Visible Path Sees Its Way To An Acquisition

from TechCrunch by Nick Gonzalez

Corporate social networking application Visible Path is set for an acquisition soon. The term sheet has been signed and the acquirer, says the company, is a “multi-billion dollar international company with established sales and technology operations.” No word on the terms of the deal, but a worthwhile exit price would be high considering the $22.7 million already invested in the firm.

Visible Path differs from other business social networks like LinkedIn or Xing, by creating your social network out of your email inbox. The service is based on an Outlook plug-in that impressed us earlier because your connections are based on the frequency of your real interactions and not random friending or pokes. These relationships are mapped online and make up a directory of people you can search through by skill or relationship. It’s a useful feature that I imagine a service like the “email utility” Xobni implementing.

Visible Path never saw as great a level of adoption as LinkedIn, which launched around the same time and has effectively cinched the U.S. corporate social networking scene. Maybe their new partner will give them some much needed exposure.

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JibJab Now Puts You In a Pepsi Ad—Thanks Lloyd Braun

from TechCrunch by Erick Schonfeld

We’ve written before about JibJab’s Sendables electronic video greeting cards that cost $0.50 to $3 each. Now, they found a sponsor in Pepsi for two holiday greeting videos through former Yahoo exec Lloyd Braun’s new company BermanBraun, which works with Pepsi to create online video branding opportunities like this one. You can upload a photo of your head and that of your friends (or frenemies) to personalize the cards, just as you can with JibJab’s Starring You series. A “This Sendables is free thanks to Diet Pepsi Max” message flashes for a few seconds before the greeting starts, and if you don’t blink, you will see that you are actually part of the promo. In the Snowball Fight card below, which the folks at JibJab made for us, you can see Mike and me in elf costumes doing a cartwheel over the sponsorship message. So not only can the audience now star in JibJab videos, but it is also being roped into pitching products. Hey, where are our royalties?

And now a message from Jibjab’s sponsor [Update: The Pepsi ad only appears on JibJab.com, not in the embedded player below]:

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Loic Le Meur’s Ten Rules For Startup Success

from TechCrunch by Michael Arrington

The Financial Times has a profile of French (now Silicon Valley) entrepreneur Loic Le Meur today.

Loic is an accomplished entrepreneur - he founded uBlog (merged with Six Apart), organizes the annual Le Web conference and has now created Seesmic (note that I’m an investor in Seesmic). So even though he’s French, his advice, when given, is worth listening to.

Included in the article are his ten rules for startup success. Reprinted below.

1. Don’t wait for a revolutionary idea. It will never happen. Just focus on a simple, exciting, empty space and execute as fast as possible
2. Share your idea. The more you share, the more you get advice and the more you learn. Meet and talk to your competitors.
3. Build a community. Use blogging and social software to make sure people hear about you.
4. Listen to your community. Answer questions and build your product with their feedback.
5. Gather a great team. Select those with very different skills from you. Look for people who are better than you.
6. Be the first to recognise a problem. Everyone makes mistakes. Address the issue in public, learn about and correct it.
7. Don’t spend time on market research. Launch test versions as early as possible. Keep improving the product in the open.
8. Don’t obsess over spreadsheet business plans. They are not going to turn out as you predict, in any case.
9. Don’t plan a big marketing effort. It’s much more important and powerful that your community loves the product.
10. Don’t focus on getting rich. Focus on your users. Money is a consequence of success, not a goal.

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Buy A Virtual Gift And Fight Malaria

from TechCrunch by Michael Arrington

Causes is one of the most popular Facebook Applications, with over 300,000 active users. The service, which leverages virality to spread the word about worthy causes, aggregates 40,000 causes that benefit 13,000 nonprofits worldwide. In many ways, it’s a pyramid scheme for good.

Now founders Sean Parker and Joe Green are leveraging another phenomenon to increase participation even further: virtual gifts. Facebook has been selling them since February this year. A number of unofficial virtual gift applications created by third parties have also launched on Facebook. Clearly, they are here to stay. Facebook says 24 million of them have been given away through the official application alone (although many of them were free).

But now you can give a gift that says a little more than “I spent a dollar on you.” With Gifts from Causes, you can give a $10 - $200 gift to a friend. Each virtual gift (see image below) benefits a different charity. 100% of the proceeds (minus only credit card fees) go directly to the charity.

$10 gives two blankets to people in a disaster area. Or one insecticide-treaded bed net to a child in Africa to fight Malaria. Or a soccer ball to a poor child. etc. So the next time you want to send your boyfriend a rose, think about spending $15 instead and sending him a teddy bear. In the real world, a sick child will receive a real teddy bear, thanks to your generosity.

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Is Beacon Inflating Facebook’s Visitor Numbers?

popups or includes being counted as traffic/uniques

Is Beacon Inflating Facebook's Visitor Numbers?

from TechCrunch by Erick Schonfeld

While Facebook's Beacon program has been drawing the ire of many people because of the privacy issues surrounding it, advertisers might be equally concerned about whether Beacon is inflating Facebook's overall visitor and traffic numbers. Yesterday, Compete reported that Facebook's unique visitors went up 20 percent in the month of November, after a controversial dip in September and practically zero growth in October. Could the increase have had anything to do with the launch of Beacon in early November?

In a word, yes. Every time someone visits a Facebook Beacon partner (there were 40 of them at the time of the announcement) and performs a pre-defined action like writing a review or rating a hotel, a little Beacon toast pops up alerting you that your action is being sent to Facebook. That pop-up is actually coming from Facebook, and in some cases may be counted as a Facebook page even though the person seeing it does not normally click through to Facebook. It is triggered by a tag on the partner's page known as an iFrame, which then tells your browser to load a page from Facebook within the site you happen to be visiting. This occurs even when a non-Facebook member visits that page and performs the same action. In that case, it creates a ghost iFrame, though, because the viewer does not see anything. But data is still sent to Facebook.

I called up Jay Meattle at Compete, who wrote the post, and he confirmed that of the 29.2 million unique visitors Compete counted for Facebook in November, those could also include visitors to Facebook iFrame "pages," which are really nothing more than a pop-up on a partner site. So, for instance, if you write a review on Yelp, a Beacon partner, a JavaScript is executed for all users writing a review (http://www.facebook.com/beacon/beacon.js.php) and an iFrame is launched (http://www.facebook.com/beacon/auth_iframe.php). That review on Yelp can now count as a unique visitor on Facebook.

So how many Beacon iFrames "visits" did Compete mix up in its numbers? Meattle says that 2.3 million people triggered a Beacon iFrame in November. But he wasn't able to tell me what the overlap is because a portion of those 2.3 million people could have already been counted as Facebook visitors when they visited Facebook previously, and thus would not be counted again. The Beacon pop-up would be treated in that case like any other Facebook page. (That is, after the first one, it would count towards page views, but not towards unique visitors). But remember, these iFrames are triggered by non-Facebook members as well who never go to Facebook proper. That would explain why Facebook had such a huge jump in visitors in November. If all 2.3 million of those iFrame visitors were counted improperly as part of Facebook's total, that would account for nearly half of the 4.9 million jump in unique visitors measured by Compete.

Another strange thing about the Compete numbers is that they show unique visitors going up by 20 percent but page views only going up 2.58 percent. That could be due to lots of things, like Facebook users doing more stuff with apps on a single page, clicking off to Websites controlled by application providers, or Facebook just becoming more efficient in not making you click around as much to do the same things. But I wonder if that is partly Beacon-related as well.

Will wel see the same inflation in comScore's November numbers when they come out next week, or in other measuring services such as Quantcast, HitWise, or Alexa. The folks at comScore assure me that they filter out any traffic or pages not requested by users such as pop-ups, so it might not be an issue for them. I don't know how the other measuring services treat iFrames. But in an age when Websites are interchanging so much data and so many actual applications, where one begins and the other one ends is becoming blurred. Do page views even matter anymore? Do uniques? Maybe it is time for some new metrics.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it's time for you to find a new Job2.0

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