Condé has a demo video it has been showing to advertisers, employees and plenty of other people, including me. The demo gives you a pretty good overview of what the publisher and Adobe (ADBE), which is building the software to produce and view the magazines, have in mind. But the publisher has turned down my request to show the clip to my readers.

This doesn’t mean you can’t see it, though. If you’re in New York City, you can troop down to the promotional “store” Wired magazine sponsors each year, located this time in the Meatpacking District (keep an eye peeled for the Betaworks guys). The publisher is showing off at least part of the clip there, and you can see some of it in this YouTube clip below (thanks to Brian Chen for spotting):

Obviously, it’s a much better experience if you can watch the video directly, instead of through someone else’s video camera. Also, I think you’d prefer to see it outside of the store, where you’re not subjected to slit-your-wrists techno music. So perhaps this will prompt the Condé folks to put the entire clip out in public.

In the meantime, here’s a gallery of “Saturday Night Live” cast members and other sort-of-famous people checking out last year’s store.

That’s the core of Twitter’s pitch, of course, and it has helped the microblogging service raise $155 million, a $1 billion valuation, and forge partnerships with Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT). Not surprisingly, investors are looking to place money on related bets, from search engines that parse real-time data to location-based social networks with real-time updates, and even real-time photo-sharing sites.

The newest entrant: Hot Potato, a buzzy start-up that’s supposed to let users converse about a particular event, whether they’re attending it in person or watching from afar. When it’s up and running, that is. The five-man crew doesn’t have users or a product just yet.

But that hasn’t prevented the Brooklyn, N.Y-based company from raising about $1 million, sources say, in a round led by First Round Capital and RRE Ventures. A group of smaller investors, including Betaworks, the incubator that specializes in real-time companies, and Ron Conway, the angel investor best known for his Google bet, are also backing the company.

Hot Potato is led by Justin Shaffer, an eight-year veteran of Major League Baseball Advanced Media, pro baseball’s well-regarded Web unit. Shaffer has recruited three other MLB.com employees (one of whom subsequently left to get an MBA at MIT) to join him.

Shaffer wouldn’t comment about his funding round, but was willing to discuss his start-up’s general plans. They are finishing an iPhone app and plan to submit it to Apple (AAPL) in the next few weeks, he said, and will open their doors once that’s approved.

The big idea is an interesting one. People are already using Facebook and Twitter to converse about events in real time–think about Barack Obama’s inauguration, or Balloon Boy, or last night’s Yankees-Angels game.

Shaffer’s critique of those platforms, though is that “they break at scale–there’s no good way to filter the chatter so that  you, your friends, and a group of strangers with something relevant to say can all connect. Hot Potato, he says, will offer a “curated stream” in real time of all the data coming out of the event in real time. What we’re really focused on doing is bringing together the entire audience of an event, whether they’re at the event or watching at home.”

Business model? TBD, of course. But there are a couple of obvious ways to go. For instance, Shaffer thinks people who opt-in to a particular conversation–say, about an NFL game or a U2 concert–would be okay with seeing “in-stream” ads, as long as they were relevant.

But that’s a problem that’s best tackled once the service is up and running. We’ll check back then.

In fact, co-founder Ivan Kirigin’s first day at Facebook was last Monday–four days before he and his wife, Abby, announced that they are shuttering their start-up.

Confused? You should be: This is one of the odder M&A stories I’ve seen in a while. Not surprisingly, the tale differs depending on who’s telling it.

Some basic, undisputed facts: Sometime this spring, TipJoy, a year old start-up that lets Web surfers “tip” bloggers and publishers, shopped the service to multiple parties, including Twitter and Facebook. By July, Facebook had offered, via a term sheet, to buy the company. Facebook then pulled its offer, and shortly after, offered Ivan a job. Now he and his wife are shutting TipJoy down and returning what’s left of the $1 million they had raised to their investors.

Also undisputed: No one has accused anyone of violating any laws, or contracts. Facebook’s offer was nonbinding and nonexclusive. And it’s not unheard of for companies to walk away from an M&A deal late in the process. That’s what happened, for instance, when Google (GOOG) bailed out after deep talks with Digg a year ago.

You could see why some of TipJoy’s backers, which include BetaWorks, the Accelerator Group, ex-Googler Chris Sacca and the Y Combinator start-up factory, might cry  foul. The argument would be that Facebook’s actions effectively prevented the company from finding another buyer. But even if that was true, it doesn’t mean that Ivan Kirigin had to accept Facebook’s job offer and/or shutter his company.

Facebook spokesman Larry Yu declined to discuss the negotiations in detail, but offered this statement via email: “We take pride in operating in a transparent and ethical manner. We can’t offer any specifics here, but to suggest anything untoward occurred on our part simply ignores the facts.”

I’ve sent the Kirigins repeated requests for comment but haven’t heard back. Their statement announcing the decision to close their company doesn’t mention Ivan’s new job. But it does hint, obliquely, at their future plans:

When we evaluate why there’s been so much hype about payments on Twitter, and yet so little traction for us (and even far less for our competitors) it is clear to us that the reason is that a 3rd party payment service doesn’t add enough value. We strongly believe that social payments will work on a social network, provided that they’re done within the platform and not as a 3rd party….the only way to get around this is for the platforms themselves to control payments–then all people wanting to operate on that platform would have to play along. We believe that a payments system directly and officially integrated into social networks such as Twitter and Facebook will be a huge success.

UPDATE: Y Combinator founder Paul Graham, commenting on this story on his Hacker News site, says Facebook hired Ivan at his urging:

Facebook didn’t do anything wrong. Tipjoy was out of money. They’d been talking to several potential acquirers, including Facebook, but those deals all fell through. So the Tipjoys were going to have to get jobs somewhere. Since they were worried about money and Ivan admired the hackers at Facebook, I asked FB if they’d offer him a job, and they did.

It doesn’t portend anything for the future of startups, as this story seems to imply. If your startup tanks, you have to get a job somewhere, and lots of hackers get jobs at Facebook. There are several other YC alumni working there.

Ivan Kirigin also weighs in within the same comments section, and says that my report “completely doesn’t tell the whole story.” Ivan, I’m all ears, so either drop me a line or leave a comment below.

Note: I’m assuming that the commenters identifying themselves as Paul Graham and Ivan Kirigin in the comments section are indeed Paul Graham and Ivan Kirigin. But I’ve sent emails to both men so I can verify that. Update: That is indeed Paul Graham.

John Borthwick, who funded bit.ly via his Betaworks investment group, explains the details of his offer here, along with a bit of pro forma condolence for the demise of his competitor: “Sad day yesterday to see tr.im announce that they are shutting their doors, after failing to make a business of a nice service with a great URL.”

To me, that sounds a bit like a mafia don shaking his head a tad wistfully after hearing that one his old rivals got bumped off, then sending a big bouquet to the funeral. And I think that the tr.im team, as well as some of bit.ly’s other competitors, may take it in the same vein.

UPDATE: I spoke to Eric Woodward, CEO of Tr.im’s parent company Nambu Networks. As I thought, he’s uninterested in working with Bit.ly, either directly or via 301works, the third party archive Borthwick has proposed. His response: “Why would I want to upload all my of data to Bit.ly?” When I suggested that this might be a good move for his users, he allowed that it still might happen — if he can’t find a buyer for Tr.im. And that’s a distinct possiblity: Woodward said he has been looking for a buyer for the past few months, without success.

But Borthwick’s proposal also sounds like a good one to me. I’ll let the wiser Webheads explain whether it’s a real solution for the problem that tr.im’s failure will create for the Web, namely, the notion that lots of Web addresses, shortened for use in social Web services like Facebook and Twitter, will stop working one day.

And if you do think it’s a real problem and not just an annoyance for the service’s users, as well as for Web sites that got referral traffic from the service, then someone’s going to need to think of something. We’re going to see more of this.

That’s because if there is any business at all in URL-shortening, it’s going to be a scale business that ends up in the hands of a couple competitors, max. Just like search. And that means that dozens of mom-and-pop competitors (here’s a visual snapshot, taken last fall, of 117 URL-shorteners) are going to fall by the wayside.

Right now Bit.ly looks to be the Google (GOOG) of URL-shortening, and there is some griping that it got that status unfairly, via a deal with Twitter that made it the service’s default shortener last May (type a long Web address into the message box on Twitter’s Web page, and the service will automatically convert it into a bit.ly link–like this). Not true, says Borthwick–the Twitter deal helped, but it’s not responsible for the majority of Bit.ly’s traffic.

But there’s no reason for Borthwick, Bit.ly or Twitter to be defensive about the deal. If Twitter wants to pick a preferred vendor/partner/developer for any or all of its services, it should do so. It’s not going to do that very often; one of the main reasons that Twitter has taken off is the ecosystem of developers who have built innovative stuff using the service’s open architecture, and it won’t want to discourage that.

And if Twitter wants to work with someone it’s already doing business with–prior to Twitter’s most recent funding round, Betaworks owned a sizable slug of Twitter’s stock, via Twitter’s acquisition of Betaworks portfolio company Summize a year ago–there’s no problem with that, either.

In any case, the Bit.ly/Betaworks guys have other things to worry about. They still need to figure out how to take the data stream they’re mining from all those tiny Web addresses they’re making and do something useful/valuable with it.

Then again, so does Twitter.

The site is the work of Peter Rojas, who helped build Gizmodo and Engadget, and Ryan Block, who took the torch from Rojas after he moved on. Gizmodo and Engadget are the best known and most powerful of the new generation of gadget sites, which makes Rojas and Block revered by the gadget gang. That’s why we’ve been hearing about gdgt, in dribs and drabs, for many many months.

But as well known as Rojas and Block are, they’re still going to have to work hard to make a dent in the crowded field. In addition to the two blogs they created, the gadget spectrum includes everyone from staid players like CBS’s (CBS) CNET to rumor sites for Apple (APPL) obsessives, like MacRumors, to sites for real obsessives, like the handful of people who still own Palm (PALM) Treos. (And, of course, there’s All Things Digital’s Walt Mossberg, who bestrides all of this like the colossus he is, and is also my boss. Hi, Walt!)

Rojas and Block argue that their site is different because it’s not going to be driven by editors but by the site’s users, who will gather there to swap info, stories, rumors, opinions, etc. In other words, Facebook for gadgets, though I gather they’d recoil if they heard that. The other pitch, though they won’t spell this out, either: Their site takes a bunch of features and content that you can find other places and presents them in a better way.

There’s a bunch of nifty features, like a gadget-finder that lets you find products via specs instead of brands, and the site seems to be pretty slick. But it’s better if you have a look yourself instead of having me describe it. And gdgt.com won’t really hit its stride until actual users start using it. I look forward to hearing what they have to say about my upcoming phone dilemma: iPhone 3GS, Palm Pre or Blackberry Tour?

But as much as Rojas and Block argue that this is a community site, it’s their names and reps that have people interested in the project. And that’s what has convinced investors to plow money into an ad-supported Web site in an era when the economy sucks and there are way too many ad-supported Web sites.

The duo won’t discuss funding, but I’m told that last fall they were discussing investments of up to $1 million, but ended up taking less than that via a group of VCs and angel investors. I don’t have a complete list of investors, but people familiar with the company tell me that early-stage investor True Ventures led the round, which also included New York-based incubator Betaworks and Mahalo’s Jason Calacanis.

Calacanis’s name will resonate with longtime followers of the tech blog world: He was one of the founders of Weblogs Inc., which created Engadget as a rival to Gawker Media’s Gizmodo, and hired Rojas away from Gizmodo. Calacanis eventually sold Weblogs Inc. to Time Warner’s (TWX) AOL for a decent pile of cash, some of which I believe ended up in Rojas’s lap.

Click the image below to see a screenshot of what gdgt’s homepage ought to look like.

ComScore says Twitter logged 30.1 million search queries in May, more than Time Warner Cable (TWC), but not even on the same playing field as search also-rans like Ask.com.

But what if comScore is dramatically undercounting Twitter’s search–not just the standard undercounting that Web publishers always complain about, but something more significant?

It’s a given that comScore is undercounting. I know this because the research outfit told me so: The company confirmed today that it only measures searches executed at Twitter.com. But at least half of Twitter’s users are accessing the service without visiting the site, via third-party clients like Tweetdeck. And within that group of users is the power-user set, which is far more likely to be executing searches, many times a day in some cases, than Oprah fans who just joined the service last month.

So it’s easy enough to conclude that the majority of Twitter’s searches are going uncounted by comScore (SCOR). But how big is the gap? I’ve asked Twitter to share its search numbers, but I’m not holding my breath on that one. (UPDATE: See bottom of post)

In the meantime, let’s do some guesstimating.

Start with this year-old post by John Borthwick of Betaworks, who at the time was an investor in Summize, a Twitter search engine at the time (Twitter later bought Summize outright).

Borthwick reports seeing a huge number of search queries on Twitter on the opening day of Apple’s (AAPL) 2008 developer conference, topping out at an average of 190 queries per second. Tease that out over a full day, and you get 16.4 million searches in 24 hours.

For argument’s sake, let’s say that most of those searches occurred in an eight-hour stretch before, during and after Steve Jobs’s pronouncements that day, and knock that total down by two-thirds, to something like 5.5 million queries.

Steve Jobs pronouncements are rare things so it would be wrong to assume that Twitter sees similar usage patterns every day. But then again, Twitter has had an insane growth spurt in the last year: The most recent comScore traffic numbers peg monthly visitors at 32 million world-wide, up from a couple million a year ago.

See where this is going? Again, for argument’s sake, let’s say that Twitter’s peak traffic a year ago is now close to daily traffic today, and extrapolate that 5.5 million query guesstimate out for a month: You get something closer to 165 million queries.

Want to tweak any of my assumptions above? Be my guest. But no matter how you cut it, I’m sure that Twitter’s real search numbers are going to be several times higher than comScore’s number, at the very least.

Again, this matters in the end because Twitter’s most compelling investment thesis is that it can provide real-time search. And for that to mean something, the company is going to have to start registering as an actual search competitor at some point, not just to Time Warner Cable but to Yahoo (YHOO), Microsoft (MSFT) or even Google (GOOG). So how close, or far away, is that from happening?

UPDATE: Twitter cofounder Biz Stone responds, but declines to hand out any numbers. No surprise. I am a bit surprised to see him play down the importance of search at Twitter. I wonder if his investors are also surprised.

We don’t share absolute data such as total requests or queries per day but we do look at the whole ecosystem when we measure these things (not just Twitter.com).

Also, we are focused on the sharing and discovery of tweets so comparing Twitter to web search is interesting but not necessarily how we would measure success.

Today’s example: StockTwits, a day trader-meets-Twitter site that just raised $800,000 from venture capital firm True Ventures. It’s not a ton of money, but StockTwits doesn’t need a ton of money. The site, which launched last fall with an $800,000 angel round, employs all of four people.

And it’s yet another bet that investor Howard Lindzon has made in Twitter: He’s also put money into bit.ly, a Twitter-centric url-shortner, and Tweetdeck, a useful Twitter client, alongside incubator Betaworks, which in turn invested in the StockTwits angel round. Cozy! (Cozier: Lindzon was an early investor in Silicon Alley Insider, my former employer).

Like all of those companies and just about every other company that’s trying to make money from Twitter, StockTwits doesn’t have any kind of formal relationship with Twitter. It doesn’t need one: If you want to take advantage of Twitter’s data and users, you can just plug right in for free via its open API.

As a wise man once said: “All of [these companies] are part of the burgeoning ecosystem that revolves around Twitter, which powers all of their companies by letting them plug into its data stream. In exchange, all of these companies make Twitter more successful, by bolting on frills and features to its bare-bones service.”

Name aside, StockTwits may be less dependent on Twitter than any of the other Twittery start-ups. StockTwits users employ Twitter to pass along investment ideas, but beyond that, it’s a fairly straightforward stock message board, the kind we’ve seen since the first Web boom.

Lindzon and co-founder Soren Macbeth plan to make money via ads and by publishing newsletters/blogs on behalf of some StockTwits users, (two of whom are already selling their investment advice for $60 a month). Basically, Twitter is a lead-generator for the site.

Come to think of it, that could be a business for the Twitter team. Right?

Here’s a video interview I shot with Lindzon last week in which he declined to hand out any stock tips of his own. Presumably he’ll rectify that today.

]]> http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090518/twitter-app-investors-still-writing-checks-stocktwits-raises-a-round/feed/ 0 http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090330/is-a-shorter-web-address-worth-big-money-bitly-raises-2m/ http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090330/is-a-shorter-web-address-worth-big-money-bitly-raises-2m/#comments Mon, 30 Mar 2009 18:30:36 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=5772 Here’s another Web 2.0 riddle that seems particularly hard to solve post-Lehman: What’s the value of a service that takes a long Web address and makes it shorter?

One answer: Several million dollars.

Oh, and did I mention there’s no business model attached to said Web service?

Still with me?

OK. Here are the details: Betaworks, the incubator/start-up platform best known for selling Twitter a search engine for $15 million last year, is taking in-house project bit.ly and spinning it out as a separate company. A group of new investors, led by O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, has poured about $2 million into the company, which implies a valuation in the midseven figure range.

Other investors include Howard Lindzon’s Social Leverage group, Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech VC, and uber-angel Ron Conway. O’Reilly’s Bryce Roberts will join the board of the four-man company.

bit.ly is one of roughly a gazillion url-shorteners, all of which do the same thing. They take an unwieldy Web address like, say, this one: “http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090330/huffington-post-pays-for-content-after-all-via-175-million-investigative-fund/” and turn it into something concise like this: “http://bit.ly/14WdlB.”

If you spend much time on Facebook, Twitter or any other Web service where brevity is useful, you’ve encountered a shortened URL, and you’re likely seeing more and more of them all the time. The bit.ly guys say people clicked on 20 million of their shortened Web addresses last week, and that the number is increasing by about 10 percent a week.

Great. So where’s the money? Many of bit.ly’s competitors, like the aptly named tinyurl.com, generate modest revenue by running Google (GOOG) ads against the many eyeballs that come to the site to use the service. But bit.ly won’t sell ads, and it plans on distinguishing itself by tracking all the clicks and streams that come through the service and using the data to provide interesting analytics and insights into who’s looking at what on the Web, in real time.

The logic: If you’re impressed with the possibilities of Twitter’s real-time search capabilities (see above), you’ll love bit.ly.

Great. So where’s the money? bit.ly is free to users, and the company says it doesn’t plan on selling its analytics or other tools to publishers. Team bit.ly says revenue will come sometime down the road, from something else–when they figure out what that is.

That kind of shrugging was par for the course during Boom 2.0 days. But in the dark days of last fall, even the sunniest Web optimists, including Betaworks founder John Borthwick himself, were telling start-ups that they had to face reality and start making money.

So either things have gotten much better than we realized or the bit.ly investors think it’s still worth betting on fast-growing, revenue-free start-ups. It’d be nice if both things are true.

]]> http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090330/is-a-shorter-web-address-worth-big-money-bitly-raises-2m/feed/ 3 http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090116/another-twitter-app-funded-tweetdeck-raises-an-angel-round-next-up-a-business-plan/ http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090116/another-twitter-app-funded-tweetdeck-raises-an-angel-round-next-up-a-business-plan/#comments Fri, 16 Jan 2009 12:54:58 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=3209 Yes, you can still get someone to invest in a Web start-up with zero revenue. It helps if you can insert the word “Twitter” into your pitch, though.

TweetDeck, a one-man company that makes a very helpful piece of free software that organizes your Twitter streams, is raising an angel round led by Betaworks, the investment company with a hankering for all things Twitter. The round, which hasn’t closed yet, will eventually end up somewhere south of $500,000, I’m told.

When it does, the financing will make 34-year-old programmer Iain Dodsworth a paper millionaire. Nice work for a Brit who built TweetDeck just last June because he was following 30 people on Twitter and wanted a better way to organize their Tweets.

Dodsworth says TweetDeck has been downloaded 250,000 times since then and that users are sending out 120,000 messages a day using the software. That places it above other free Twitter clients like Twitterific and twhirl, both of which are cranking out 80,000 to 85,000 messages a day, according to tracking service TweetRush.

All of them are part of the burgeoning ecosystem that revolves around Twitter, which powers all of their companies by letting them plug into its data stream. In exchange, all of these companies make Twitter more successful, by bolting on frills and features to its bare-bones service.

And no money changes hands at any point: Twitter doesn’t charge for use of its data, and its partners do all their development work for free. That could change at some point. As Twitter casts about for a business model to support its service–it is, famously, just about revenue-free at this point–an obvious solution would be to start charging a fee to the likes of TweetDeck.

No problem, says Dodsworth, who says he’d be happy to pay Twitter, particularly if it gave him even more access in exchange. Oh. And what about his business model? It’s coming, Dodsworth says–he’d like to start selling a pro version of his software, targeting power users and corporations.

That strikes me as a fairly small market, but then again TweetDeck is a very small operation. Dodsworth says he doesn’t plan on hiring any additional help in the near future, even as he preps new features like a version for Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone.

I’ll let him explain himself, via a short video interview I taped with him yesterday–just as soon as the Internet cooperates and lets me post the clip. In the meantime, you can also track Dodsworth on Twitter here or here.

[ See post to watch video ]

]]> http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090116/another-twitter-app-funded-tweetdeck-raises-an-angel-round-next-up-a-business-plan/feed/ 1 http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20081217/twitter-launches-another-business-it-doesnt-make-money-from-trading-site-stocktwits-raises-800000/ http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20081217/twitter-launches-another-business-it-doesnt-make-money-from-trading-site-stocktwits-raises-800000/#comments Wed, 17 Dec 2008 17:44:34 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=2231 Twitter’s executives and investors tend to roll their eyes when people ask them when they’re going to start, you know, generating revenue. Maybe that’s because there’s a really obvious answer: Start collecting money from the many companies that are using Twitter’s infrastructure and service to create their own businesses.

Newest example: StockTwits, a Twitter-based bulletin board/chat room for individual investors. The company has raised more than $800,000 from a big group of angels that includes Roger Ehrenberg and Howard Lindzon (disclosure: Ehrenberg and Lindzon invested in my previous employer). Ehrenberg has provided a long list of investors at his blog; other notable names include Betaworks, the New York-based start-up investment company, and Todd Stottlemyre, the former Toronto Blue Jays pitcher turned investor and Twitterer.

The idea is fairly simple: Users toss off quick thoughts about trades, companies, markets, etc., using “$” or “$$” signs to identify their messages as StockTwits. The site compiles and sorts them, and will eventually start ranking users based on their following, track record, etc. The service is free, but will try to upsell users with premium products like research, etc.

You could do all this without Twitter, if you wanted to. But the service is perfect for the rapid-fire bursts of text/thought that a certain breed of investor treasures. And, of course, Twitter does all the heavy lifting for free, so why not build a business off its back?

Twitter isn’t the only Web 2.0 business to let other people build services based on its API, of course. It’s standard practice for everyone from Google (GOOG) to Facebook. But usually those businesses benefit because users end up more closely tied to their core businesses, which… is a business of some sort. Since Twitter has yet to actually generate any business, it’s just a giveaway.

That could change sooner than later: Twitter is hiring a “Business Product Manager” who is supposed to “lead the definition and execution of the products and features that will lead to monetization of the Twitter platform.” Perhaps step one will be a phone call to StockTwits and the other members of the Twitter ecosystem.

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