Facebook doubles office space in Seattle
The social network is spreading its wings in Seattle, taking advantage of relatively cheap office space and a pool of talented engineers in Microsoft and Amazon’s home town.
According to a blog post today, Mark Zuckerberg’s unstoppable web phenomenon is moving into 27,000 square feet of space in a 20-story block in downtown Seattle. That’s double the size of their current rented offices overlooking Pike Place Market and Seattle’s harbor.
Seattle is Facebook’s biggest engineering office outside its home in Palo Alto, California, with more than 60 engineers. Zuckerberg said when he visited in June that the city was a great place for hiring, with so many software and mobile superstars working for local firms like Microsoft, Amazon, T-Mobile and a host of smaller firms.
Facebook’s Seattle crew already led the tie-up with Skype — now a part of Microsoft — and is busy on more video calling, iPad and iOS projects.
“This new office will give us room to keep growing as we hire the best engineers in Seattle,” said Ari Steinberg, the head of Facebook’s operation in the city. Back in August 2010, when he set up the office, there were only three local employees.
The move will take place in late January 2012. The staff will get a great view of Lake Union, Seattle’s Space Needle and the I5 Interstate.
And if the damp Seattle winter gets too much, the flagship REI store is just round the corner for some rain-proof outdoor gear.
Brace yourselves: (former?) video titan takes aim at Netflix
By Lisa Richwine
It’s getting crowded in Netflix-land.
The field of players battling for customers in the fast-growing online video market may soon get another big-name entrant: Blockbuster, reinventing itself under new owners Dish after a disastrous run, looks ready to launch its long-awaited move into instant video streaming next week, another shot at grabbing customers frustrated with Netflix.
Blockbuster, a unit of Dish Networks, set a press conference for next Friday in San Francisco coyly named “A Stream Come True,” where it promises to unveil “the most comprehensive home entertainment package ever.”
CEO Joe Clayton and Blockbuster President Michael Kelly will appear at the event.
Blockbuster has already tried to lure Netflix customers — upset by a recent price increase — to its subscription rental service, which currently offers DVDs by mail and in stores.
Adding streaming could better position Blockbuster to pull customers away from Netflix, the popular movie and television show rental service that helped push Blockbuster from a dominant chain of video stores into bankruptcy.
another opinion piece with the same recycled info. Yawn. Netflix is still the only good streaming service and is by far the best value.
Tech wrap: Google’s appetite for local grows with Zagat buy
Google bought Zagat, the popular dining recommendations and ratings authority, jumping into a niche Web market alongside the likes of OpenTable and Yelp. The 32-year-old Zagat, which polls consumers and compiles reviews about restaurants around the world, will become a cornerstone of Google’s “local offering” and work in tandem with its mapping services and core search engine, the Internet search and advertising leader said.
The Zagat acquisition also marks Google’s first foray into original content creation. Google had been accused of poaching user reviews from the likes of Yelp for use on Google Places pages, without providing a link back.
Only about half of Twitter’s 200 million-plus registered members log on daily but the microblogging website is chalking up growth of 40 percent every quarter in mobile device usage, CEO Dick Costolo said. Twitter is gearing up for a hotly anticipated initial public offering. But Costolo told reporters they would do so only on their own terms. Twitter.com now sees about 400 million unique visitors every month, a 60 percent leap from 200 million at the start of the year.
Apple sought to ban sales of Samsung’s Galaxy S and S II smartphones and the Galaxy Tab 7 in Japan, accusing its rival of violating patents relating to the iPhone and iPad, the latest salvo in a series of patent battles between the two companies. Last month, Samsung said it would delay the launch of its latest Galaxy tablet computers in Australia until after a court ruling in late September. Last week, a German court banned sales of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 7.7.
Hedge fund and major Yahoo shareholder Third Point demanded that the Internet company overhaul its board, saying the directors have made “serious misjudgments” and “destroyed value” for stockholders. A “reconstituted board with new directors who will bring fresh eyes, relevant industry expertise and increased investor alignment to the table is immediately necessary,” said Third Point, which has about $8 billion under management and owns about 5 percent of Yahoo shares.
California lawmakers rushed to write a bill to give Amazon.com a one-year reprieve from collecting certain sales taxes in exchange for dropping its ballot measure campaign to undo the tax, aides said. Under terms of the deal, Amazon will begin collecting sales tax on orders made by its California shoppers next September if federal legislation on online sales taxes that applies to all states fails to take shape by the end of next July.
Read an excellent post about how good this acquisition will be for Google. Some really great insight and analysis, check it out: http://ihaveoptions.blogspot.com/2011/09 /googles-best-acquisition-deal-ever.htm l
Sony not out of the woods
Sony cranked up its video game networks over the weekend starting with the Americas after an unprecedented breach led to the theft of personal information from more than 100 million user accounts. But experts continued to criticize the Japanese electronics giant for failing to plug other potential holes in its vast global network.
Using little more than a web browser, a search engine and a basic understanding of security systems, one researcher found more than five entryways into Sony’s systems in the United States and elsewhere shortly after the story went to press. ”"Sony still has several external security issues that need to be addressed,” John Bumgarner, chief technology officer for the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, tells Reuters’ Jim Finkle.
Bloomberg weighed in on Monday to lay out how hackers of Sony’s networks and others have Amazon.com’s cloud computing services to launch attacks, citing unnamed sources.
Kazuo Hirai, Sony’s No. 2, has played a prominent role in dealing with the crisis. Whether Sony recovers from the drubbing to its brand will decide if he takes his place as leader of the company.
We’ll have some tips for Hirai later this week at the Reuters Global Technology Summit in New York and Paris, where we plan to ask a broad range of tech chiefs how they would fix the one-time mighty electronics giant.
Tech wrap: Amazon offers Android apps, gets sued by Apple
Amazon.com opened its store for Google Android smartphone applications, ratcheting up its fight with Apple after the iPhone maker sued Amazon in a bid to stop the online retailer from improperly using its App Store trademark.
A New York court rejected a class action settlement hammered out between Google and publishers that would allow the Web search leader to scan millions of books and sell them online.
U.S. wireless operators will have to pay higher subsidies for cellphones as they come with more features, Sprint Nextel CEO Dan Hesse said during a chief executive panel at the annual CTIA wireless industry conference.
AT&T/T-Mobile USA’s ability to reach 95 percent of the population will mean a better wireless service for consumers, Business Insider’s Dan Frommer writes. Fewer phones, higher prices, and the year or two that it will take for customers to notice any appreciable improvement in network quality are reasons why the deal won’t benefit anyone but AT&T and Deutsche Telekom, Gizmodo’s Matt Buchanan opined.
RIM’s long-awaited tablet, the BlackBerry PlayBook, will go on sale through retailers and wireless carriers in the U.S. and Canada on April 19 at a base price of $499, matching the pricing for Apple’s iPad 2. But with no word on distribution plans outside North America, RIM will still be chasing Apple, one analyst said. Samsung said its base Galaxy 10.1 tablet will cost $499.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs was ordered by a federal judge to answer questions from plaintiffs’ lawyers in a class-action lawsuit that claims Apple created a music-downloading monopoly with its iPod player and iTunes store.
Social network for professionals LinkedIn boasted 100 million users. But while many may have signed up to create an online resume, only a fraction continues to use the service even on an occasional basis, writes VentureBeat’s Sid Yadav.
Tech wrap: Facebook friends Google exec
Facebook signaled an increased interest in deals, poaching a member of Google’s corporate development team to lead its fledgling merger and acquisition efforts and underscoring the rivalry between the social networking company and the search engine giant.
AOL hired Twitter co-founder Biz Stone as a strategic adviser for social impact. Its newest addition, The Huffington Post, also announced several hires. AOL announced last week that it was firing 20 percent of its global workforce and editor in chief for AOL’s Engadget Joshua Topolsky quit over the weekend. Still unclear was the fate of AOL freelancers.
Sales of Apple’s iPad 2 eclipsed that of its predecessor on its debut weekend, with around 1 million units being gobbled up. One analyst sees the iPad 2′s early success as a warning sign of a global tablet bubble, where supply could outpace demand for tablets by about 36 percent. While a glut might not make tablet makers happy, consumers aren’t likely to complain about the price drops that could result.
Did your iPhone wake you up on time this morning? Daylight saving time went into effect on Sunday in the U.S., but at least one person was late for work on Monday after his iPhone, having updated to DST on Sunday, reverted back to standard time on Monday, writes Engadget’s Sean Hollister.
GigaOM’s Ryan Kim thinks the deal between Angry Birds developer Rivo and Amazon.com to offer the sequel to the hugely popular game exclusively at the online retailer’s Android app store shows Amazon.com is serious about supporting the smartphone platform and highlights the importance of third-party app stores.
Need to know how to fend off a mountain lion or uncork a champagne bottle with a saber? A new iPhone app based on the website showmenow.com and “Show Me How” books has the answers.
How PayPal fumbled in the Wikileaks controversy
A unique feature of the web is that it was designed by idealists and capitalists alike. A hacker sensibility fights for an open, democratic structure, while profit-minded businesses helped shape it into a thriving industry. The more successful companies, like Google and Facebook, understand both ethics equally.
But idealism and commerce often clash as well, and woe to the company that is caught in the crossfire. This week, PayPal is such a company. The eBay online-payments subsidiary suspended the account that Wikileaks used to handle donations, citing a violation of terms that prohibit “activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity.”
The business logic seemed clear enough: Avoid the wrath of the U.S. State Department and steer the company away from the Wikileaks controversy. But it quickly backfired. Not everyone agreed Wikileaks was engaging in illegal activity, and many hackers and other idealists not only boycotted PayPal, they hit the company with denial of services attacks.
In a web conference in Paris, a PayPal executive was booed by the audience when he tried to explain why it shut down Wikileaks’ account. It later emerged that all it took was a letter from the State Department claiming Wikileaks was illegal. The PayPal executive, VP of Platform Osama Bedier, told the audience, “One of the signs that you’re a successful payments company is that hackers start to target you, this case isn’t anything different.”
That may be true as far as it goes, which isn’t very far. Again, web companies thrive when idealism and profits are in harmony, not when they are opposed. PayPal miscalculated how strongly many of its customers feel about the issue, and caving in under pressure that was no weightier than a letter doesn’t look very good.
Which is unfortunate for PayPal, because it is more vulnerable to the controversy than other companies. Many online shoppers are threatening to boycott Amazon along with PayPal, but Amazon has long been accepted by the mainstream consumer, which has never been quite comfortable with PayPal.
Similarly, other online-payments companies, like MasterCard, suffered denial of service attacks. But unlike MasterCard, PayPal has a reputation as a buggy, sometimes unreliable payments processor. Complaints about the company – about its customer service and its penchant for shutting down accounts for little reason – won’t be helped any by any disruption caused by the denial of service attacks.
Paypal looks like a bank to me. They’re regulated like a bank in Europe. Why aren’t they regulated like a bank here in the US? Someone really needs to investigate this further.
Hey Woot, its Amazon. You’re rich.
You gotta figure that every web entrepreneur waits (prays!) for a call or email that goes like this: “Hey dinky but popular outfit with a loyal customer base — super-huge company here. We want to buy you and make you rich. Have a nice day.”
Woot.com got a call like that from Jeff Bezos’s Amazon.com. They announced the deal on Wednesday. It’s speculated that Amazon paid about $110 million for the company that sells only one item per day at discounted prices, until inventory runs out. The next day, it moves on to another item such as you know, a water gun or a home pedicure kit.
Already, Woot is playing a part in the e-book reader price war between Amazon and its Kindle, and Barnes & Noble and its Nook, by selling Kindles cheap. (But sorry, It sold out before many of you woke up.)
The deal opens up a monstrous growth opportunity for the suburban Dallas outfit. But it doesn’t appear to have taken the starch out of the company’s irreverant CEO Matt Rutledge, who told employees that they should continue doing what they do best — whatever that is.
We plan to continue to run Woot the way we have always run Woot – with a wall of ideas and a dartboard. From a practical point of view, it will be as if we are simply adding one person to the organizational hierarchy, except that one person will just happen to be a billion-dollar company that could buy and sell each and every one of you like you were office furniture. Nevertheless, don’t worry that our culture will suddenly take a leap forward and become cutting-edge. We’re still going to be the same old bottom-feeders our customers and readers have come to know and love…
If that doesn’t give you an idea about the kind of shop Amazon is picking up, perhaps the video above — which, ahem, features a rapping monkey puppet — will. Oddly enough, this crazy-like-a-fox energy reminds us of another clip showing a bunch of wacky young Internet entrepreneurs giggling about their startup’s pending acquisition by a super-huge company. That would be when Google bought Youtube. For $1.6 billion. Chad and Steve, yeah they had a nice day.
Apple’s iPad in Jobs’ words
In case you weren’t among the members of the fourth-estate lucky enough to get an invitation to Apple’s highly-anticipated unveiling of the iPad on Wednesday, here are some of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs’ key comments about the new device and its importance to the company:
“Apple is a mobile devices company. That’s what we do.”
“When you feel all this power, and this much fun, and the internet in your hands, you’ll never want to go back.”
“When we set out to develop the iPad, we not only had very ambitious technical goals, and user interface goals, but we had a very aggressive price goal. Because we want to put this in the hands of lots of people.”
“At $499, a lot of people can afford an iPad.”
“Another thing we’re so excited about is that because we shipped over 75 million iPhones and iPod Touches, there’s over 75 million people that already know how to use iPad. We can’t wait for them to get their hands on it.”
On creating an entirely new class of computing product:
from Shop Talk:
Bezos and Zappos.com in a garden, K-I-S-S-I-N-G
Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos puts his quirky on in an online introduction geared to employees of Web shoe retailer Zappos.com.
The chief executive of the world's largest online retailer, in an 8 minute YouTube video posted on Zappos' website, told folks he "gets all weak-kneed when I see a customer-obsessed company."
Bezos, wearing a purple-red button-down shirt and standing in a very non-corporate-looking garden under natural light -- which gives the spot a quasi-online video dating feel -- enthuses about Zappos and his excitement over acquiring the zany online shoe company. Amazon announced on Wednesday the approximately $928 million deal, mostly in stock.
The video was included in an online letter posted by Zappos' CEO Tony Hsieh to employees, in which he assures staff that the acquisition is amicable and suggests a headline for the deal as "Zappos and Amazon sitting in a tree." Readers will remember the next line of that juvenile rhyme is "K-I-S-S-I-N-G." Online video dating moves fast.
Using an easel and a large pad of white paper (uh-oh, vaguely corporate feeling is invading the garden) Bezos explains what he calls the short list of things he learned running Amazon for the past 15 years -- "obsess over customers"; "invent"; and "think long term."
He tells war stories about the early days of his company, some of which are admittedly endearing -- as when he admits that Amazon's first customers were the employees' mothers, or describes a software snafu.
Facebook is getting more “in your face” lately. I get about 10 emails a week telling me I have “notifications.” There’s nothing there. Just facebook’s “suggestions” for friends. There is obviously a big push to get more users and to get current account holders to “share” more. This company will crash and burn if they don’t branch into something more durable and meaningful. People are getting fed up with the shallow human relationships that facebook promotes.