve it.

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Nail in the Coffin

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Let’s be clear: MySpace isn’t dead, and it will continue to exist in one form or another for the foreseeable future. But if Ping turns out to be a viable social network, Apple will certainly be able to attract artists to create their own profiles and build their own followings. MySpace will lose its edge and fall even further.

While we love what MySpace has been doing to revamp its interface and turn things around, having Apple and Facebook as direct competitors simply may be too much of an obstacle to overcome. It will have to get creative in order to retain its users and, more importantly, keep artists from jumping ship to Ping.

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Reviews: Facebook, MySpace, Ping, Twitter, iTunes

More About: Apple Ping, facetime, iphone, ipod, Opinion, Ping, social network

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New York City startup BankSimple today disclosed that it raised its first venture funding in a round led by First Round Capital, Roger Ehrenberg’s IA Ventures, and Village Ventures, along with seed investors SV Angel (Ron Conway) and Nauiokas Park (Amy Nauiokas and Sean Parker), and . But it did not disclose how much it raised. I’ve confirmed that the round was $2.9 million, with an additional $190,000 raised last year in convertible debt (which converted to shares with this round), for a total of $3.1 million raised.

BankSimple has not yet launched. It is trying to develop a better interface for banking, working with financial institutions to actually hold the deposits. “Anything the customer sees is what we do,” says CEO Joshua Reich. BankSimple is creating a new front-end experience for bank customers both online and through mobile apps. The service will simplify their accounts into a single account and gives them a dashboard to see how much they are saving, how much they can spend, and how close they are to reaching financial goals.

The whole point is to simplify people’s financial lives by giving them a modern Web interface and realtime data linked to their accounts. So when you are about to reach an overdraft, you might get a notification on your phone. The first customers will be required to own a smartphone so they can download one of BankSimple’s mobile apps (iPhone and Android will probably be first). They will be able to deposit a check by taking a picture of one with their cell phone camera. Customers will also get a bank card tied to their account.

“The way banks work is they shove products down the throats of consumers,” says Reich. The more products you sign up for with your bank, the more fees they can charge. BankSimple will not make money from fees. Instead it will split the net interest margin with its partner banks (the net margin interest is the difference between the rate at which banks lend out money and the rate at which they pay depositors). It is looking to partner with wholesale banks to take care of the back end.

This strategy of focusing solely on the user experience contrasts with Betterment, a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist which also tries to simplify the online banking experience with a single, smarter account, but does hold deposits. Reich acknowledges that “we would certainly get more revenues if we did it ourselves,” but does not want to be distracted by regulatory compliance and managing large pools of money. Plenty of banks do that better than BankSimple could. Instead he wants to focus on what banks don’t do well: building a technology company and making the customer experience less harrowing.

I've got iTunes 10 installed, and have signed up on Ping.

My handle is "scriptingnews." You're welcome to follow me.

To be clear, they didn't give me a choice of name. That's the name I chose when I got my first iPod or whatever got me logged into their store the first time. (I don't remember.) I never would have chosen to be scriptingnews on a social network. Not at all obvious how to change it, if I can.

Here are their first recommendations. They bear absolutely no resemblance to any music I listen to or people I know. Obviously this is very very early days for Ping.

One thing I don't like about Ping is that it isn't in my web browser. I keep looking for the Back button. I keep wanting to find a URL so I can publish a link somewhere else. I think this is a big lose. It's the only social network I've ever tried that isn't in the web. Right now I think that's a deal-stopper.

So I played one of my current favorites thinking there would be an easy gesture in the iTunes interface to tell my Ping followers that I like it. After all why bother integrating it with iTunes if there is no integration? Well, there's nothing in the right-click menu for pinging the song. No menus, nothing anywhere in the user interface. What the heck were they thinking?? Hello, anyone home at Apple??

…as I said, “more to come”.

You may have heard of the Double Rainbow Video. The guy who filmed this, Paul “Bear” Vasquez, lives in Yosemite and in the past month has gotten huge traffic for his ‘vivid’ reaction to that double rainbow. We hooked up with Bear to learn more about him & show him how to capture a full on double rainbow with Windows Live Photo Gallery using our panorama stitch feature. It’s so intense!

Some more background…

When I first showed the Windows Live team the famous “Double Rainbow” video back in July they thought it was hilarious. But when I said I wanted him to come and do a video with us, they looked at me as if I had been seeing rainbows all day…they thought I was kidding. I e-mailed Bear that night and sure enough, he responded, and with great enthusiasm.

I called him and gave him the lowdown on the project and asked if he would do a “Double Rainbow” redux. He was ecstatic! So we jumped right on it. He flew to Seattle and we had an absolute blast. After a 10 hour shoot we shared stories, ate delicious Vietnamese food (his favorite), and hung out with the crew.

 

Photo Caption: Bear and our crew. From left to right: Connor Lanman, Max Lanman, Adam Collins, Matt Garrett, Bear, Austin Chick, Michael Fishman, Andrew Sobey, & Shawn Anderson not pictured: Tommy Yacoe & Brendan Schlagel

We did a second video called “Meet Bear” where talks about his experience posting “Double Rainbow” and his love for sharing photos and videos with the world using Windows Live Essentials – video coming soon (will update post when its up). UPDATE: You can check out the second video called “Meet Bear” by clicking here!

Bear is something special. He’s entered the world of social media in hopes to share laughs, smiles, and insights. It’s not about the product, it’s about the people. It’s about the viewers, the users, it’s about you. And more importantly this project also shows how powerful sharing photos and videos can be. If tools like Photo Gallery and Movie Maker didn’t exist, Bear and I wouldn’t have met.

People can now share their lives with everyone and anyone, and can influence each other’s lives in a positive way. That’s what is so cool about Bear’s story.

Till next time,

-Connor

Twitter is launching the first native app it’s built from scratch tonight, Twitter for iPad. Aimed at fostering content consumption, the app is designed for new users and power users alike.

The iPad app indicates the direction all Twitter-designed apps will be heading, said Leland Rechis, Twitter’s mobile product manager, in an interview at Twitter headquarters on Wednesday. “It’s not about timelines, it’s about consuming information and encouraging exploration.” The iPad app, he added, “is a great place for us to show how important the content is in the tweets.”

Rechis created the app with Loren Brichter, who joined Twitter when it controversially purchased his iPhone Twitter app, Tweetie (which is now Twitter for iPhone, and is actually the same app as the one released tonight, but with different features expressed in the iPad environment).

Twitter for iPad makes use of the device’s touch interface and big-screen real estate by letting users see multiple cascading panels of information. So, for instance, you might click on a person’s twitter handle, open a panel of information about them, then click on one of their tweets, and open another panel that shows the full text of a linked article from the tweet. If users are new or not signed in, the first panel is a scrollable list of recommended users. There are also nice multitouch features, like pinching to see a user’s profile and swiping to see the rest of a thread of a conversation.

At launch, web pages are the only content format fully supported, but Rechis said to expect support for other inline media such as videos. He said Twitter’s mobile group is highly focused on the goal of connecting the Twitter experience to the real world in whatever ways it can. That could be something like location, but it could also be connected to helping a phone or iPad user who’s fiddling with the device on her sofa while watching television.

Twitter for iPad is free, it’s available in all regions, and it should be live tonight. At this point (like other Twitter apps) it does not contain Twitter’s version of advertising (Promoted Tweets).

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

The App Developer’s Guide to Choosing a Mobile Platform

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When it comes to seed investing, New York City is becoming a hotbed. And now TechStars, the incubator that began in Boulder. Colorado and has spawned nearly 40 startups, is coming to New York. This will be the fourth (and supposedly last) city TechStars expands to, according to CEO David Cohen (the other two are Boston and Seattle).

TechStars is accepting applications for the New York City Class of 2011, which will start in January. TechStars provides a little bit of cash ($6,000 per founder for a three-month program) and a lot of mentorship. The list of New York City mentors includes Foursquare founders Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai, Tumblr founder David Karp, VC Fred Wilson, Hunch founder and seed investor Chris Dixon, angel investor Roger Ehrenberg, StockTwits CEO Howard Lindzon, Boxee CEO Avner Ronen, BuzzFeed president Jon Steinberg, and Hot Potato founder Justin Shaffer. Jeff Clavier and Dave McClure snuck in there as well, even though they live in California.

TechStars takes a 6 percent equity stake in each startup in common stock (no board seats), and has a decent track record. Cohen and David Tisch will be running the program. They are looking for about ten startups for the initial New York City class.

Of all topics, this is one of the perennials. People want more traffic, more attention, more awareness to their blog. It’s fair. We work hard on our blogs. We want more attention and traffic. If your business depends on volume, this is especially important (for instance, if you’re using ads). Getting traffic is a tricky business, and it requires a lot of experimentation. I’ll tell you what’s worked for me, so far, and I’ll tell you what you might try. Maybe others will educate us both in the comments on their best methods.

Great Titles Help

The first few seconds of someone’s attention are the hardest to pass. If you have a lame blog post title, no one’s going to want to read the post. For whatever reason, we react to “how to,” we react to “7 great,” we react to all kinds of things. Not sure where to look? I stole this advice from Brian Clark years ago: go to the grocery store, buy some ladies’ magazines like Cosmopolitan, and learn how THEY write headlines on the front page.

Graphics Don’t Hurt

This entire series (and most of my blog posts) use graphics to catch your eye. It’s an easy way to get one’s attention. Screen captures help. Video helps. There are tons of ways to get people into a receptive space with your material, and graphics are just the easiest one.

Now that we’ve got a decent title, decent graphics, let’s be quick about your content.

Brevity Is the Game

Keep your posts brief (unless you want tons and tons of bookmarks). People don’t have all day to read. If you can keep your posts between 250-500 words, that’s in alignment with most people’s attention spans. Hey, you’re welcome to write whatever length you want. You asked me how to grow traffic to your blog. I can only give you results that I’ve tested. When I write a super long piece, I get much less involvement with it.

Share Your Blog

I’ve written about making shareability a priority. If you don’t have easy-to-share buttons on your blog, you’re missing the easiest way for people to see your stuff on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on Twitter, and all the other sites where it would matter. Sharing out is a great way to make some more traffic happen. I also automatically push my posts into Facebook with their notes feature. I have an automated post into twitter via @broganmedia, but don’t do this same effect on my primary @chrisbrogan account.

Subscriptions or No?

In my case, subscriptions to my blog matter. I want people to subscribe, because I don’t necessarily survive on ad revenue. If you’re trying to monetize via ad revenue, and if your ads are in the header and the sidebar, a subscription really won’t help you get more traffic. If for whatever reason you want people to come to your website directly instead of via your RSS feed, you might want to obfuscate where you put your subscription information.

If you’re like me, you ask for the subscription all the time. In fact, I’ll ask now. You’re not yet subscribed? Enter your email (I respect your privacy):

Guest Posts

Over in the Third Tribe, we talk about guest posts quite often as a great traffic-builder to your blog. Find someone who has a very similar kind of blog topic to yours (not sure where to start? Check out Alltop), and offer a guest blog post. Oh, and then actually follow through. I have heard recently from my friends who accept guest posts that often, people ask for something, get approval, and then don’t take an action. That doesn’t sound like a good plan. Just FYI.

Consistency

This is one of those points where people disagree. I blog daily. Truth be told, I’m up to 2x a day most days. Why? Because the more I blog, the more people subscribe. I learned it from some of the larger blogger sites out there.

Lots of people justify once a week, or once every two weeks. That’s fine. But if you want to grow traffic to your blog, that’s a very long slow crawl towards that growth. That said, no matter which frequency you’ve chosen, stick to it. The moment you drop off the map, people who haven’t yet subscribed to you lose sight and move on.

Market Your Blog

You can always market your blog the good old fashioned way. I’ve had people hand me business cards at events that had a compelling question or interesting graphic, and then a URL to their blog. More often than not, I’ll at least check out the post. You might make postcards and bring them to the places where your prospective readers might congregate. For instance, if you write a restaurant blog, why not have a business card tray by the mints? Make an offer, just like you do with any other kind of marketing.

Often times, we sit around inside the fishbowl of social media and hope people from outside will find us. Here’s a hint, hero: the people you need are out there wondering what they can do to learn more about the thing you’re talking about. Go get ‘em, tiger.

How Do You Grow Traffic To Your Blog?

I’m a big fan of the basics: write about what they need, make sure they see that you wrote about it, make it easy to carry on the relationship, make it easy for them to promote you to others.

Seems like a simple formula, and yet, we go through all kinds of hoops to come up with trickier methods. Try this one first. What do you say?

Idea management software seeks two "holy grails" of enterprise collaboration technology: 1) innovation and 2) the breaking down of silos. Enterprise idea management has been around for over 10 years, but according to Mark Turrell, co-founder of pioneering idea management company Imaginatik and current CEO of Orcasci, there's been an "explosion of interest" in the field in the past 18 months. Here are a few of the trends in the area that we've noticed.

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SharePoint Integration

Stand alone enterprise idea managment platforms are increasingly integrating with Microsoft Sharepoint. Imaginatik recently added Sharepoint integration to its flagship Idea Central product.

Spigit (our coverage) and Kindling, newer players with big name customers, have both announced SharePoint integration in the past 12 months as well. Kindling actually took it a step further with Outlook integration.

Since Sharepoint is the most popular enterprise collaboration platform, it makes sense for vendors to focus on Sharepoint.

Vendors Baking In Idea management

Meanwhile, other enterprise collaboration vendors are baking idea management into other products. MangoSping has an idea management solution (previous coverage) and Jive added an ideation module to its offerings in March.

Newsgator is fusing both trends by adding Ideas to its Social Sites for SharePoint offering.

Bringing ideation into existing collaboration tools - whether it's SharePoint, Jive or something else entirely - is a logical strategy for enterprises hoping to encourage not just innovation but collaboration on ideas.

Customer Facing Tools Being Turned Inwards

Many times departments and business unit managers want to gather ideas from staff but don't want to deal with complex solutions or wait for the IT department to purchase and deploy a solution. Other times, they find that the systems like Spigit are too complex.

"Most employees don't three hours a day to spend in these systems," says UserVoice (see our previous coverage) CEO Richard White. UserVoice started as a customer-facing web application, but White says the company has been getting more inquiries from enterprises wanting to use it for internal purposes.

Deloitte is now offering a Deloitte Innovation Academy service that combines some of its own tools, UserVoice, and education to provide all in one innovation solution to enterprise customers.

Don't be surprised to see Salesforce.com customers turn the Salesforce.com Ideas platform, used by companies like Starbucks and Dell to solicit consumer feedback, inward for more ideas.

Are You Using Idea Managment Software?

Are you using idea management software in your organization? Which software? Has it been successful in fostering innovation, or has it been an unnecessary distraction? Have you seen any trends we didn't mention?

Photo by Bart

Discuss

Curated.by is a new Twitter curation tool that makes it easy to gather and share collections of messages on any topic. The service is slowly letting more and more people create accounts, and I really hope it will launch soon so I can make public use of it.

It's quite simple: create a collection and drag Tweets into it, or use the service's new Chrome Extension to curate Tweets right from Twitter webpages. Then share your collections, embed them on a web page and subscribe to the collections of other users. Founder Bastian Lehmann, for example, curated a really good collection of Tweets about today's Apple event that I would have embedded below if the service had launched yet.

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Other interesting examples of collections saved for posterity include All YC DemoDay Startups as seen by @davemcclure and Tweets about the Chevy Volt.

Curation is a beautiful thing and something that's still too hard to do online. Curated.by is likely to make a nice addition to any content curator's toolset. (See also Curated.info, a very cool blog subscription bundle sharing service.) The service still has some rough edges, and these sorts of tools tend to require more investment than most users are willing to make, but I'm personally very excited for it to finally launch. "Soon," Lehmann says.

Click to enlarge.

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