eBay, Come Back

Image via CrunchBase

I have not used eBay in years. I had no idea it needed a comeback. I just read about it in my hometown newspaper.

Behind eBay’s Comeback

EBay, Yahoo and AOL, the dominant Internet triumvirate circa 2004 ..... eBay’s success has big implications for struggling companies like Yahoo and AOL, not to mention more recent sensations that have already lost some luster, like Zynga, Groupon and even Facebook ...... “One of the unique things about the Internet is a company can be a white-hot success and become a global brand and reach global scale in just a few years — that’s the good news,” he told me this week. “But then somebody can turn around and do it to you. There’s constant disruption. One of the first things I had to do here was face reality. EBay was getting disrupted.” ...... So thoroughly has eBay been transformed that he didn’t even mention its traditional auction business ..... Excitement about eBay’s prospects has little to do with its traditional auction business, or even its core e-commerce operations ...... Most of its growth came from mobile retailing and its PayPal online payments division, a business it acquired in 2002 for what now looks like a bargain $1.5 billion. ...... “Mobile is revolutionizing how people shop and pay.” ..... EBay is offering a one-click payment solution. .... Mr. Spitz said he was recently stopped at a traffic light and the sun was bothering his eyes. By the time the light turned green, he had used his phone to order and pay for sunglasses. ...... “We saw the mobile revolution early and we made a big bet across the entire company. We saw that mobile was an important factor for our customers. It was becoming the central control device in their lives. We didn’t worry if it cannibalized our existing business, because we knew it was what our customers wanted.” ..... The smartphone “has blurred the line between e-commerce and off-line retail,” Mr. Donahoe continued. “Four years ago, you had to be in front of a laptop or desktop to shop online. Now you can do it seven days, 24 hours. We’re going to have to drop the ‘e’ from e-commerce.” ...... Amazon continues to invest in its delivery systems and it, too, has an effective mobile app and one-click payment system. ..... EBay and PayPal apps already rank among the top 10 mobile apps .... EBay stresses, without mentioning Amazon by name, that it doesn’t compete with its retail customers. ...... “We spent three years fixing the fundamentals and tried not to worry about what everyone else was saying.” ..... “We’re more technology- and innovation-driven than we’ve ever been. Mobile gave us the opportunity to start with a clean slate from a technology perspective.” Less than two years ago, eBay acquired Critical Path Software, which was helping to develop eBay’s mobile apps. “We thought they were the best, so we bought them and got a couple hundred of the best software developers in the world working exclusively for us,” Mr. Donahoe said. ...... PayPal Here, a new payment system, would allow customers to “check in” in advance at a shop, be greeted by name when they arrive, complete transactions without a mobile device or credit card and get a text message as a receipt. ..... Mr. Donahoe has been chief for just over four years, and has replaced most of eBay’s top management.

Looks like PayPal is doing the trick.

Looks like John Donahoe is a role model for Marissa Mayer. Yahoo also needs a turn around.

Related articles

• eBay's John Donahoe Seeing a "Staggering Surge" in Mobile Shopping
• PayPal helps eBay profits more than double
• eBay: we'll do $10bn in mobile transactions this year
• eBay Continues to Benefit From Mobile Growth
• eBay sees quarterly income double
• EBay more than doubles 2Q earnings, revenue up
• eBay stock rallies to 6-year high
• EBay Profit Soars 144% As E-Commerce Rebounds
• Amazon Shares Up On eBay's Reflected Glory: Good Or Bad?
• Pixar Image Computer cameos on eBay

Venmo In Flight

It feels like yesterday that Venmo was taking its baby steps.

Venmo Could Make Moves
Could 2011 Be Venmo's Year?
Venmo And Frictionless Payments
Venmo Me For My Charm
2010: Location, Random Connections, The Inbox, Frictionless Payments

Look at them now, processing 250 million dollars a year.

VentureBeat: Venmo, now processing $10M a month, comes out of beta, offers me the world’s smallest bribe

Related articles

• Re: is Venmo a huge roadblock to Bitcoin?
• Venmo History is Social
• On Venmo and Payments
• Don't Have Paypal? No Problem!
• The Regretsy PayPal Debacle and Online Payment Alternatives

• Will Mobile Devices Kill the Credit Card? (bigthink.com)

MegaUpload: The SOPA/PIPA Aftermath

Image via CrunchBaseThe Shout: Megaupload: A Lot Less Guilty Than You Think

The heart of this case is whether and when an enterprise can be held criminally liable for the conduct of its users. ....... “Can the Grokster theory of CIVIL liability even be the basis for CRIMINAL copyright claims?” This has never been decided by any Court. ...... Rojadirecta’s lawyers at Durie Tangri have challenged the U.S. Government’s assertion that criminal liability arises from linking to infringing content. The lawyers argue that judge-made secondary infringement liability theories, including Grokster style inducement, cannot be the basis for a criminal copyright violation because the criminal copyright statute doesn’t mention secondary liability. Congress considered and rejected statutes that would have created such liability, in COICA and PROTECT IP. In sum, due process doesn’t allow incarceration under a civil legal theory that the Supreme Court dreamed up in 2005. The issues yet to be decided in Rojadirecta apply to the Megaupload case as well. ...... The list of overt acts show that the object of the conspiracy was infringement by Mega users. ....... If the idea is that Mega conspired with its users to infringe, those users may or may not have been criminally infringing copyright. They were located all over the world, and may or may not have acted willfully, i.e. intended to violate U.S. law. Again, the government would basically have alleged an agreement to violate a U.S. CIVIL law, including by many people who are not subject to U.S. rules. ....... Is it a federal crime to conspire to induce others to violate a U.S. civil law? ....... The answer to that is an obvious “no”. ...... prosecuting this case against Mega, especially if Defendants get good criminal lawyers who also understand copyright law, is going to be an uphill battle for the government. ..... the indictment identifies four films that the defendants supposedly distributed before release: The Green Hornet, Thor, Bad Teacher, Twilight–Breaking Dawn Part 1. But Count 4 only charges one such act of prerelease infringement, the movie Taken. What about the other films? Why were those not also charged? .......... Finally, this case is extremely interesting from a JURISDICTIONAL standpoint. One of the very first issue to be litigated will be extradition to the United States. Does the United States have jurisdiction over anyone who uses a hosting provider in the Eastern District of Virginia? What about over any company that uses PayPal? That’s a very broad claim of power, and I expect it will be vigorously contested.

TorrentFreak: Mega Aftermath: Upheaval In Pirate Warez Land

While last week’s shutdown of MegaUpload is of huge interest in itself, but a wave of aftershocks and side-effects are proving equally fascinating to watch. In addition to causing all sorts of problems for legitimate users of file-sharing services, there is no avoiding the fact that certain elements of the piracy scene are in a mess. But amazingly, still the beat goes on. ....... The perception of the established ground rules had been changed, without the passing of a single new law. ....... “If the US government can come for Kim Dotcom it can happen to almost anyone,” a file-hosting operator told TorrentFreak on condition of anonymity. “I’m trying to think of everything I did possibly wrong in the last 3 years and worrying about that and the next 3 years also, if we even have that long.” ..... For many hosting sites it was time to react – quickly. ......... drastic actions taken by services such as Filesonic and Fileserve who shut down all 3rd party sharing and, like many others, closed down their affiliate payout programs ...... file-hosting competitors such as 4shared, Rapidshare and Hotfile had grown as users hunted for spare capacity ...... huge libraries of both legitimate and pirated material were wiped out as filehost after filehost deleted an impossible-to-calculate number of files and closed down thousands of suspected infringing accounts. ....... For more than half a decade Hollywood and the recording industry have spent millions of dollars not so much on actually eliminating illegal content, but getting rid of links to content such as those found on BitTorrent........ But this week, without a single cease and desist being sent, cyberlockers across the globe not only self-deleted vast quantities of files, but in doing so made millions of links across thousands of ‘linking sites’ completely useless too. ......... While there is money to be made in torrent sites, the content sharers there are largely altruistic. ...... But like worker ants whose nest has just been smashed apart by angry humans, others are utterly unfazed and just want to know which hosts are still paying out. Despite the climate of fear, quite a few hosts say they are ...... Cyberlockers are in a mess, but already recovering. Release sites are continuing, albeit with a reduced number of multiple links to the same content. ...... Perhaps the best test is whether it’s now very hard or impossible to find and download popular content. Not even close.

This MegaUpload stuff is related to SOPA/PIPA. The people who lost the battle in Congress hit back in New Zealand. There is no fighting the technology. But the music and movie industries have the option to come up with new business models.

The Solution Is Tech Heavy, Data Heavy

My BusiCopy Cofounder Anuj Bikram Thapa

Me In The New York Times

A few weeks back Anuj and I became Cofounders at 50% each to BusiCopy, a social network for businesses.

Before I came to America I was renting a place near the largest library in Nepal. Anuj was friends with the landlord's son. And we got to know each other. I came to America and kind of lost touch for the most part. He went to Japan. He was there for seven years doing hotel management. We might have exchanged an email or two along the way.

He returned to Nepal. The country was going through the final phases of a decade long civil war. And so going into tourism, his first choice, was not an option. To that point his only experience with computers was that he had used them for personal use.

In January 2006 he decided to go into IT. He, his brother in the US Amit Thapa, and that brother's friend Ujjyol Raj Singh teamed up. Amit was studying IT in Texas. He dropped out. Little knowledge is dangerous. You end up becoming an entrepreneur.

Quora Wants To Be Facebook Plus Wikipedia

Image via CrunchBaseQuora has worked so well for the startup scene. I hope it goes far and wide in terms of topics and people, but there is a part of me that feels like maybe Quora should stay focused on the startup scene. On the other hand the startup scene will teach Quora lessons that can then be replicated into other topic areas. Only time will tell.

Startups And The Art Of Selling

Image via CrunchBaseI for one think Facebook should have been forced to go public at a billion dollar valuation, or 10 billion max. But the company continues to be privately held. I could argue it has had several private IPOs.

There are several forms of exits. IPO is the rare exit. It is for the best of the breed. By definition most startups are not there, will never get there. Getting bought by a bigger company is a respectable, lucrative exit.

And there's the non exit exit. You don't go IPO. You don't get bought. But you become profitable. You start minting money. What's there to complain? I'd hope the vast majority of startups out there would go for this "exit."

Dave McClure: Fighting Words For The Angel List

If you follow tech in the blogosphere, it is hard to miss out on Dave McClure. I read this blog post of his the day it came out, but only today found out he was one of the people behind something called the Silicon Valley Microfinance Network. This guy is of interest. I have been meaning to comment on his post about The Angle List.

The Angel List Controversy, Fred's Marketing Controversy

The Kiva Story

Image via CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBaseMatt Flannery: 2007: Kiva And The Birth Of Person-To-Person Microfinance: started Kiva in 2005 ..... a growing network of microfinance institutions (MFIs) in more than thirty countries ..... MFI partners post the profiles of their loan applicants to the website ..... small loans via PayPal ..... e businesses pay the lenders back over a period of about a year ..... the human connections we build between lenders and borrowers have brought new lenders ..... One night, she invited me to come hear a guest speaker on the topic of microfinance, Dr. Mohammed Yunus. ...... my first exposure to the topic ..... the page in our workbook that asked: “What are your Career Goals? Matt ‘s Answer: “I want to live in the Bay Area and be an entrepreneur.” Jessica’s Answer: “I want to go to Africa and do microfinance. ...... “Spend as much time together as you can during the first year of marriage.” ....... Her task was to locate as many VEF businesses as possible and measure impact. She asked questions like “Do you take sugar with your tea?” and “Do you sleep on a mattress?” ...... Instead of poverty, we could focus on progress ..... I followed Jessica with my camera through Kenya and Tanzania ...... Using a set of culturally specific questions, Jessica worked to ascertain the quality of life of those she interviewed ...... the painful decisions familiar to anyone who has lived in poverty—whether to pay school fees, put food on the table, or buy medicine for a child suffering from a curable sickness ...... The $500 needed to buy an initial inventory and start a store was too great a barrier. So everyone walked. ...... a self-regulating lending marketplace where microfinance institutions could raise loan capital online to fund projects ...... business plan software ..... forced us to think about costs, revenue,
Image via Wikipedia and, most importantly, our plan for growth. ...... Jessica is an extrovert and very good at developing a web
 of connections. ....... a ten-page “feasibility plan” document printed from our business plan software. It was for an organization we called “Kesho.org.” In Swahili, Kesho means “tomorrow.” ...... It’s eerie reading the plan after all that has happened since then ...... During the period of a loan agreement, investors will receive frequent, real-time updates on the progress of SMEs working to pay back the loan. ...... a beta round involving fifty friends ..... $5,000 in capital for operational costs for the first year, and how we hoped to raise $150K in our first year of business in loans to the poor ....... an historical tension between the donor/lender desire to “know where my money goes” and the recipient organization’s need for efficiency ...... whether it was better to be seen as a charity or as a business ...... breaking existing mental models proved harder than it looked. ...... started to go to microfinance events and conferences ...... the UNDP Global Year in Microcredit Summit at the U.N. headquarters in New York ...... If microfinance is going to have a significant impact on world poverty, the argument goes, then MFIs will need to be integrated into the global economy and tap into the capital markets ...... 50 percent of our users would not lend on the site if Kiva adopted the for-profit model. ...... the vast majority of MFIs don’t qualify for commercial grade investment ...... We began to see person-to-person debt capital as a bridge for MFIs on a journey from donor dependence to tapping into the capital markets ...... almost every U.S.- based microfinance institution was incorporated in this country as a nonprofit. ...... Scalability and commercialization were big questions ..... A cloud of legal uncertainty began to hover over our idea ..... Whenever money is being exchanged between two people, someone in some government somewhere will begin to take notice ...... whether or not you are issuing an investment product to the public. If you are, things can become complicated ...... The SEC maintains a definition for what is and what is not a security. If the SEC rules that you are issuing securities, they require that such securities meet a long list of requirements. ....... a legal minefield ..... the topic of organizational type as it relates to raising money from the public ...... When we were at the end of our rope, the phone rang ..... A third issue was the U.S. Patriot Act ...... One of the first MFIs we were thinking of connecting with operated in Gaza, another in India ........ the process of asking for permission had taken a toll on us. We had reached a point where we didn’t live and breathe this concept anymore. It was no longer rewarding and we had lost touch with the reason we had started at all ....... it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to get much traction on the business unless we figured out a way to just start ...... we resolved to “just start” ..... Money and organizations are secondary, people are primary. ...... lending money is all about information exchange. In a sense, money is a type of information ....... Every time you load our website, it should be different ..... a dynamic where philanthropy can actually become addictive ...... We appeal to people's interests, not their compassion. ...... Whenever it is possible to collect data from the field, we collect it. Over time, we will display as much information about our partners, lenders, and borrowers as possible and let the users decide where money flows ...... the lender assumes the default risk. ..... Create loans between people, not necessarily organizations, where Kiva acts as a platform and MFIs act as distributors ..... The SEC seemed to me like a gigantic black box ....... One day, I just decided to cold call the SEC ...... even large scary organizations are made up of normal people and there is a lot to gain by simply reaching out to them in a transparent way ...... if we return interest to users on the Internet, we run the risk of being seen as a securities issuer ....... if we remove the interest rates from the service, the SEC would be unlikely to take notice and consider these loans as securities .... We would have to launch without interest rates on the site. ....... a short, memorable brand can be incredibly important in launching a company ..... I was able to buy it from the squatter for a clean $600. That was perhaps the best $600 I ever spent. ...... my electric guitar for a logo. We had a logo a week later. That was perhaps the best use I ever got out of that guitar ..... Moses Onyango is a pastor in Tororo, Uganda ...... Moses was ready to post and administer the loans of seven entrepreneurs in his community. ....... We emailed about 300 people, and all seven businesses were funded in a weekend. That was April 2005, and we raised $3,500 in a few days. We were blown away; everything worked. It was better than we expected. ....... Moses blogged his heart out, chronicling the intimate business challenges and successes ....... a sustained mental and emotional connection ..... These tiny, interpersonal loans were creating a consciousness that didn’t exist before. ....... At that point, I knew every user in the database. Then a stranger showed up: Premal Shah from PayPal. ...... Jessica and I were confessional, careful, thorough, strategic, and technical. Premal was passionate, charismatic, brilliant, wildly enthusiastic, and reckless ...... Premal continued to focus primarily on building support within both Ebay and PayPal for a corporate microfinance effort. ...... We told Moses to find fifty qualified entrepreneurs in Tororo by October ..... I had received nearly a thousand emails to my Kiva address. I checked the database logs and saw that we had raised about $10K that morning and that all the loans on the site were sold out. Why? We had been featured on the home page of DailyKos, one of the world’s largest blogs. Over a million people had read about Kiva that day and hundreds were actively discussing it online. ...... many of the emails were from MFIs all around the world ...... I heard from MFIs in Bulgaria, Rwanda, Nicaragua, and Gaza. ..... an overwhelming feeling: pain. ..... how much it actually hurt to not fully pursue a passion .... I quit my TiVo job the next Monday. Every day since has seemed more colorful. ..... Pretty soon I was surrounded by a tight group of true believers and my previous pain of distance was leavened by the blessing of community ...... Ebay supported Premal’s decision and to this day supports Kiva by donating to us free payment processing ..... Just a few months into our full commitment to this project, we had assembled an energetic nucleus of people ready to build something big. We hunkered down in Premal’s house and worked there, unpaid, for the first six months ..... The most pressing challenge we faced was to get more businesses on the site ....... creating a partnership program whereby microfinance institutions could use our site as a platform to attract low-cost debt capital—one borrower at a time ....... Signing up partners onto our system presented a significant challenge. We were facing the broken record of criticism that “it won’t scale.” ...... In response to the question, "What is your greatest need?" he overwhelming answer was, "Money for peanut seeds." ...... Fay learned of Kiva through an Internet blog in early 2006. He contacted Kiva ...... Tier 1 MFIs, the largest and most established, account for just 200 of the approximately 10,000 MFIs in existence ...... Many of the 9,800 MFIs are extremely small, opaque, unsustainable, and often impossible to contact internationally. We call this the “long tail” of MFIs ..... Our ability to take risks and dip into the long tail is what differentiates us from the microfinance investment funds ..... no previous credit history or formal, traceable identity .... they use reputational collateral and a hope for future access to funds in order to enforce repayment. ..... It took three months after the DailyKos event to get our first set of MFI partners on the site. By the fall, we had around twenty. As of April 2007, we have nearly forty ...... Sometimes, though, reality surprises you and the picture becomes more colorful than your wildest imagination ...... we needed to quickly expand our partnership base and work with well-vetted, growing, and transparent institutions ...... Africa currently represents only 10.4 percent of microfinance world-wide; the greatest areas of concentration lie in Southeast Asia and Central and South America ..... Microfinance has scaled best in places where crowds of people live in close quarters. Dense populations bring down the transaction costs ...... We came to see ourselves as a technology platform for microfinance institutions alleviating poverty anywhere ...... fascinating to see the similarities and differences in microbusiness across disparate geographies ...... Lenders showed unambiguous preferences according to region, gender, and business type: Africans first, women first, and agriculture first. A female African fruit seller? Funded in hours. Nicaraguan retail stand? Funded in days. A Bulgarian Taxi Driver? Funded in weeks ...... We had completed our 501(c)(3) application in late 2005. By the summer of 2006, we were still waiting. .... For nearly a year, our application was stuck in a pile of papers somewhere in Cincinnati ..... seven out of ten users choose to donate 10 percent on top of their loan to Kiva. For instance, after making a loan of $100, the typical user chooses to pay $10 on top of the loanbringing the total to $110 ..... Float refers to the revenue from the interest accruing in one's bank account ..... Eighty percent of our users re-loan their funds after being repaid ...... Kiva is managing a fund that will grow at well over a factor of two every year for the near future. Kiva earns about 4.5 percent interest in its bank account ..... That summer, however, Kiva was crawling along at $1000-$2000 in loans and 25 new users a day. ..... Running out of options, I ran the idea of becoming a for-profit by the board, but they shot it down unanimously. ...... filming for Frontline World on PBS. ..... The 15-minute piece ....... Like being in DailyKos a year earlier, the Frontline event was a gamechanging moment for the organization ...... Overnight, our loan volume went from approximately $3K per day to approximately $30K per day ..... Our lender base before the piece was around 6K. Today, it is around 60K. Before the show, we had processed $500K total in loan volume. By April 2007 we had processed around $5.5M cumulative and have a goal of being at $12M cumulative by the end of 2007. The Frontline piece was fundamental in making this happen. ....... e took our nonprofit from a point of financial crisis to a relatively healthy state ...... PayPal donates free transaction processing to us, which means we aren’t charged the usual 3% of every transaction ...... single mindedness unlocked a potential I never knew existed ..... what people can achieve when they lay their egos at the alter of something greater than themselves ...... recipients resent benefactors even as they consume the aid. ...... A benefactor assumes that the poor need your help to escape. A colonizer assumes the poor cannot escape. However, both share a common assumption—the poor are helpless ....... interest rates, which turn a charitable relationship into a business relationship, empower the poor by making them business partners ...... a deeper integration between daily decisions and core values. ...... the mobile devices loan officers carry as information retrieval tools ...... A data-rich system is inherently more transparent. Transparency allows more accurate risk assessments ....... In many places, the Kiva website is serving as the first ever public record of a particular person’s existence ...... the Internet is a promising platform for housing portable credit ratings. One day a borrower moving from one MFI to another, or one country to another, will be able to point to a Kiva profile as a reference point for creditworthiness. ..... Although microfinance can be an amazing tool to fight poverty, it can also be quite harmful when placed in the wrong hands. Predatory lending, fraud, and mismanagement are commonly cited in cases of MFIs that get it wrong ....... extensive offline monitoring ..... an international auditing and visitation program .... This will help us communicate to our users the financial health of our partners, the truthfulness of the information posted on the site, and the extent to which we are fulfilling our mission of alleviating poverty ...... This model thrives on information, not marketing ...... default and delinquency rates will fluctuate ..... Crises in a particular region—political, economic, or natural disaster– will cause temporary drops in repayment rates that will eventually stabilize ..... I firmly believe that repayment rates will stabilize at well over 90 percent .... Kiva is different from the typical international development organization in that the platform will deliberately show the negative as well as the positive stories. Thus, in cases where things go bad, our lenders will know.

Paul Graham: Disrupt

Etsy, GroupOn, Zynga

Image via CrunchBase
Steven Carpenter

On Etsy

While eBay saw its marketplace growth stagnate at just over $1 billion a quarter, I see several areas Etsy must optimize just to pass $100 million in business

On GroupOn

No other startup has gone more quickly from launch to $1 billion+ in valuation except YouTube (12 months), which Groupon achieved in 16 months .... Groupon is achieving considerable revenue growth across all measures: more customers, higher deal prices, and rapidly expanding markets. ..... makes its model highly attractive (hence, every week seems to bring new copycats). .... Groupon gets more of its traffic from Facebook than any other site, including Google ...... the company does not hold any physical inventory and its customer acquisition costs are so low. ..... Groupon has raised a total of $171 million to-date, employs more than 200 people, and serves 52 markets. Its next biggest competitor, LivingSocial, has raised $49 million, employs about 50 people, and serves 14 markets. .... Groupon is far ahead. The data suggests that Groupon is not yet feeling the impact of all the new entrants. ..... There is no reason to believe that this concept couldn’t be extended to virtually any category or service provider.

On Zynga

Like YouTube, Twitter, and Groupon, social gaming pioneer, Zynga is a member of the “fastest from founding to $1B valuation” club, having earned its membership in just 19 months. .... over half of Facebook users are playing Zynga’s games .... Farmville alone now attracts over 100 million unique users per month, just 10 months after it launched. ..... PayPal said last week that Zynga is now its 2nd largest customer by volume ..... “Zynga Nation” ...... the beneficiary of a once-in-a-decade tectonic shift in the Internet landscape. ..... Zynga accounts for 31% of all active applications on Facebook, more than 2 times Facebook’s own apps ..... The company also continues to sit on a warchest of its largely unspent $219 million in venture capital that it was able to raise because of its rapid success. ..... Zynga’s incredible hockey stick growth of the past 2 years appears to have come to an end .... Games are the No. 1 application in the Apple App Store. Collectively mobile games are a $3B+ a year business

These three companies, especially Zynga and GroupOn, have grown very, very rapidly. Their rise has been dizzying. I have a feeling we will see more and more rapid rise companies. So when I ask, which is the next Zynga, I am not necessarily talking of the social gaming space. Actually, I am not. I am asking, what could be that next space that will create that next rapid rise company?

A lot of the action is moving to the mobile web space.

Related articles

• Zynga: The Google Of Games? (technbiz.blogspot.com)
• Facebook, Zynga charge fees for share sales (sfgate.com)
• Facebook, Zynga Impose Pre-IPO Fees (businessweek.com)
• Facebook, Zynga Impose Fees on Private Sales of Shares (Douglas MacMillan/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
• Facebook, Zynga Impose Fees on Private Sales of Shares (businessweek.com)
• AOL Joins the Daily Deal Movement with Groupon-Like Site (mashable.com)
• The Headache Of Share Trading For Facebook And Zynga (allfacebook.com)
• Fastest-Growing Facebook Pages (forbes.com)
• For 'Zynga to become the Google of games,' it will take more than good timing (games.com)
• Facebook, Zynga Add Fees to Stock Sales, as Early Employees Consider Sale Options (insidefacebook.com)

Adoption And Missed Opportunities

Image via Wikipedia

The Chromium Blog: WebP, a new image format for the Web: a single component of web pages is consistently responsible for the majority of the latency on pages across the web: images....Images and photos make up about 65% of the bytes transmitted per web page today.

The engineering accomplishment might be the easy part. Adoption might be the hard part. There still are people whose ISP is AOL. Most people who use IE use some primitive version.

Slate: The Other Social Network:That spring, Goldberg started instant messaging with Mark Zuckerberg. In March, he met with Zuckerberg and Sean Parker, the Napster co-founder and early Facebook investor, at a Starbucks on 96th Street. According to Goldberg, Parker tried to persuade Zuckerberg to acquire CU Community. Zuckerberg didn't tip his hand, but Goldberg says they kept in touch. In June, he says, Zuckerberg invited him to Palo Alto, Calif., where the Facebook crew had moved to work on the site. Goldberg flew out and stayed with Zuckerberg and pals for two weeks. "I think we went to one Stanford party," he says. There was "no crazy partying or drinking," Goldberg says, despite what The Social Network may suggest...... One factor was that Zuckerberg's site had the financial means to expand. Goldberg says he turned down advertisers, including MTV, and didn't seek out venture capital .... He started writing a food blog

The dude should have joined the Facebook team at the earliest possible date. Capitalism.

In The News

CNet: Google offers JPEG alternative for faster Web

Google Social Web Blog: Google URL Shortener Gets a Website: http://goo.gl

The Official Google Blog: Explore the world with Street View, now on all seven continents: everyone can now see places from all seven continents

AP: IMDb turns 20 with a refreshed, video-full website:the site has 100 million monthly visitors worldwide.

Adventures in Capitalism: Did Peter Thiel Make The Single Best Investment In History?:In 2005, Peter Thiel paid $500,000 for a 10% stake in Facebook..... his stake is worth between $2-3 billion. That's a 6,000x return on his capital in 5 years.

The Next Web: Square using social media stats for credit checks and fraud prevention:the number of Yelp reviews a business has or the number of Twitter followers a business has.... Square, which wants to be “PayPal for the real world”

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• Why did Columbia's Campus Network lose out to Harvard's Facebook? (slate.com)
• No IPO Till 2012: Facebook Director, Peter Thiel (gigaom.com)
• Did Peter Thiel Make The Single Best Investment In History? (chrisyeh.blogspot.com)
• No IPO Till 2012: Facebook Director, Peter Thiel (nytimes.com)
• Mark Zuckerberg Describes the 'Dirty Tricks' That Led To the Facebook Movie [Facebook] (gawker.com)
• Clarium Capital President: Facebook is relatively undervalued among tech giants (venturebeat.com)
• Did Peter Thiel Make The Single Best Investment In History? (cloudave.com)
• Business Lessons of "The Social Network" (fool.com)

2010: Location, Random Connections, The Inbox, Frictionless Payments

I am not suggesting all four spaces carry equal weight; they don't. Location carries more weight than all the rest put together. 2010 is location's year. By now that is conventional wisdom. I can see why, and I buy into it. But these strike me as spaces to watch for this year. One of the other three might claim 2011 as their year. And I am open to adding other spaces to the list if I can find them, read up on them, imagine them. This list of four is by far not exhaustive. Charlie (@ceonyc) had a blog post a few weeks back (my comment) that ranked high on my vision grid, and he talked about some spaces he would like to see action in as an early stage investor. And he does not even touch upon these four spaces. So what you are looking for impacts what you see. There's plenty of exciting stuff happening in many directions. The 2010s will be what the 1990s should have been but weren't. We will dream big again, only this time there will be less fluff. Real businesses will get built. Old industries will get reinvented. New industries will see light of day. These are exciting times.

(1) Location

I'd be rooting for FourSquare even if it were half the size of Gowalla, but it makes it easier to root for because it is crushing the competition. But like the Google and Amazon people will tell you, don't spend too much time looking in the rear view mirror. Focus on customer feedback more. Grow.

Selling FourSquare Would Be A Mistake, Partnering Would Be Genius

The mobile web is bigger and is growing faster than the old web. Location is key to the mobile web. FourSquare has itself a sweet, sweet spot. All the best to Dennis (@dens) and Naveen. (@naveen)

(2) Random Connections

Chatroulette Is For Real

We could have had Mark Zuckerberg, but instead we lost him to the Valley. We should try better with Andrey. We want people all over the world to be able to meet random New Yorkers. There's the fun in sharing.

(3) The Inbox

ReadWriteWeb: Gmail Becomes an App Platform: Google Adds OAuth to IMAP ....Syphir, which lets you apply all kinds of complex rules to your incoming mail and then lets you get iPhone push notification for your smartly filtered mail.
Rapportive - an incredible GMail contacts plug-in.
Your Inbox as Platform: Google Calendar More Closely Integrated With Gmail

Everything is email, if you think about it. When I first started blogging, I was like, great, I no longer need to flood people's inboxes. All I have to do is send them a link to a blog post. Facebook is email. People who don't know you don't email you, and people who email you are only one click away if you want to know the latest in their lives. No need to call them up, or ask them. Twitter is the ultimate email. Eric Schmidt even called it that, but he was a little miserly in the description. A poor man's email? I am poor, everyone is poor by Eric's standards, but hey! FourSquare is email. I am emailing you my location.

Don't give up on email. Email is here to stay. There is so much that can be done with the inbox. I am glad some startups are looking into it.

For now all I want is about four different inboxes. Inbox 1, emails only from individuals whose addresses I have saved. Inbox 2: emails from those people that are going out to more than me. Inbox 3: emails from mailing lists I have subscribed to. Inbox 4: everyone else.

(4) Frictionless Payments

Venmo is my FourSquare in this space. I take hometown pride in Venmo. But then supporting FourSquare and Venmo is like supporting Obama. (Jupiter And Obama) It helped that the guy was outstanding. I get the impression Venmo is also a leader in this crowded space. It was listed in Time magazine as one of the top 50 sites of 2009, along with Drop.io, another hometown goodie. (@lessin)

It is like this, there was barter trade back in the days. Then they had coins, some coins were as big as cart wheels. Then paper money. Then plastic. Then PayPal. We are about to hit the next phase. That is where Venmo comes in.

In my homevillage in Nepal growing up, I saw rice used as currency. Farm workers got paid in rice. Vegetable vendors would give you vegetables for rice. And it was pretty smooth, as in frictionless, enough to give Kortina a run for his money. (@kortina)

What I am telling you, Kortina, is rice as currency is pretty cutting edge, and there was major trust involved.

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Google, Micropayments, And Online Newspapers

Google's proposal to the Newspaper Association of America

This article has been making the rounds this morning among some of my friends: Google developing a micropayment platform and pitching newspapers: “‘Open’ need not mean free”.

This truly is the wild wild west.

Image via CrunchBase

Noone really has a clue. Newspapers are imploding left and right. News is more important than ever before. But newspapers are not? Journalists are not? Many people don't know how to square that circle.

Companies need focus. That is why Cisco outsources its manufacturing. And big companies don't necessarily do well in every little venture they paddle into. But Google is Google, and Google Checkout has been a minor hit, although, it has to be noted, in the aftermath of Google Checkout PayPal has only grown.

But micropayments, I believe, are a tougher nut to crack. PayPal did not show up in

Image via CrunchBase

the face of an imploding industry. It simply showed up.

Will people pay? Even small amounts? Will ads carry the day on their own? I don't know. I don't know anyone does.

We sure will see a lot of creative destruction in the space over the next few years.

My PayCheckr team has as good a chance as any, and I am sure there will be several players in the space.

(Disclaimer: I sit on the PayCheckr Board, and am a small part owner.)

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Netizen: The First Blog To Place The PayCheckr Button
The PayCheckr Promise
PayCheckr Potential
PayCheckr: Bringing Money Into Blogging?

Netizen: The First Blog To Place The PayCheckr Button

The promise of blogging is that anyone, but anyone can get published. The promise of PayCheckr is that any blogger, but any blogger can hope to make part or full time income blogging.

Image via CrunchBase

PayCheckr's beauty is that it economizes space. It is a button. It is small in size. It can be placed anywhere at your blog. I'd prefer to have it show at the bottom of all my blog posts, just like the Share This button.

It is so easy to create your particular PayCheckr button. Right now you don't even have to register. You pick and choose your channels, and, voila, your button is ready for you. Copy and paste your code.

Image via CrunchBase

I have started out with four channels.

1. PayPal Donate
2. Amazon Affiliate: my favorite channel
3. Ad Supported
4. My Blog's Kindle Subscription

I recommend the Amazon Affiliate program to all bloggers out there. I think your Amazon store has to go with the theme of your blog. If your blog is about digital cameras, your Amazon storefront will do brisk business if it displays digital cameras.

There is one bottleneck with using the PayCheckr button. You can't blame the button if yours is not a high traffic, great content blog. PayCheckr has not made me rich yet, but I think it is because my blog is not yet the high traffic, much linked to blog that I am working to make it. The onus is on me.


But you don't want to wait until you are a large traffic blogger before you put a PayCheckr button on your blog. Do it now. Do it right away. Get people into the Amazon store through your blog.

The PayCheckr button is beautiful for how little space it takes. It is so not intrusive.

I am obviously leading by example here. My blog Netizen was the very first blog to get a PayCheckr button. I want 10 million bloggers to follow my lead. That will allow you to experiment with various business models for your blog.

Every blog is a storefront. PayCheckr can turn every blog into a storefront. Take the plunge.

In a few months you should be able to have tens of revenue channels for your blog, and the button does not get fat in the process at all. Same small space, many different revenue models. You tweak to your heart's fill.

Go to PayCheckr and get your button now. In about 10 seconds, you will be in business.

Eons.com: Share Your Love Of Eons With The Share Button

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Netizen: The First Blog To Place The PayCheckr Button
The PayCheckr Promise
PayCheckr Potential
PayCheckr: Bringing Money Into Blogging?

(Disclaimer: I am a small part owner, and part time team member of PayCheckr.)