(I’m live-blogging from Startup School, a daylong program from startup incubator YCombinator held at Berkeley today. Twitter’s co-founders Biz Stone and Ev Williams are on-stage for a question-and-answer session. You can watch it here live or update as we go. This is paraphrased.)
Jessica Livingston: What were your main motivations in starting Twitter?
Biz Stone: We should start with Odeo, our older podcasting service. We realized we weren’t passionate about it. We were building i
(I’m live-blogging from Startup School, a daylong program from startup incubator YCombinator held at Berkeley today. Mark Zuckerberg is on-stage for a question-and-answer session. You can watch it here live or update as we go. This is paraphrased.)
Jessica Livingston: First I want to go way, way back. I know you built a few things in high school. What did you learn from those experiences?
Zuckerberg: I mostly built stuff I liked. I built games and I built AIs to play the games against me. M
Ask Seth Priebatsch, the founder of SCVNGR.
SCVNGR offers a platform for businesses, universities and museums to build real-world, location-based games. Some are exactly what the name implies — a scavenger hunt with clues from your phone. Cities use them in tourism campaigns to promote places, while museums use them to point out works of art. Still others, like jewelers, use them for promotions. One involved burying a $15,000 diamond ring in the ground and giving it away to the finder.
I
“Government 2.0” has been a big buzzword of 2009, with thought-leaders like Tim O’Reilly and The Sunlight Foundation showing the way. It’s a movement that pushes public institutions to use technologies that have thrived in the last five years like social networking and blogging to foster closer relationships with citizens. This entails being more open with data, and encouraging regular people to transform it through mashups and apps for use by others.
A few city governmen
OKCupid, the dating site run by Harvard alums who love statistical analysis, has just released another data-driven study of its users. The topic? Profile pics and how to optimize them to attract more interest from prospective dates. (We covered an earlier study that looked at how race affected response rates on the dating site.)
For this survey, OKCupid looked at 7,140 people randomly chosen from all users in big cities between ages 18 and 32 with only one profile photo.
Some unexpected conclu
Google released some interesting statistics today about Friend Connect, which is part of the search giant’s push to build a social layer across the web where visitors can get tailored experiences depending on their interests and friend network. So how has Friend Connect done since its launch last year?
It’s on nine million sites
Friend Connect sites attract about half a billion unique viewers over a 30-day period
And over two people join a site every second
Pretty mind-boggling, i
Joe Hewitt, the one-man powerhouse behind Facebook’s iPhone app, explained more of the reasoning behind his decision to leave the project earlier this week. He stopped developing Facebook’s popular app out of frustration with Apple’s review process.
The issue (as it has been for a long time) is Apple’s draconian selection process and the resulting bottleneck for new apps on the platform. He argued that the last decade on the web has been about weakening the power of gate
Ah, the sweet state of journalism today.
Tweets and Facebook are infiltrating the hallowed reporting of the Gray Lady, as a Facebook photo made the front-page of the newspaper’s Web site today. Admittedly, the report raises rather serious questions about the safety of U.S. President Barack Obama. The story is about a couple, Michaele and Tarek Salahi, who somehow got into a state dinner with the prime minister of India Manmohan Singh all without being on the guest list.
The New York Times
Facebook handed Google a bit of a weaker deal than it gave to Microsoft.
The search giant gets to index status updates to pages, which are primarily commercially-oriented. In contrast, Microsoft, an investor in Facebook, gets public status updates to profiles for its Bing search engine. Those updates could contain bits and pieces of rich social information if friends reference each other plus explicit data about what people are interested in, which could be used for ad targeting.
We reported ear
Asana, the workplace productivity startup from Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, just released a sneak peek at the new programming system underlying its product, called Lunascript.
It’s an in-house programming language, named after Moskovitz’ cat, that the company claims will cut 90 percent of the time needed to code rich web applications. (You can check out a video here.) Asana co-founder Justin Rosenstein explained to us when we covered Asana’s $9 million round of fundin
Facebook has started officially allowing outside developers to bring its instant messaging service into their own applications. The company is now supporting the open IM standard XMPP/Jabber, which is used by other chat software including iChat, Pidgin, Adium, Miranda and Google’s GTalk. AOL’s AIM service just began supporting Facebook Chat.
It looks like chat is a feature Facebook is aggressively promoting in early 2010. In the redesign last week, the company gave it a much mor
Hardly a week goes by where we don’t receive a company pitch from a hopeful startup trying to crash the group deals scene. And for good reason, since venture capital firms seem happy to throw cash at well-executed takes on the business model.
LivingSocial is the latest to score a large amount of funding. It raised $25 million in a round led by U.S. Venture Partners, with Grotech Ventures and Steve Case’s Revolution, LLC. That’s fresh on top of a $5 million round announced only two
