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In-depth analysis and expert insight into the music, mobile media, and computing devices trendsetter.The Patent Pledge
Ur-angel Paul Graham wants companies to promise not to offensively use patents against startups. So far, the participants in this patent pledge tend to by YCombinator companies. It could end up being something idiosyncratic to YC, which already seems to seek out the kind of companies that wouldn’t use patents offensively. But…
Facebook Pages and SEO
According to PageLever, Facebook pages get about a third of their referring traffic from search. This could be a good reason to focus on SEO for those pages, but there are some caveats:
Many of these searches are likely to be navigational. Big brand advertisers often direct people to their brands’…
Skype Buys GroupMe
Skype has purchased group-texting service GroupMe for about $85mm, a nice exit for the year-and-a-half-old firm. It’s also an interesting combination: one of Skype’s big strengths is its peer-to-peer structure, which basically coopts users’ computers to keep things running smoothly. GroupMe uses Twilio, which is basically an API for anything a standard…
Google’s Intrinsically Boring Patent Deal
Google is buying Motorola Mobility for $12.5bn. There are three parts of this deal: the assets Google will immediately liquidate (low-margin phones, cash), the assets they’ll reluctantly liquidate (the set-top box business), and the assets they only bought in order to avoid being sued (the patents).
It’s unfortunate that Google’s…
Buddy Media Raises $54mm for Facebook Marketing
Buddy Media, provider of high-end Facebook pages to large brands, has raised another huge round to fund further expansion. Facebook seems eager to have companies raise money in order to expand on their platform. This, despite Facebook being ranked the worst API in a survey of developers.
Opt-In Privacy on…
The Worst Business Story in the World
Yesterday, we argued that the worst business stories were of the “X nearly reaches Y” genre. We could have cited the example of the “Index reaches round number” stories, but we chose the ever popular “Apple’s earnings/market cap/etc. approach Microsoft’s.”
What Monday was to the S&P, yesterday…
A Social Media ETF
ETF issuer Global X has announced a new social media ETF. This network is based on a third-party index that includes mostly non-US companies (there are very few pure-play SEO companies, other than the rather mangy ones trading over the counter). Since overseas social media companies tend to be…
Forget the debt ceiling. As far as Internet investors are concerned, Apple is the macro situation—it’s the central bank, the legislature, and the source of exogenous unpredictability in the web.
Apple owns a growing number of screens, eyeballs, and minutes. However you measure it, Apple products are a conduit for more and more attention. Apple…
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