Posts tagged Publicly
LinkedIn Can Teach Facebook a Few Things About Being a Publicly Traded Social Media Company
Feb 11th
Thanks to Facebook’s faltering stock prices since its IPO, many in the business world wonder if social media companies like Twitter and Pinterest will ever become business models worth investing in. It would seem that monetizing social activity is the current holy grail of business. After the posting of last quarter’s earnings, LinkedIn is proving it possesses [...]
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Zynga Is Now A Publicly Traded Subsidiary Of Facebook
Dec 16th
Zynga CEO Mark Pincus named his gaming company after his late American bulldog, a beloved yet health issue-ridden breed with a short life expectancy. Ninety-five percent of four-year-old Zynga’s business depends on Facebook. Will Zynga’s overdependence on Facebook make it repeat the story of the bulldog it was named after?
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Zynga priced its shares in the $8.50-$10 range. It aims to be the biggest tech IPO since Google’s in 2004.
When the company began trading on NASDAQ this morning, the public offering kicked off at the high end at $10 per share. Forbes reports that shares did not see a customary first-day trading pop. It has, however, sold 100 million shares at $10 each. Zynga is valued at $7 billion.
A few days ago, analysts predicted that Zynga would under-perform, and that shares were priced too high for a company with such a high-risk business model. Sterne Agee analyst suggested a $7 target. Within the first 10 minutes of trading, it dropped below its initial public offering price.
In its developer agreements, Facebook promises Zynga that it won’t make any Facebook games. If it does, Zynga can bolt. In its initial filing, Zynga noted that almost all of its unique monthly active users were from Facebook. But Facebook will not flat out buy Zynga because Google is a Zynga investor – and Facebook certainly doesn’t want to pay off one of its main rivals. That’s why Zynga is keeping its options open.
In October, Zynga launched Project Z, a social network designed for games and discussions about them. It’s hosted on Zynga’s own site, and was designed as a way to gain a bit of independence from Facebook. One month prior to the announcement of Project Z, and one day after Facebook’s f8 conference, Google launched Zynga’s CityVille on Google+, hinting at another node of independence from Facebook. Google had been building a game platform for a year or more prior to the CityVille Google+ announcement. Some analysts believe that Google Plus games will rival Facebook.
Zynga launched its first Android social game in November 2010. A few months later, it launched the hit Words With Friends for Android, again shifting the focus away from Facebook dependence.
Even still, Zynga’s mobile games are tied to the social graph, and Project Z uses Facebook Connect.
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World’s Largest Free Source of Real-Time Keyword Ranking Data Now Publicly … – MarketWatch (press release)
Oct 11th
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World's Largest Free Source of Real-Time Keyword Ranking Data Now Publicly …
MarketWatch (press release) "As a reliable public benchmark, the STAT Codex has the potential to become a part of how we talk about SEO every day-in the same way that comScore or Hitwise are used to talk about online market share," he says. The company timed the launch of the … |
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Foursquare’s Push API to Be Released Publicly Today
Sep 14th
Foursquare’s Push API, which the company first unvieled to developers in February, will be publicly released sometime this afternoon, according to a post on BetaBeat.
Select developers have had access to the API since the company’s last hackathon and have been using it to build applications that take advantage of the Foursquare’s push notifications. The API will go into a public beta just a few days before the company’s global hackathon on Saturday.
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So what kind of uses will this API have? BetaBeat’s Adrianne Jeffries describes it as a “magical tool that will allow developers to build apps that can remind you to buy milk when you walk past the grocery store.”
A more specific example would be 4sqtransit, a service that sends up-to-date public transit schedule information to people when they check into a transit stop. It works by pairing a Foursquare user’s check-in with data about transit stops and schedules from another database. Depending on their location, it sends a text message to the user containing the next few departure times.
4sqtransit creator Matt McCormick explains in further detail:
When a user checks in on Foursquare, I receive a notification from the Foursquare Push API that the user has checked in, with details about which of my users checked in and where they checked in at. My service then matches this Foursquare user to the user in my database to determine which transit agency they use, which they specified when they signed up for my application. I then query that transit agency for the nearest transit stop, based on the GPS coordinates of the user’s check in location from Foursquare, and calculate the distance from the user to the transit stop. If the stop is within 100 meters of the user’s check in location, then I move forward and deliver the stop times, otherwise I ignore the check in. To deliver stop times, I again query the user’s transit agency for the stop times in the next 2 hours and send this information to the user by text message, using Twilio.
Pretty neat. It should be interesting to see how this API is used once it’s available to a wider group of developers. For samples and documentation, check out its listing on Github.
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Visual.ly Infographic Search & Data Visualization Tools Launch Publicly
Jul 14th
In the world of a highly visual web, data has remained largely static and visually uninteresting. Visual.ly aims to change that with extensive infographic aggregation and a set of automated graphic data representation tools.
What Visual.ly Is an…
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Is Publicly Sharing Your Location Creepy? This App Thinks So
Mar 31st
You might want to file this under the “perhaps this was obvious, but we needed another app to show us” category, but if you check in, Tweet your location and otherwise publicly broadcast your GPS coordinates for all the world to see on the Internet, other people can see where you are.
Creepy is a desktop app for Windows and Linux and it’s a stalker’s dream come true. The big question, though, is should you stop sharing? And is it really all that creepy?
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Last year, all the talk was about PleaseRobMe, a website that simply showed where people were checked in. It did nothing more than a Twitter search for the Foursquare domain, but it brought to attention the idea that whenever you publicly broadcast your location, you also publicly broadcast your absence from home. You know, the place with the valuables.
Creepy takes this idea a step further. It takes a couple minutes to gather all the data – which it searches for according to Twitter or Flickr username – before showing a very detailed map of every Tweet, check-in and geo-tagged picture that person has posted to the Internet for months on end. And depending on how a particular piece of information was sent, such as from a smartphone with an accurate GPS signal, the results can be, well…creepy. We’re talking “Yep, I was next to that oak tree in the park when I took that picture” creepy.
So, should you stop broadcasting your location? I vote no. (And not because I want to stalk you, I swear.) I share my location all the time and for a number of reasons. It enables random and serendipitous connections to occur. I can look back and have all sorts of contextual information as I weave my way through the world. I can plug it all in to services like MemoLane and get a time-ordered snapshot of my own life, as I share it online. And in turn, it gets fed through algorithms and stuffed into features like Foursquare’s latest recommendation service, which looks at where I’ve been and suggests where I may want to go next. And that’s just the first step for what can be done with all of this location information.
I also get second hand value from all this public location sharing. I see people’s check-ins on Twitter and can figure out that the coffee shop down the street is the place to be. Tweets can help with a host of scenarios, from public health issues to mysterious explosions in Portland.
Of course, I may be a bit overzealous in my location sharing. It’s on, by default, for everything – pictures, check-in services (which are public) and Tweets. Go ahead – download Creepy and enter @rwwmike and you’ll see my recent trips to Palm Springs, CA and Austin, TX. You’ll see my bike ride across town to Golden Gate Park. You’ll see snapshots of food and beer and bikes.
This isn’t for everyone. If you have bad relationships with your exes or lawyers coming after you for bills, you might not want to live so publicly. And are we that far off from insurance companies gathering check-in information and using it to calculate your premiums? But that’s what Creepy is about, right? It’s saying “Look, you’re sharing your life on the Internet and really, everyone can see.” The question is, do you care? (And perhaps, far more importantly, should you care?)
Creepy is available for Windows and Linux with a Mac version on the way.
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