Venture Capital

China Mobile Ltd. has begun pushing the development of a new high-speed fourth-generation wireless network, but many Chinese venture investors who would finance the development of applications for the platform are skeptical of its prospects.

Beijing-based, state-owned China Mobile is the leading wireless service in China and boasts the greatest number of mobile subscribers, with 522 million customers as of Dec. 31.

In mid-January, China Mobile said it would begin the rollout of its 4G network at the Shanghai Expo in May. The company said it would run trials for users from May to October.

One of the concerns for venture investors is that China Mobile will be one of the first companies in the world to be bringing a 4G network to customers. Mobile phone companies make a good portion of their revenue from roaming fees and charges abroad. If no one else is using the 4G standard, then China Mobile loses that revenue to the carrier that can support those services, one investor said.

“They are rushing the deployment of 4G, because they want to be in a competitive position relative to China Telecom and China Netcom, which are deploying the global 3G standard,” said Richard Lim, a managing director with the Sino-U.S. firm GSR Ventures.

Indeed, China divvied up its wireless licenses between 3G and 4G to give smaller carriers like China Telecom and China Netcom a chance to compete. Those companies are attracting users with their 3G packages, investors said, although even 3G is still in the process of getting deployed around the nation.

And that’s the other concern some investors have. Timing for deployment of wireless networks is notoriously tricky, several of these investors said. There are also some concerns about how to develop a business model that can generate sufficient revenue without stepping on the toes of the vertically integrated telecom companies, investors said.

Still, not every investor is so reticent to back the 4G plan. “We typically look three to five years ahead of time, so by the time it gets hot, it’s probably not the time to invest anymore,” said Jui Tan, a Beijing-based partner with BlueRun Ventures.

BlueRun has backed Innofidei Inc., a wireless video distribution technology developer, whose technology has been tapped for a prototype baseband chipset for the 4G rollout that China Mobile is piloting at the Shanghai Expo.

Besides China Mobile, Swedish telecom company TeliaSonera AB is also planning to roll out a 4G network this year in Sweden and Norway. Swedish rival Tele2 AB and Norwegian peer Telenor ASA are also expected to roll out a 4G network in 2010.

“The next migration path is definitely 4G,” Jui said.

Wetherly Capital Group’s settlement with New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and decision to exit the placement agent industry are tied in part to its marketing of the debut fund raised by Ares Management LLC.

According to Cuomo, Ares Corporate Opportunities Fund LP was one of three private equity funds that Wetherly engaged Hank Morris as a sub-agent on; the other two are Freeman Spogli & Co. and Levine Leichtman Capital Partners. Morris, one of the central figures in the New York pay-to-play scandal, subsequently shared in the placement fees that Wetherly got from the firms. He has denied wrongdoing.

Ares Corporate Opportunities serves as a good example of just how convoluted the placement agent ties can get when a firm is raising a fund - particularly a debut fund. Recent disclosures from California Public Employees’ Retirement System show that at least five placement agents - six, counting Morris - were involved in raising the fund. Besides Wetherly, they included ARVCO Financial Ventures LLC, Liati Group LLC, Merrill Lynch & Co. and Platinum Advisors LLC/Gold Bridge Capital.

Here’s how it worked. Ares originally engaged Merrill Lynch to act as a non-exclusive placement agent for ACOF I, according to Calpers’ disclosures. But partway through the fund-raising, Merrill Lynch suffered some personnel departures, prompting Ares to enter into a consulting agreement with Platinum Advisors to raise capital commitments from a “subset of the Fund’s prospective clients,” Ares wrote in a disclosure to Calpers.

Platinum then engaged DAV/Wetherly, as Wetherly Capital is also known, as a sub-agent, “in part in consideration of the difficult fund-raising environment,” according to Ares. DAV/Wetherly, in addition to hiring Morris, also hired Liati Group as its own sub-agent.

Then there’s ARVCO, the placement firm run by former Calpers board member Al Villalobos, whose role in raising capital from the pension fund is being investigated by Calpers. (Villalobos has said he is cooperating with Calpers’ probe.) Ares itself engaged that firm to help with a subset of LPs by assisting in “structuring and early development of the Fund, including assisting with the creation of presentation materials, advising with respect to the arranging of meetings with the key investment personnel of potential institutional investors and other related activities.”

A person familiar with Ares said the firm only directly hired two agents for its debut fund, largely due to the challenging fund-raising environment, particularly for first-time funds, back in 2001. He added there was nothing illegal or questionable about using both ARVCO and Platinum to market the fund, even to the same LP, as the firms had skill sets that complemented each other.

He also noted that the fund has performed well. As of June 30, 2009, Calpers’ $100 million commitment had generated at 14.4% net IRR, according to the pension fund’s data.

The disclosures from Calpers and in New York cast new light on the practice of hiring sub-agents, which until recently hadn’t attracted much attention. These disclosures indicate the practice has been quite widespread.

Wetherly said in a statement after news of the New York Settlement that “our firm supports Mr. Cuomo’s proposals because we think they are good for the industry. We are very pleased to have resolved all issues.”

“At no time was Wetherly ever charged with any wrongdoing,” the firm said.

Interviewed before news of its New York settlement broke, Wetherly founder Dan Weinstein would not comment on specific sub-agent relationships as a matter of policy, but offered some insight on why the firm occasionally hired them.

“We had 10 full-time professionals in three offices but there were a number of local markets where we weren’t as well-established,” Weinstein said. “Much like the brokerage business, it allowed our firm to provide more comprehensive service and coverage.”

However, he acknowledges that damage can be done to a firm’s reputation if these sub-agents get into trouble. “In hindsight, if there’s one thing that I’d do differently, it would have been never to hire a sub-agent,” Weinstein said.

Indeed, the practice, while certainly not illegal, may now be on its way to extinction. Said one East Coast placement agent: “We were reluctant to do it before and we definitely won’t do it now. Everyone’s more careful about the company they keep.”

I don’t often write about very personal topics on this blog (although hopefully my personality shows through in my writing some) but with my wife 8,500 miles away adopting our third child (2nd adopted child) I thought that I might take a post or two to talk about our experience.

I wrote about adoption after we came home with our now 5 1/2 year old daughter a few years ago and was turned off by the experience after receiving some annoying comment traffic (mostly challenging me on why we didn’t adopt domestically – none of their business, of course, but especially in the way they commented about it). I expect I’ll see some of that again, but I’m hoping to do a better job ignoring it this time.

Why adopt? Of course this answer is different for everyone who goes through the process. For us it was a very personal decision about what we felt would be the best way to grow our family. We love being parents to our biological daughter and we equally love being parents to our two adopted children.

Why Ethiopia? Both of our adopted children are Ethiopian. There’s no formula for how this works – it was a decision that my wife and I came to after looking into programs from a number of countries and after considering a domestic adoption (I don’t really want to get into our reasons for choosing an international adoption over a domestic adoption but I’ve found that there’s a certain group of people in the US who think that adopting a foreign born child is somehow unamerican. As I referenced above this can often be pretty mean spirited and xenophobic. I don’t run around asking people why they chose to have biological children vs. adoption – I expect people to give me the same privacy around why we adopted and why we adopted from Ethiopia).

How long did the process take? What’s it like? For us, both of our adoptions took a little under a year, but it varies (often quite a lot) from country to country and on how well organized you are in pulling together the volumes of information that adoption agencies and the government require as part of the process. My wife jokes sometimes about the process that “no one every accidentally adopted” – a reference to the multiple finger prints, government clearances, reference letters, financial statements, etc that adoptive parents have to provide. And then there’s the home study, which involves a social worker making several visits to your home and interviewing you, your spouse (together and separately), your kids and checking out your home. In some states (Colorado included) you are also required to take “parenting classes” – in our case 24 hours of classroom time.

Can you really love an adopted child as much as a biological child? I thought I should just get this out there. I don’t get asked this question much, but I have the feeling a lot of people wonder this. I also expect that it plays a roll in people’s decision to adopt (or not to adopt) as well.  Our experience is a resounding “of course!”. This may sound stilly because our adopted kids have a different skin color than we do, but sometimes I truly forget that they’re adopted. I just don’t think about it that way at all.

Aren’t there a lot of really religious people who adopt? Is that weird if you’re not religious? I’ve been asked this a few times as well and it has occasionally been a bit challenging for me. We participate in a number online forums and groups about adoption and yes, there are many very religious people who choose to adopt. And some of them can be pretty evangelical about their beliefs (although many are not). And for someone like me, who is not religious, it is at times a little over the top. I mostly just tune out the religious stuff. We’re friends with plenty of devout people so it’s not that. But there can be something a bit “in your face” at times about the way religion works its way into adoption circles and I do sometimes feel a bit like the odd man out. I’ve heard from some people that this has turned them off some from adoption and I’d encourage you to not let that happen if that’s on your mind.

Baby or older child? Again, a very personal decision. Both of our adopted children were toddlers when we brought them home. There are a lot of adoptive families who prefer younger children but there are also a large number of wonderful older children who may have to wait longer for a family because of their age and would love a great home.

How did the first months go? Although this is not always the case my sense is that the first few months for most families is really really challenging. For us it absolutely was, made worse by the fact that we thought at the time that we were pretty much the only family in the history of adoption that had a rough time coming home (the transition period is something that’s being talked about more now in adoption circles but at the time was pretty much a taboo subject). We now joke with our daughter about her early aversion to ice cream (she loves it now), her insistence on wearing her shoes to bed and her absolute fear of our dogs (she now wants to be a “doggy doctor”). These are just surface examples of what was really going on at the time which both my wife and I found extremely challenging. Fortunately with a little time things eventually eased up and the challenge of those early months has faded to a distant memory.

 

Next post – things you shouldn’t ask an adopted family. Stay tuned!

I’ve had the pleasure of working with the fine folks at Topspin Media since I joined the board of the company when Foundry Group invested in Topspin’s Series B in 2008, and I’ve been fortunate to know Topspin’s co-founders, Peter Gotcher and Shamal Ranasinghe since the late ’90s.

Topspin was founded with the premise that the key to any artist’s success in the digital age will hinge on an artist’s ability to engage directly with their fans and build a meaningful and authentic artistic and commerical relationship with them. Topspin provides sophisticated artist-focused and data-driven tools to enable artists and their management to run their businesses online.

Now that Topspin has been working with hundreds of artists and has a couple years of real-world experience with their platform in production, they’ve built up enough data to start to share some of their findings about managing, measuring and marketing with data. Shamal gave an excellent presentation at the Midem Conference in Cannes last week, and the deck is packed full of Topspin’s learnings about best practices for running direct-to-fan campaigns.

Here’s the presentation, which is well worth a read for anyone interested in the latest thinking on music marketing in digital age. For a more in-depth discussion of these slides, check out Shamal’s post on the Topspin blog.

Today, Google’s social strategy took a big step with the launch of Google Buzz — a new FriendFeed-like feature that’s integrated into Gmail, mobile search, Maps, and more (you can see our live notes from the announcement here). Shortly after the event, Google co-founder Sergey Brin fielded questions backstage from members of the press. Our own Steve Gillmor was there to record the conversation (and ask a few questions himself). We’ve embedded the footage below, and have transcribed some of his answers.

In the video, Brin answers questions covering a broad array of topics, including Google Buzz, Google’s current situation in China, and the company’s research in clean energy. Among the revelations: Brin hopes to eventually remove the task of having to choose between Email, Buzz, and IM, so expect those to converge more in the future.

Note: The video starts off with some loud music in the background, but it gets turned down after a few minutes

Regarding the appeal and potential of Google Buzz, and the company’s ability to make it useful:
“Extracting signal from noise is one of our core competencies, it’s one of the key things we do in our web search product every day. And I think that now peoples’ personal communications are getting to be on a scale comparable to that of web search, so those technologies are becoming far more critical.”

On getting relevant results, and internal use of Buzz before now:
“I think there is huge potential. Right now if you look on the recommendations, there is some ordering that we do that uses these signals. We’ve been testing this internally, and even there, there’s quite a lot of noise internally, you’d be surprised. But I think that to really get the algorithms large scale we needed to wait for today and we need to have noise, people using this. That’s when the relevance technology is really going to come into play… ” [On the signals Google will be paying attention to] “We’re going to see which articles you like, which ones you comment on, which posts you read, things like that. And I think we’ll be able to try to tailor things to you that you’re likely to be interested in.”

Brin says that he’d like to make the recommendation technology more transparent (as opposed to a black box) but hasn’t yet discussed those details with the Buzz team.

On integrating real-time into Buzz in an accessible way, and possibly working that into Wave:
“I think we want to see what the experience with Buzz is in the wild and then make decisions from there. I know we’ve learned a lot, we’re very happy with internal testing. Actually that’s why I am very excited for the Enterprise product. But before we make plans like that I want to see how Buzz gets used from today on out. I think the integration [into Gmail] has proved valuable, and that’s definitely something we’re going to be looking into for Wave.”

Why he thinks Google Buzz might work, when other social services integrated with Email haven’t made much of a splash:
“I think if you look at the history of technical products, there are a lot of details that matter. It’s not just the general idea, oh I have Email and social. And you know maybe, maybe we got the details right, maybe we didn’t, we’re going to see from today on out. Internally I’ve been very happy with the result. There are a lot of detailed things. If you look at the success of the world wide web, you look at Xanadu (an ongoing Hypertext project founded in 1960) for example by Ted Nelson that had a lot of these concepts yet it wasn’t so successful. There are a lot of details, perhaps chance and timing. I wouldn’t discount something because it’s similar to something in the past…”

On his experience using Buzz:
“It’s been internally, probably half a year I’ve been testing it internally, with an increasing number of other people, the whole company has been on it for a while now. It has really enabled me to communicate, you get far better information about what’s going on in the company. Now if I have a question about something I don’t have to dig up who is the person who is particularly responsible for this, I can just throw a question out there, I know there are enough people out there who pay attention to my posts, and also now with the recommendations it should get recommended to the right person anyway. And I don’t worry that I’m disrupting people because the social expectation on Buzz is different than on email.”

On users having to make the choice between Email, IM, and Buzz:
“I think it is stressful today to have to make those choices. And I’d like to move to a situation where people make that choice less. You have to decide what medium you’re using, you have to decide to whom you’re sending it to, and sometimes you have to decide what is the heading going to be? There are a lot of decisions you have to make. And Google Buzz at the very least you do have to choose Buzz as the medium today. Though I would like to simplify that in the future. But you don’t have to decide to whom to send it. You can always type an @reply in the mid stream. You don’t have to necessarily pick a heading. Those lower the barrier a lot. But I agree that there is definitely room left to further simplify it. Because the very act of choosing Buzz to do that is in itself a bit of work.”

The conversation then changed to the situation in China. Brin was asked about this topic repeatedly and directed reporters to read the company’s blog post on the matter (which he says reflects the consensus view of the company). Eventually he did explicitly say, “We have not pulled out of China”, going on to give a general timeline of Google’s initial steps to launch in China in 2006 and how things have progressed since then (you can see this start around 15:45).

Finally, the interview closes out with a few questions and answers about Google’s initiatives in energy, and how the economy is affecting the company.

hipsterpuppies:

lola bean believes “cars suck” and cyclists have a “right to the road”—but has no idea how mean and annoying she is to pedestrians

[photo via elizabeth e]

Andrew’s $0.02: Lola Bean is the new mascot of Critical Mass as far as I’m concerned.

Generating buzz—getting people talking about our products or even advertising on their own—is the goal of many ad campaigns today, even television commercials. (Case in point: the Super Bowl.) Onlin...

When pushbutton-simple free blogging site Tumblr launched in 2007, friends of mine with a lot to say but no interest in tinkering with HTML jumped onto it. Not only did they create their own personal blogs, they spun off temporary joke blogs for topics of the day. A coworker of mine at Valleywag created fakepaulboutin.tumblr.com, where she posted my wisecracks from Valleywag’s private chat room.

But if you want your own personal domain rather than _____.tumblr.com, you have to set it up yourself. It’s a multi-step process: Buy domain. Get domain’s A record registered in DNS, whatever that means. Deal with technical problems. Deal with more technical problems. Forget to renew domain. Lose domain to squatter in Ukraine.

Wouldn’t you pay to have someone else deal with this stuff for you?

ZooLoo sells subscription blogging services for as little as $1.99 that includes a custom domain and backups, email for the site, plus a dashboard for managing your blog. ZooLoo’s Graffiti blog platform is a lot like Tumblr: Simple, attractive, easy to use because it’s not complicated.

For $4.99 a month you can remove the ads from your ZooLoo site and double your storage capacity to 2 gigabytes. (There’s no limit on image uploads, which aren’t stored on your personal space.) For $8.99 monthly, you can run your own ads and use ZooLoo’s search engine optimization (SEO) tools.

You can use ZooLoo for free, if you’re happy with just a blog, a dashboard, and the ability to check and update your status on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Linkedin.

The company, founded in Scottsdale, Arizona in May 2008 by CEO Jeff Herzog, is privately funded. The one-minute video below shows how ZooLoo works for beginners.

Google announced Google Buzz today -- the search engine's answer to Twitter and Facebook.

We weren't impressed. Reasons:

• It doesn't do anything new -- only what several existing brands already do better.
• 400 million people are already happily using Facebook. Why would they switch?
• We hate the name, a ripoff from Yahoo.
• The design looks like every other bland Google page.
• The people who are our Gmail contacts are not the same people we're friends with on Facebook.

Here are some more highlights from our coverage of today's big news:

Read the rest of this story »

See Also:

• Google Launches "Buzz," Goes After Facebook, Twitter, And Foursquare
• Watch A Demo Of Google Buzz
• The Truth About Google Buzz: It's Late, Boring, And Lame

Last spring, after leaving Yahoo and taking some time off, Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield started a company called Tiny Spark Speck with four other members of the original Flickr team, and started work on a browser-based, massively multiplayer game. The product of that effort was Glitch, which Tiny Spark Speck launched this week with a web site and a video highlight reel. The game is in invitation-only alpha, Butterfield said, and then this summer will be moved to open beta in preparation for a full-scale public launch later this year. In a phone interview on Tuesday, the Flickr co-founder talked about how he had always wanted to build a massively multiplayer fantasy game, about the benefits of building a 2D game rather than a 3D one, and about how he originally wanted to start a bank.

GigaOM: Can you tell us a bit about the genesis of Glitch?

Butterfield: It’s something I’ve wanted to work on since I was a little kid. When I played SimCity — the original one, I guess, in the mid-80s — I remember always being curious what it would be like to play a game like that, where you got to play from the perspective of one little ant driving around the freeway rather than from the god’s eye point of view. It was the collective or emergent action of all the players that determined the way the simulation unfolded.

GigaOM: Did you want to start a game company right after you left Yahoo?

Butterfield: I knew that I wanted to work with the same group of people again. I actually tried for awhile to convince them that we should make a bank instead, in late 2008. That would be incredibly boring, but I think there would have been some nice opportunities to change the world on that front. But a game is just as good, and everyone else was much more interested in building a game than building a bank. I guess if you’re an engineer, banks are phenomenally boring to work on.

GigaOM: What’s your view of where the gaming industry is now?

Butterfield: I’ve been watching everything that’s been happening over the last five years. The pace seems to be accelerating. We’ve seen a lot of increased uptake of what we’ve been calling casual games, and at the same time the iPhone’s done a lot for indie game development. With the Wii, tens of millions of people are buying their first console, and of course there is the rise of social games on Facebook. All these different avenues…it’s like, letting a thousand flowers bloom. There is all kinds of interesting stuff happening all over the place.

GigaOM: Flickr also started as a massively multiplayer game called Game Neverending. How is this different from what you envisioned then?

Butterfield: Obviously in the last eight years, a huge number of things have changed. From the perspective of 1982, hardware is effectively free. But the biggest shift is that there are now hundreds of millions of people using Facebook, whereas back then Friendster was yet to launch and when it got to a million people that was a huge deal. So there’s just a lot more people online now, using the web in a social way, and that wasn’t really such a big thing before. So it’s a much better time to be working on this.

GigaOM: With all those different platforms out there, are you planning to extend Glitch into any of those other markets?

Butterfield: In the ideal future, we would like to have it be playable across all kinds of platforms. At first it will only work in a browser on a PC, but we will have companion applications for mobile, so iPhone and Android, that give you a more limited amount of gameplay but allow you to kind of interact with the game without having the whole client open. Because it’s massively multiplayer and you’re encountering other people, talking to friends or strangers, it’s tough to play without a keyboard in front of you, because that’s the way people talk. But if, for example, you’re participating in an auction, you should be able to use the iPhone app for that sort of thing, or if there’s a local election happening or some other asynchronous social interactions, that kind of stuff can happen in a mobile app.

GigaOM: Tell us a bit about the game. What are players trying to accomplish?

Butterfield: The 30-second version of the backstory is that it’s a billion years in the future and everything worked out perfectly — everyone’s enlightened and it’s peaceful and and just perfect. And of course, that’s a very unlikely future. One day scientists discover that and determine that the solution is to go back to the past and fix it so the future actually happens. Now, as everyone knows, the world was originally spun out of the imagination of eleven great giants, wandering sacred paths on a barren asteroid, and singing and thinking and humming the whole world into existence. So we have to go back into the past, into the minds of the giants and grow the world–so that the future can actually come to pass.

GigaOM: You’ve mentioned Facebook games such as Farmville and World of Warcraft. Is Glitch anything like either of those?

Butterfield: When you compare it to Farmville or any of what we’re calling social games for Facebook, they’re all single-player games with a little bit of access from my single-player game experience to your single-player game experience. You can fertilize your friend’s crops but that’s about it. If someone’s better at growing corn for example, in their farm in Farmville, I can’t just buy their corn. There’s no economy, no real interaction; what I do doesn’t really make any difference to you. So this is what people used to call a persistent world game, a massively multiplayer game — but it’s different from most massively multiplayer games because the focus isn’t on fighting. And the reason for that is just that once you have fighting in a game, then the game becomes about fighting, and it’s really hard to fit in any other kind of significant human interaction. When it’s about getting better weapons and better armor so you can kill more impressive foes, then that ends up being what the game’s about, and we didn’t want it to be about just that.

GigaOM: Is it the type of game that takes hundreds of hours to play, like some other massively multiplayer games?

Butterfield: People can sit down and have a multi-hour game session, but they should be able to get some satisfaction out of short bursts as well — 10 minutes snuck in at work — stuff like that. It is definitely possible to wander around the world by yourself, and go exploring and — to use the game industry word, to grind — to do the repetitive tasks and level yourself up by yourself. But there are other people always there. There’s plenty of opportunities to work with people so that for example, a lot of the larger, more expensive things that you can build or develop in a new area require a group of people who have different skills and pool their resources. But there can be competition as well — economic is the most obvious, but I think we’ll see a lot of sort of tongue-in-cheek politics and even religions. Someone started the Church of Emergent Complexity back in the Game Neverending days.

GigaOM: Glitch is a bit of a throwback design-wise to the early days of 2-D, side-scrolling PC games. Why did you decide to do that?

Butterfield: It was partly a technology decision, because it’s much easier to develop in that way, and the tolerance for latency is a lot higher. But also 3-D, while it often looks beautiful, is a lot more complicated for people to deal with. Just physically moving a 3-D avatar around in a virtual world is a lot more challenging than in 2-D. If you look at something like Second Life, there are many differences, and just moving around in Second Life is a challenge for a lot of people. But everyone can sort of immediately grok the 2-D, side-scrolling, platformer method of moving and that kind of gameplay.

GigaOM: What kind of funding does Tiny Spark Speck have?

Butterfield: We did a small angel round of $1.5 million last spring, and the bulk of that was Accel Partners, plus there were about a half a dozen angels including Marc Andreessen, Jeff Weiner the CEO of LinkedIn, Rob Solomon from Technology Crossover Ventures and the former CEO of Sidestep, as well as Brad Horowitz who is VP of products at Google. So there has been a pretty big group of people. We’re going to be doing a Series A round sometime soon.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Lately, I’ve had the “pleasure” of lying in bed (most of the time in traction) recovering from hip surgery.  Given the liberal doses of Percocet and other pain meds, I’ve refrained from doing any work-related emails.  But it’s boring as crap and I can only read so much (poor attention span due to drugs) and watch so many bad movies (Max Payne was one of the worst ever).  I relegated myself to surfing around the Internet and getting caught up on all the cool stuff that I’m behind on.

One site that I’ve neglected the past 6 months has been Facebook.  Besides playing Zynga games Poker and Mafia Wars, I had stopped updating my status, uploading pictures and maintaining my profile.  Whereas, I used to be on FB a couple of times a day, I was now spending all of my social media time on Twitter. I figured that with my copious amount of free time, I’d rediscover my interest in FB and get sucked back in.

Surprisingly to me, it hasn’t happened.  And it’s day 4 of trying.  I’m not sure that I need FB anymore.  What I perceived as the value before has clearly changed.  And when I look at the value proposition then, versus now, I can’t imagine what FB would have to do to win my social media time away from Twitter.

Here is why Twitter is better than Facebook (in scorecard fashion):

1. Meeting and / or reconnecting with friends.  I have 1,110+ friends on Facebook. I have about 1,700 on Twitter.  But there are two factors that must be considered above quantity: quality of friend and velocity of friend acquisition. 

Quality-wise, my networks are probably about equal with a mix of real friends, acquaintances and folks that are just network builders.  I find this interesting, as on FB I have to allow folks to be my friends, but on Twitter people can essentially befriend me unilaterally.  (I accept all FB friend requests, by the way).  I’m very much overweighted with high school connections on FB and over weighted with business  friends on Twitter.  (This is a good thing, nothing against my high school friends).

Velocity, however is no match.  While FB started strongly, I’ve only added about 200 friends in the past 3 months.  I’m adding about 250 a month in Twitter.  Just this week alone, I’ve added several dozen Twitter followers and only a couple new FB friends. 

Winner:  Twitter

2. Relevant Information. This one isn’t even close.  Besides knowing when a birthday occurs, the information stream inside Facebook sucks.  It’s 90% noise.  Yeah, I know that I can go and configure the info stream, but the interface stinks and it’s always changing.  Twitter?  Simple.  I follow those who provide me interesting information and can always check out “@jasonmendelson.”  If someone is creating too much noise, I can unfollow them with one button.  Plus, for those in my life whose opinions I really trust, I can pay attention to who they are retweeting and pick up others to follow. For this reason, friend discovery is better on Twitter, as well. 

Winner:  Twitter

3. Activity.  So which network sees more activity from those that I care about?  This one is mixed.  It’s all over the map, so let’s punt on this analysis. 

Winner:  Tie

3. Fun.  So life isn’t all work.  Fun matters.  Which one is more fun?  I think FB still wins this one with the games, applications and photos that Twitter doesn’t have.  Plus the persistence that exists with content is nice, as well.  That being said, Twitter is catching up and some of the Facebook fun is moving off the FB platform.  One of our recent investment, StockTwits shows that a great application can be built on top of the Twitter platform and game makers like Zynga have more and more standalone offerings (like Farmville). 

Winner: Facebook (but, isn’t a guaranteed long-term advantage)

4.  Efficiency.  Putting aside all jokes about Twitter’s infrastructure aside, the cumbersome nature of FB, plus the ever-changing and poor UI make this one no contest.  Plus, I think 140 characters is a better format for folks to connect up, instead of the three page dissertation from the girl from high school telling me about her high school crush on me.  And don’t even get me started about FB email and chat – two more complete time sucks in my life that I see no benefit to.   

Winner: Twitter (In a landslide, but please scale your infrastructure)

5. Privacy.  Let’s see… On one hand we have a founder (Facebook) who believes privacy is dead and on the other hand we have a really simple platform that allows me control over what the public sees.  Even more inscrutable is knowing what Facebook’s du jour policy on privacy really is. 

Winner:  Twitter

6. Spam. I’ve had to defriend folks on Facebook due to spam (mostly politicians) and I’m sure we’ve all made a mistake or two where we’ve invited our entire address book to something that we weren’t aware that we were doing.  With Twitter, I only follow those whom I enjoy, it’s easy to audition folks by following / unfollowing, where the “Remove Friend” button seems to change location often. 

Winner:  Twitter

7. Ability to Network.  connections / help:  At one point, I thought that FB would replace Linked In.  I was wrong, Twitter did.  I sent out a tweet and almost instantaneously whatever I need is addressed.  Instead of spamming folks on FB, I just send out a 140 character missive and folks decide whether or not they want to help or not.  With FB, I’d have to create an email and send to everyone and annoy them as they would at least have to go delete the message or forever show new messages in their inbox (especially annoying on the iPhone client). 

Winner:  Twitter

8.  Sharing.  I think FB still wins.  Granted, if you want to share each and every part of your life, there is no substitute for posting pictures and letting everyone know which Sex in the City character you are most like. I think the novelty of this wore off on me a while ago and I prefer sharing information and content that I find find interesting and I find Twitter to be the perfect platform to do this.  That being said, I may not be norm.  And perhaps those that rank sharing as their top attribute for participating in a social network will always flock to FB, but I’m not sure how many people feel this way. 

Final Score:  Twitter: 5  Facebook: 2 Ties: 1

Now that Twitter has effectively taken over friend discovery, connection, networking and information for me, the only real use that FB has if for fun.  And I’m finding more fun in the Twitter platform everyday.  Given that I only have so many hours a day for social media, I’m allocating my hours to Twitter (and blogging, of course).  I wonder if others are finding the same thing? Or is sharing the killer app?

Google’s “sort of temporary detente” with the Associated Press is progressing: now new AP stories have started showing up on Google (NSDQ: GOOG) News—this one, for example, about AP itself—as first noticed by WSJ. It comes after a nearly seven week gap and continued negotiations on the licensing terms.

Google has the same statement it had last week: that is has a licensing agreement with AP, and discussions to modify/extend it are ongoing. AP says they have nothing to add to that statement. This follows AP’s new agreement with Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) News, as we reported last week.

Related

• AP Signs New Licensing Deal With Yahoo
• AP Reportedly Close To New Licensing Deal With Yahoo
• Google News Stops Hosting New AP Content

Baidu (NSDQ: BIDU), the Chinese search giant which stands to gain the most if Google (NSDQ: GOOG) goes ahead and pulls out of China, had a standout fourth quarter, as it completed the roll-out of its new Phoenix Nest ad system and benefited from an uptick in online ad spending.

The company had surprised analysts last quarter by issuing lower than expected guidance for the fourth quarter because of the switch to Phoenix Nest. But Baidu said that the ad system had put in a “better than anticipated performance”—driving the results, which were above the company’s guidance and analyst forecasts.

Baidu’s revenue jumped 39.8 percent to $184.7 million and its net income increased 48.2 percent to $62.7 million. Next quarter, Baidu expects revenue to come in at between $176 million and $181 million—also above analyst expectations. The company’s stock is up more than 9 percent in after-hours trading.

T-Mobile may end up having one of the fastest mobile broadband networks in the country — at least for a short time, as it rolls out HSPA+ upgrades across its network this year, which will offer theoretical speeds of 21 Mbps down. And in an interview with me yesterday, T-Mobile’s Dave Mayo, VP of engineering, hinted that the first cities to get it (outside of Philly, which already has a test network) will be located on the coasts.

Mayo said that T-Mobile has already upgraded the existing HSPA software in “major cities” along the California Coast and said “major cities from Washington, D.C. to Boston” will have it on the East Coast, including Philadelphia, where it’s already live. My requests for more information on the timing and exact cities were denied, but my guess is T-Mobile, which said it would have HSPA+ deployed by the middle of 2010 and that the network would offer access to 205 million, is waiting for devices and better backhaul before flipping the switch.

Currently T-Mobile has about 10 devices that can use its existing HSPA network, which offers download speeds of up to 7.2 Mbps and no HSPA+ capable gadgets. The relatively young 3G network was rolled out in 2008, but has several compelling devices such as the Nexus One, the MyTouch and unlocked iPhones scavenged from AT&T’s network. AT&T is currently deploying HSPA coverage, but will skip HSPA+ and go straight to the Long Term Evolution network beginning with trials in 2011.

However AT&T is currently beefing up its mobile backhaul faster than T-Mobile is, at least judging by Ma Bell’s statements to the world (GigaOM Pro, sub req’d). Mayo at T-Mobile said the operator doesn’t have the advantage of a fixed wireline network, but it has deployed fiber to 7 percent of its towers with 20 Mbps of capacity on those fiber strands. He also said that within the next few weeks the operator will turn on fiber to about 25 percent of its towers.

When it comes to mobile broadband, the HSPA+ deployment puts T-Mobile in a singular position with regards to the other national operators. Bend Broadband, an Oregon cable operator, also has an HSPA+ network with faster speeds.  None of the big carriers in the U.S. is rolling out HSPA+, although a spokesman for T-Mobile points out that more than 25 operators have deployed HSPA+ so there are plenty of devices available. However, the speeds should beat out those offered by WiMAX (maybe even on older HSPA gear) and will likely compete with early Long Term Evolution deployments, especially LTE’s slower end. For example, Verizon expects users to see speeds on its network of between 5-12 Mbps down.

T-Mobile’s unique bet on HSPA+ is probably dictated in part by the high costs of rolling out entirely new infrastructure to build an LTE network, especially so soon after it upgraded to 3G from 2G. However, Mayo said the 3.5G network is an asset as more consumers pick up smartphones and want a fast surfing experience on them (sorry iPad fans, no word yet on T-Mobile’s plans for Micro SIMs). He believes T-Mo’s network will provide a good experience for those who want voice and mobile data on a handset.

I think that’s true, especially since voice and converged handsets for LTE networks are farther out than carriers may want us to believe. Plus, while a select few with deep pockets or mobile lifestyles plunk down $60 a month for a data card or personal hotspot, smartphones will be the mainstream consumer device for accessing the mobile web for a while yet. So until about 2012 or later, when LTE handsets hit the mainstream, I think T-Mo may have a slight advantage over other mobile broadband providers. After that, HSPA+ may look more like a handicap.

Gregory T. Huang wrote:

Seattle-based RealNetworks and MTV Networks announced today they will spin off their digital music service joint venture, Rhapsody, into a separate company. Under the terms of the deal, RealNetworks (NASDAQ: RNWK) will no longer be the majority owner and operator of Rhapsody; the new company will not have a single majority owner. Real says this is a significant first step in making itself more focused and profitable. More information on the restructuring can be found in the Form 8-K that Real filed with the SEC today. The deal is expected to close at the end of this quarter.

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As soon as Google Buzz was released earlier today, all the early adopters piled in to give it a spin. Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmal and a founder of FreindFeed, was among them and his initial reaction was: “This seems vaguely familiar . . .” Or, as he put it elsewhere, “There’s a FriendFeed in my Gmail. Sweet! “

It is vaguely familiar to him on various levels. Like FriendFeed before it (which was acquired by Facebook), Buzz acts as a way to bring together different social streams together—Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, Google Reader shared items, status updates, shared links and videos. It presents them all in a single stream from everyone you follow from you Gmail contacts. Each item can be commented on, “liked,” or taken into a private email or chat conversation. You end up getting comment strings around a single shared link, photo, or video, just like on FriendFeed, except FriendFeed can import items from many more social websites. (Although FriendFeed is not enabled as a connected site for most users, strangely enough it is enabled for Buchheit’s account.).

But the other reason Buzz is vaguely familiar to Buchheit is because it lives right inside Gmail, which he launched when he was a Google engineer. It appears right under your “Inbox” link, and takes over the entire window where your 10,000 unread emails usually stare you in the face. It replaces it with a living, breathing, never-ending social commentary. My first reaction when I saw Buzz was to wonder what happened to all my mail. I didn’t miss it.

Unlike Google Wave, which lives in its own silo, the fact that Buzz is a feature of Gmail makes me want to use it, despite it’s deficiencies. Right now, Buzz only consumes communications from outside Google in a one-way fashion. You can see other people’s Tweets, for instance, but you can’t Tweet back to them. And those Tweets definitely don’t come in realtime either. There is a noticeable lag.

Buchheit agrees. When I asked him via email how he feels about Google channeling him, he responded: “It seems nice. Integrating into Gmail is the right way to go. It’ll be interesting to see how much activity it gets.” The fact that I was sable to gather his thoughts from Buzz, FriendFeed, Twitter, and Gmail speaks to the disjointed nature of our communications. Back in November, I had the opportunity to interview Buchheit on stage on whether he thought that email is dead. He defended email and admitted he had not yet tried Google Wave. But he’s already jumped into Buzz.

The question is not really where email is dead, but whether it will continue to be the primary form of electronic communication, or merely recede to the background as convenient dumping ground for archiving our realtime conversations. Whether Buzz puts more people at ease with using a realtime communication mode as their primary communication mode remains to be proven. But it points towards the inevitable direction that all Web communications are taking: more realtime, intermingled, disjointed, and multimedia.

I recently wrote a comment strongly recommending the Bridaluxe Wedding Affiliate Program in reply to this question from JBird85 in the WAHM forum:

“I was looking for different programs for people in the wedding niche and I came across a network called Bridaluxe.
Has anybody here used them, and is it a good (legit ) program?”

Hoping to be helpful, ampris2000, who has an online gaming fun site, replied “just type bridaluxe scam in google and see what shows up”

While it is obvious TO ME that she didn’t mean to imply Bridaluxe was a scam, I was concerned others might not realize she was offering generic advice not specific to them.

I realized what I wrote in my comment is a perfect description to share with my readers about why I recommend Bridaluxe. Here is the comment:

I highly recommend the Bridaluxe niche Wedding Affiliate Program and assure you it is definitely not a scam. It is one of the very best affiliate networks and for any wedding site it is as good as using Commission Junction and ShareASale (considered one of the cleanest affiliate networks) and better for wedding related sites.

You can add one line of javascript code to any site and instantly have a Wedding Store complete with products from all of their merchants (without having to apply to a single one!) – and that store is automatically updated with daily specials.

On top of that Bridaluxe stores will convert better than manually created sites because they have an algorithm that rearranges the products being offered based on what is currently selling best. If something gets media buzz and becomes hot your store will automatically have that product in prime position for maximum sales.

Their stores are far superior to Amazon stores especially in this case. I manage one site that has a Bridaluxe store and am the advisor to another that has an Amazon store. There is no comparison. If you operate in the wedding niche definitely go with Bridaluxe.

Bridaluxe collects your commissions for you and pays you directly the same way Commission Junction and other affiliate networks do. I have never heard a single complaint of them not paying their affiliates on time – and I recommend them regularly in my own blog.

There are a couple of points I forgot to include in that comment. One is that Bridaluxe has the longest cookie duration of any affiliate program I have ever seen. They use 365 day cookies. That makes sense if you consider that many plan weddings over a very long period of time.

They also have tiered commissions that are very beneficial to the affiliates while less so to the merchants in that affiliates are rewarded with higher commissions for combined sales from all merchants. I encourage affiliate publishers to read more about the benefits of joining Bridaluxe.

Both merchants and affiliates should know that Bridaluxe runs a clean affiliate program free of toolbar publishers, parasites, cookie stuffers, coupon scrapers, or any other bad players.

Merchants selling wedding related products should consider Bridaluxe because of their innovative stores that automatically feature hot selling products and their willingness to personally train affiliates for you in their use.

They can provide instant visibility for merchants on many prominent wedding related sites and dozens if not hundreds of blogs. See details on their merchant wedding affiliate program.

P.S. If JBird85 had any information in their profile they would be linked in this post (and if they let me know I will still do that for them).

Bridaluxe is such a great idea for bloggers that I sincerely hope they will license their solution to create stores for other niche affiliate programs.

WEDDING AFFILIATE PROGRAM RECOMMENDATIONS:

• Derek Semmler  (DerekSemmler) How Bridaluxe Wedding Affiliate Program Hits the Affiliate Network Nail on the Head
• Weddex Bridaluxe: Wedding Affiliate Program for Wedding Pros

Related articles by Zemanta

• How to Evaluate a Merchant Gift Affiliate Program (growmap.com)
• How to Attract Affiliates to Your Program (marketersdaily.com)
• The Way I See It: State of Affiliate Marketing Part 1 (revenews.com)

The following is a reminder of our own upcoming events, those we’re partnering with and those we think are of particular, special interest to the tech community. To enquire about formal media partnerships with TechCrunch Europe please contact our commercial partnerships and event sponsorship manager Petra Johansson (Petra[@]TwistedTree.co.uk) in the first instance. To keep TechCrunch Europe informed of your upcoming event, get in touch with editorial (whether we list it is at our discretion). Also see our RSS and Twitter feed to keep up to date.

TechCrunch Europe Mobile 2010 – Barcelona – 17th February 2010
During the 2010 GSM World Mobile Congress, TechCrunch Europe will be returning to Barcelona for yet another interactive and live-streamed session featuring some of the most innovative and interesting mobile 2.0 startups and investors in Europe. We are releasing a limited number of early bird tickets now – please go here to get yours! To submit your idea for a speech/presentation, apply to be a panelist, or apply to pitch your startup please contact editorial via email. To enquire about sponsorship opportunities only contact Petra(@)TwistedTree.co.uk.

Bootlaw – 17 February 2010, London 2010, London
Bootlaw is a free boot camp. On 17 February 2010 Barry and Danvers will be discussing how tech companies can avoid commercial disputes and how to resolve them when avoidance doesn’t work. The event is for emerging technology, internet and digital businesses and the professionals working in them who want to learn more about the legal issues they face. It is brought to you by Barry Vitou and Danvers Baillieu, the friendly lawyers at Winston & Strawn in London. For more information go to www.bootlaw.com

Mini Seedcamp Zagreb – 11 February 2010, Zagreb
Mini Seedcamp Zagreb is a one day event aiming to connect the 20 best web-tech, mobile and software talent with some of the leading entrepreneurs, developers, and experts from the European tech ecosystem. We will be bringing together 20 of the region’s best seed stage tech start-ups with experienced entrepreneurs, investors, and developers from the Balkans and all over Europe to participate in a day of intense mentoring, panel discussions and presentations at the excellent Croatian Chamber of Economy.

Future Mini Seedcamp events:
Prague – 2nd March
Barcelona – 23rd March
Paris – 15th April
Tel Aviv – 6th May
Copenhagen – 27th May
Berlin – 16th June
London – 20th July
See www.seedcamp.com

TechCrunch Paris – Paris – 24th March 2010
TechCrunch Europe will return to Paris for its 2nd annual afternoon seminar on 24th March featuring yet another interactive and live-streamed session featuring some of the most innovative and interesting web & mobile startups and investors in France. We are releasing a limited number of early bird tickets now and you can get yours here. To submit your idea for a speech/presentation, apply to be a panelist, or apply to pitch your startup please contact editorial via email. To enquire about sponsorship opportunities only contact Petra(@)TwistedTree.co.uk.

Geek’n Rolla – London – 20th-21st April 2010
2009 saw the launch of the highly successful Geek’n Rolla. More than 300 participants gathered in London for a full day of ‘speed’ presentations, interactive discussions and TechCrunch Pitch. 2010 will see the return of Geek’n Rolla with the first day dedicated to startups. New for 2010 will be a second day with an investment focus. We are releasing a limited number of early bird tickets to the startup day of Geek’n Rolla – tickets for the investment day will be released in early February 2010. To get your early bird rate ticket to the startup day, please go here. Twitter hashtag will be “gknr”. To submit your idea for a speech/presentation, apply to be a panelist, or apply to pitch your startup please contact editorial via email. To enquire about sponsorship opportunities only contact Petra(@)TwistedTree.co.uk.

4ip is sponsoring Geek’n Rolla and our event in Edinburgh. 4iP is Channel 4’s innovation fund to stimulate public service digital media across the UK. In English, that means supporting great ideas for disruptive websites, games and mobile services which help people improve their lives. 4iP aspires to be the riskiest and highest value add investor in the UK. Last year 4iP did over 30 deals including Audioboo, MyBuilder, GymFu, Newspaper Club and Mapumental. Daniel Heaf 4iP’s National Investor said: “Geek n’ Rolla was one of my favourite events of last year and fits perfectly with 4iP’s mission to catalyse the UK start-up economy. There is huge benefit to bringing together those in the process of launching start-ups with more experienced entrepreneurs, business leaders and investors.”

TechCrunch Edinburgh – Edinburgh – 12th May 2010
TechCrunch Europe will be co-locating with EIE’10 in Edinburgh on 12th May 2010. Our venue hosts will be holding EIE in the AM and in the PM TechCrunch Europe will be running an interactive afternoon seminar followed by a joint networking party for both events in the evening. Full details of the day will be posted here soon along with details on how to book a place at what is set to be a highlight in Scotland’s entrepreneurial and tech calendars. We are releasing a limited number of early bird tickets now for this event and to register please go here. To submit your idea for a speech/presentation, apply to be a panelist, or apply to pitch your startup please contact editorial via email. To enquire about sponsorship opportunities only contact Petra(@)TwistedTree.co.uk.

TechCrunch Nordic – Copenhagen – 26th May 2010
TechCrunch Europe will host its 3rd TechCrunch Nordic event – joining Seedcamp on their European tour in Copenhagen at the end of May 2010. Full details on the event will be announced shortly. A limited number of early bird tickets are now available here. To submit your idea for a speech/presentation, apply to be a panelist, or apply to pitch your startup please contact editorial via email. To enquire about sponsorship opportunities only contact Petra(@)TwistedTree.co.uk.

The Europas – London – July 7th or 8th – To be confirmed, 2010
The Europas is TechCrunch Europe’s summer awards event for the tech community and where we recognise the talent in Europe at a stunning awards ceremony and party, done “TechCrunch Europe style”. Please mark these days in your diary for now, tickets to be released in due course. To enquire about sponsorship opportunities only contact Petra(@)TwistedTree.co.uk.

The above series of TechCrunch events is sponsored by Sun Startup Essentials programme.
Sun Startup Essentials program consists of:
· Discounted servers
· Discounts on storage
· Open source software
· Discounted partner hosting
· Free technical advice and training
· Co-marketing opportunities
For more information or to sign up please visit them here.

TechCrunch & UKTI pitch workshops
Since late 2008 TechCrunch Europe and UKTI have been organising a series of pitch workshops – the next one is on 10th February 2010. It is free to attend for qualified startups and it gives you a chance to possibly pitch at a forthcoming TechCrunch Pitch event. For more information on future pitch workshops or to register, please contact Petra Johansson on petra (at) twistedtree.co.uk.

The pitch workshops are supported by:

UKTI – UK Trade & Investment is the government organisation that helps UK-based companies succeed in the global economy. We also help overseas companies bring their high quality investment to the UK’s dynamic economy – acknowledged as Europe’s best place from which to succeed in global business. UK Trade & Investment offers expertise and contacts through its extensive network of specialists in the UK, and in British embassies and other diplomatic offices around the world. We provide companies with the tools they require to be competitive on the world stage. For further information please visit www.uktradeinvest.gov.uk or telephone +44 (0)20 7215 8000. British Library and IP Centre – The British Library Business & IP Centre at St Pancras, London can help you start, run and grow your business.

Sponsorship Opportunities
Please contact Petra Johansson petra (at) twistedtree.co.uk for further details.

Press
If you are a member of the press wanting to cover the event, please contact Rassami Hok Ljungberg on rassami (at) rassami.com.

Editorial/Programme
Editorial queries related to the programme and TechCrunch Pitch! at the event should be directed to Mike Butcher.

Ticket queries
Any questions relating to tickets, please contact Petra Johansson on petra (at) twistedtree.co.uk or Rebecca McRobb on rebecca (at) twistedtree.co.uk.

Small print
Attendee identification will be checked at the door. Due to strong demand for tickets, we regret tickets are not transferable and not refundable. If you use your name to purchase multiple tickets, your guests must arrive with you to check in at the door. If you show up at the event without a valid ticket, TechCrunch Europe reserves the right to charge the full ticket price plus an administration fee to allow access to the event subject to availability. Why are we rather strict about this? Because TechCrunch Europe events are almost always sold-out and we like to protect the people who actually gone to the trouble of buying a ticket and following the instructions.

2010 Events TechCrunch is supporting:

Mobile Peer awards
The Mobile Premier Awards announces 49 nominated startups to the Mobile Premier Awards in Innovation: The best grassroots startup innovation chosen by their peers in partnership with MobileMonday, the global community of mobile professionals. The nominees were chosen by participating MobileMonday chapters from over 250 participating startups.

Music 4.5 – 4 March 2010, London
2Pears, the team that bring you the popular TechCrunch Europe events and the UKTI Pitch Workshops, are pleased to announce the launch of a new music tech start-up event – Music 4.5 – which will take place in central London on Thursday, March 4, 2010. Music 4.5 will bring together music tech start-ups, serial entrepreneurs, investors, artists, band managers and key industry players to share knowledge, discuss strategies for business success, debate market trends and evolution, as well as network. TechCrunch readers can benefit from a 20% discount on delegate rates by using the discount code TCE10

If you’re a European startup then you need to check out Plugg on March 11, 2010. Organised by long-time Web 2.0 consultant, blogger, entrepreneur and now TechCrunch contributor Robin Wauters, the event will take place in Brussels, Belgium, and will feature a host of top speakers from the continent, and a startup competition.

Social Media World Forum – 15-16 March 2010, London

Social Media World Forum is now firmly established as Europe’s leading social media event. With 5 supporting conference streams, over 300 speakers, free to attend workshops and exhibitions. Covering the latest in brand engagement within social media, monitoring campaigns, branding, b2b social networks, pr, virtual currencies, gaming, and many more. TechCrunch Europe readers can claim a 15% discount by using the discount code #SMWF2010

Marketing 2.0 – 22-23 March 2010, Paris
The Marketing 2.0 Conference is aimed at all professionals who think that today’s marketing industry is in need of a change! We are bringing the world’s best experts and specialists together to discuss the future of marketing, (social) media, and advertising, as well as new technology. TechCrunch readers get a €200 discount on the standard attendance fee by quoting the discount code “TCM2C”

EIE’10 – 12 May 2010, Edinburgh
Engage | Invest | Exploit is Informatics Ventures annual showcase of the high-quality deal flow spinning out of Scotland’s world leading Informatics and Computer Science departments, and hot startups associated with our institutions. The Informatics space is vast, including ventures in BioTech, CleanTech, Gaming, Mobile/Wireless and all varieties of Software. In its third year, this annual showcase has a simple value proposition for investors, serial technology entrepreneurs and industry: spend one morning with us and get to see fifty hot prospects in one place with an engaging agenda, in one of Europe’s most dynamic and award winning physical environments. Add to this the extra value and buzz of E|I|E 2010 being followed in the afternoon and evening with a TechCrunch Europe event. Investors who have previous attended E|I|E include: TTP Ventures, Seven Spires, Seraphim Capital, Scottish Equity Partners, Pond Ventures, Pentech Ventures, NESTA, Doughty Hanson, Balderton Capital, Archangel Informal Investment, Amadeus Capital and 4iP.
· Images from E|I|E 2009 can be found here.
· A video summary of E|I|E 2009 can be found here.
· One page “crib sheets” on each company pitching and demonstrating at E|I|E 2009 can be found here.
· E|I|E 2009 featured a keynote speech by Guy Kawasaki which can be found here.

CloudStorm events
22/02: London 2 (just before Datacenter World)
09/03: Düsseldorf, Meilenwerk Galerie
24/03: Antwerp, Marble Hall of Zoo of Antwerp
Week of 19/04: New York (during or just after Cloud Expo)
Week of 03/05: Amsterdam
Week of 17/05: Silicon Valley
Week of 14/06: Stockholm
Week of 19/07: Texas (during or just after HostingCon)
Later in 2010: Paris, London 3, Madrid, Milan, …
CloudStorm is a new style event set up in 2009 and completed 3 successful editions in London, Paris and Brussels (see gallery). At CloudStorm, attendees will receive in 100 minutes an update of the latest trends and products in Cloud Computing by innovating cloud companies, followed by a mini expo and networking opportunity. CloudStorm is an event where the real solutions and products are shown. To make it interesting for everybody, each event will feature a varied mix of cloud vendors. This ensures a much broader view than on any other event on Cloud Computing and allows you to select the technology solution that best suits your needs! Cloudstorm.org

The January search share numbers are in.

The big story is that Microsoft's Bing continues to gain share, jumping another half-point to 11.3%.  We think Bing is buying these share gains, which means that they won't be building a profitable search business anytime soon (on the contrary). 

Read the rest of this story »

See Also:

• Microsoft Buying More Market Share For Bing: Default Search Engine On More HP PCs
• Microsoft Still Flushing $2 Billion A Year Down The Online Drain
• Microsoft Spends Big To Promote Bing At The Olympics