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Skype’s VP Of Enterprise On Future Strategy, Products And Competitors
Why Twitter Is Massively Undervalued Compared To Facebook
Crashing Washington: How CleanTech/Silicon Valley Can Have Their Cake And Eat It Too
Hitching A Ride With UberCab, 5 Minutes With The CEO [TCTV]
MacBook Air Apparent: I Have Never Used My Computer’s Optical Drive
New Features Help A Birthday Wish Set A New Causes Record: $10K In 24 Hours
Ron Conway’s SV Angel Rakes In Another $9 Million
Evan Williams Takes Questions On Twitter And Reveals Some Of What Could Be Next
Atlantic’s Michael Hirschorn: “Americans will Believe any Shit They See Online” [TCTV]
And Now a Folksy Update From Carol Bartz, Massive Outage Relegated to “PS”
RockYou Rocked By Layoffs As It Switches Focus To Social Games
Maybe Dave McClure Should Just Use UberCab
Think Bartz Can’t Answer What Yahoo Is? Listen to Ballmer Try to Answer Why You Should Work at Microsoft.
Reid Hoffman Bristles Being Called a VC, Answers Reader Questions Anyway [TCTV]
Source Claims 11.6″ MacBook Air Incoming
Google’s Greatest Trick Is Pouring Gas On The Hockey Stick
For Those About To Rock, We Offer You An iPhone-Controlled Guitar
Ever Wish You Were Dating Yourself?
Review: Adobe Lightroom 3
GoPro CEO: “Some People’s Most Exciting Moments Also Happen to be Horrific” [TCTV]
Looks Like Top Gun 2 Is Cleared For Takeoff — All Thanks To Larry Ellison’s Son
Ten Culprits Of The Global Water Crisis (And Startups Trying To Solve It)
Hands-On With The MIT Media Lab’s G-Speak Interface
Groupon Hooks Up With InStyle On Beauty Deals
Just Four Dudes Jamming On The Subway — With Their iPhones As Instruments [Video]

Skype’s VP Of Enterprise On Future Strategy, Products And Competitors

Posted: 16 Oct 2010 08:10 AM PDT

It’s no secret that Skype has major ambitions for its enterprise business. When the VoIP company filed to go public, Skype publicly stated that it plans on adding enterprise products to its suite to help build additional revenues. And in a move that was clearly not a coincidence, Skype recently brought on Tony Bates, who ran the enterprise group at Cisco, as CEO.

I recently spoke with Skype’s General Manager and Vice President of Enterprise, David Gurle, for an exclusive interview about the future of Skype for Businesses.

There are two major parts of Skype’s enterprise strategy: a business to business solution and a business to consumer product. In terms of the business to business suite of products, Skype is already offering businesses Skype Connect, which is a way for employees to make domestic and international calls using regular office telephones. Two weeks ago, Skype announced a partnership with telephony company Avaya to offer their customers Skype Connect. The company also recently launched the Skype Channel Partner Program which allows partners in the United States to sell endorsed IT support for Skype's enterprise products.

While Skype seems to be steadily shoring up these partnerships with existing B2B products, there is a tremendous opportunity in offering Skype products for businesses to communicate with consumers. Gurle says that the company is developing a number of customized, industry-centric B2C products for enterprise companies. For example, Skype will soon be offering businesses a way to establish Skype-powered virtual video call centers, allowing enterprise customers to talk to their own customers across multiple devices, platforms, geographies, and more.

For each industry, there is a different video calling application. Another customer, a large financial institution that Gurle declined to name, wanted a custom Skype application to enable service representatives to use video calling to communicate with customers around the world. The client wanted representatives to be able to form a more emotional connection with customers with face-to-face interaction over Skype.

Gurle is working with an education company to develop a Skype technology that will help teachers and students learn over a realtime video connection. The hospitality market is also a potential revenue stream for Skype. The company is helping hotel chains provide business travelers with the ability to use high-quality Skype video calling for personal and business communications from their rooms.

While Gurle declined to name the current number of enterprise customers using its business products, he did say that Skype’s “sweet spot” is small to medium sized enterprises with a few thousand employees.

In terms of competition, Gurle seems optimistic about Skype’s chances against Cisco and others. “We are smaller and can innovate faster than out competitors,” says Gurle. “We can react to a client’s needs in a way that very few other companies can.” One aspect of Skype that Gurle feels is a differentiating factor when it comes to competing with other companies is the fact that Skype’s technology has gained significant traction with consumers, making it easy for any enterprise to implement the technology with both employees and customers, since they are likely to already be familiar with how it works.

Skype, which is averaging 124 million users a month worldwide, stated in its recent IPO filing that users made 95 billion minutes of voice and video calls during the first half of 2010, with 40 percent of those minutes using video technology. The company recently landed a deal with Facebook, which should only expand its userbase.

When I asked him about Skype’s future, Gule says it is in creating a one-click solution to allow you to reach a partner, friend, manager, employee, or business contact from any platform.

As Skype prepares to ramp up its enterprise strategy, Gurle is looking to add talent in engineering, sales and marketing. He plans to hire “several dozen” employees in the next few months. Gurle, who joined Skype in January of this year, was actually based in Singapore until April, when he moved his team to Skype’s offices in Silicon Valley. He says that not only is there a greater talent pool on the West Coast, but Skype is targeting enterprise opportunities in the United States.

But can Skype build an enterprise-focused business around its technology that can rival the business model of Cisco and others? While at Cisco, Bates was responsible for 80 percent of Cisco's business, which amounts to $20 billion in revenue (and 55 percent of Cisco's profits). Currently, Skype is on track to pass $1 billion in revenues next year, so the company still has a steep hill to climb when it comes to making that kind of money.

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Why Twitter Is Massively Undervalued Compared To Facebook

Posted: 16 Oct 2010 07:11 AM PDT

Editor’s note: In this guest post, Naval Ravikant and Adam Rifkin argue why Twitter is undervalued. Naval was an early investor in Twitter and owns Twitter shares; Adam does not. They have not discussed the content of this article with anyone inside Twitter. The views expressed are their own. They can be found on Twitter @naval and @ifindkarma.

Twitter was valued at one billion dollars in its last round of financing, but we believe it may in fact be severely undervalued relative to Facebook because Twitter’s value proposition is less obvious.

Facebook has utterly dominated the definition of the “social graph” to the point that conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley says that they have “already won social.” Few analysts seem to notice that the particular definition of “social graph” promulgated by Facebook—people you already know in real life—is not the only possible social graph. In fact, Facebook’s future revenue will actually be built on top of another social graph: the social interest graph, aka Pages & Likes.

Twitter’s social interest graph is potentially a huge cash machine that will lift the company out of the red and into the black . . . (Naval certainly hopes so).

An interest graph differs from the “people you know in real life” social graph in that it is:

Built on one-way following rather than two-way friending
Organized around shared interests, not personal relationships
Public by default, not private by default
Aspirational: not who you were in the past or even who you are, but who you want to be

It should already be clear that the interest graph lends itself brilliantly to commerce.

This explains in part why Facebook is potentially very lucrative: it owns the somewhat-buried interest graph constructed through all of the shares coming from our Facebook friends. As its News Feed grows, so will Facebook’s version of the interest graph. The interest graph makes itself most explicit in Facebook Pages, which also works on the principles of one-way following, shared interests, public streams, and aspirational relationships.

But Twitter is in theory even better positioned than Facebook to capitalize on the social interest graph. Its keys components are:

The composition of the social graph
The value of the data flowing through it
The volume of the data

By excelling at all three, Twitter is demonstrably superior to Facebook Pages, at least, along specific axes related to revenue potential.

1) Twitter’s social graph is inherently interest-based.

Facebook, as we noted earlier, maintains two separate graphs from the user perspective: a social graph and an interest graph. For most Facebook users, the former is vastly more important than the latte—no one joined Facebook so they could follow Justin Bieber’s Fan Page. Twitter’s graph by contrast is fully interest-based: people use it to stalk celebrities, not to stalk ex-girlfriends from high school.

Twitter’s graph reflects the power-law distribution of human nature. Social hierarchies are rigid and constraining, and slow down the flow of information. On Facebook, unless you are one of his 5,000 closest personal friends, you aren’t going to find out what Mark Zuckerberg likes. But on Twitter, when Demi Moore tweeted at a suicidal kid, she used the power-law distribution—aka celebrity—to help save a stranger’s life.

Twitter’s interest graph seamlessly accommodates whales, including celebrities, professionals, and increasingly businesses. By contrast, it is downright painful to maintain concurrent presences on the dual Facebook graphs—Facebook’s lack of tools to automate Profiles and Pages wastes energy, goodwill, and time. Twitter has no such ambiguity, and as a result it is growing its own kind of lightweight business-related engagement.

2) Twitter connects strangers, creating more value for all.

Twitter data is all assumed to be public by default. Therefore it can be indexed, crawled, searched, and aggregated. Value can flow across the graph to people who don’t know the original poster.

When strangers communicate with each other, they are much more likely to be short-term transactional: ask questions, report news, flirt, buy something. Friends communicate more over the long term, building a relationship over time. Therefore, from an advertisers’ perspective, a Tweet is much more likely to be valuable than a Facebook share.

Businesses make money by connecting strangers. Even on Facebook itself, the most promising applications are there to connect strangers—Zynga, Zoosk, BranchOut, TopProspect. Facebook itself has struggled to allow strangers to connect in commercially-relevant ways: even now, Pages don’t allow users to talk to each other so much as potentially allow businesses to blast news or cupcake offers at their followers.

A follow is the ultimate opt-in. There is no clearer statement of interest on the Internet today, because you are giving permission for that person or entity to push data at you as much as they want as long as they’re interesting to you. Interested intent + Opt-in = The dream of every marketer.

3) Twitter’s usage model encourages volume.

Facebook Pages are rarely visited after an initial “like.” Community behaviors have not developed around Facebook’s interest graph. Many users consider all Facebook Page messages to be of low value—akin to spam—and therefore do not welcome higher volume.

You can pick up a follower from anywhere on Twitter, and they can drop off at any time, so you must keep the quality and flow of messages high to be successful. Other users on Twitter won’t put up with your lame tweets just because they went to junior high with you . . . you have to find some interesting “hook” to grow your audience, and you must keep the flow of information coming to keep them, not just place mirrors beside mirrors to make it seem like beautiful content goes on and on.

Now that we’ve analyzed the massive potential value of Twitter, it’s time to address the undeniable operational and structural missteps by the company to date. To take advantage of these opportunities, Twitter must fully embrace three things: third-party developers, Google and Microsoft, and the Open Web.

1) Embrace third-party developers.

Unfortunately, Twitter has lost its way with developers. Six months ago it was a critical piece of infrastructure that everyone wanted to use as the messaging layer for their applications. Now Twitter has turned its back on third party developers because the company thinks it is necessary to own the major clients (web, iPhone, Android, iPad). Hopefully the elevation of Feedburner’s Dick Costolo to CEO signals a shift back to the correct strategy: Don’t monetize the client, monetize the feed.

Here are three things Twitter could immediately do to mend fences with developers in a way that’s also good for the company:

Embed ads in the search results and tweet stream API calls so any startup using the recently-opened firehose can monetize for Twitter and themselves too.
Make the client attribution published with each tweet more prominent again to promote different Twitter clients.
Open the graph API so any startup can innovate on the basis of Twitter’s extremely high-quality follow-based interest graph. For instance, one could imagine building a very accurate spam filter using Twitter’s graph.

These moves would not hurt Twitter at all, and in fact would kickstart their platform efforts versus Facebook Connect. And they’re very much compatible with promoted tweets, promoted accounts, and promoted trends—and the accompanying tools.

2) Embrace Google and Microsoft

Twitter has significant common interests with these two companies. They can help Twitter solidify its infrastructure foundation, invest a half billion dollars to make sure the company has the cash to scale, promote Twitter heavily as the open social network, and help Twitter monetize hugely as full-fledged partners.

3) Embrace the Web.

Twitter has the ability to power the open Web versions of Facebook Pages and Facebook Places, and that’s where the real money is. Don’t make brand advertisers have to think—provide a clear, open alternative to Facebook where they can promote their own Websites and brands instead of on Facebook Pages, and the dollars will start to flow.

The real money comes from two places: search and brand advertising on an open alternative to Facebook.

Memo to Twitter: with search, do not grow a brain. Partner with the best at Google and Microsoft (see Facebook-Bing), and you’ll get great AdSense, AdWords, display ads, and mobile ads without having to run all the infrastructure—and manage all the people!—to do it. They should be willing to give you 70% of the revenues now that you’re doing a billion searches a day.

Let’s say you can’t yet get the dime per search average that Google has spent a decade optimizing. Even if you only average 2 cents per search, that’s $20 million in revenue per day. Your cut? $14 million a day. That is real money: roughly $400 million a month, or $5 billion a year. And it grows as your number of searches and average revenue per search grow.

In addition to that, look to brand advertising increasingly moving online. TV money wants to move to the Internet, but right now Facebook Pages are the only place brand managers can make big spends. Come up with a cost-per-follow model similar to Facebook’s $1-per-like model. Heck, maybe even rev share with the consumers who are following, and give new users a tangible answer to the oft-expressed question, “Yeah, Twitter, I don’t get it… WTF?Who really cares?“

If Facebook’s revenues are $2 billion and its valuation is $35 billion, then a Twitter with a potential $5 billion in annual revenues is massively undervalued. Twitter employees and investors understand the potential, as evidenced by the fact that there are currently many unfilled bids on the Sharespost secondary market for shares at a $4.5 billion valuation. If Twitter can improve its execution and learn to play well with others, this valuation will prove to be laughably low.

Top image: Mistersweaters; photo: Paula Anddrade

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Crashing Washington: How CleanTech/Silicon Valley Can Have Their Cake And Eat It Too

Posted: 16 Oct 2010 06:33 AM PDT

Editor’s note: Guest writer Maury Litwack is a lobbyist, former Hill staffer, opinion writer and author of the recently published The Capitol Plan – A Comprehensive Washington Advocacy Strategy.

TechCrunch’s Sarah Lacy recently penned an article which laid out the complaints against government intervention in Silicon Valley, while at the same time presenting the challenges faced by the subset of tech leaders who favor subsidies—in CleanTech. This paradox may have left some in the tech community frustrated at the obvious problem but without a clear solution. Is the government’s hand to be slapped away in all situations? The solution isn't really that difficult—it's time for Silicon Valley to have its cake and eat it too.

Ordinarily, Silicon Valley as a whole can ignore the government, its players, and its traps because they are an independently-minded group which thrives on willing funders and growing consumer interest. CleanTech is different. CleanTech is large scale, which requires massive dollars, and transformative, which requires public policy. It is a large scale in that if fully realized it would include nearly every type of organization, from small non-profits to massive municipalities and states. To get a feel for just how encompassing this technology is take a look at the many types of members are in the voluntary Chicago Climate Exchange. Their membership numbers are a fraction of what could be in a full-scale exchange and gives some concept of the resources required.

CleanTech is transformative because it requires a fundamentally new way of doing business. A commercial building has to rethink their bottom line, homeowners have to rethink how they pay their monthly bills, and municipalities have to rethink how they provide services. Recycling took a while to implement and that just involved throwing one piece of trash from one bin to another. Imagine the collective efforts of Americans trying to rethink everything from what types of windows to install in a small business to what kind of car to drive. CleanTech is interested in the government because the funding there is massive. Government is interested in the transformative angle because, some argue, only they have the capability to kickstart such a process. If you want to get a feel for how much government cares then venture into Thomas (the official Library of Congress search page) and insert some CleanTech terms. I inserted "energy efficient" and found over 400 individual pieces of legislation introduced this past Congress. CleanTech has a unique relationship with the government whether they like it or not. The question is how to pursue it.

The tech community seemingly has before it two options. Ignore the government and lose out on existing funds or engage with the government and face possible regulation or unwanted intervention. In June, Michael Arrington vented about how the Obama administration hadn't fulfilled campaign promises important to Silicon Valley and how he didn't think it was likely for any of these things to occur in this presidency. That seems to follow the non-engagement "get out of Silicon Valley" argument. Alternatively, in the engagement category, there is the recent statement by Google CEO Eric Schmidt to The Atlantic that "the laws are written by lobbyists." Faced with a choice of “fight” or “flight,” neither scenario at its extreme particularly helps the CleanTech world.

If one were to follow the Arrington method to its extreme, there would likely be numerous foreign companies all too willing to grab the CleanTech mantle by paying lobbyists to push their case before Congress. Foreign investment is moving along very nicely. The Chinese are investing $7.3 billion in smart grids and other technologies, the Japanese are rolling out an energy-smart city, and South Korea is investing $200 billion in a smart grid project. South Korea is working on a free trade deal as we speak, so who knows what such an agreement would mean to CleanTech in our country. The “flight” approach is often taken by those who feel disenfranchised in Washington and decide to pack up their bags and declare "you leave me alone and I will leave you alone." But in this case, this could be a disastrous approach to advocacy which would leave an entire industry exposed to the whims of others.

However, if one were to follow the other model to the extreme, there would be a needless intrusion into one of our most promising fields. Politicians do love to intervene despite a lack of knowledge. Perhaps these same lobbyists Schmidt speaks of don't understand Silicon Valley and wouldn't fight the right battles to prevent government intrusion. Who knows what kind of weird relationships could transpire. One bizarre situation could play out eerily similar to the Canadian government's privacy czar who recently told a conference of technology groups that the government expected them to shore up their privacy standards. Closer to home, as Lacy articulated, the financial services bill had all kinds of problems which venture capitalists and many other funding sources of the tech world couldn't stomach. Was that a result of a sour relationship? To fully embrace the government and the potential revenues it represents could be a temporary solution but seems to be a bitter and controlling pill for our most innovative field to have to swallow.

Which lesser of two evils will it be? How can the CleanTech industry have its cake and eat it too?

What Silicon Valley and CleanTech needs are strong advocates in Washington. Engagement with teeth is the right approach. Yes, I am a lobbyist, but hear me out. This is already happening. Politico wrote last week on the number of huge technology firms looking to beef up their lobbying in the next Congress. Twitter, HP, Facebook, you name it and they are there—fighting for net neutrality, privacy, mergers and other issues. Most big names in Silicon Valley are creating an equally big name in Washington and establishing clear markers for what they want and don't want from the government. Additionally, they are setting up serious in-house lobbying shops who know their products, and coupling them with strategic outside lobbying firms who know how the government works.

Many of you reading this may think Washington lobbying is just a waste of time and money. But making your voice heard in Washington can be valuable and necessary. This approach—a constant, knowledgeable and forceful voice in Washington—is what an industry does to make sure they are getting what they need while at the same time not being taken advantage of. True, if one goes to the government only asking for a handout with lobbyists who don't get it then the backlash can be lethal, but this doesn't have to be the case. The American CleanTech industry can use their powerful voices as both constituents and an important engine of economic growth to argue for good policy and needed resources, while also making sure the government stays at arms length in most cases. Because ultimately, if they don’t do it, someone else will.

Photo credit (of White House party crasher): Samantha Appleton/White House Photo

Hitching A Ride With UberCab, 5 Minutes With The CEO [TCTV]

Posted: 15 Oct 2010 08:39 PM PDT

Less than four months old, UberCab’s mobile app for on-demand car service has become something of a breakout hit in San Francisco this summer.

The startup has amassed a fleet of 45 SF drivers to cater to the whims of the early adopter urbanites and, so far, it’s delivered on its promise to provide swift service with the average wait time hovering between 7 to 8 minutes. To certify UberCab’s buzz factor, a group of prominent investors led by First Round Capital have plunked down a cool $1.25 million for a piece of the company’s seed round.

On Friday, we caught up with UberCab’s chief executive, Ryan Graves, to put UberCab to the test.

Our mission was to get a ride from UberCab’s headquarters on 540 Washington St. to TechCrunch HQ at 410 Townsend. From the moment Graves tapped on the UberCab icon, the clock was ticking. Exactly one minute and 26 seconds later, a black SUV and a friendly bespectacled driver named Jesse pulled up. While I wondered whether we were benefiting from special treatment— the request was dispatched from the CEO’s mobile after all— it was a pleasant and indulgent ride back to the office. The total bill including tip was $36, that was a little more than double our initial ride from TCHQ to UberCab (although traffic was heavier during the Uber run).

For the wait time and the convenience of knowing exactly when you’re getting picked up, UberCab is definitely a welcome alternative in SF’s not-so-reliable car service market. The question is whether the rest of America’s major metropolitan areas will embrace the startup with such open arms— before other copycats get there. The team is eager to break into New York and Las Vegas but is wading through regulation and market-specific issues. The hope is to be there before the end of next year.

At UberCab’s headquarters (which is literally a glass conference room with five employees), we asked the new CEO about his plans to roll out, the effect the startup will have on the private car service market, and how the team came together (see video above). Interesting factoid: Graves came on board after noticing a tweet from founder Travis Kalanick, who was looking for people with business development experience. Graves simply responded with his e-mail address and the rest is Uber Cab history.

For those with Androids (and too lazy to SMS) UberCab will start beta testing an Android app this weekend with plans to roll it out in one or two weeks.

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UberCab

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MacBook Air Apparent: I Have Never Used My Computer’s Optical Drive

Posted: 15 Oct 2010 07:08 PM PDT

There’s this weird slit in the side of my MacBook Pro. It almost seems like a credit card swipe, or a receipt dispenser, or an air vent, or something. Oh wait. That’s an optical drive. You’ll forgive me if I wasn’t sure. You see, I’ve never used the thing.

This dawned on me the other day. I’ve owned this computer for months now and I have never had the need to insert a compact disc or DVD into this computer to do something. Not once. And going forward, I can’t imagine a time where I ever will. Okay, maybe if my computer dies. But even then, I would probably just take it into an Apple Store and let them deal with it.

So this drive is a huge waste of space. Without it, this great machine could certainly be much more svelte. What I want, of course, is a MacBook Air. But Apple seems to have been neglecting those recently. If the latest rumors are true, come Wednesday, that could change.

The most recent rumors have Apple releasing a new, smaller MacBook Air that would have an 11.6-inch screen (versus the current 13.3-inch one). The thing may weigh in around 2 pounds (versus the current 3 pounds). And it may even have a new sort of solid state memory system that would allow it to be even thinner than normal, and faster to boot.

This is exactly the type of system I want.

I’ve been spoiled in recent months. I bought my current 15-inch MacBook Pro a little bit before the launch of the iPad. It’s a fantastic machine, but the iPad has changed the way I view it now. The thought of carrying around a 5.6 pound machine when I could just carry around a 1.5 pound iPad makes me groan inside a bit. 2 pounds? I can do that.

Why not just carry around the iPad? Because as great as it is, it’s still not nearly good enough to use professionally on a daily basis. Even if I were to carry around the keyboard accessory, it’s lacking some of the intensive multitasking properties I require to write about important things like iPhone subway bands.

That said, I also definitely don’t need all the power this dual graphics cards i7 MacBook Pro offers. I need something in-between the two. Again, this new MacBook Air sounds ideal.

A couple days ago, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said that the original MacBook Air missed the mark because Apple underestimated how many people wanted an optical drive on their machine. I don’t know. To me, the MacBook Air was always interesting but it seemed far too underpowered for its relatively high price. Apple eventually cut the price, but it was still probably too much money. Rumors for the new version suggest a much cheaper price. That could be very interesting.

A lot of people bitched and moaned when Apple first unveiled with Air with only an optional optical drive add-on. But the fact remains that this is the right move, and Apple is simply a little ahead of the curve (as they were with floppy drives, etc). These drives take up way too much room and are increasingly seldom used. Backups are done via USB or Firewire (or the Internet). Software installs can now be done over the Internet or via USB. Movies and music? Same thing. The optical drive is dying. And fast.

Going forward, I suspect the majority of my computing will be done on the following devices: iPhone, iPad, MacBook Air (and perhaps a ChromeBook, or whatever Google will call their Chrome OS notebooks). It’s becoming all about ultra-portability. As Apple CEO Steve Jobs famously said recently, PCs will become like trucks. Desktop computers and these larger laptops will still be around for utilitarian purposes — but I don’t want to have to sit behind one all day. Or worse, have to carry one around.

I want a system that instantly boots. One that’s always connected to the Internet (that could be another interesting play for the new MacBook Air — 3G built-in). One that lasts for a very, very long time. And one that I don’t think twice about carrying around.

Even this relatively new MacBook Pro that I use is starting to feel like one of those old camcorders that required you to carry around a VCR in a bag in order to record something. It’s time to cut out the VCR — in this case, the optical drive. It’s time to continue the march towards portable computing. It’s time to lighten the load.

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New Features Help A Birthday Wish Set A New Causes Record: $10K In 24 Hours

Posted: 15 Oct 2010 06:39 PM PDT

Birthdays have always been a big deal on Facebook, driving users to pile onto eachother’s Facebook profiles to leave good wishes and doodles of cake. But more and more, users are looking to channel this goodwill into something a little more special using Birthday Wish, a service from the philanthropic startup Causes that makes it easy to ask your friends to donate to charity in honor of your big day.

Today, we’ve gotten word that the service has set a new record: Dave Morin, a long-time former Facebook employee who is now CEO of stealthish startup Path, managed to raise over $10,000 in 24 hours, which is the fastest-growing Birthday Gift ever (the total totally is now up to over $11K). He’ll be donating the proceeds to UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in San Francisco, and if you’d like to participate you can find his Wish here. Morin’s success with Birthday Wish is awesome news, but it’s also important for another reason: it shows how some recent tweaks to the Causes platform are beginning to take off.

Over the summer we reported that Causes was moving away from existing primarily as a Facebook canvas application that lives on Facebook itself, toward a Connect-enabled site on Causes.com. Causes CEO Joe Green says that since the change two months ago, Birthday Wish has been raising twice as much money per day (up to $20,000 a day from $10,000).

He expects that number to keep growing. Green says that over the last few months Causes has primarily been focusing on helping each Birthday Wish campaign drive more donations, but it hasn’t been doing much to boost the total number of wishes being created (in other words, to boost awareness). That’s going to change soon, he says.

The site is also going to begin rolling out some new features, like a ‘sidekick’ system where one friend is supposed to help promote your Wish as much as possible. There’s also going to be listings of the top donor, most recent donor, and so on — Green explains that the site is working on getting these social dynamics fine-tuned for helping you raise money from friends, which is tricker than what you’d find on a basic social game. You probably won’t be able to raise quite as much as Morin (who has a large online presence), but everyone should benefit from the changes.

I also spoke with Morin about the success of his Wish. He’s thrilled, explaining that he’d set a goal of $10,000 by the holiday season – which he reached in one day. He attributes some of this success to the aforementioned optimizations that have been made to Causes (he says he’s being running Birthday Wishes for three years, and the amount raise has doubled or more each year). Here’s a portion of his letter to friends, in which he explains why he is doing this:

Health has been an important dedication of my family for decades.

I have dedicated my life to entrepreneurship, helping other entrepreneurs, and the creation of better social networking technology to help cause positive change in society.

Because of this I have been working for over a year in partnership with Ron Conway, Marc & Lynne Benioff, Joe Green, and the team at UCSF towards the creation of a social media movement to support the new world class UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital here in San Francisco.

Because of my family’s dedication to family health for decades, this organization is particularly important to me because it is going to set a new standard of health care for children and their families.

My personal goal is to raise more than $10,000 through the holiday season. And to recruit more than 50% of my friends on Facebook to join this important cause.

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Ron Conway’s SV Angel Rakes In Another $9 Million

Posted: 15 Oct 2010 06:19 PM PDT

An SEC Form D filed today revealed a few new things about “Godfather of Silicon Valley” and much lauded angel investor Ron Conway‘s SV Angel fund, namely that it is going after more; The forms show that what the fund is seeking has been raised from $20 million to $30 million, and that it is also closing in on an almost $9 million update today.

This latest Form D filing is an amendment from the first time SV Angel filed this Spring and it refers to a $22,805,000 in total new funding vs. in $13,865,000 in April. A little handy subtraction reveals that SV Angel just wrastled up another $8,940,000 to be specific.

And just like we predicted in February, it seems as though triple threat Facebook, Google and Twitter investor Conway and partner David Lee have had no problem finding investors for Conway’s own fund, which marks a departure from only investing his own capital and his previous investments through Baseline Ventures.

Some of the pretty hot startups SV Angel is currently invested in include Hipmunk, Wavii, Bit.ly, Flipboard and BankSimple.

Update: David Lee from SV Angel clarifies regarding the perceived increase in fund size,

“This is just a filing/SEC formality. We haven’t raised beyond the $20mm…because the actual amount was a hair over $20mm, lawyers just “checked a box” saying that it was up to $30mm

So bottom line: we are not raising more and fund size is 20mm.”

Thanks: FormDs

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Ron Conway

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Evan Williams Takes Questions On Twitter And Reveals Some Of What Could Be Next

Posted: 15 Oct 2010 05:54 PM PDT

Maybe it is a good thing that Twitter co-founder Evan Williams is no longer CEO — he now seems to have time to do things like answer a boatload of questions from users on Twitter. For about an hour today, Williams did just that and provided some interesting insights into New Twitter and what types of possibilities are out there for the service in the future, feature-wise.

I went ahead and curated a list of his best tweet replies, but I’ll spell the answers out in a simplified manner below. According to Williams:

Twitter is working on a way to show entire back-and-forth conversations in the right-pane on New Twitter. Currently, they only show one tweet that a tweet is replying to.
Many of the New Twitter ideas will find their way into the various mobile interfaces.
Williams agrees that the new URL structure for Twitter isn’t pretty, but it’s needed to keep things fast.
There are no plans for a way to make individual tweets private on a case-by-case basis.
Twitter is thinking about an option to put DMs and @replies in the main timeline.
There will eventually be a DM alert of some sort on the site to show you when you have a new message.
Twitter.com will eventually use the User Streams API (real time updates).
The Settings page will soon get an update to look like the rest of New Twitter.
There are no plans to ever put any time of media in the tweet stream itself.
Twitter may experiment with live-updating feeds instead of having the new tweet alert.
There won’t be a Twitter movie — unless it’s an animated musical.
“Also followed by” and “You both follow” are coming back — Twitter is figuring out how to re-implement them.
Twitter is trying to think of a way to make it easier to see who has retweeted you.
Williams likes that the right pane is the same size as the stream — he actually wants it wider.
Twitter plans to keep on changing things up regularly — this redesign is not the end.
Williams would like to see more stats for users on the front-end.
Twitter is thinking about allowing users to change the color of the black top bar in New Twitter.
New Twitter decodes all shortened links.
Retweeting with comments is not coming.
A new Tweetie for Mac is not coming anytime soon.
The Fail Whale exists on New Twitter, but they’re working hard to keep him out of the waters.
Twitter not currently working on a profile picture cropper.
Animated avatars will not be allowed. Twitter finds them “distracting”.
New Twitter will have Posterous support in the right pane soon.
Tumblr and img.ly might be getting support soon as well. Twitter is working to add “many more” media providers.
The ability to shorten a link on twitter.com is being worked on right now.
Twitter is thinking about a “mute” button to block users temporarily (like Brizzly has).

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Atlantic’s Michael Hirschorn: “Americans will Believe any Shit They See Online” [TCTV]

Posted: 15 Oct 2010 05:09 PM PDT

In the current issue of the Atlantic Monthly, contributing editor Michael Hirschorn rails against the "commodification of facts" caused by social media.

Specifically he’s irked by how Twitter, Wikipedia and the rest have made it possible for right wing (in most cases) commentators to create their own set of facts to support their agenda.

"The communal void allows the emergence of an Andrew Breitbart on the right and, occupying far less morally compromised space on the left, a figure like Julian Assange, the mastermind behind WikiLeaks (no affiliation with Wikipedia)… While Breitbart unapologetically conducts his information warfare à la Sartre via Malcolm X—by any means necessary, including blatant falsehoods—Assange uses "truth" as a weapon while assuming that context will be provided by the commons…"

Coming as it did in the same week that Paul criticized a disingenuous anti-Meg Whitman attack ad (leading to TechCrunch's resident socialist being labelled an evil Republican fanboy by commenters) Hirschorn's persuasive essay struck a chord with us. So you can imagine our delight when the man who the NY Observer called "Mr Bad Taste" agreed to be join us (along with his son, Paul, and his dog, Clover) to explain why social media is evil and how “most Americans will believe any shit they see online…”

Video below.

And Now a Folksy Update From Carol Bartz, Massive Outage Relegated to “PS”

Posted: 15 Oct 2010 04:17 PM PDT

Talk about burying the lead. For your Friday reading pleasure, the latest memo from “fearless leader” Carol Bartz, talking up how far the company has come and how the outage just proved how important Yahoo is.

Read it for yourself:

“There sure are a lot of folks writing about us. There are some pretty incredible stories out there. I'm not letting it distract me, and you shouldn't either. Because the really incredible story to me is how far we've come to build a better Yahoo! – something you're all making a reality.

I've been traveling the last four weeks to New York, Atlanta and Washington DC, seeing customers, partners and visiting our offices. I want to call out the U.S. Account Management folks who have been working non-stop to transition our advertisers to Microsoft's Ad Center. Microsoft should be powering paid search in the U.S. and Canada by the end of this month, right on schedule. Our Yahoo! transition team under Mark Morrissey deserves the BIG THANKS for steering us through this important transition.

I met with the News product and engineering teams yesterday. On Monday, we're going Alpha in four countries on a totally new platform for global News. We've had nine different News code bases around the world and haven't brought up a new country in two years because of the complexity! With "new" News we can bring a new site up in a month. To compose a new page it used to either never happen, or took engineering and editorial weeks. Now it only takes FIVE minutes with just the editor. Why am I going into this detail? First, I'm really, really proud of the Media and Content Agility Platforms teams. They started in July '09 and have delivered a kick-ass product on time. Secondly, I want you all to know that this is the new Yahoo! – great technology driving great content for a great user and advertiser experience. No one will stop us!

Now after all that happy talk, we have a lot to do. Change is very hard but no company or no one person can stay the same. Let's all look out the windshield, not the back window. That's how we move forward.

OK, Yahoos, that's all for today.

Your fearless leader,
Carol

P.S. – You all know Front Page was down yesterday. Our teams worked hard and got it fixed fast. And looking on the positive side, I thought you should see some of the comments. Several outlets indicated their surprise at such a major issue with one of the world's largest Websites, noting the importance of Yahoo! to the daily lives of users and the fact that Yahoo! is never down.

• "Yahoo.com was offline this PM. Friends/readers wrote to us, underscoring the site’s continued relevance." – Tweet from a Wall Street Journal reporter

• "The people have spoken, bring us back our Yahoo!" – The Next Web

So remember, Yahoo! is still an important destination for folks on the Web. Let's give them the best experience we can.”

RockYou Rocked By Layoffs As It Switches Focus To Social Games

Posted: 15 Oct 2010 03:56 PM PDT

RockYou, a social network app developer that also has an advertising branch, has had substantial layoffs this week, we’ve just confirmed. The company says that it has “restructured the organization” in the last couple of days, and that going forward it is going to focus exclusively on social games, where it “sees the largest opportunity”.

A company spokesperson declined to comment on how many people were laid off (the best I could get out of them was that it was less than half the company) — we’re working to get a more specific number. RockYou has been very well funded, with over $125 million raised to date. It recently closed a $10 million round in June to boost its presence in Asia.

RockYou will continue to work on its advertising initiatives and will be directing most of its resources at developing social games. It won’t be shutting down its established non-gaming properties, which include Pieces of Flair and SuperWall, but it won’t be supporting them to the same extent that it has been up until this point.

It’s been a bad year for RockYou. Less than twelve months ago, the company had all of its 32 million accounts hacked.

RockYou arch-rival Slide was acquired by Google in August for $228 million.

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Maybe Dave McClure Should Just Use UberCab

Posted: 15 Oct 2010 03:47 PM PDT

There is a very excited startup out there called Baydin that is about to close it’s first angel round of financing. One of the investors, at least, is Dave McClure’s 500 Startups.

How did they get McClure to invest? By giving him a ride from a meeting to his mechanic.

Then, my girlfriend noticed Dave's tweet that said he was looking for a ride to his mechanic. Anyone who picked him up could pitch him on the way. Figuring dignity is for the unfunded, I threw on yesterday's clothes, hopped on 101, and headed over to Buck's to give Dave McClure a lift.

The pickup happened, although CEO Alexander Moore seemed a little annoyed that McClure was on the phone for the first part of the ride. But by the end of the “meeting” Dave was hooked and committed to invest $50,000 or $100,000.

I spoke to McClure today about this. He says he’s done this two other times – once in Seattle and once in Boston – but this was the first time he’s made an investment.

“You did this without any due diligence or research into the company,” I asked. His answer - “Yes, but I had a referral from someone.”

“Do you feel like you have an obligation to invest when you get a ride from someone?” I asked Dave. “Psychologically speaking, that’s probably accurate,” he said.

Ok. My last words to Dave included a pointer to UberCab, which we wrote about last night. It might be a less expensive way for him to get around town in the future. Meanwhile, if you’re a startup and you need cash fast, just start following Dave around wherever he goes, and hope that he needs a ride.

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Think Bartz Can’t Answer What Yahoo Is? Listen to Ballmer Try to Answer Why You Should Work at Microsoft.

Posted: 15 Oct 2010 03:22 PM PDT

Maybe it’s time for the great salesman to hang it up. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer spoke at a computer science school this week and was asked in a roundabout way, why someone would want to work at Microsoft when there are so many more exciting companies out there, like, say Apple.

Ballmer tap dances for four minutes, the moderator hops in and notes that one-third of the school’s graduates go to Microsoft, which isn’t that surprising given this talk was held at the University of Washington and Microsoft is by far the biggest tech company in the state. That’s like auto companies saying because a lot of people in Detroit have jobs with them, they’re still on the cutting edge.

Finally Ballmer gets to the answer of why Microsoft is exciting: Windows…and….phones. He doesn’t even sound like he’s convincing himself. Let’s hope for the sake of shareholders the pitch to customers is as dynamic as it used to be. [Drinking game bonus: Drink every time he says "Best and the Brightest"]

Reid Hoffman Bristles Being Called a VC, Answers Reader Questions Anyway [TCTV]

Posted: 15 Oct 2010 02:29 PM PDT

Reid Hoffman was my guest on Ask a VC this week, although he still considers himself more of an entrepreneur than a VC and did the call from LinkedIn, not Greylock. Oh well at least the question asking and answering was as advertised.

Among the questions he answered were who Facebook’s biggest competitive threat would be, why Google has failed in two attempts to build a social platform and whether the latest will succeed, whether micropayments can work for categories other than games (Hint: News media, we’re still out of luck), the few investments he’s made outside the United States and why he doesn’t do more and how his value add is different when he’s wearing a VC hat and when he’s wearing an angel hat.

We also play a fun game: If LinkedIn is the virtual office, Facebook is the virtual backyard BBQ, MySpace is the virtual nightclub, what are the real world analogs for Ping, FourSquare, Gowalla and Zynga?

The video is below.

Source Claims 11.6″ MacBook Air Incoming

Posted: 15 Oct 2010 02:21 PM PDT

A little more than a week ago, it was reported that MacBook Air retail supplies were dwindling. This has historically indicated a new product or refresh, and now there is chatter suggesting that the new version will indeed be the 11.6″ version we heard about back in July.

A source credited with “pinpoint accuracy” in the past by Apple Insider claims that the new 11.6″ laptops have been in manufacture for about a week. But will it simply be a smaller version of the existing laptop, or something new? I’m going to go with new.

Google’s Greatest Trick Is Pouring Gas On The Hockey Stick

Posted: 15 Oct 2010 02:03 PM PDT

Google tried yesterday to convince the world that it is no longer a one-trick pony (or won’t be forever). It revealed for the first time during its earnings call some pretty big revenue numbers in businesses other than core search advertising. It’s annualized revenue for display advertising (including YouTube and DoubleClick) is now running at $2.5 billion; mobile search is $1 billion (oops, that’s still search). Some people don’t buy it. But as Google CEO Eric Schmidt told an audience today at MIT: “Anything that is $1 billion is good.”

The real story from yesterday’s blow-out quarter is not so much that Google has learned any new tricks, but rather that the one it knows is still a pretty good trick. And Google is playing that trick for all it’s worth. Towards the end of the earnings conference call, CFO Patrick Pichette offered this garbled metaphor: “When you see a hockey stick, pour on gas on that fire.”

In a note today titled “Fuel on The Hockey Stick,” Citi analyst Mark Mahaney included a table showing the growth in U.S. gross revenues, which I’ve charted above. Google’s U.S. gross revenues grew 26 percent in the third quarter, compared to growth of 22 percent, 11 percent, 4 percent, and 2 percent in the four previous quarters, respectively. New search ad formats such as comparison ads and product listings are showing 10 to 30 percent better clickthrough rates than plain-vanilla paid search ads, and are helping revenues.

Display ads and mobile may not yet count as another trick, but by next year they could start to be material. Google offered up the numbers more to signal what is coming and to help analysts with their “Jedi Guesstimation skills,” in the words of senior VP of product management Jonathan Rosenberg. Since Google doesn’t give official guidance on future results, these snippets of information are all they have to go on other than the official quarterly results. Mahaney now estimates that 10 percent of Google’s revenues next year will come from display, YouTube, and mobile.

Today, Schmidt also offered up this additional piece of advice: “A simple rule for those of you who are CEOs: rising revenues solves all problems.” In the end, it really doesn’t matter to investors where the revenues and profits come from, as long as they keep going up. Maybe if they keep pouring gas on that hockey stick, it will turn into another pony.

Photo of actual pony on Google campus, circa 2007, courtesy of Kevin Marks:

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For Those About To Rock, We Offer You An iPhone-Controlled Guitar

Posted: 15 Oct 2010 02:00 PM PDT

Rob Morris just showed me this very cool gestural guitar interface that allows you to control a guitar with your iPhone. You can modify the sound by moving the guitar around (think Star Power in Guitar Hero) and you can even shred on the iPhone while the guitar twangs away.