The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘relationships’

Joel and I were so angry at each other in this picture that Cat Schwartz literally had to keep us apart. I don’t usually want to bring people’s personal lives into focus here on CG. After all, we’re dedicated to, as Joel himself always pointed out, self-deprecation and dick jokes.

Here is the original: 
An interview with Joel Johnson on why he’s funny

Spiceworks, a startup that develops a social IT management software, has raised $16 million in Series C funding round led by Institutional Venture Partners with Austin Ventures and Shasta Ventures participating. This brings the startup’s total funding to $29 million.

Spiceworks develops a desktop software suite that helps a company’s IT staff collaborate with each other and manage “everything IT.” The IT management software, which is free and ad-supported, is currently being used by 850,000 IT professionals at small to medium businesses in 196 countries to inventory, monitor, troubleshoot, report on and run a help desk for their IT networks. Currently more than 25 percent of all businesses with greater than 100 employees rely on Spiceworks to manage their IT operations.

The compelling part of Spicework’s software is that it includes a social network for IT pros that they use to help each other out that includes a crowdsourcing troubleshooting platform. Its product roadmap is visible to all members, who can vote on which features they want to see next. The application features a network map that visually shows every computer and network device on a company’s IT network, along with their relationships and bandwidth consumption.

Spiceworks also recently added a host of plug-ins and social media widgets, letting users keep track track of alerts, tickets, new software, and new hardware, as well as inventory summaries. Spiceworks also lets users add themes and skins to the desktop, create customized user portals, and lets users drop in news widgets from RSS feeds and social networking widgets for Twitter, Digg, Facebook, and MySpace

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Private equite firm TA Associates announced this morning that it has signed a definitive agreement for a majority investment of over €60 million in eCircle, a decade-old email marketing service provider headquartered in Munich, Germany.

Founded in 1999, eCircle specializes in a range of digital marketing solutions, but it’s mostly known for its high-end email marketing software and related services. The company says more than 550 enterprise clients, including Argos, Nintendo and Samsung, are currently using its eC-messenger Web-based email marketing software, and the company has a transmission volume of over 5 billion emails per quarter.

eCircle has over 200 employees, spread across offices in Germany, the UK, France and Italy.

LinkedIn’s founder Reid Hoffman will be joining Greylock Partners as a partner but will continue to hold the role as executive chairman of LinkedIn. Hoffman tells us that he will be shifting his angel investing under Greylock Partners, where he will be a partner.

Greylock has also closed Greylock XIII, a $575 million fund, which will be used to invest in and support promising enterprise and consumer software, services and infrastructure ventures. Hoffman said that Greylock was the right fit because of the relationships he had with the partners, and the angel investing presence of the VC firm. Hoffman said that Greylock and his interests in funding early stage companies were aligned. He adds that he will continue to work full-time for LinkedIn.

Greylock also led LinkedIn’s series B funding round, which totaled $10 million. Hoffman has been one of the more prolific angel investors in Silicon Valley, investing in Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm, Ning, Six Apart and Zynga. Prior to LinkedIn Hoffman served as executive vice president at PayPal, where he was a founding board member. We are told that Greylock will not be taking on Hoffman’s current portfolio, only his future investments.

LinkedIn has been steadily growing, recently hitting 50 million users. Hoffman recently changed the guard at the company, with Jeff Weiner taking the helm as CEO in June. While LinkedIn is a strong IPO candidate, Hoffman recently told us that he’s not in any rush to go public. The company was valued at around $1 billion in its last round of financing in 2008, and has been profitable for the past years.

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Friendster, with 19 million worldwide monthly unique visitors (Comscore, August 2009) is no longer a leading social network in the U.S., but it did forge the trail for the MySpace’s and Facebook’s that came later. And they may be gathering IP assets that could provide offensive or defensive tools down the road – patents.

The company has announced four social networking patents between 2006 and 2009. And they’ll be announcing a fifth shortly – No. 7,478,078, titled “Method for sharing relationship information stored in a social network database with third party databases.” It was first filed on June 14, 2004.

The patent describes the sharing of information between users and applications based on relationships between users, as well as other uses. Most social networks today do exactly this, and may violate the patent:

By having a way of obtaining relationship information from an online social network, operators of online services can manage services based on the relationships between their customers. For example, a site offering a directory of members may allow each member to limit who may access his or her member information, or who may communicate with him or her, based on the closeness of the relationship between the requesting member and him or her. In addition, providers of online services may use methods of the present invention to allow users to control the accessibility of personal information maintained in an online environment. Furthermore, operators of existing database are better able to target particular information (e.g. advertisements) to individuals with an interest in receiving it, based on the premise that people closely related to one another in a social network share common interests, goals, lifestyles, and the like.

This patent joins the previous four Friendster patents. From information supplied by the company:

• In July 2006, Friendster was awarded its first U.S. patent describing how people are
  connected in the context of an online social network, titled “A System, Method and
  Apparatus for Connecting Users in an Online Computer System Based on Their Relationships within Social Networks” (U.S. Patent No. 7,069,308).
• Friendster was granted a second U.S. patent in October 2006, which discloses the
  process of enriching other users’ profiles with text, video, pictures and additional content,
  titled “Method of Inducing Content Uploads in a Social Network” (U.S. Patent No.
  7,117,254).
• In March 2007, Friendster added another patent to its portfolio, titled “System and
  Method for Managing Connections in an Online Social Network” (U.S. Patent No.
  7,188,153), which describes a technology that manages connections in a social network and allows members of the social network to add friends, personalize their network through arranging, ordering and classifying their connections, and search and browse profiles of other members of the social network.
• In December 2008, Friendster was granted its fourth patent, titled “Compatibility Scoring of Users in a Social Network” (U.S. Patent No. 7,451,161), which discloses a unique methodology used to calculate compatibility based on expressed interests between users of a social network. This includes scoring the compatibility between two members of a social network based on their interests and scoring the correlation between two interests for a given member of a social network.

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Two things that would end hypocrisy and make the world a better place: Priests should be allowed to get married, and the New York Times should update its Ethics Policy.

The venerable and vulnerable newspaper finally starts talking about the “Pogue Problem” out loud to its readers. For years David Pogue has covered Apple (and other tech companies). And for years he has been authoring books on Apple products. He doesn’t get paid by Apple for the books, but his bias is clear and he has been accused to conflicts of interest more than once by other mainstream media. Dan Lyons has a very funny take on the whole story which is worth reading.

If you have any doubt about Pogue’s opinion of Apple, this should clear it up.

We actually celebrate this kind of behavior, as long as it’s disclosed to readers. But the New York Times has a different standard, and Pogue’s reporting is a clear violation of their Policy on Ethics in Journalism, in my opinion:

Though this topic defies firm rules, it is essential that we preserve professional detachment, free of any hint of bias. Staff members may see sources informally over a meal or drinks, but they must keep in mind the difference between legitimate business and personal friendship. A city editor who enjoys a weekly round of golf with a city council member, for example, risks creating an appearance of coziness. So does a television news producer who spends weekends in the company of people we cover. Scrupulous practice requires that periodically we step back and look at whether we have drifted too close to sources with whom we deal regularly. The test of freedom from favoritism is the ability to maintain good working relationships with all parties to a dispute.

The NY Times generally self-regulates. If you’re too close to a source, you need to “step back” and evaluate your writing and “must be especially wary of showing partiality.” Of course, we think it’s best to show your partiality instead of hiding it, tell readers your relationships and then let them decide. Pogue’s bias is obvious, and we have no issue with it.

But we do take issue with the NY Times preaching about ethics when they continue to engage in the same behavior, sans disclosure.

The NY Times ethics policy also says “When we first use facts originally reported by another news organization, we attribute them.” But in our experience that isn’t always the case.

The one thing the NY Times has is its brand and its people. They aren’t first to stories but they generally get things right. Trying to hide conflicts of interest hurts that brand, particularly when they hide, hypocritically, behind an ethics statement that prohibits the behavior they’re hiding. It’s far better to keep everything in the open. Transparency is what’s important, not appearances.

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Linda Avey, one of the two founders of personal genomics company 23andMe, is leaving the startup to start a new foundation dedicated to studying Alzheimer’s disease. Avey, who has been with the company for over three years, writes that the new foundation will make use of 23andMe’s research platform to “drive the formation of the world’s largest community of individuals with a family history of Alzheimer’s, empower them with their genetic information and track their brain health using state-of-the-art tools”.

Avey notes that the foundation will be starting with the connection between Alzheimer’s and ApoE4, which helps in the breakdown of peptide plaques associated with the disease. The decision seems to be driven in part by personal reasons, as Avey’s father-in-law suffered from Alzheimer’s.

Avey sent the following Email to the 23andMe team:

Dear all-

As I trust you all know, 23andMe is very special to me. I also recognize that the company has reached a critical point in its growth where new leadership can take it to the successful heights we all think it can achieve.

I’ve decided that I’d like to focus my efforts on an area that is personally significant and will continue to have a huge impact on our healthcare system–Alzheimer’s disease. Effective today, I’m leaving 23andMe and have begun making plans for the creation of a foundation dedicated to the study of this disorder. The foundation will leverage the research platform we’ve built at 23andMe–the goal is to drive the formation of the world’s largest community of individuals with a family history of Alzheimer’s, empower them with their genetic information and track their brain health using state-of-the-art tools. We’ve always planned to include Alzheimer’s in our 23andWe research mission…I’m just approaching it from a new angle.

Some of you might be aware that my father-in-law suffered from Alzheimer’s and passed away last year. For this reason, Randy and I are motivated to do what we can to improve the understanding of what leads to the debilitating symptoms and what might prevent them from starting in the first place. The ApoE4 association is barely understood but gives us a great starting point.

I’ll miss working with you but will be excited to hear about the progress I know you’ll be making!

All the best,
Linda

Anne Wojcicki, who founded the company with Avey and is also noted for being Sergey Brin’s wife, sent out the following letter.

Team:

As Linda has told you, she will be leaving 23andMe to focus her energy on transforming Alzheimer’s research and treatment, leveraging the 23andMe platform. While I am quite sad to see her leave I am excited and hopeful as she takes on this mission. As Linda’s co-founder and partner over the last three years, it has been clear that revolutionizing research has been a primary passion. Our drive to change health care has always had roots in our personal lives and we have tried to structure 23andMe so that any individual or organization could actively participate in research. Linda and I have talked about doing research in Alzheimer’s since the inception of the company and the need for the Alzheimer’s community to have a strong leader. With Linda’s involvement, I believe that the APOE4 community could be the first asymptomatic community to successfully develop preventative treatments. I hope that going forward we’ll both be able to shake up and transform the health care space, making health care and treatments better for all.

Linda’s departure is also a sign of 23andMe’s maturation. When we started the company, the personal genetics industry did not exist; now it is a thriving and competitive landscape. Our company has grown and we continue to be an innovative industry leader. While our success has been exceptional, it is also clear we have a lot of work ahead. We have created a significant and empowering tool, but we must find new and better ways to promote the value of knowing your DNA. In the weeks ahead, we will outline a strategy for the company that we believe will make genetics a routine part of health care and will lead us to making significant research discoveries.

Linda has been instrumental in making 23andMe what it is today and we thank her for her passion and dedication to the company. We have many exciting opportunities before us, and I look forward to working with all of you to make 23andMe a spectacular success.

Anne

Worth pointing out is Wojcicki’s statement that 23andMe needs to find “better ways to promote the value of knowing your DNA”. That may be tricky — while there are some traits that are well understood, this is a field that is still in its infancy and the relationships between our genes and most traits are murky. At some point personal genomics will play a key role in our health care system, but I’m not sure we’re there yet.

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IT software maker Spiceworks is launching version 4.0 of their desktop software suite that helps a company’s IT staff collaborate with each other and manage “everything IT.” The IT management software, which is free and ad-supported, is currently being used by 700,000 IT professionals at small to medium businesses to inventory, monitor, troubleshoot, report on and run a help desk for their IT networks. The company says the upgrade will be rolled out later this week.

The interesting part of Spicework’s software is that it includes a social network for IT pros that they use to help each other out. Its product roadmap is visible to all members, who can vote on which features they want to see next. The top feature, which will be in the new release, is a network map, visually showing every computer and network device on a company’s IT network, along with their relationships and bandwidth consumption. Spiceworks will be integrated with Twitter as well, allowing activity updates to be published to Twitter.

IT pros at small and mid-sized companies can band together in buying clubs. And allows users to see how other IT pros have prioritized and managed various Windows Events. Users can now view Windows event background pages and read community group discussions on how to best troubleshoot and resolve related problems. Spiceworks calls this crowdsourced troubleshooting.

The new version also offers plug-ins to manage apps from vendors including Microsoft, LiveOffice, Intel and Trend Micro. For example, the LiveOffice Mail Archive Widget will let IT staff archive email accounts from within Spiceworks from the dashboard itself. The Microsoft License Organizer allows users to automatically track Microsoft licenses and to order additional licenses when needed. Spiceworks charges companies like Microsoft and Intel to add these features.

Spiceworks has ramped up its virtual help desk feature, letting users now control a help desk from a mobile phone. Users can create new tickets, edit & update existing tickets, and delete tickets remotely.

Spiceworks recently added a host of plug-ins and social media widgets, letting users keep track track of alerts, tickets, new software, and new hardware, as well as inventory summaries. Spiceworks also lets users add themes and skins to the desktop, create customized user portals, and lets users drop in news widgets from RSS feeds and social networking widgets for Digg, Facebook, and MySpace

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One almost surefire way to find if a new feature is on the verge of launching is to dig through code. That’s exactly what led to finding a reference to something called “Magic Inbox,” in Gmail. But what is it? Well, it could just be another one of those nifty, but small new features that Google loves to roll out in Gmail Labs at breakneck speed. But there’s a chance it’s something much, much bigger.

Specifically, Google Operating System, which did the digging, believes that the feature likely is a way to sort your Gmail inbox by your social graph. The two references to “friends” in the code, seems to lend some credence to this. Presumably, this would allow you to better filter your inbox based on if you have specified the emailer as a contact. As someone who gets bombarded by email everyday, most of which is not from people I actually know, I would weep with joy if such a feature were implemented. And so would my mom, as she may actually get emails back from me were that the case.

Of course, others have been working on this same idea as well. Yahoo has been saying for a while that it wants to use your inbox as a part of your social graph. Microsoft’s Hotmail has been working on things in the area as well. But given all the work Google has been doing recently to tighten up its social graph across its huge network of services, a social filter in Gmail could be very, very useful.

Users are likely to have security concerns about this as well. Some people want their email client to be completely private and not a part of the social graph. Of course, Google has already been using Gmail as a key starting point for your social graph for a while now, even if you didn’t realize it. Well over a year ago, Google it rolled out its social features to Google Reader, pulling in who it thought your friends were based on who you emailed in Gmail.

This proved to be an awful idea as people you email aren’t necessarily your friends. Google eventually rolled out several updates to this feature to allow users to better tailor their relationships. And that would obviously be a key part of a Gmail social filter as well. You need to be able to separate out your actual friends from those who you simply have contacted in the past, or maybe even correspond with a lot.

While Google hasn’t exactly nailed the social features, it’s pretty clear that the company is thinking about them — a lot. And that your Google Contacts, which started as a part of Gmail, but have since been spun out, are a key part of it.

Google I/O, its large developer conference is taking place next week. Google is likely to use the event to unveil some key new things it has been working on. Could that be a “magic inbox,” which is also called “icebox inbox” in the code? We’ll be there to find out. Maybe Gmail will even leave beta — but probably not.

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Is the IPO drought over? Not quite. But OpenTable’s successful IPO today will give tech startups and VCs a sign of hope that you can still go public eventually if you have a real business. On a day when the Nasdaq is down 2 percent, OpenTable is up 40 percent from its offering price of $20 (which itself kept moving up from $12 to $14 initially). The stock opened at $24, and was trading at around $27.40 last time I checked. With 21.6 million shares outstanding, that gives OpenTable a market capitalization of $605 million on its first day of trading. (The company itself cleared $60 million in the offering).

This is an extremely healthy IPO. Opentable is not a blowout Internet company. But it is a solid Internet company that matters. It pulled in $55.8 million in revenues last year and a net loss of $1 million (largely due to expansion-related costs). In the first quarter of 2009, it managed to turn a net profit of $366,000 on revenues of $16 million. (For a deeper financial analysis, see this earlier post).

OpenTable delivers reservation management software to restaurants through a Web browser and collects monthly subscription revenues. In that sense it is in the same class of software companies as Salesforce—selling software as a service over the Web to business customers. But it also has a friendly (free) consumer-facing side. It is yet another example of enterprise and consumer apps merging in the cloud.

So what does it take for a tech company to IPO these days? If OpenTable is the new measuring stick, a company needs at least $50 million in revenues, have at least one quarter of profits, customers with proven loyalty, and solid growth potential. In other words, it needs to be a real business.

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