Internet radio service Pandora posted its first financial results as a public company yesterday, six months after filing for an IPO. While the company may not yet be profitable, it's off to a pretty good start in terms of growth. Its total revenue grew 117% year-over-year and its total listeners grew 125%.
Contained amongst these investor-pleasing stats was another takeaway: The company is now commanding ad rates comparable to those sold on terrestrial radio stations, as GigaOm pointed out.
Joshua Schachter, founder of the world-changing social networking service Delicious, late last night quietly unveiled his newest work. It's called Jig and it's a site for posting your needs and getting responses from other users.
In many ways "what do you need" is the most basic of questions for a tool to ask a human. Jig applies the best practices of contemporary lightweight social networks to the problem of people filling each others' needs online. It's not fully baked yet, but it's got a team filled with rockstars, a beguiling simplicity to it and it may very well unfold into a compelling service to use. I began testing the service a few months ago but news about it unfolded publicly last night on Techmeme.
This morning Facebook sent out invites to f8, its annual developer conference. The conference will be held at The Design Center in San Francisco on Sept. 22. Registration for the event is $400 and Facebook will not offer discounts (outside of press passes).
The keynote for f8 2011 will be held at 10:00 a.m. PDT with breakout sessions starting at 12:30 p.m. A post-conference event, After8, will be held at 8:00 p.m. In years past, Facebook has used f8 for major announcements and to set its agenda for the next year. This year, f8 comes a bit later than usual, with the annual conference coming in the fall as opposed to the spring. Are you attending f*8? What are your expectations for what could be announced this year?
We've written many times about modern mobile phones acting as a network of sensors to detect what's going on around their users - but what if those same phones were set to watch existing networks of more traditional real-world sensors? That's what's happening in Japan, where the next version of Apple's iOS includes a unique option in the settings to turn on push notifications for earthquakes. This is probably just the beginning of a paradigm that could spread to other places and other functions where real-time push is a valuable utility - many use cases we can't yet imagine until multiple intersecting systems of technology evolve further.
Japan struggles with earthquakes as much as any country on earth and has an extensive network of sophisticated seismological sensors distributed around the country to try to detect big ones on the way. With the push of a slider (screenshot below), iOS5 users in Japan will be able to receive push notifications from those government sensors automatically (though probably via the mobile carriers). This could be what the future looks like, at least in part.
Amazon is bringing its daily deals Groupon competitor to the largest city in the United States. AmazonLocal, which debuted in select cities including Seattle, Los Angeles and Chicago in early August, is coming to New York City. With Groupon's IPO lingering, Amazon looks to be moving aggressively to impede the daily deals giant's momentum.
Since New York City is so big, Amazon says that the initial rollout will be for most of Manhattan (downtown, midtown, uptown including upper east and west sides) and Brooklyn. Amazon made no mention of the Bronx, Queens or Staten Island. Coming to New York City is a significant move for AmazonLocal and perhaps a precursor to a nation-wide rollout. Are you more inclined to use an established e-commerce company like Amazon for daily deals over startups like Groupon or LivingSocial?
Steve Jobs has announced his resignation as CEO of Apple. He will remain chairman of the board of directors. Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook has been named as his replacement. The Apple co-founder has taken medical leave for health problems this year, fueling much speculation about Apple's life after Steve. The swift confirmation of Cook as CEO indicates a smooth transition as part of Apple's succession plan.
From inspiring Windows to pioneering creative uses of personal computers to popularizing quality industrial design and mobile media consumption, to finally delivering on the sci-fi promise of tablet computing, Jobs has been at the forefront of global cultural evolution for decades.
Today, a NYC-based startup called Jux has launched a personal publishing platform that kicks a field goal right over the heads of Tumblr and the post-blogging crowd. It's a big, beautiful, dynamic tool full of splashy images and sharp Web fonts. It offers six kinds of basic posts: BlockQuote, Article, Photo, Video, SlideShow, and CountDown. You start from there and build huge, full-screen posts that suck the viewer in. It's like a blog that can crank out whole About.me or Flavors.me pages for every post. You have to see it to get how powerful it is.
Power, of course, is not everything when it comes to publishing. Jux isn't lean like Posterous or clean like WordPress, whose publishing platform powers nearly 15% of the world's websites. Compared to blog posts that feel more like pages, a Jux post is more like a Times Square billboard. It takes some time to load. There's an animated loading bar between screens, especially when editing. But it's worth the wait. Perusing a Jux profile is like taking a deep dive into someone's ideas.
Social networking behemoth Facebook reached 1 trillion pageviews in June, according to new data. Facebook is the most-visited website on the Internet, according to data compiled by the ad network DoubleClick, a subsidiary of Google.
In June 2011, Facebook received about 870 million unique visitors, a figure that exceeds the number of registered users the site has by about 120 million. That's because many of the site's pages come up in search results and are generally visible to non-users, if only partially.
A new level of integration between Facebook and Ticketmaster lets concertgoers see where their friends are sitting at upcoming concerts and events.
Hoping to make the process of buying tickets to concerts as social as attending them, Ticketmaster launched the new Facebook-enhanced seating charts recently, giving fans the option of buying seats near their friends.
The recently-departed co-founders of Twitter - Ev Williams, Biz Stone and Jason Goldman - now working together again under the old Obvious Corporation name, announced their latest product today, a stealth alpha app called Lift. It's described as a way to help users achieve their goals through positive reinforcement.
It sounds like Twitter in its simplicity and from what I've seen it looks a lot like Twitter too, but with more structure. What's called Lift today was apparently called Mibbles just weeks ago and was described then as "a very simple tracking and encouragement tool." GetMibbles.com now redirects to Lift.do. What was Mibbles all about? Lift has disclosed almost no details about how it works, but you can find a number of hints about it if you look at the previous iteration of the project. It looks like a really interesting idea, too. (Lots of other coverage of corporate background etc. is here.)
