Cristina Cordova

Today, WakeMate users received an email from Greg Nemeth, named Co-Founder and President of PerfectThird, Inc., the company that makes WakeMate. He told them about a new company he was starting to take “the WakeMate sensor technology the next level with MiLife+” (page now taken down, but video still up) and encouraged people to donate to the new venture. Arun Gupta, another co-founder of WakeMate, posted an update on the WakeMate blog stating that this email was “completely unauthorized” and “not affiliate with” WakeMate in any way. As the blog post is currently down, here it is:

WakeMate Update

Hello everyone.

MiLife+

Many of you received an email this morning concerninga new product called MiLife+.

Today is the first time I have heard of this product and I am shocked at the way it was promoted to WakeMate customers. We are not affliated with this product in any way. It was completely unauthorized and I am scrambling to get to the bottom of it. I sincerely apologize that you received those unsolicited messages.

What’s Next?

I poured my heart and soul into this company and though we stumbled along the way I believe that weprovided something of value to our customers. However, as many of you have guessed, we have exhausted our capital and will no longer be making any more WakeMates.

Currently our plan is to keep the service going whilewe work on open sourcing the technology. Hopefully this will ensure that you can continue to enjoy theproduct and its benefits even after the company nolonger exists.

As always if you have any concerns please email meand I will do my best to resolve them:arun[at]wakemate[dot]com.

all the best,

Arun Gupta co-founder of WakeMate

It seems Nemeth took the WakeMate technology and began working on another competitive product, emailed WakeMate’s userbase and responded to its users on Twitter — all without permission. Nemeth recently took down the fundraising page. 

I suppose this is a good lesson to all: choose your co-founders wisely.

Today, as Matthew Keys notes below, Facebook hid all email addresses you have added your profile and replaced them with a single Facebook email address. When asked why they would do this, Facebook said that they were giving the user more “control”, allowing them to decide what email addresses they want to show or hide on their timelines. 

Yet, they ignore the fact that users have purposefully added several email addresses to their profiles. Hiding all email addresses except the one the user has no control over (for example my email address is 221530@facebook.com), is not a step in the direction of more user control or privacy. 

Funnily enough, when I visited my Facebook and added my google email address back to my profile, I saw this nifty ad from moo.com. All in the name of privacy and user control, eh?

producermatthew:

“As we announced back in April, we’ve been updating addresses on Facebook to make them consistent across our site. In addition to everyone receiving an address, we’re also rolling out a new setting that gives people the choice to decide which addresses they want to show on their timelines. Ever since the launch of timeline, people have had the ability to control what posts they want to show or hide on their own timelines, and today we’re extending that to other information they post, starting with the Facebook address.”

—

A Facebook spokesperson, in an email sent to me today regarding several press reports on Facebook’s decision to switch the default email account on a person’s Facebook timeline with a Facebook-provided email address, as outlined by LifeHacker.

(Source: matthewkeys)

I had dinner with a couple friends this week who work for large technology companies in Silicon Valley. Both said they really like their day-to-day jobs, but absolutely hate the internal politics they endure. They said they spent anywhere from 25-30% of their time dealing with internal politics instead of doing their jobs. To succeed, their managers suggested they do things like:

“Get all your internal stakeholders together” - This resulted in the employee calling for large meetings with everyone on the team, even the team members that didn’t really need to be there. 

“Send out weekly update emails” - This resulted in the employee sending long weekly emails to the entire management, sales and engineering teams so that they all knew he was doing his job. He admitted that the length of the email was more important than the content. He thought it was unlikely that anyone would ever read these emails.

“Be data driven” - This resulted in the employee spending hours looking at data (and getting engineering to pull even more data) to report to management, even though he knew this qualitatively from countless customers, clients and partners.

“Get management sign-off” - When an employee wanted to take the lead on a new project she came up with, she was told to get the approval of many other managers, directors and executives first. After working through scheduling, meetings and follow-ups, she gave up and went back to her day-to-day job.

Both of these employees are considering new jobs at smaller companies or startups. As companies scale, employees can shift from a “geting stuff done” culture to one of “talking about getting stuff done” and lose some of their best team members. What can be done to fix it? Or are all big companies doomed to become places where only 70% of employees’ time is spent getting stuff done?

On Monday, Pulse will have its first day at our brand new office in San Francisco - our fifth office. We started in Palo Alto coffee shops - where I was “interviewed” for about 30 minutes and then officially started working later that night.

We then graduated to a co-working space. It held us until we were a 5 person team.

We then made it to our own office in the fall of 2010.

Soon after, we grew out of that space and up to a larger office in downtown Palo Alto.

About six months ago, we hit 20 people and knew we wouldn’t have enough space for interns during the summer. So we began the search for our fifth office space…

If you take one look at office space in downtown Palo Alto, you’ll notice that there is a serious crunch. According to 42Floors, which combines commercial real estate listings from brokerages, landlords and Craigslist, there is currently not a single office space available in downtown Palo Alto over 1000 square feet. 

If you do the same search for San Francisco, you’ll have many more options.

When I was taking a look at office space in April of 2010, I was seeing about $33 per sqft/year in downtown Palo Alto. Today, I’m seeing about $54 per sqft/year. Contrast that with prices for San Francisco office space within a mile of the Caltrain station and you’ll find you can get space for about the same price you could get in Palo Alto two years ago. Not only are there very few spaces in Palo Alto within walking distance of public transportation, but the spaces that are available are small and expensive. 

Why is this happening? It’s no secret that more startups are getting funded and can afford office space, which makes for a crowded commercial real estate market. It certainly doesn’t help that Palantir Technologies controls a significant share of the market for larger space with offices at 151 University, 156 University, 101 Forest and 100 Hamilton (and those are just the ones I know of). The larger problem remains that while startups have been growing faster than ever, the Palo Alto real estate market hasn’t kept up. Buildings that could add a second, third or fourth floor have remained unchanged. There are several store-front spaces that have been sitting empty for years, but they’re zoned for retail space and startups can’t legally take them over.

So while some may think that “all the startups are moving to San Francisco because it’s cooler/hipper/younger”, it’s just not true. Making the move to San Francisco is not a matter of preference for a more lively scene or exposure to more technical or design talent. It’s a matter of necessity - there is simply no more room left to grow in Palo Alto. 

I decided to quickly chart some data about user growth that Path has pushed out recently:

November 10, 2010: Launch of Path 1.0

June 1, 2011: Path hits 500,000 users

October 20, 2011: Path hits 1M users

November 29, 2011: Launch of Path 2.0

February 3, 2012: Path hits 2M users

June 1, 2012: Path (almost) hits 3M users

Path went from zero to 1M users in 247 days, showing that they received about 4048 downloads per day during that period. Path went from 1M to 3M users in 119 days, showing that they now grow by about 16,806 downloads per day. Path 2.0 seemingly resulted in a good 4X increase in user growth. 

According to Google Trends data, Zulily has more daily active visitors than both Fab and Gilt. Why have you probably never heard of it? It’s an online flash sale site for moms, babies and kids and the tech press typically doesn’t cover that demographic. It’s hitting its stride and growing faster than all other flash sale sites (Fab has been doing particularly well also). 

Beyond Zulily’s growth, I found it pretty interesting that some more well-known flash sale sites like Gilt, Jetsetter and Ruelala have seen litte growth over the last year.

Gilt

Jetsetter

Ruelala

Whereas sites like Zulily and Fab have found their niche (the mommy & design-focused crowd in these cases), the same can’t be said for all flash sale sites. Is it the lack of a niche audience to market to or are users churning out of the flash sales sites faster than expected?

This morning Eric Jackson wrote an article on Forbes comparing Kim Polese to Sheryl Sandberg in an effort to give Sandberg some advice of his own: “Tone down the public appearances for a while and just keep your head down” (now redacted from the article).

In 1997, Polese was listed as one of Time’s 25 most influential people in America. He begs, “What were they thinking?”. Polese sold her company for twice the capital it raised, served as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Kleiner and later became CEO of another company. Most startups fail, returning nothing to their investors or employees. Polese performed far above average at a time when most companies crashed and burned. 

He then goes on to compare Polese to Sandberg saying they both like to appear on magazine covers, do public speeches about being a woman dealing with power and are admired by young women. Participating in this, he argues, is “taking your eye off the ball” as Sandberg will ultimately be judged by her business accomplishments. 

What Jackson fails to mention is that it is not the press surrounding Sandberg that got her where she is today. She attended Harvard, was a research assistant at the World Bank, worked as a management consultant at McKinsey, served as Chief of Staff to then United States Secretary of the Treasury and was Google’s Vice President of Global Online Sales & Operations. More than these titles, however, she led the Treasury’s work on forgiving debt in the developing world during the Asian financial crisis, was responsible for online sales of Google’s advertising & publishing products and also for sales operations of Google’s consumer products. All of this was before leading the operations of a $100 Billion dollar company to its IPO. 

How does Jackson boil down her accomplishments? “She’s a great speaker and she seems to do a fantastic job at being Facebook’s COO. Her husband’s super-smart to boot” (now redacted from the article).

She did not make it to the top because of her public speeches or her husband, but from her hard work. To suggest that she should “keep her head down” is patronizing and gendered in its connotation. It is ludicrous to claim that landing a smart husband is somehow equivalent to successfully running one of the most valuable companies of our time.

If Jackson were a true friend of Sandberg’s as he seemingly hopes to be, he would praise her for being an example to women everywhere. In a world where women represent a small portion of the technology industry and are facing alleged sexual harassment and discrimination, we need a Sheryl Sandberg to remind us of why this type of article should never stop us. 

Yesterday, Techcrunch reported that Kleiner Perkins Partner Ellen Pao sued her firm for gender and sexual discrimination. A friend immediately told me “Well that’s career suicide” and I can’t say I didn’t think the same thing. While few can comment on whether the allegations are true, this news does highlight some of the reactions the media and tech community have had to gender issues in the past.

Over the past few months, many have been engrossed in the Valley gender gossip on “brogrammer culture”, sexist comments at tech panels and the general lack of women in tech. Many of these topics are easy to ignore as they’re off-handed comments or just the result of fewer female grads in computer science - and there’s not much we can do to change it.

When I first heard of Ellen Pao’s lawsuit, I thought of Noirin Shirley’s alleged sexual assault at a tech conference. It was first reported on Techcrunch by Alexia Tsotsis and then subsequently taken down because “TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington has a ‘no personal drama’ policy”. Gawker later pointed out that Arrington wrote about his personal issues with Jason Calacanis just a week before. It’s easy to silence issues like this as being about “drama” or “unproven allegations” - but we wouldn’t have much to read on Techcrunch if they waited for confirmation on other rumors, would we?

Ellen Pao’s lawsuit allows our community to discuss these “women in tech” issues as real problems that face our gender and our industry. This is no longer about about dumb comments made at a tech conference about bikini shots or “bro” attitudes - it’s about what’s stopping women from reaching their true potential.

How many women do you know about who have allegedly faced sexual harassment hoping that it will end once they’re promoted to Managing Partner or Director of Engineering? If you asked me Monday, I would have said not a single one. Yesterday, that changed.

For more, head to Women 2.0.

The views above are my own personal views. It does not reflect my employer’s views.

Jeff Bercovici originally reported that from April to May, Washington Post Social Reader faced a large decline in monthly active users - going from 17.4M to 9.2M. Some said these drops may just be temporary, but I was curious to see if the trend continued. I took a look at the latest reports from AppData and let’s just say it’s not looking any better. The Washington Post’s Social Reader went from about 9.2M Monthly Active Users at Bercovici’s first reporting to 5.9M monthly active users as of today.

The Guardian’s app was at about 3.9M monthly active users when Bercovici did his original report. They’re now at 2.2M monthly active users.

Looks like this isn’t just a temporary trend based on some changes to the Facebook newsfeed algorithm, but likely a much more permanent change.

For more, see Peter Kafka’s article on AllThingsD.

The views above are my own personal views, as a consumer. It does not reflect my employer’s (Pulse) views.

Yesterday, Facebook released App Center, a home for Facebook-integrated mobile applications. Much like Google Play or Apple’s App Store, Facebook’s App Center will promote various apps to users. Unlike other marketplaces, apps are not ranked - each user will receive personalized recommendations. This is a great move by Facebook to promote apps built using their platform and gives them even more power than they already have on the uptake of certain mobile applications.

Facebook’s App Center enjoys a few distinct advantages over its competitors:

1. Data: Facebook has much more data on users and user behavior than Apple or Google. Facebook’s application recommendation system can employ a user’s likes and interests across Facebook and the web. They don’t need rankings to tell you what you should download and you won’t need to search for it. App discovery is an issue for even the best mobile developers, so if Facebook can target apps to specific users it will be a great tool for distribution.

2. The Ratings Game: Apple hasn’t been able to conquer the ratings spam issue that plagues the App Store. Developers leave 1-star reviews on competitor’s applications. Users leave ratings on apps they have never opened. These problems are exacerbated by the fact that user accounts on the App Store are not necessarily tied to a real person. Because Facebook user accounts are tied to a real human being, it’s much easier to avoid spam (the time it takes to set up a spam Facebook account > the time it takes to set up a spam email account).

3. The Social Graph: Mobile developers have to push users to share apps with their friends. With App Center, an app can be recommended to me because ten of my good friends are using it or give it a high rating. Knowing which mobile apps my friends are using would be much more valuable than knowing which apps everyone is using.

Now what’s in it for Facebook?

1. Platform Distribution: Facebook could control an aspect of the mobile app ecosystem. Mobile is an area of uncertainty for Facebook. They spent a lot of time pushing for HTML5, when they should have been focused on native applications. They need to ensure that their platform continues to grow on mobile as it has on the web. Pushing downloads of apps using the Facebook platform gives them even more data about their users.

2. Controlling the Rise and Fall of Apps: We’ve seen that Facebook’s platform is a very powerful tool for distribution. It can make your app soar to the top of the charts because of heavy newsfeed placement. A small change can also reduce the Facebook traffic heading over to other sites. Facebook can use App Center to demonstrate the power they have over mobile, not just the web.

3. Monetization: Facebook can charge developers for referrals that lead to paid downloads or take a cut for fixed-price paid apps within the App Center.

I’m excited to see where App Center goes - we’ll likely be seeing a lot more of Facebook on mobile apps in the near future.

Farmville, helping you lose Facebook friends since 2009.

Last night I came across the tweet below from Dan Porter, the CEO of OMGPOP, which makes the hit game Draw Something (recently acquired by Zynga). Porter is now the VP of General Management for Zynga New York. They’re in reference to a former OMGPOP employee, named Shay Pierce who wrote a piece in Gamasutra stating that he wouldn’t be joining Zynga post-acquisition citing that it “views players as weak-minded cash cows”.

Other than the above being tactless and petty, what really bothered me was that this behavior is not at all new for Zynga. They have quite the reputation for scamming their own users, ripping off the games created by other developers, requiring employees to give back their stock, and not telling employees how much their equity is truly worth. I’ve heard similar ramblings from former Zynga employees in person. So, why are we still surprised?

While I’m certainly proud of the OMGPOP team for working through the tough times to a successful exit, it’s hard to feel good for a company that treats people (their users and employees alike) this way time and time again. Hope the money was worth it.

I answered this Quora question today and thought I should post it to my blog since I’ve been asked many times what business development actually means. As I say below, it doesn’t mean the same thing for every startup, but here are my experiences in working at Pulse as we’ve grown from just a few people to a team of over 20.

Q: What is a business development role like at a startup that only creates a consumer mobile/web application?

A: I currently lead business development for Pulse, a consumer application that makes it easy to consume news on mobile phones and tablets. Business development varies quite a bit from startup to startup, but here’s my take:

I started off simply being a “business” person when we were still working out of coffee shops. In a startup with a handful of people, this meant doing everything I could to let our founders focus on building out the product. This included partnerships, data analytics, marketing, community management, hiring, culture etc. In a small startup, a business development role will likely mean wearing all of these different hats. If you hate doing the same thing day after day, it’s a great gig.

As we grew from a handful of people in a coffee shop to 20+ employees busting out of our current office, I began to focus on the areas I enjoyed the most and were most beneficial for the company. There are still a few hats to wear, but not as many as when we began:

Partnerships: I spend the majority of my time pursuing partnerships that will help our company grow. We’re a news application and it’s my job to partner with publishers like Bloomberg News, USA TODAY, Al Jazeera, etc. so that our users have the content they want. We know what our users are asking for and it’s my job to make that happen - we have over 300 partners to date and that number continues to grow each day. I also help plan our content strategy and develop partnerships to execute on that accordingly. Partnerships are much more than signing the deal - I’m constantly staying in touch with our partners ensuring they’re getting just as much out of our partnership as we are.

Data Analytics: When I started at Pulse and we needed data to send to our partners, I had to ask our engineers to pull the data for me. It took longer than I wanted and didn’t seem to be the best use of their time, so I learned SQL and started pulling the data myself using Hive. I then started pulling our internal metrics for how Pulse was performing with our users and sharing it with our team and I still do that to this day.

Marketing/PR: We don’t have anyone at Pulse fully focused on marketing and PR, so if you’re a business person at a small startup, that will likely be in your territory too. When our product team is pushing out the release, it’s my job to write a press release, blog post and email to our userbase, coordinate assets for the press and finalize our “pitch” to journalists.

This varies quite a bit from startup to startup. For startups like Foursquare that are much larger (100+ people), business development is likely fully focused on partnerships. For startups that don’t have many partnerships yet (Path for example, has only partnered with Nike so far), it’s probably more focused on marketing, community and PR.

UPDATE: The Milk team removed usernames from the file download link. Instead of providing a link like http://oink-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/kevinrose-export.zip, links have been changed to http://oink-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/86n0KZ0uSa.zip, which are not attached to usernames. Thanks to Kevin Rose & the Milk team for the fix!

When Oink shut down yesterday, I used their export tool so that I could do something useful with the information I gave them. In requesting my data, which I did simply by filling out a form with only my username, I received the email below. In looking at the link, it seemed that my publicly available username (cristina) called for the download.

Oink Data Download Email

So, curiously, I tried replacing my username with Kevin Rose’s: http://oink-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/kevinrose-export.zip (go ahead, click it). You’ll get a zip file of every item he has ever added, rated or reviewed. You’ll also get every photo he has ever uploaded to Oink.

All of Kevin Rose’s Oink Data

While you may think “So what?”, one’s personal photos and information are fully available for anyone and everyone to download.

Kevin Rose’s Photos

I began thinking about what access I gave to Oink - did I somehow allow them to make all of my data publicly available without my consent? Well, I tried exploring their privacy page, but it seems to conveniently redirect to their data export page. I hope in the Milk team’s next steps at Google, they place a higher value on user data and privacy.

For more on this, check out The Verge, VentureBeat & PCMag.

In July of last year, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures noted the ”law of web/mobile physics” as the ratio of registered users/downloads to monthly actives, daily actives, and max concurrent users. Most of the mobile companies he was seeing hovered around the 30% monthly active user (MAU) rate.

“30% of the registered users or number of downloads (if its a mobile app) will use the service each month

10% of the registered users or number of downloads (if its a mobile app) will use the service each day

the max number of concurrent users of a real-time service will be 10% of the number of daily users”

He noted that the best mobile companies will often use notifications to increase the number of daily and monthly active users, but a 30% MAU rate is actually fairly standard on mobile.

It’s extremely difficult to find companies willing to shed some light on their mobile statistics, but in keeping tabs on the MAUs of a few companies, I’ve noted that:

Zynga grew from 13M mobile DAUs in December to 15M in February 2012

Facebook has 425M mobile MAUs as of December 2011, meaning about 50% of its web MAUs are also mobile MAUs

In September, Bump had 50M installs with 10M MAUs. Yesterday, Bump reported that it now has 77M installs with 12M MAUs.

That last figure really surprised me. In 5 months, Bump has gone from about a 20% MAU/Install rate (already lower than Wilson’s standard rate) to about a 16% MAU/Install rate. I’ve also heard similar stats off the record from other companies about their mobile apps.

About a year ago, Flurry identified the top 100 applications among a set of the largest categories across the App Store and Android Market and exposed their aggregate retention rates (see chart below, more info here).

So, what’s really going on in mobile? Too many apps flooding the market leaving users with short attention spans? As things only seem to be getting worse for retention, how does that affect these companies as they continue to grow? I doubt notifications alone are going to fix this problem, but what can be done to keep these users coming back after the initial install?