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Posts Tagged ‘marissa-mayer’

Every year the World Economic Forum names its Young Global Leaders, a list of up-and-comers from the worlds of business, politics, culture, and non-profits. Last year’s list included YouTube founder Chad Hurley, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Digg founder Kevin Rose, and Skype CEO Josh Silverman.

Today, the World Economic Forum named its 2010 Young Global Leaders. There are 197 people on the list overall, including celebrities like musician Wyclef Jean and fashion designer Stella McCartney. Some of the startup CEOs and tech execs on this year’s least include:

Evan Williams—CEO and co-founder of Twitter
Marissa Mayer—VP, Search Product and User Experience, Google
Steven Chen—Co-founder, YouTube
Peter Corsell—CEO, GridPoint
Calvin Chin—CEO, Qifang
Heather Fleming—CEO, Catapult Design
David Rosenberg—CEO, Hycrete

Square, the startup that is making mobile payments for the iPhone, just announced it’s full list of angel investors. Kevin Rose announced his involvement in a video demo (embedded below) he did a few days ago, but until now it wasn’t known who else was involved.

The full list includes: Marissa Mayer from Google, Dennis Crowley from Foursquare, Kevin Rose from Digg, Ron Conway, Biz Stone of Twitter, Joshua Schachter, Shawn Fanning (who’s starting a new venture with Dave Morin), Zachary Bogue, Andrew Rasiej, Greg Yaitanes, Jean-David Blanc, David Lee, Esther Dyson, Robin Chan, First Round Capital and Fritz Lanman. Basically, it’s an extremely impressive list.

Most notable are Marissa Mayer and Dennis Crowley, making their first investments, and it seems like a great investment to get into.

Square has gotten off to a fast start these last few months. When it raised $10 million, it was rumored that the company was valued at $40 million. For a company whose product isn’t even available to the public, that’s not bad. Our own MG got a demo of Square, and saw its potential to democratize mobile payments.

DataXu is a Boston-based startup founded by a couple of tech entrepreneurs and MIT alums who are committed to making waves in the online advertising landscape by debuting the first real-time ad optimization system working across exchange platforms from the likes of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

Essentially, the aim is to bring more power to advertisers – rather than publishers – who are looking to increase the ROI of their online ad campaigns by making it easier for them to make fast decisions based on qualitative data and act on them virtually in real-time. Ad exchanges serve to float unsold and/or undervalued inventory in a pool to be bid upon by advertisers. On the marketplaces, sellers get guarantees about the impressions that will be sold for the highest bid price above the specified reserve, and buyers can use the exchange to supplement their online campaigns with low-cost impressions.

The DataXu platform values, bid manages and buys ads on an impression-by-impression basis, across the major ad exchanges and based on smart algorithms. The platform is said to be capable of processing hundreds of thousands of “ad decisions” a second, each returned in under 100 milliseconds, through automated, campaign-specific algorithms.

Founded in 2007, DataXu has raised $7.8 million to date from venture capital firms Atlas Venture and Flybridge Capital. The startup has been running its system in private beta on Yahoo inventory, is about to add Google’s upcoming Ad Exchange platform – which they say is in fact launching in the next few weeks and will be processing “hundreds of billions of dollars” a day – to the mix and has just added Havas to its roster.

Expert panel Q&A:

Q – Marissa Mayer: On a technology level, it looks impressive. My questions is: are you targetting people?

Ad buyers can build their own data profiles, so you can tweak it to fit your core audience. The Internet is becoming more dynamic, and what we’re doing fundamentally is make decisions quickly, change campaigns in real-time and learn from past behavior.

Q – Paul Graham: What’s the rocket science behind it, the core engine?

A: Our system is designed to find the features that matters for brand, really custom. Advertising is not a one-size-fits-all, you need dynamic, intelligent algorithms.

Q – Tony Hsieh: We’ve dealt with third-party pixels at Zappos, and it causes problems. How do you deal with that?

A: As soon as we can tie data together, we can work, so it doesn’t have to be pixel ads.

Q – Marc Andreessen: What’s your sales model?

A: we can paid on a CPM basis, like an ad server, but a percentage on the lift.

Video:

Pictures:

Extra coverage:
TC50: DataXu optimizes ad campaigns in real-time VentureBeat.

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Remainder aka remnant advertising are not exactly widely known terms, but the average person browsing the web for content knows perfectly well what it is. Anyone who’s ever browsed their favorite news site and has been exposed to advertising units that seem totally off base with the publisher brand, or even completely – even if unintentionally – juxtaposed to the content that’s being viewed has been a ‘victim’ of ads that were placed just to fill up unsold ad inventory, which is what remnant advertising comes down to.

5to1, a startup with a high-profile founding team that includes former Fox Interactive execs Jim Heckman and Ross Levinsohn, has raised $4.5 million in seed funding to work on a solution that can turn remnant advertising into premium advertising. The company’s breaking out of stealth mode today at TechCrunch50 with a service that could rid both publishers and advertisers of the extremely ineffective ad campaigns that are basically only beneficial to the networks selling them.

The 5to1 system allows publishers to get in between the remnant networks and the ad inventory to give them more control over what will appear on the site, where and when. The company’s founder and CEO Jim Heckman dubs it a “Match.com meets iTunes for advertising” because it allows publishers to dynamically create ‘playlists’ of ad units of sorts and easily run both proper ads and potentially placeable remnant ads on variable places on their website(s).

Ultimately, the goal is to make it easier for content publishers to increase the quality of – and with it, the revenue that comes from – the ads that appear on unsold inventory without too much hassle. And if it takes off we’ll see a lot less of these horrible screaming ads that you’d never click on even if they held you at gunpoint.

Expert panel Q&A:

Q – Marissa Mayer: At Google, we agree that optimization can be done. However, what technology do you have for matching content to advertising, and how can you provide for larger-size networks with lots of inventory?

A – Jim Heckman: We’ve been in stealth for a year, but we’ve noticed that publishers like hearing about being able to match advertising with context and having control over it. We didn’t want to compete with the Google model, but we’re more like iTunes: you ‘play’ ads whenever you want. It’s no different than what Web 2.0 has done for content. So if you’re a tech blog on gadget, you can see what ads work for gadget news sites specifically. It’s not algorithmic, but more of a marketplace.

Q – Roelof Botha: Can you demonstrate better CPMs?

A: We can find ads so fast, even with hundreds of thousands of ads in the system, literally in seconds. You can drag and drop ads right in the rotation. We talk to publishers and they tell us that even if we get similar CPMs but just prettier ads that don’t curse with the content, they’d already be happy. But talk to us again in six months.

Q – Tony Hsieh: Does it take a lot of time for publishers to deal with your system, and what about scale?

A: We showed publishers in our beta test that it doesn’t take a lot of time to manage their advertising units on unsold inventory. They want to be involved, and they seem to be motivated with the speed of our system. The key thing is: the compiled results of the entire network shows the context of just one ad in seconds.

Q – Paul Graham: Humans can only do worse than the best optimization, right?

A: Pages are dynamic. What we found is that a vast majority of ads are not contextual, and we can fix that.

Q – Marc Andreessen: Regarding the chart, which side do you lean most to?

A: All inventory is not created equal, but I’d say just in the middle.

Video:

Pictures:

Other coverage:
TC50: 5to1 gives publishers more control over their ads VentureBeat.

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This is Part 2 of my series of posts summarizing a fascinating recent hour-long one on one interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

Early in the interview I asked Schmidt about the future of search. I brought up the “search is 90% done” misunderstanding from last summer. Said Google Vice President Marissa Mayer at the time:

Search is a science that will develop and advance over hundreds of years. Think of it like biology and physics in the 1500s or 1600s: it’s a new science where we make big and exciting breakthroughs all the time. However, it could be a hundred years or more before we have microscopes and an understanding of the proverbial molecules and atoms of search. Just like biology and physics several hundred years ago, the biggest advances are yet to come. That’s what makes the field of Internet search so exciting.

Specifically I asked Schmidt “What are the hard things to be solved in search in the next ten years?”

His lengthy answer meandered around a central theme, that Google needs to move “from words to meaning.” In other words, Google needs to understand queries better, and return results that best match the real meaning of a query. “We have to get from the sort of casual use of asking, querying…to “what did you mean?””

He then took a detour and shared a (non-serious) approach that cofounder Sergey Brin has talked about internally - direct brain implants:

Now, Sergey argues that the correct thing to do is to just connect it straight to your brain. In other words, you know, wire it into your head. And so we joke about this and said, we have not quite figured out what that problem looks like…But that would solve the problem. In other words, if we just - if you had the thought and we knew what you meant, we could run it and we could run it in parallel.

When I (again, jokingly) asked if Google was working on that product, he answered “Well, I wish we were. But we don’t exactly have all the medical clinics necessary to test brain insertion.”

But he also had a serious point. One big problem with search is a proper understanding of what exactly the user wants. And then how to pair that with exponential growth in datasets:

Okay. So to me, the question is sort of, what’s next, is really basically how far does the artificial intelligence technology go here? How many signals can we get from who you are, where you are, what you’ve been, what you’ve done and so forth to refine that querying? And at the same time, you also have this enormous expansion of data sets. I think what people are missing is that the amount of information on the Internet is going very, very rapidly…Because it gets more open, people put more data on it and so forth and so on and that’s wonderful. Also, you have all these dynamic databases that are now - they basically publish that at web pages and again index them as well.

The long term goal of Google search, he says, is to give the user one exactly right answer to a query:

So I don’t know how to characterize the next 10 years except to say that we’ll get to the point - the long-term goal is to be able to give you one answer, which is exactly the right answer over time. Okay, you know, the question I’ll ask today, how many Americans have - what percentage of Americans have passports?…The Google’s answer was a site, which was somebody who had attempted to answer that question and had multiple answers. It’s quite interesting actually to read…So you go to a very good definitive site. And what I’d like to do is to get to the point where we could read his site and then summarize what it says, and answer the question…Along with the citation and so forth and so on.

More interesting topics from the interview coming up soon.

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Creately, an online diagramming and design application launched by Cinergix and showcased at TechCrunch50’s Demopit in 2008, is unveiling its online tool to the greater public (the startup has been in private beta). Creately lets anyone create create and collaborate on flow charts, wireframes, network diagrams, sitemaps and more within its site.

The key to Creately’s application is that manages to harness the abilities and tools that traditional design and graphics software offer, but packages this functionality in an easy to use application that allows for collaboration between users.

The design features are varied but relatively easy to use and intuitive. For example, Contextual Toolbars appear when you click on any object on the drawing canvas and depending on the object and its size will offer all the commonly used operations within the toolbar. Collaboration is another crucial part to the design process, says co-founder Charanjit Singh, so the startup built in commenting, sharing, publishing, embedding and the ability to publish directly to Twitter. Plus, many of its offerings are free to use.

With this public launch, Creately is also unveiling its pricing model and monetization strategy. Creately will offer a free plan that lets users makes and unlimited amount of public diagrams that can are published on Creately and visible to anyone. Free customers are restricted to a maximum of 5 collaborators and all diagrams will be published with the Creately logo. Diagrams can also be embedded and shared. The paid version will offer an unlimited amount of privately-hosted diagrams that will not have the Creately logo. But it’s unclear how much Creately’s paid version will cost and we’ve contacted the company for further explanation.

Microsoft offers a design program, Visio, that’s has similar functionality to Creately but is more complicated to use and is not web-based.

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Digg’s been busy lately adding new features—some loved, some not—but they seem to be having a positive effect on overall. In June, comScore estimates the site brought in 8.8 million unique visitors in the U.S alone, up 31 percent over the preceding three months.

What accounts for the change all of a sudden? Well, by Digg’s own admission, once it introduced the Diggbar it saw an initial lift in visitors just as a result of people passing around short links. And it’s been getting even more aggressive on that front lately, having to reverse itself at times.

But it’s not just the Diggbar. The site launched a decent search feature in April (which always helps generate more traffic) and Facebook Connect in May.

Its recently-introduced Digg Dialoggs with people like Al Gore, Trent Reznor, and Marissa Mayer have also been popular. Users can suggest and vote on questions of be asked during a video interview conducted by Digg founder Kevin Rose.

What do you think is the biggest source of new visitors to Digg?

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A short post on the Google News blog today revealed a big number: Google recently quadrupled the number of newspaper articles in its News Archive Search. You may recall that at TechCrunch50 last year, Google’s Marissa Mayer demoed this powerful news tool that can search the text of publications far back in time — some over 200 years old.

The recent update saw Google add a bunch of new publications, including some from different parts of the world. And it even has a newspaper in the archives from 1753 now. The fact that it’s searchable is fairly insane.

Google launched with “millions” of searchable articles, so now we have to assume it has millions times four (Google didn’t give an exact number). But this along with its book scanning efforts are getting impressive in their size and scope (but the book scanning is not without controversy).

Of course, why Google primarily cares about archiving these old publications is not just for information, but also for the fact that it can sell contextual AdSense ads against them. Look at this article from the Manila Standard about a volcano eruption, it features an ad to get an emergency management degree.

[photo: flickr/DRB62]

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Ning’s Marc Andreessen, Sequoia Capital’s Roelof Botha and Google’s Marissa Mayer will return to our third-annual TechCrunch50 conference Panel of Experts September 14 - 15 in San Francisco. Our experts judge the fifty startups launching at the event and discuss each of the demos on stage as a group. Marc, Roelof and Marissa have been experts since our first conference, and we receive lots of positive feedback to have them return each year. We have an amazing line-up of new and returning experts, and additional judges will be announced over the coming weeks.

If you’re a new startup, and want a shot to launch at TechCrunch50 and pitch our expert advisors on stage, you have until June 30 to submit your application. No need to wait until the last day, we’re actively reviewing companies and extending offers now. We want to hear from you. The only rule at TechCrunch50 is that you have to launch your product for the first time on stage at our conference. We showcase a diversity of technology verticals (consumer, enterprise, mobile, hardware, etc), including funded and unfunded companies from all corners of the world.

All the details for the conference are here. TechCrunch50 is an action-packed conference where fifty new startups launch over two days. The event will be held at the San Francisco Design Center, a huge and beautiful venue where we packed nearly 2,000 participants last year.

Tickets for the event can be purchased here courtesy of Eventbrite (extra early-bird pricing is available until June 30).

More on the TechCrunch50 blog.

	Marc Andreessen Marc Andreessen is the co-founder of Ning, the create-your-own social network platform company that has raised over $100 million in funding. He also serves on the board of Open Media Network. Marc is best known as a co-founder and chief technical mind behind Netscape Communications Corporation and co-author of Mosaic, the first widely- used web browser.
	Roelof Botha Roelof Botha is a partner at Sequoia Capital focused on services and software investments. Prior to joining Sequoia Capital in 2003, Roelof served as the Chief Financial Officer of PayPal (EBAY) and worked as a management consultant with McKinsey & Company. Roelof is a certified actuary (Fellow of the Faculty of Actuaries), has a BS in Actuarial Science, Economics, and Statistics from the University of Cape Town and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
	Marissa Mayer Marissa Mayer is VP, Search Products & User Experience at Google. She joined Google in 1999 as Google’s first female engineer. Her efforts have included designing and developing Google’s search interface, internationalizing the site to 100+ languages and launching numerous features and products. Several patents have been filed on her work in artificial intelligence and interface design. Before Google, she worked at UBS research lab (Ubilab) and SRI International. Marissa has been featured in various publications, including Newsweek (“10 Tech Leaders of the Future”), Red Herring (“15 Women to Watch”), Business 2.0, BusinessWeek and Fortune.

We’re really lucky to have the corporate support of some of the best names in the business. Sequoia Capital, Charles River Ventures and Perkins Coie all returned quickly to support us for the third year in a row. Google, Founders Fund, MySpace and Microsoft are back for their second year of partnership. Additional partners will be named in the months leading up to the conference. Want to learn more? Partner and exhibitor details here.

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Being in Beta is cool. So cool that five years after its April 2004 launch Gmail is still held in Beta by Google. That’s despite the fact that it has 146 million users worldwide (Comscore, April 2009). Which is sort of ridiculous.

Now we’re hearing that Google is having an internal debate about removing the Beta logos from a number of products that are aimed at enterprise customers.

About half of Google’s products were still in Beta at the end of 2008. Retaining the Beta notation in the logo gives the company a sort of get-out-of-jail card when problems occur. Hey, it’s still in Beta, so don’t be surprised when something goes wrong.

There’s a problem though. Sure, users think Beta is geeky and fun and cutting edge. But it turns out that enterprise customers are a little more serious about stuff working. A Beta tag means what it’s supposed to mean - not fully baked. Stuff that isn’t fully baked has risks, and guys that run IT at companies aren’t fans of risk. They need things locked down. And while they’re smart enough to know that Google’s Betas aren’t really Betas, they aren’t going to take a risk. If something goes wrong it’s their fault.

That’s why Google took Chrome out of Beta just a couple of months after it was first released. OEMs need release software to install it on PCs, so they had to move it along. Marissa Mayer talked about Google Beta’s in general at the Le Web conference in Paris last December - the relevant clip is below.

Don’t look for Google to give up their love of Betas in general. But they may remove the Beta notation from a number of Google Apps services, which are aimed at enterprise customers, sometime soon. A source first tipped us off that a debate was going on at Google, and we’ve subsequently confirmed it. Some of their top execs feel strongly that the Google Apps products need to have the Beta notation in their logos removed to get some enterprise customers to even consider switching from Microsoft Office.

Four of the Five core Google Apps services are still in Beta: Gmail, Google Docs, Google Talk and Google Calendar. Google Sites, previously Jot, is the lone exception. We may see those Beta notations coming down soon, though. Stay tuned.

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