For some reason, a foolish White House aide decided to celebrate Blanche Lincoln's narrow primary victory by slamming organized labor -- and by extension the netroots and the entire progressive movement. Speaking to Politico's Ben Smith, the White House aide said: "Organized labor just flushed $10 million of their members' money down the toiled."
That aide is obviously a coward for hiding behind the shield of anonymity. Moreover, whoever it is doesn't have a good political sense. Anyone who thinks Blanche Lincoln has a shot at re-election is a fool. Bill Halter was the only chance at winning that seat in Arkansas, and they spent millions to defeat him.
As Sam Seder tweeted:
and when Blanche loses? MT @benpolitico Sr. WH Official: Labor just flushed 10 mil of its members $ down the toilet in a pointless exercise
And Ezra Klein too:
For a WH that prizes discipline and dislikes drama, some "Senior WH official" is sure shooting off to @marcambinder and @benpolitico
@benpolitico A few more statements like that one, and bet Labor will launch some more "pointless exercises."
Not to be outdone, the response of the AFL-CIO is a keeper:
AFL to White House: 'Labor isn't an arm of the Democratic Party'
The major labor federation AFL-CIO took sharp objection tonight to a White House official's assessment that they'd "flushed $10 million of their members' money down the toilet" in the "pointless exercise" of supporting the failed bid of Bill Halter to unseat Senator Blanche Lincoln.
"If that's their take on this, then they severely misread how the electorate feels and how we're running our political program. When we say we're only going to support elected officials who support our issues," said AFL-CIO spokesman Eddie Vale. "When they say we should have targeted our money among some key house races among Blue Dog Democrats --that ain't happening."
"Labor isn't an arm of the Democratic Party," Vale said. "It exists to suport working families. And that's what we said tonight, and that's what we're gong to keep saying."
I'll bet some people in the White House understand what's going on here, but whoever this senior official is has no clue about what's happening outside of the beltway. Time after time, the same White House aides make boneheaded, stupid political decisions that cost the President both popularity and political strength, in the process weakening and undermining the Democratic coalition. Instead of taking potshots at their supposed allies, maybe they should spend some time listening to the voices they hate, for example Greg Sargent's take on Lincoln's narrow win.
Blanche Lincoln's victory will be widely painted as a crushing loss for the left. Labor poured a huge amount of cash into the race, and there's no quibbling with the fact that this is a disappointing defeat.
But make no mistake: Progressive activists and labor mounted a challenge that was barely months in the making, and rallying behind Bill Halter, came within a hair of unseating a longtime incumbent who had the backing of the entire Dem establishment and the two most recent Dem presidents.
No matter what you read about this, the Halter challenge was a show of force by the left. Period. If you don't belive that, ask yourself why Lincoln suddenly found herself backing a tough-on-derivatives proposal in the Senate, why Obama had to cut radio ads and robocalls to save Lincoln, and why Bill Clinton had to come into the state to instruct voters not to listen to unions in order to save Lincoln's hide.
It remains to be seen who on the left will lift a finger to help Lincoln from here on out. More on this tomorrow, but for now, it's clear that the Dem establishment threw its weight behind a candidate who polls show is less likely to win the general election -- and Dems may have just lost themselves a Senate seat.
Whoever this aide is feels like he or she is king or queen of the world. Well, you know what? You're not God. You don't own this nation. We do. This is a government of the people. Not of senior White House officials. Not of lifelong DC hacks. And we're never going to let you forget that.
One of the most widely used photo sharing services connected to Twitter, Twitpic, has added a new feature today. Users will now have the ability to tag people in an image before sharing. Twitpic will allow the addition of name as well as Twitter username. When tagging anyone in a pic, Twitpic offers the option to send an @reply to the user being tagged.
This is a feature Facebook has had for some time. The often tight integration of Twitter with this service could provide added benefit similar to that of Facebook. With Twitpics 10 million users and new geolocation service, we're excited to see how people utilize this new function.
Does this sound useful to you, or just another Twitter tie-in you'll never use?
Image via Twitter
Like we didn’t know this wouldn’t happen eh.
Morgan Stanley is calling it the reshaping of the PC market and in the process gives Apple a great big pat on the back by raising its target price to $332.00. Leading the charge at Morgan Stanley is Katy Huberty who raised her iPad sales estimates to 10 million units in 2010 (up from 6 million). At the same time she believes the company’s stock price could go as high as $440 by May 2011.
What’s turned her head? The blistering sales of the iPad and the diminishing growth of the netbooks’. Among her findings:
- The iPad is on track to become the fastest ramping mobile Internet device out of the gate and one of the most popular in history (see Exhibit 2).
- Early iPad usage patterns validate the tablet as a computing device. It’s already overtaken the Web browsing share of devices like the iPod touch.
- It’s at least partially responsible for a sharp drop in the growth of netbook sales, which decelerated to -13% year-over-year in the month of April, from +45% in the first quarter of 2010. Huberty thinks the netbook phenomenon may have peaked; she expects tablet sales to overtake netbooks by 2012.
Source: Fortune
I buy that the iPad will bury netbooks - mostly because I think that netbooks were already well on the way to burying themselves. The iPad just gives a convenient and better option for most people who were going to get a netbook. Others will migrate to increasingly cheap full ultralight full sized laptops.
- felix
How Twitpic Face Tagging Does & Does Not Work (Yet) http://bit.ly/cMVMXe
Any of Facebook's over 400 million users will immediately recognize some new features on popular Twitter photo-sharing service Twitpic today as users can now tag people in their photos. In an blog post this morning, the two-year-old company announced it had passed the 10 million user mark that it sees 40 million unique visitors each month. The company says they are releasing their Face Tagging functionality "to show [their] thanks" to the community, but could it bring headaches and worries with it too?
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Face Tagging literally works exactly like tagging photos on Facebook. While viewing a picture, the text "In this photo:" is displayed below it with a link to begin tagging the photo. By clicking the link, users can then pinpoint people's faces in the photo and a box will appear around the face, as well as a pop-up dialogue box in which to enter the person's name and Twitter handle. Once done, users hit the "Done Tagging" button to return to normal browsing functionality - just like Facebook.
Honestly, the only difference between tagging photos on Facebook and on Twitpic is that the "Done Tagging" button appears above photos on the former and below photos on the latter. While Twitpic's new functionality is a dead lift of Facebook's long-existing photo tagging feature, it is smart to copy the social networking giant. Why re-invent the wheel? Instead, Twitpic is giving users a familiar experience, making the process easy and intuitive.
When users tag a face in a photo, by default they can send a rather dry tweet announcing the tag and including the user name of the person tagged, effectively working as a notification. First of all, the inability to personalize this message is a bit of a downer, but you can always just uncheck the box and send out the tweet yourself. Secondly, by default it does this every time you tag a person in a photo. You thought Facebook notifications were bad? Just wait until someone tags a photo with ten people and unwittingly tweets the photo out ten times.
Additionally, the only way Twitpic alerts users that they have been tagged in a photo is via Twitter - so users could be tagged in hundreds of photos and not know it if the tagger chose not to tweet the tags. Users do have the ability to delete tags of themselves on other people's photos, but right now the only way of knowing of such photos is to be sent the tweet, which not everyone will choose to do.
In a phone interview today, Twitpic founder Noah Everett told ReadWriteWeb that additional features, like the ability to view photos you're tagged in, are in the works and should be out in a few weeks. The goal, he says, has been to launch the tagging feature and use user feedback to determine the next logical step.
That next logical step, for many users, may be privacy controls - something the new feature lacks. On Facebook, users have the ability to manage photos they have been tagged in and remove their association from a photo once-and-for-all. The only option related to photo tags for Twitpic users is the option to allow other people to tag their photos. Everett says they are looking into possible privacy controls, such as a blanket rule preventing anyone from tagging you, or specific user-based bans to avoid those "crazy ex-girlfriends", as he put it.
Personally, I use Twitpic mainly as a means to an end - I upload photos to the service for sharing on Twitter via a mobile application, which means I don't visit the Twitpic web interface too frequently. How am I supposed to know when I'm tagged in a photo if the user tagging me chooses not to tweet it? Even if I visit the Twitpic homepage, there is no way for me to view an aggregated list of photos I am tagged in and no system for notifying me of such photos.
Everett says they are looking into ways of notifying users, including email alterts, but hopes that eventually app developers will add the functionality using Twitpic's API. I guess the good thing is if someone decides to surreptitiously tag me in a photo, for now the general public has no real great way of finding it either.
The other important thing to note from the launch of Twitpic's Face Tagging functionality is that it is a new stand-alone platform for a third-party application to another service. What that jumble of words means is that when other Twitter-based photo sharing apps add this functionality, it will be nearly impossible for users to effectively aggregate their tagged photos (and other meta-data) across platforms. With the low barrier of entry to Twitter applications, it seems likely that Twitpic's competitors would adopt similar features to keep up.
I spoke with Thomas Vander Wal, father of the phrase "folksonomy" which refers to collective tagging of meta-data, and he shared some interesting insights into this situation.
"Since others have done similar things on other platforms (Facebook, Flickr) the [intellectual property] is fuzzy and Twitpic can't claim it, so others are free to jump in," Vander Wal told ReadWriteWeb. "It would be in Twitter's best interest to build a central aggregation point for this."
This is exactly why Twitter is rolling out annotations, which have been testing recently and should be out soon. The annotations will create a standardized framework for third-party apps to build from, making interoperability between services much easier. Everett said he actually spoke with people from Twitter today about "coming together" and "rolling [tagging functionality] into annotations."
Strangely, however, Twitter mentioned in April that they planned on having "trending annotations" and letting developers battle for standardization. It would make sense that meta-data for tagged photos could be added to Twitter's annotations, and if the services adopted the standard, aggregation would be simple.
If not, then the entrepreneurial community, "somebody like PixelPipe" as Vander Wal suggested, would need to create another third-party Twitter service that would handle this aggregation - not an ideal solution going forward. We can't blame Twitpic for this fate: what they're doing is good in terms of pushing the platform forward. We can, however, bring up the privacy issues they've have raised with their new service and its apparent lack of controls, but then again, it is a brand new feature and more functionality is on the way soon.
Tagging photo courtesy of the LA Times
Discuss
How Twitpic Face Tagging Does & Does Not Work (Yet)
- Sarah PerezHow Twitpic Face Tagging Does & Does Not Work (Yet)
- (jeff)isageek
Just one week after announcing Events grouping for photos, Twitpic is rolling out Face Tagging.
Just as you do on Facebook, you can now tag images of you and your friends and acquaintances on Twitpic. Below the image in question, just click the blue link reading “Add/Edit Faces.”
When you tag your pics, you’ll also have the option to tweet out who you’ve tagged. You’ll be able to add real names and/or Twitter usernames to the pics, and others can see the tags when they mouse over the picture.
Users will be familiar with the Facebook-like interface. Here’s what the feature looks like on the site:
Last week, the service added the ability to group your photos based on the event at which they were taken. In practice, this feature works a lot like a Flickr set, letting users organize, define and showcase their pictures quickly and easily and making the discovery process easier for both humans and web crawlers.
Twitpic has also just reached its 10 million users mark and is gearing up for more group and geo-location features from this service. To get a better idea of where Twitpic might be heading in the months to come, you can check out this video interview with Twitpic founder Noah Everett on the future of Twitter-based photo sharing.
Are these new features going to make Twitpic more interesting, fun and useful for you? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
Tags: Photos, pictures, Tagging, twitpic, twitter
Like we didn’t know this wouldn’t happen eh.
Morgan Stanley is calling it the reshaping of the PC market and in the process gives Apple a great big pat on the back by raising its target price to $332.00. Leading the charge at Morgan Stanley is Katy Huberty who raised her iPad sales estimates to 10 million units in 2010 (up from 6 million). At the same time she believes the company’s stock price could go as high as $440 by May 2011.
What’s turned her head? The blistering sales of the iPad and the diminishing growth of the netbooks’. Among her findings:
- The iPad is on track to become the fastest ramping mobile Internet device out of the gate and one of the most popular in history (see Exhibit 2).
- Early iPad usage patterns validate the tablet as a computing device. It’s already overtaken the Web browsing share of devices like the iPod touch.
- It’s at least partially responsible for a sharp drop in the growth of netbook sales, which decelerated to -13% year-over-year in the month of April, from +45% in the first quarter of 2010. Huberty thinks the netbook phenomenon may have peaked; she expects tablet sales to overtake netbooks by 2012.
Source: Fortune
When Zynga launched FarmVille last June, the company thought 200,000 daily active users in the first two months would be a success. Within eight weeks, the game had surpassed Zynga’s hits of the previous two years. For the first 26 weeks FarmVille added 1 million net new users per week; it currently has 70 million active users a month.
The story of Mark William’s last two years has been one of trying to support such unpredictable growth. “Zynga has been horrible in terms of its ability to predict its success,” said Williams, the company’s VP of network operations. Not that it’s a bad problem to have. Under his watch, Zynga has grown from a few dozen servers to “several thousand” — Williams said maybe he’ll give us a more specific number when he speaks at the GigaOM Structure conference later this month.
At the time of FarmVille’s launch, Zynga had just run out of data center space, so the company had to use Amazon’s EC2. That circumstance-based decision was extremely lucky, Williams said; given the game’s huge growth, without Amazon FarmVille would have failed.
Amazon allowed Williams to “acquire instances at will” using RightScale, which he called “absolutely key.” Zynga uses Apache PHP on the front end, memcached for active user play and MySQL on the back end. It uses memcached to store key value pairs to deal with active user play during sessions and then later writes it to disk.
Was it cost effective to lean on Amazon this hard? “We did spend a lot of money to make that possible,” Williams said, “but we also made up for that in terms of the success of the game and what it did to Zynga as a brand and our success later on.” Post-FarmVille, Zynga has a new model for rolling out game launches.
Now, within less than a day, Zynga can allocate a new game enough EC2 computing capacity to support 10 million daily active users. That pre-built environment should last even the wildest growing game at least five to eight weeks. Each game starts on EC2 and is watched for the next three to six months. If at any time growth goes flat or predictable, the game is transitioned off Amazon and into Zynga’s data centers where it can be optimized to work with those resources.
Williams tries to maintain a 50-50 split between using EC2 and data centers. At any one time, the split could be 30-70 or 70-30, depending on the ratio of new games to predictably growing ones. Williams said he doesn’t want to test Amazon’s capacity and he’d rather not have all his eggs in any one basket, but he values the ability to get big fast.
One of Williams’ next big projects is to help Zynga unify its infrastructure as it diversifies across new platforms including mobile. Right now, Zynga dedicates infrastructure separately for each social network’s instance of any one game. Now, with launches like Monday’s FarmVille for iPhone, there’s an increased emphasis on syncing one user’s experience between everywhere they play a game.
Want to hear more from Williams? Come to Structure in San Francisco, June 23 & 24.
Yay @facedotcom! RT: @TwitPic We hit 10 million users today! We released a new feature called Face Tagging: http://bit.ly/c7PAFb
[Direct Link]
Twitter’s COO, Dick Costolo today announced that Twitter now has 190 million users that produce 65 million tweets per day. Sounds impressive right? Well, not if you think of it this way: that means that in aggregate, Twitter users produce less around one-third of a tweet per day.
Of course you’ll say that there are probably millions of users on Twitter that tweet more than once a day, and you’re probably right…but, how many millions? From here on, we’re guessing, but from our experience using Twitter this below is a reasonable guess.
Is it less than 5 million? 10 million? If 10 million users tweet on an average of twice per day, that would equal 20 million tweets, meaning that the other 180 million Twitter users account for the other 45 million tweets per day. But this probably isn’t the case, it’s probably worse.
More likely is that those 5-10 million users average 3-4 tweets per day mean that they are accounting for a lot more of the overall tweets. Then there are the bots – how many do they account for and do we consider them “real” tweets? Most users would probably say no, we shouldn’t.
So while it’s great to have an idea of how large Twitter has become in aggregate, we need to keep a cool head here and realize that until these numbers are a little more transparent (according to TechCrunch, Costolo did say that many users use Twitter as a “consumption media” tool, but that sounds like a bit of a cop out to us), we’re just going to have to assume that the curve of user generated tweets (UGT?) drops off the cliff after a very low percentage of power users. Of course, Twitter may be showing much more detailed numbers to partners and advertisers, but even so, they’ll need to justify that 1/3 of a tweet number per day just the same.
Why is this important? Two reasons, and they both come down to advertising, which Twitter has (finally) declared is their business model. First of all, if only say 5% of Twitter’s users are engaged with the service more than once a day than it will be hard for Twitter to sell advertisers that they are reaching 190 million users. The second half of this, of course, is Facebook.
Although is seems as if Twitter won’t (initially at least) offer display ads therefore competing directly with Facebook there, advertisers still will have to make choices on where their online spending will go, and Facebook’s tremendous engagement (yes, privacy issues and all) could very well still tip the scales in Zuckerberg and Co.’s favor.
So what does Twitter need to do here? Well, they should consider better ways to get more of their users to start tweeting, whether through better instructional materials (like many that have come before, lots of new users probably just don’t get how to use Twitter) or – and this is a very slippery slope – through some kind of incentives.
That said, perhaps Twitter’s hands off approach will continue, a small percentage of users will continue to account for a majority of tweets, and both Twitter and advertisers will be fine with that. Perhaps, and if Twitter management wants to provide us with lots of numbers to back up that plan, we’ll certainly publish them. But in our minds, at some point, Twitter is going to have to face up to these numbers and be more transparent – the first step to making things better is to admit that you have a problem.
Original title and link for this post: On Aggregate, Twitter Users Produce About 1/3 Of A Tweet Per Day
The iPad's sales rate is fast enough that it could grow faster in its first year than netbooks, Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty estimated today. Having increased the expected iPad shipments in 2010 from 6 million to 10 million, Huberty estimates Apple could move 13 million to 16 million iPads in the tablet's first full year, or well over the 7.6 million netbooks that sold in that category's first 12 months....
PostRank Activity Streams: FriendFeed for your content! http://bit.ly/chbzJr
Knowing how and where your readers are engaging with your content is critical to the success of any publisher today. With so much activity happening off the authors site, discovering the fragmented conversations, connecting with the audience, and growing your presence on all the social hubs has been an incredibly manual and a time-intensive task. That is, until today, because we are rolling out a new beta feature on PostRank Analytics: Activity Streams for your content!
Think of it as FriendFeed, but for your content. PostRank aggregates over 10 million daily activities from over 20 different social hubs, which means that we see every tweet, bookmark, vote, and comment about your stories. PostRank already knows about all the content you publish (zero setup, just specify your RSS feed), which means that we can scan the millions of activities, and pull out just the conversations and actions which mention your content! Nothing to setup, just login into your PostRank Analytics account and you’re ready to go. A picture is worth a thousand words:
Did someone just vote on your story on Reddit, or Digg? Did someone mention your story on Facebook or MySpace, or maybe they shared it with their friends on Google Reader? Well, now you can find answers to all of those questions by logging in, or signing up for a PostRank Analytics account.
Oh, and the beta part is there for a reason – we’re just getting started with the activity stream, so stay tuned!
PostRank Activity Streams: FriendFeed for your content!
- Tac AndersonThe iPad's sales rate is fast enough that it could grow faster in its first year than netbooks, Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty estimated today. Having increased the expected iPad shipments in 2010 from 6 million to 10 million, Huberty estimates Apple could move 13 million to 16 million iPads in the tablet's first full year, or well over the 7.6 million netbooks that sold in that category's first 12 months....
Social games and entertainment company RockYou has raised a further $10 million from SoftBank and acquired a stake in RockYou Asia, its collaboration with the Japanese financial institution.
With total financing of $127 million, the company plans to expand further into Asian markets following success in Japan, Korean and China.
"We've always been very excited about the Asia market and believe that the market for social applications will really heat up in the coming months," said Jia Shen, founder of RockYou.
It’s interesting that this WWDC keynote was all about mobile. Obviously he had a big reveal this year – last year was all about the 3GS and Snow Leopard – but there was a decided lack of desktop talk this year.
iOS looks like the horse Apple is betting on, at least this year. The uptake in terms of programming for the iPhone far surpasses that of OS X. After all, you’re not going to make a mint writing for Mac desktops and laptops. With 10 million phones and iPads in the pipeline and $1 billion in app sales, the economics of iOS are staggering.
My hope is this: that OS X moves in the direction of the iPad with clever integration of touch on laptops and iMacs. Now I’ve been against touchscreen PCs for years now and I doubt things can get much better on that front but that’s what I used to say about tablets. Apple can redefine a few things, tweak some more, use the Darwin core, and please everybody all of the time.
Apple will never sell as many laptops and desktops as it does iPhones. Ever. The market share it enjoys in phones is not transferrable and it’s clear Apple knows where it should point its engineers and designers. My worry is that OS X will lie fallow while iOS takes off. It’s not a fear, however, as much as a knee-jerk concern.
Thoughts?
LOS ANGELES, eBay sees a growing opportunity in mobile commerce and expects to record $1.5 billion in revenue via mobile devices this year, CEO John Donahoe told Beet.TV on Wednesday after his on-stage presentation at the Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital conference.
He said that over the over the past 18 months, some 10 million iPhone Apps have been downloaded.
Andy Plesser, Managing Editor
RockYou, the big social networking app developer, has raised $10 million more in funding from SoftBank, which it says it will use to expand in Asia. The company is buying a majority stake in its Asian joint venture, RockYou Asia, which was set up one-and-a-half years ago to bring social networking apps to social networking sites in Japan, Korea and China; the company doesn’t say how much of the $10 million will be used to buy up those shares or who it is buying them from.
SoftBank and RockYou each owned 44 percent of RockYou Asia, while Japanese gaming firm GungHo Online Entertainment owned 9 percent and VC firm DCM owned another 3 percent.
The funding comes less than a year after RockYou raised $50 million in a fourth round. With the new cash, it will have now raised $127 million. More details in the release.
Related
Six Apart (the company behind Typepad, Movabletype, and Vox) has dipped its toe in the green movement by purchasing an environmentally conscious network by the name of NaturalPath Media.
Six Apart, the world’s leading blogging and conversational media company, today announced the acquisition of NaturalPath Media, the largest online advertising and media network for sustainable, healthy, and conscious lifestyles. [...]
“NaturalPath Media is a valuable addition to the Six Apart Media network and strengthens our ability to help marketers reach highly influential green and healthy living consumers while they are engaging with content and conversations that are important to them,” said Chris Alden, CEO and Chairman of Six Apart. (MarketWire.com)
This seems like a great move by Six Apart, and may help the blog company attract new users upon their respective platforms (especially Typepad who is facing increased competition from Tumblr).
NaturalPath Media may also give Six Apart a way to help bloggers generate revenue upon other platforms, which could help the company maintain relevancy in an age where the blog population is publishing upon Blogger and WordPress.
Six Apart has not disclosed how much they paid to acquire NaturalPath Media, and (unfortunately) the latter is not informing anyone on how much they received from the grandfather of blog platforms (note: although if I had to guess it was between $5-$10 million).
(Hat tip: TechCrunch)
Ovi Mail, the email solution available for users of a Nokia mobile phone, has just announced that it managed to top 10 million activated accounts. The milestone has been reached about ten months after the first million Ovi Mail registered accounts were announced, and shows that the service is gaining traction among the owners of a handset from Nokia. Here’s a statistic that’s going to get lost in the flood of Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) news due to shortly hit: Ovi Mail, the service that Nokia (NYSE: NOK) builds into their mobile phones, now has 10 million activated accounts. No word as to how many of those accounts are active, and what the definition for active really is. I have an Ovi Mail account. I made one just so I could see what the service was like. I logged on once, maybe twice, and that’s about it, and I bet many people did the same thing.
Anyway, it’s a good day for the team at Nokia that built Ovi Mail … or maybe it isn’t since Nokia recently announced that they’re dumping Ovi Mail and going forward their solution is going to be powered by Yahoo! Mail.
Cynicism meter is reading off the charts right now.
[Via: Nokia Conversations]
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Digital media company The GoAdv Group is today announcing (PDF) a “strategic delisting” from France’s stock exchange, the Alternext of NYSE Euronext, where it has been trading since August 2007.
Luca Ascani, chairman of GoAdv, in a statement made it very clear that the decision was driven by the wave of consolidation in the mass-production and distribution of online content and the opportunities that brings for the company he co-founded in 2004:
“GoAdv is experiencing phenomenal growth in the emerging content on demand sector which is fundamentally changing the way content is produced, distributed and monetised online. With the recent acquisition of Associated Content by Yahoo Inc and other consolidation activity, we believe the company will be better positioned for growth and other strategic opportunities as a private entity.
Due to GoAdv’s strong cash position, our delisting will allow us to pursue expansion opportunities while continuing to increase cost efficiencies in our business.“
In short, looks like GoAdv wants to make itself more attractive for potential buyers. Makes sense, as it’s basically a multi-lingual, Europe-focused rival to the likes of Demand Media, Associated Content and AOL’s Seed.com.
Either one of those, or other Web giants, could potentially be interested in buying them out – which is a tad easier when they are not publicly listed. We’re told GoAdv is still looking for more acquisitions and other means of expansion in the near future, however.
GoAdv says its network of over 500 properties, which includes Excite Europe (acquired from Ask.com in 2007), BetterDeals, Nanopublishing and Blogosfere, currently reaches over 20 million unique users per month. The company produces content in 8 different languages, supported by a staff of 140 employees located in offices around the world.
Revenues have jumped from €10 million in 2006 to €42 million in 2009, GoAdv adds, and there’s about €20 million in funds left in the bank (the company recently raised more than €11 million in financing after completing a Convertible Bond Issue with several investors in France).
To be continued, no doubt.
Chegg
may very well be the fastest-growing, most successful, second-generation e-commerce startup that you hardly ever hear about,except maybe for the fact that it’s raised more than $140 million. Chegg is the “Netflix for textbooks.” It lets students across 6,400 college campuses rent from a virtual bookstore containing 4.2 million books. Based on my analysis (which I get into more detail below), the company is on track to generate $130 million in revenues in 2010, up from $25 million in 2009, and $10 million in 2008. During the January, 2010 semester, I estimate the company made close to $1 million in revenue a day, up fivefold from $200,000/day the previous January, and it should double that this coming September. My analysis suggests Chegg will do close to $50 million in revenue this September alone. It is underappreciated, to say the least.
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