Today is the day. Today is the day where we can put the nonsense of yesterday’s press events behind us and actually get on the floor of CES 2011 with our Ustream equipment. Hallelujah.

The show technically opens at 10:00am, but we’re kicking off the day with a live interview with Ford’s superstar CEO, Alan Mulally at 9:00 in Ford’s North Hall booth. We have twenty minutes with the man, so please, drop any questions you may have in the comments below concerning Ford’s roll in vehicle technology, the auto maker’s stance on EVs, or anything else, really. We’re certainly going to ask Detroit’s top car guy how he feels about the new US Top Gear series.

After the Mulally interview, we’re going to hit the show floor hard and fast with our Ustream equipment. There’s a lot to see here and we only have a couple short days to bring it all. So yeah, click over to CES.CrunchGear.com for the latest news and the live Ustream feed, which we’ll fire up at 9:00am PST today.

Read More

Let the social enterprise software wars begin. Socialtext, which offers an enterprise social software platform built around microblogging, is going after competitor Yammer today with a new free migration tool that allows Yammer users to move to Socialtext.

The free tool allows users to move from Yammer to Socialtext, and to use the social platform for businesses at a discounted rate. Customers who have a free instance of Yammer with more than 100 users can switch to Socialtext Signals, and get a hosted or on-premise microblogging appliance to suit their needs.

Socialtext’s CEO Eugene Lee says that the tool was launched because a “number” of potential clients complained to the company about having to pay Yammer to control the data within their network and to manage users. Lee claims that Socialtext offers a more secure offering, that allows users to put their data behind a firewall with no extra cost.

It’s unclear if Yammer is really as “unsecure” as Socialtext proclaims the platform to be. Yammer seems to be doing fine as a company, recently raising $25 million in new funding and hitting the 1.5 million user mark. Socialtext, which declined to name its exact number of individual users, said that there are currently 6,500 companies using its social software.

One thing is clear from this announcement—Yammer may be the one to beat in the social enterprise world. There are a number of competitors in the space, yet Socialtext targeted Yammer as opposed to Salesforce’s Chatter, Socialcast, Jive, Bantam Live, Success Factors’ CubeTree and others. Socialtext has not released a migration tool for any other service and doesn’t appear to be releasing any other tools in the immediate future. The fact is that Yammer is growing fast and competitors are using aggressive tactics to gain (and retain) users.

Of course, Yammer is using its own aggressive tactics as well—the company just put up a large billboard in the SOMA neighborhood of San Francisco advertising its social platform for businesses.

OMGPOP, the social gaming site formerly known as iminlikewithyou, has raised $10.1 million in Series B-1 funding, we’ve been informed. The round was split between two existing investors (Spark Capital and Betaworks) and two new ones (Rho Capital and Softbank).

The New York-based startup, which started out in 2006 making multiplayer games for the web, says it will continue to pursue a multi-platform approach to social games.

OMGPOP CEO Dan Porter tells us the company is also set to pursue a number of acquisitions this year, eying the mobile and social space for smaller game developers.

The company will be opening up its website to outside developers to scale game production, Porter adds, and OMGPOP also plans to release 5 games for Facebook and the iPhone in the next 6 months.

Porter says usage is growing, too, with 50,000 new users signing up on a daily basis, and 5x growth in monthly active users (MAUs) over the last 6 months since their move to Facebook. Over 1 billion cupcakes have been served through its hit Facebook Game, Cupcake Corner.

Individual investors in the company include Digg founder Kevin Rose, Brian Pokorny and Marc Andreessen.

The Mac App Store just launched this morning (it is a separate app store from what’s in iTunes that comes with the latest update to Mac OS X), and already the top free app is Twitter for Mac. I just installed it and started to play around with it. My first impression is meh.

Twitter for Mac is a stripped down version of the excellent Twitter for iPad app. Imagine if you took just the left-hand stream column in the Twitter for iPad app and launched that as a widget on your desktop. It feels like a half-hearted attempt to me. I’ll give it this: it is very fast, and it stays out of the way. But it is jarring because it doesn’t operate the same way that Twitter for iPad, or even Twitter.com operates. When you click on a Tweet with a link, it doesn’t expand into a second pane with the page opened underneath like the iPad app does. Instead it launches a new tab in your browser. That is a recipe for tab overload. Also, the only indication of when a Tweet is in reply to another Tweet is a too-subtle conversation balloon which appears when you hover over the Tweet. Finding the conversation view is not completely obvious. You have to doubleclick the Tweet or click on the conversation bubble.

The rest of the app is fine. You can see your stream, mentions, direct messages, lists, profile, and search. You can reply to individual Tweets, favorite them or Retweet them. And that’s about it. Maybe that is all you need. But when you have the full capabilities of your desktop computer, scrimping on features doesn’t make much sense. Maybe I’ve been spoiled by the richer features of Twitter on the Web and on the iPad. I think I’ll stick with those for now.

*BAM* Just like that, AT&T destroyed the $50 smartphone market by dropping the iPhone 3GS down to the same level as Nokia communicators, teeny-bop Blackberrys and the bargain-bin Android devices. That whole market now has to compete with the big dog, the iPhone 3GS.

Well, they do starting tomorrow when the wireless carrier’s new pricing starts. Notice this pricing is just for AT&T as the carrier is dropping the price independently from Apple themselves. So yeah, shoppers looking for the $49 3GS need to head down to their local AT&T dealer rather than the Apple Stores. Of course

Read More

Pretty sure 99.9% of you won’t care one bit, but this fills me with joy: Rdio, the music service I was most happy to have discovered in 2010, will soon be available on Sonos, the awesome wireless sound system I was most happy to have discovered in 2010.

Scheduled for release ‘later in Q1 2011′, Rdio Unlimited subscibers (that’s me!) in the United States and Canada will be able to listen to the social music service on Sonos’ phenomenal Multi-Room Music System.

Sonos already had partnerships in place to do the same for Spotify, Last.fm, Napster, Pandora, Rhapsody and SIRIUS users (it also lets you access the single best-kept secret in online music land, Wolfgang’s Vault).

But as a proud Rdio fan, and I was left out in the cold.

Sure, I got Sonos’ wireless docking station so I could actually use the Rdio iPhone app to stream music to the system, but it wasn’t an ideal solution (considering the phone also receives calls, text messages, push notifications and whatnot whilst streaming).

Rdio and Sonos, you’ve made my day. Apologies, 99.9% of you who don’t care.

eBay has announced that global mobile sales generated nearly $2 billion in 2010, up from $600 million in 2009. To be clear, we’re not talking revenues here but gross merchandise volume. Nevertheless, a clear sign that mobile ecommerce has reached a tipping point.

eBay earlier announced that global sales were up 166 percent to $230 million from Nov. 25 to Dec. 25 from the same period last year, so the holiday season was a clear catalyst for much of that growth.

The ecommerce company says its mobile apps, which give users access to eBay’s global marketplace on the go, have been downloaded more than 30 million times in eight languages, and in over 190 countries.

The United Kingdom has apparently been the fastest adopter of mcommerce, with more Brits shopping through the eBay app than anywhere else in Europe. An item was purchased on average every two seconds through the eBay buyer app in the UK, the company adds.

Germany and the UK combined generated nearly one-third of all eBay's mobile sales in 2010.

Other tidbits shared by eBay:

- 13 pieces of clothing, pairs of shoes and accessories are sold every minute through eBay's mobile apps worldwide

- 94 bids are made every minute via eBay's mobile apps worldwide

- since its release in 2008, more than 15 million people have downloaded eBay's iPhone app

eBay also has apps for Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7 devices.

Clare Gilmartin, VP of eBay Europe, perfectly captures my thoughts on the subject:

"It's staggering to think that $2billion worth of sales has been generated through a platform that didn't exist a couple of years ago, and on a device that didn't exist three years ago."

The holiday season appears to have treated Barnes & Noble well, thanks in part to a strong demand for the company’s eReader the NOOK. The company just issued a release stating that it sold its entire inventory of NOOKcolor and E-Ink devices over the holiday season.

Of course, we knew that the NOOK was a bestseller for Barnes & Noble. The company issued a release following the Christmas holiday announcing that the line of NOOK eReading devices was the book retailer’s “biggest best selling” product of all time, with millions of devices sold. And the company said that it sells for digital books than physical books on its website.

B&N said today that strong device sales helped drive eBook content sales that have significantly exceeded forecasts. Barnes & Noble.com comparable sales increased 78% compared to last year's holiday selling season. The company’s CEO William Lynch said that 60% of NOOKcolor owners are new customers of the Barnes & Noble digital bookstore. And total sales at Barnes & Noble.com came in at $228.5 million, an increase of 67% as compared to the period a year ago.

Amazon also reported record sales for Nook’s competitor, the Kindle, stating that the Kindle 3 is now the best selling Amazon product of all-time. Of course, the missing information in both Amazon and B&N’s released are the number of devices actually sold during the holiday period, which both companies have declined to release.

Apple this morning announced that the Mac App Store is now open for business, as previously announced, with more than 1,000 free and paid apps.

The Mac App Store brings the iTunes App Store model straight to the Mac – it’s available for Snow Leopard users through Software Update as part of Mac OS X v10.6.6.

Note: it’s a separate app, so don’t go looking for it in iTunes.

Apple software is of course in the store, from iPhoto, iMovie and GarageBand ($14.99 each) to Pages, Keynote and Numbers ($19.99 each). Aperture 3 is available for $79.99.

Other apps include software from Autodesk, Ancestry.com and Boinx. To find out more about developing for the Mac App Store, head on over here.

Our previous coverage:

Tread Lightly When Embracing The Mac App Store

Might The Mac App Store Lead To A New Class Of Micro-Apps?

Clickfree this morning said it has received an investment from Intel Capital that brings its total funding raised to more than $33 million, following an earlier $15 million financing round (PDF) secured back in August 2010.

Clickfree, which is actually a brand name (the company’s called Storage Appliance Corporation), provides a range of computer backup products.

PC and Mac users can simply plug a Clickfree device into their computer’s USB port, and the company says its patented automated backup technology will then take care of the rest (at least for the 400 file type it’s able te recognize).

No need to download or install software, which makes for a pretty compelling offer.

Clickfree is currently available in 35 countries and more than 7,000 retail locations. Aside from the funding from Intel’s venture capital arm, the Intel PC client group and Clickfree are also working on business and technical collaboration to further enhance PC backup capabilities.

Social shopping company LivingSocial this morning announced that it has recruited an experienced chief financial officer, notably mere weeks after Amazon veteran Jason Child was appointed that role at rival Groupon. Funnily enough, Child’s former employer is the company that just pumped $175 million into LivingSocial.

LivingSocial’s fresh CFO is John Bax, a former Wal-Mart executive that most recently served as chief financial officer at RecycleBank.

The social shopping startup says Bax will be charged with managing all aspects of financial planning and operations management for its business initiatives.

Tim O’Shaughnessy, CEO and co-founder of LivingSocial says Bax already played a crucial role in securing the funding round from Amazon.

LivingSocial has raised a whopping $232 million to date.

Qik, which enables mobile phones users to record and stream videos in realtime, has secured a little over $6.3 million in funding, an SEC filing reveals.

We’ve asked Qik for more details on the financing, but are still awaiting a response. Investors listed in the filing are (previous backer) Quest Venture Partners and Russian investment firm Almaz Capital Partners.

Last we heard from Qik was back in September when they released some usage stats, revealing that it had attracted some 3.5 million users at the time, growing at a rate of nearly 500,000 users each month. If that growth rate was accurate and has remained steady, that means Qik has about 5.5 million users today.

Qik competes with companies like Kyte, Justin.tv, Ustream and Bambuser.

Update: actually, Qik on its blog says it has 5 million users.

Update 2: strangely timed, a source tells The Business Insider that Skype has acquired Qik for around $100 million.

Tapjoy (formerly known as Offerpal Media) has raised $21 million in new funding led by Rho Ventures, with D. E. Shaw Ventures, InterWest Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners participating in the round. The latest investment brings the company's total funding to over $40 million.

Following the Scamville drama in 2009, Offerpal went through a significant transition. The company is on its third CEO since November 2009 (Mihir Shah took the role in September 2010). And after Facebook transitioned games and applications from Offerpal’s currencies to Facebook Credits and partnered with rival Trialpay, the company was forced to lay off people who worked on its Facebook monetization initiatives.

But Offerpal shifted strategies and recently launched distribution platform Social K-Factor, which aims to relieve any game developer that was hurt by Facebook’s recent decision to seriously cut down on the many ways they could distribute notifications via the social networking site in order to get new users to sign up. Social K-Factor aims to enable game developers to connect with audiences across social networks and media platforms such as Yahoo and Google, opening the doors to massive distribution of game-related notifications to roughly 1 billion users in over 150 countries.

And along the way, Offerpal acquired Tapjoy, a mobile app monetization platform. Using the platform, developers of mobile and social apps can turn on virtual currency, analytics and other monetization tools to their iPhone, Android and Facebook apps.

The company says that more than 5,000 app developers and advertisers are using Tapjoy for
the monetization and distribution of their games and applications, including GameDuell,
Tapulous, glu, Pinger, Playdom, Kayak, Barnes & Noble, MTV, Bing, Fandango, Groupon,
Intuit and others.

Last fall, Offerpal officially changed its name to Tapjoy, marking its change in overall direction for the company. While the startup is still in the offers business, Shah says that Tapjoy’s direction is much broader and the name reflects the shift. He adds that game offers on social networks are still a profitable business and has no plans to abandon this side of the business. Of course, the change in name also helps the company move away from its “Scamville”-tainted past.

Shah tells us the new funding allows the company to further invest in its services platform for app developers on mobile and social platforms. He adds that the company feels strongly about investing in providing a cross-platform infrastructure, for both mobile applications as well as Facebook apps. Tapjoy will also use the funds to further invest in application media licensing and incubation opportunities.

As for the health of the company under a new brand, Shah says that the fourth quarter of 2010 was best quarter in terms of revenue, profits, and margins in the startup’s history. If Tapyjoy/Offerpal can manage to shed the Scamville-drama and turn the company around into a thriving business, it be a great example of how any startup can recover from a major speedbump. And everyone loves a good comeback story.

This past December, I used Airbnb for the first time. After two years worth of buzz reading about the startup on TechCrunch and other places, I was interested, but skeptical. Turns out, it is just as awesome as it sounds. You can get a room, in various places around the world, in great neighborhoods, for bargain prices. And apparently I wasn’t alone in using the service in 2010. They saw nearly 800 percent growth for the year, co-founder Brian Chesky tells us.

More specifically, they went from about 100,000 nights book in January, to just about 800,000 nights book by the end of the year. “Travelers came from over 160 countries, and booked places in 89 different countries. We expect to hit 1 million nights booked sometime this spring,” Chesky says.

To make sure that happens, Airbnb continues to expand their coverage around the world. Chesky lists Hawaii, Sydney, Tokyo, Lake Tahoe, and Austin as places that have gotten recent traction.

They’ve also created a slick new video to explain exactly what Airbnb is to those, who like me previously, might be skeptical. Chesky says it was filmed at 13 different actual Airbnb locations around the world. It’s nearly as nice-looking as their iPhone app.

GM and Powermat took the CES platform to announce a major partnership. Starting with several GM 2012 vehicles, Powermat’s inductive charging pads will be integrated directly into the vehicles, allowing for a quick and seamless charging solution. The auto maker is investing $5 million into Powermat to accelerate the development cycle.

The exact details aren’t addressed in the press release so it’s not exactly clear how or where the Powermat will work. Hopefully somewhere in this massive CES 2011 mess, we can find a demo or an executive to shed a bit more light on the plans. Most of the deets should be worked out. The first car to get this charging solution will be the 2012 Chevy Volt later this year.

Read More

Nobody likes cable TV, although we all pay exorbitant sums for it to be piped into our homes. That is why the idea of being able to cut that cord (and related bill) and replace it with a variety of streaming video services from the Internet is so appealing. So far, however, you can’t quite yet replace what you watch on cable with Internet TV. But that day will one day come, and the gateway drug to cord cutting and embracing Internet TV is Netflix streaming.

In a presentation put together by J.P. Morgan’s Internet analyst Imran Khan (which also goes into ecommerce and ebook trends) is the slide above, which shows the results of a consumer survey titled “Netflix Watch Instantly subscribers are more likely to consider dropping their cabe packages.” Of those surveyed who stream one to two movies and TV shows a month from Netflix, 47 percent would “consider dropping pay TV,” compared to only 33 percent of non-Netflix subscribers. By the way, the fact that a third of people who don’t even have access to Netflix streaming are ready to ditch cable should worry the industry even more. But once they get into the habit of streaming video from the Internet, the number of potential cord cutters goes up by 14 percentage points.

Netflix may not have the most recent Hollywood films available because of the deals it is striking with the studios which add a 28-day lag to the movies that Netflix gets, but streaming is taking off. Already Netflix streaming accounts for 37 percent of peak Internet traffic during primetime, and you can sign up for a streaming-only subscription.

I have a review-unit Boxee Box, which I only pull out occasionally because most Internet video simply can’t compete with the gazillion channels I get from Verizon FIOS TV. But Netflix is supposed to come to the Boxee Box by the end of the month, and once that happens I can guarantee the amount of Internet TV I am going to watch will go up at least five or ten times. Yes, I can hook up my laptop to my TV in the living room today and stream from Netflix to the big screen, but it is kind of a hassle and I’m too lazy, especially when I am feeling lazy. And being lazy what watching TV is all about. Once I get Netflix to a box always connected to the TV that I can control with a remote . . . oh boy, bring out the popcorn.

The 360 is turning into more of an all-purpose living room machine, and the Kinect is blowing up. That’s the takeaway from the Ballmer keynote here at CES. They’ve sold a huge amount of Kinect — 8 million, far more than the 5 million they predicted, and which we were all skeptical of. But it’s a surprise hit and I think that’s indicative of both its unique appeal (even the haters have to admit it’s unique) and the growing importance of a powerful box in the living room.

Avatar Kinect? I’m not buying it. But I’m not the target audience. I’d rather have it for the hands-free media control. Either way, though, it’s more stuff the 360 can do, and the central hub for media, games, and communication is obviously becoming a popular and contentious product category.

Continue reading…

We had an inkling that the Olympus E-PL2 would launch this week and we weren’t disappointed. The new model is a little light on spec changes but under the hood you have a larger, brighter screen, improved ISO up to 6400, and new layered effects for adding multiple effects at the same time. The new kit, priced at about $600, comes with a m14-42mm. The new camera supports the new PenPal Bluetooth, a $60 device that allows you to send HD images from your camera to any mobile device (except the iPhone, at least for now). The new lenses are movie/still compatible, a feature that considerably reduces lens noise when recording video.

Read more…

So this service Quora, it’s getting pretty hot. But up until now, we’ve only be able to guestimate how hot it actually is. But today they’ve finally shared some actual information — on Quora, naturally.

Specifically, Quora engineer Albert Sheu has put up a long answer to the question: Why did the Quora website get so slow at the end of December 2010? The reason Sheu gives includes a brief explanation of how the service works. When someone adds an answer or updates one, everyone else on that page sees the new information in realtime. That’s obviously not easy to scale, and Sheu says they’ve never tested it beyond 2 to 3 times their normal load. That was an issue at the end of December because they started seeing spikes of 5 to 10 times their normal activity.

Why was that? Sheu credits a few things, namely, us:

On December 28th, we saw between 5-10 times more activity on the site than usual. A number of blog posts, including ones on TechCrunch, Scobleizer, CNN, and others fed a huge number of new users to the site. Later in the day, “Quora” hit the San Francisco trending topics list on Twitter, pushing our system beyond its ability.

Sheu credits Amazon’s EC2 system with allowing the service to get back up to speed relatively quickly. But the fact of the matter was that they simply weren’t really prepared for such a spike. And given how big it was, that seems understandable. Further, Sheu writes, “We take site downtime very seriously here, and so we did an extensive post-mortem of our site scalability during peak usage, and while usage was lower over the New Year’s, we upgraded and migrated almost all of our servers, removed a lot of inefficient code, and distributed some of our previously non-distributed systems.”

And it’s a good thing they did that, because this week, just one week later, the service has seen even bigger growth. Look at the two graphs below that Sheu has shared. The first one represents the late December explosion in signups. The second one is the explosion this week. As you can see, the giant growth from the December week has been far eclipsed by the growth this week. In fact, he says the signup surge this week has been twice as big as it was in the late December period.

“This round however, we were much, much better prepared for the increased load. While a few of our services still saw delays, for example with email deliverability and picture uploads, our main web servers stayed up all through Monday and Tuesday,” Sheu notes, thanking the engineers that helped keep things up.

It seems as if most Quora users had seen the massive influx of new friend requests on the service in the past week or so — now you know why. I wondered if it was something Quora changed with regard to autofollowing, so I asked the company. “Nope, we haven’t changed anything recently. There has been a lot of activity and growth the last week especially,” co-founder Charlie Cheever told us last night. Sheu’s data clearly confirms that. And he seems like a good resource to have for scaling — he’s previously worked at both Twitter and Facebook.

So we’re sorry Quora for contributing to the problem. But it sure is a nice one to have.

I’ve avoided writing something about the Goldman Sachs- Facebook deal, because God knows the rest of the blogosphere has been doing enough speculation for the entire world. But four things I’ve read in the last 24-hours need a serious rebuttal.

1. Facebook is still not “essentially” a public company. I don’t care if it reaches 500 indirect individual shareholders through the Goldman transaction, a public company is one where the general public is able to invest and existing shareholders are able to sell shares, without approval from the company first. That isn’t happening.

Deals like these have indeed been Facebook’s way of avoiding the pressures that would force a company to go public for some time now, so there are IPO-like ramifications from these deals. But that doesn’t change the fact that a tiny fraction of people are able to buy and sell shares. That’s a huge fundamental difference that affects everything about the way a company operates. Anyone who has run, worked at or covered a public company and a private company for any period of time knows that. Beyond that, it’s just an argument of semantics.

2. Some people are drawing a comparison between Google’s let’s-empower-the-users IPO by dutch auction and Facebook’s selling of shares to Goldman’s richest clients as if it’s an indication of some Robin Hood vs. Sheriff of Nottingham moral battlefield. These two deals are not apples-to-apples comparisons, by any means. For one thing, this isn’t an IPO no matter how badly some members of the tech press want it to be. (See point #1) To my knowledge, Google never let its users or everyday people buy pre-IPO shares.

But beyond that, the comparison misses a fundamental difference in the relationship between Silicon Valley and Wall Street from the days when Google was founded and today. This difference has been widely documented, is far broader than just Facebook, and has been brewing for more than ten years. It’s part of a continuum that started with the excesses of the dot com bubble, culminated with huge changes on Wall Street that hurt the ability for smaller companies to go public and the desire for entrepreneurs to take them public, and has been rippling through several trends like partial liquidations, secondary exchanges and buyouts. This is about an industry as a whole looking for other ways to get liquidity that don’t sacrifice price and independence. That’s the reason deals like these aren’t confined to Facebook.

What’s more, Facebook and companies like it are actually following in Google’s footsteps, in many respects. Compared to its generation, Google waited an extraordinarily long period of time to go public and did so very much on its own terms, so that it could protect its ability to be nimble and above the whims of activist, short-term hedge funds and traders. For all of its marketing, you could argue Google’s IPO was anti-the-little-guy, because it pioneered the modern use of a dual class of voting and the company refused to give earnings estimates or play other annoying Wall Street games. The company boldly drew a line in the sand and essentially said, “You want to own shares in us? Here’s the deal.” And for its generation, Google initially offered a pretty small float of shares, which was one reason the price soared.

If you look at the reasons behind why Facebook is doing what it’s doing, I’d say Mark Zuckerberg is following the spirit of the Google playbook, not going against it.

3. Being a public company isn’t a way to force Facebook to be “good.” I have a lot of respect for John Battelle, but I just don’t get this argument that Facebook trading on the Nasdaq or New York Stock Exchange means the company is a more responsible steward of our data. This is more of the hangover from that Google “do no evil” nonsense.

For-profit companies are financially motivated not morally motivated, and nothing makes you more financially motivated than being publicly traded and having to produce quarterly results to please Wall Street. Look at what happened to daily newspapers once they were owned by publicly traded companies who cared more about seeing 10% growth year-over-year than being stewards of local news.

Battelle raises a good point about the risk of Facebook using all it knows about us for selfish gains, but I don’t see how reporting quarterly numbers suddenly makes that go away. Does anyone feel like they know everything Google is doing with our data by reading its SEC filings or listening to a scripted conference call? I don’t. And frankly, I’m more worried about the things Google knows about me. The information about me on Facebook is what I have volunteered to share with people. Google has information on everything I’ve ever searched in the privacy of my own home and the content of my inbox. That’s a hell of a lot scarier if used for its own gain.

But as a user, I still trust Google with all of this, because it’s ultimately in its best interest as a company not to abuse that public trust for short term gains. Same goes for Facebook whether I can buy a share of it or not. Going public doesn’t force a company to be good, anymore than a wedding ring forces a man to be faithful. (See Enron.)

4. The SEC forcing Facebook to disclose financials will not “force” the company to go public. The reason entrepreneurs like Zuckerberg, Reid Hoffman, and countless others who opted to sell their companies in the last few years do not want to go public has nothing to do with disclosing quarterly numbers. It has to do with the brain drain of employees leaving for the next hot, pre-IPO company. It has to do with a CEO’s job becoming more about managing Wall Street and the press than building the business. Being public brings with it an almost inevitable shorter-term focus. And most important for someone like Zuckerberg, it means the CEO can’t spend his time obsessing on product, which is mostly what he cares about.

I remember discussing this with Zuckerberg back in 2007, as he was anticipating passing the 500-shareholding-employee mark. This was reportedly one of the things that pushed Google to go public in 2005, and this conversation was well-before Facebook came to a settlement with the SEC that allowed the company to skirt the rule about reporting numbers if a company has more than 500 individual shareholders. I asked Zuckerberg if it would be a trigger to go public, and he said no and added, “disclosing information is the least of the issues I have with being a public company.”

Now, two things are obvious: A lot has changed since those early days, and Facebook will go public one day. That has always been the plan. No one has argued otherwise. And by virtue of time, growth and continued outside investment that date is a lot closer now than it was then. None of us really know for sure if it’ll happen sooner or later, but based on everything I know about Zuckerberg, disclosing financials isn’t going to make a bit of a difference on the timing.

Like Google in its pre-IPO days, Facebook is operating from the ultimate position of strength. Even if the Goldman deal hadn’t happened, the company wouldn’t hurt for cash. No one is going to force this company to go public before it is ready, and all the steps it’s taken in the secondary market make it less likely to happen any time soon, not more likely because they are addressing the very reasons companies used to go public.

DST and Goldman Sachs’ $500 million investment in Facebook has obviously stirred up the tech and financial journalism pot and all sorts of amazing information is now coming to light regarding the social network’s financials. On this note the WSJ is reporting that Goldman is now offering potential investors a Facebook “snapshot” which outlines site traffic, ad statistics and other analytics.

Additional details about 2009 revenue were also revealed during the Goldman solicitation process. From the WSJ:

“According to people familiar with the document, Facebook had net income of $200 million in 2009 on revenue of $777 million. Figures for 2010 weren’t disclosed, but analysts have said the company’s revenue last year could be as much as $2 billion, fueled by advertising growth.”

The unofficial “guess Facebook’s revenue” game has been going on for a long time, but we have to say Inside Facebook came the closest for 2009, pinning it at around 700 million back in March. Their estimated breakdown below.

Last night we were streaming live from the CES Unveiled press pre-show event, but of course, not everyone can be watching a live stream during the rush hour on a workday, so we’ve collected a bunch of the videos we took there and put them in one big post for you — to whet your appetite for our live coverage tonight of Pepcom, another big press event, starting around 7 Pacific.

There was some interesting tech at Unveiled, but it’s really about experiencing the lunacy that is every CES press event. Tortellini, drinks, booth jostling, and crowd noise are all I remember. Caution: lots of video windows inside. RAM use may skyrocket.

Continue reading…

Zynga is acquiring Flock, a beleaguered startup founded in 2005 by Bart Decrem and Geoffrey Arone, we’ve confirmed. The deal should be announced shortly.

The company has raised nearly $30 million in venture capital, although the last round was closed in 2008. We do not know the terms of the acquisition. Both Google and Twitter were also bidding for Flock, we’ve heard from one source – perhaps to get Flock’s engineering talent, which is very highly regarded.

Flock first launched it’s social browser in 2005, and we wrote about it in August of that year. At the time, prior to Twitter and the rise of Facebook, “social” meant writing blogs and social bookmarking, and not much else. Flock was not a hit.

It struggled over the years, eventually switching from using from Mozilla to Chromium as its core. But usage was never really there. And now they have a well-backed competitor in a market that’s never been proven to exist.

This is Zynga’s eighth acquisition in as many months: XPD in Beijing (May), Challenge Games in Austin (June), Unoh Games in Tokyo (August), Conduit Labs in Boston (August), Dextrose AG in Frankfurt (September), Bonfire Studios in Dallas (October) and Newtoy Inc. in McKinney, Texas (December). Lots of acquisitions, and lots of hiring.

Update: From the Flock blog:

I'm very excited to announce that the Flock team will be joining the social gaming phenomenon, Zynga.

This month marked Flock's six-year anniversary and, from the beginning, we've always believed in the transformative power of social. We knew that it would change everything we do online, so we worked hard to make it easier and more rewarding for you to discover, enjoy and share the relationships and content you're passionate about. And so, it is incredibly exciting and rewarding for us to take our expertise and passion for great products to one of the hottest and most innovative companies in the world.

With over a quarter of a billion users, Zynga has captured the imagination of the world. Their dedication to understanding what social game users want and to delivering a wildly popular gaming platform is already legendary. And, they've only just gotten started…

Our team will help Zynga in achieving their goal of building the most fun, social games available to anyone, anytime – on any platform.

Flock's dedication to its products and users allowed us to achieve over 10 million users around the world with two products on the Facebook top 10 list of the most popular desktop apps. We thank our users for their unwavering support and dedication, and we're thrilled to be going to a platform that shares our passion for combining great user experience and technology. What an awesome way to kick off 2011!

Best wishes for a Happy New Year,

Shawn Hardin

About an hour ago, we wrote up the hot rumor that Tweetie 2 for Mac would be launching alongside the Mac App Store tomorrow morning. The source of that information was a site called Razorianfly which posted an image they received of the product, which is being renamed “Twitter for Mac”. We can now confirm that the screenshot is very real, we’ve heard from a reliable source.

Further, we noted that Twitter was being unusually quiet about the image/news — they won’t respond to any inquiries about it! Well, there’s a good reason for that too. We’ve heard that the shot was actually leaked by someone within Apple and there’s currently a hunt underway to figure out who it was. That means Apple likely has both companies on lockdown. They are not happy.

So when the Mac App Store launches tomorrow morning at 9 AM PT, expect to see Twitter for Mac there for download complete with native retweet support, realtime updating, and drag and drop tweets.

And while we haven’t heard anything specifically about the pricing, I think it’s a safe bet that it will be a free download. Previously, Tweetie for Mac was free with ads or $19.95 to get it ad-free, but that changed when Twitter bought it. They also made Twitter for iPhone (formerly Tweetie) free.

If you were on the Internet today, you undoubtedly saw that Google accidentally posted an overview video of Android 3.0 “Honeycomb” on YouTube earlier — then quickly pulled it. Before they did, we were able to record it and grab all the key screenshot of the Tron-like overview. Now Google has officially reposted the video, as well as a brief overview of Android 3.0 on their mobile blog.

Google was clearly waiting for the OS to be previewed at CES in Las Vegas. Now that it has, here’s what they have to say:

Honeycomb is the next version of the Android platform, designed from the ground up for devices with larger screen sizes, particularly tablets. We've spent a lot of time refining the user experience in Honeycomb, and we've developed a brand new, truly virtual and holographic user interface. Many of Android's existing features will really shine on Honeycomb: refined multi-tasking, elegant notifications, access to over 100,000 apps on Android Market, home screen customization with a new 3D experience and redesigned widgets that are richer and more interactive. We've also made some powerful upgrades to the web browser, including tabbed browsing, form auto-fill, syncing with your Google Chrome bookmarks, and incognito mode for private browsing.

We first reported on Google working on this completely revamped UI for Android back in June. At the time, they were aiming for the 2.3 “Gingerbread” release, but that was pushed — to what you see here in 3.0.

At first glance, this UI looks impressive, and an improvement over what Android has looked like until now. And that is particularly important if Google is going compete with the iPad and attempt to own the tablet space in the same way that they have the smartphone space this year.

Personally, I think I’m most excited for the true Chrome-like tabbed browsing. Obviously, Google says to stay tuned for more, as Honeycomb isn’t expect to hit until later this year.