Significant losses, declining ARPUs, failing mobile acquisitions and shareholder selloffs. A stock price down to $3.01. A product catalog repeating previous mistakes. Media coverage ranging from the mystified to “I told you so”. A vague promise to get into gambling. Last week was miserable for Zynga and, as the bellwether of social games, was not good news...
Crazy Egg, a company that helps website owners to visualize visitor activity, has acquired the web toolbar product Hello Bar. The Hello Bar is a customizable, relatively unobtrusive bar that sits at the top of a website and directs visitors with a call to action. For example, the bar on Gary Vaynerchuk’s website prompts...
Seriously, people? Unbaby.me? You hate seeing baby pictures on Facebook so much that you have to use a Chrome extension to block them? Look, I get it. Parents and non-parents sort of can’t stand each other. For god’s sake, we can’t even hang out at the same bar together without it turning into some...
Editor’s Note: This is Redpoint VC Tomasz Tunguz’s third article in a series examining trends in the public and private technology markets. (Here are one and two.) It is widely believed that the stock market is a leading health indicator for the venture industry. In reality, however, the performance of the SP 500 tells us...
Bloomberg West The Fancy CEO Joe Einhorn is being courted by Apple. See Also Kanye West Is Hanging Out With Pinterest Competitor The Fancy Right Now Apple CEO Tim Cook Likes These 7 Beautiful Things Pinterest Competitor, The Fancy, Now Powers $10,000 Per Day In Sales Apple is in talks to acquire The Fancy,...
Here’s an absolutely amazing story of a man who was reunited with his son in an interesting series of events facilitated by some caring people and the power of the Internet. Here’s the story: Seven months ago, +James Worley ran across a homeless guy named Ron Paul Burden, a US Army Medical Specialist. Months...
As a venture investor and board member, I am relentlessly in pursuit of companies that can set forth aggressive goals, and then exceed them. One of my portfolio company CEOs likes to use the term “consciously competent” — which means being successful by design, rather than by luck. Clearly, this is a goal most...
As Spring cracked the Moscow frosts and March rains doused the streets, a computer in an innocuous server farm somewhere in the heart of the city winked to life. It was 2007, a year when many people became truly invested in online life. Twitter was a year old and the most popular smartphone was...
If you’ve read any of my previous marketing focused articles, you might notice a common, underlying theme: If you’re not measuring, you’re not marketing. In my professional life, this is a credo I live by. Companies live and die by how agile they are and how they’re meeting the demands of their customers. But...
The Gillmor Gang: John Borthwick, Danny Sullivan, Doc Searls, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — struggled with Comcastic bandwidth and hours on hold as Twitter and Apple tweaked their business models. It seems that Twitter is refurbishing the accomodations within 140 characters to create a nice new home for Twitter apps, in the process...