Jim Breyer to leave Facebook board – Accel Partners venture capitalist Jim Breyer announced today that he is stepping down from Facebook’s board of directors in June after holding a seat since April 2005. Breyer was recently elected to the Harvard University Corporation Board. He also sits on the boards of Brightcove, Dell, News Corporation and Walmart. Facebook’s current board lineup includes Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Marc Andreessen, Erskine Bowles, Susan Desmond-Hellmann, Don Graham, Reed Hastings and Peter Thiel.

New Facebook data center coming to Iowa – Facebook this week announced plans for a new data center in Altoona, Iowa. Altoona will be the company’s fourth owned and operated data center. Its others are in Prineville, Oregon; Forest City, North Carolina; and Luleå, Sweden. The facility will feature its Open Compute Project server designs, outdoor-air cooling system and other innovations to be more energy efficient. Facebook says it plans to break ground this summer and begin serving user traffic in 2014.

Stickers come to Messenger for Android – Facebook updated its Messenger for Android app this week to include support for the new stickers in chat. Stickers are larger emoji that are popular in Asian messaging apps like Line, KakaoTalk and WeChat. Facebook offers a number of sticker sets, which are available for free download from its mobile Sticker Store. This feature came to the main Facebook for iOS app last week, but it is not yet available for the main Android app or Messenger for iOS.

Facebook Home passes 500K installs – According to the Google Play Store, Facebook Home was download more than 500,000 times in the week since it launched. So far the app has only a two-star rating.

Facebook tries new image format – Facebook is testing a new WebP image format, which could make the site faster and reduce network costs, according to CNet. Now, when users upload JPEG images, Facebook converts them to WebP and delivers them this way to people using browsers like Chrome and Opera, which support the format. WebP, however, is not always compatible outside of the web, which means it is harder for users to download and share images they get from Facebook.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Venture capitalist Jim Breyer is giving up his seat on Facebook’s board in June, which he’s held since April 2005. The split is amicable and stems from his desire to concentrate on his new seat on the Harvard University Corporation Board. Breyer joined the Facebook board after his venture firm Accel became one of Facebook’s earliest investors, leading its $12.7 million Series A.

Breyer will stay on Facebook’s board until its yearly director’s meeting on June 11th. In a departure note, Breyer wrote, “It has been a genuine honor to serve as an investor and board member since April 2005 as Facebook has grown from an emerging social network for U.S. college students to a global service that connects over a billion people. After over eight years of board service, it’s time to step aside in light of my other responsibilities, including my recent election to the Harvard University Corporation Board. I will leave the board knowing that Facebook is a global Internet leader with exceptional leadership within the company and on the board.”

Facebook tells me “Jim made many, many important contributions during his long tenure on the board and we were well-served by his presence. We will continue to have a strong relationship with Jim and going forward, we’re thankful we can continue to rely upon the tremendous depth and expertise of our recently expanded board.”

Breyer also has plenty of other responsibilities to handle beyond Harvard. He’s currently on the boards of Wal-Mart, Dell, News Corp., and several other companies.

His departure could leave another board seat open at Facebook. The social network’s other seats are currently occupied by Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Marc Andreessen, Erskine B. Bowles, Donald E. Graham, Reed Hastings, Peter A. Thiel, and the most recent addition, Susan Desmond-Hellmann.

Breyer’s financial expertise likely helped Facebook to navigate its early fundraising and keep Zuckerberg in firm control. That’s been crucial to allowing Facebook to concentrate on its user experience rather than make a quick buck for its investors.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The U.K.’s BBC has launched an Android version of its iPlayer Radio app which lets U.K. users listen to BBC radio stations live or catch up on scheduled programmes they missed. Confirming that the app is now available for download on Google’s Play Store in a tweet this morning, the corporation added that it would also be available on Amazon’s app store for its Kindle Fire tablets “very soon”.

The BBC launched its original iPlayer Radio apps last year, in October, releasing a native iOS app plus mobile web and desktop apps. The move extended the touch points for its digital on-demand iPlayer service by breaking out the radio content into a standalone app — with the  ultimate aim of shifting all radio listening off the BBC’s main on-demand iPlayer service so that can focus on TV.

At the time of the original iPlayer Radio app launch, the BBC said an Android version would be coming soon but said it needed to iron out Adobe Flash issues for the app to work across the various flavours of Android device — a process that apparently took half a year. The current app listening on Google Play warns that Samsung Galaxy S3 owners may encounter an audio playback bug — if they bought their device via a carrier.

The listing notes that the issue is  ”due to a problem with a specific recent firmware version” that has been fixed by Samsung by may not have yet been rolled out across all networks.

At the iOS app launch, the BBC said the vast majority (90%) of radio listening was live, rather than on demand. iPlayer Radio  caters to that listening preference by putting live listening front and centre, via a tap-to-listen stations dial, with catch up features tucked away in the background. In its most recent iPlayer usage stats

Two months after the iOS iPlayer Radio app launched, the BBC said it had passed one million downloads.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The Obvious Corporation, the startup incubator and investment vehicle headed up by Twitter co-founders Evan Williams, Biz Stone, and former Twitter exec Jason Goldman that has become an umbrella company of sorts to a number of buzzy startups including Medium, Branch, and Lift, is shifting gears, according to a blog post written today by Williams.

What exactly is happening comes across as a bit vague — which is fitting, as Obvious’ mission was purposefully vague at the time that it was launched (or rather, re-launched) in 2011, and over the years those involved have mostly preferred to let the corporation’s work and products speak for themselves. But the general gist is that as far as the focus of its founders, Obvious as an entity is taking a backseat to the individual startups it has produced and funded.

Medium, the Obvious-incubated next-generation publishing platform, is now operating as its own standalone company with Ev Williams spending “98 percent” of his time there. Some 30 staffers who previously were hired as Obvious employees are now working as full-time Medium employees.

Meanwhile, as we’ve reported previously, Stone is working on a new company called Jelly. Goldman, for his part, is spending the bulk of his time helping to lead Branch from New York City and currently looking for an additional company to work with.

The more general collaborative relationship between Goldman, Stone, and Williams will continue to be called “Obvious,” the blog post says, but the entity as a corporation seems to be winding down, or at least scaling back. He explained how they will continue to work together and detailed Obvious’ affiliations like this:

“…the collaboration between Biz, Jason, and myself — which we call ‘Obvious’ — continues… Besides Medium, Branch, and Jelly, we have working relationships with Lift (of which I’m on the board), Beyond Meat and GoodFit (of which Biz is on the board) and Neighborland. We also have a handful of less-active partnerships with entrepreneurs we were lucky enough to angel invest in, like Findery, LaunchPad Toys, and Faraday Bikes. (There are a couple more, which we’ll announce when the time is right.)”

Via email today, Williams told TechCrunch that there are no hard feelings involved in the change — that it’s been a natural evolution over the past several months. In his blog post, he elaborated a bit on the reasons for the shift:

“Turns out, we like focus. We rebooted Obvious in 2011 with a vague plan. We started investing, incubating, and experimenting to figure out what worked and what we wanted to do at this stage in our careers; we just knew we wanted to work together do stuff that mattered.

Among other things, the first few months taught us that we gravitated toward diving in more deeply on a small number of things — rather than having a lighter touch on many ventures.”

It’ll be exciting to see what the next chapter will bring for all involved here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Kodak has agreed to sell its digital imaging portfolio to a consortium of 12 licensees for $525 million, organized by patent-holding company Intellectual Ventures and patent risk advisory firm RPX Corporation. It said it will use the proceeds from the sale to pay down bankruptcy debt — the transaction is subject to the approval of the Bankruptcy Court, as well as “certain customary conditions”.

Kodak said a portion of the money will be paid by the 12 licensees, giving each licensee rights to the digital imaging patent portfolio and “certain other Kodak patents”, while another portion of the money will be paid by Intellectual Ventures, which Kodak said will be acquiring the digital imaging patent portfolio “subject to these new licenses, as well as previously existing licenses”.

It is unclear exactly who all 12 licensees are but Earlier this month Bloomberg reported that Apple and Google were joining forces on a bid for Kodak’s patent stash. The full list of 12 licensees are provided in the court documentation filed by Kodak today — they are:

Apple, Inc.
Research In Motion Limited
Google Inc.
Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.
Adobe Systems Incorporated
HTC Corporation
Facebook, Inc.
Fujifilm Corporation
Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.
Amazon Fulfillment Services, Inc.
Shutterfly, Inc.
Microsoft Corporation

Companies banding together to acquire patents may seem odd when several of the companies in the list are also — or have recently been — engaged in patent litigation with each other, but taking to the courts is a long drawn out and expensive process, and there’s no guarantee of success at the end of the day, so joining forces to license IP at least provides the companies involved with certainty and fixed costs.

Rival companies banding together to license patents is also a smart move as it helps keep the overall price of the patent portfolio down — avoiding a costly patent bidding war (as in the case of Nortel’s patent stash last year, which sold to a consortium that did not include Google for a massive $4.5 billion).

Kodak’s release follows below

ROCHESTER, N.Y.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Eastman Kodak Company has completed a series of agreements that successfully monetizes its digital imaging patents.

The proposed transaction, which achieves one of Kodak’s key restructuring objectives, follows other recent major accomplishments that include an agreement for interim and exit financing for the company’s emergence from its Chapter 11 restructuring, and resolution of U.S. retiree non-pension benefits liabilities. Kodak’s monetization of IP assets further builds on its momentum toward a successful emergence in the first half of 2013.

Under the agreements, Kodak will receive approximately $525 million, a portion of which will be paid by 12 intellectual property licensees organized by Intellectual Ventures and RPX Corporation, with each licensee receiving rights with respect to the digital imaging patent portfolio and certain other Kodak patents. Another portion will be paid by Intellectual Ventures, which is acquiring the digital imaging patent portfolio subject to these new licenses, as well as previously existing licenses.

“This monetization of patents is another major milestone toward successful emergence,” Antonio M. Perez, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, said. “Our progress has accelerated over the past several weeks as we prepare to emerge as a strong, sustainable company. This proposed transaction enables Kodak to repay a substantial amount of our initial DIP loan, satisfy a key condition for our new financing facility, and position our Commercial Imaging business for further growth and success.”

The transaction enables the company to continue innovating in its core Commercial Imaging technologies that are fundamental to its future. Commercial Imaging is a business in which Kodak has significant competitive advantages and strong growth prospects.

“Kodak remains a major center of invention and innovation,” Perez said.

The transaction also includes an agreement to settle current patent-related litigation between the participants and Kodak, which avoids additional litigation costs and helps to ensure that management and the company’s resources focus on enhancing the operations of its core future businesses.

The proposed transaction is subject to the approval of the Bankruptcy Court and the satisfaction of certain customary conditions.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

SkySQL plans to be something of a thorn in Oracle’s side. As you’ll recall MySQL, which as a free database platform annoyed Oracle, was sold to Sun and then Oracle bought Sun. That was supposed to keep a lid on things. Now with MySQL under its wing Oracle plans to move those MySQL users over to Oracle databases in due course. But it can’t push things too hard due to EU competition rules apply for the next five years. So guess what? That gives SkySQL – backed previously by the former founders of MySQL – a window to come back and start re-supporting all those dedicated die-hard Sun/MySQL fans. They’re baaack…..

And to do it they’ve raised an additional €2 million in Series A funding from California Technology Ventures, LLC (CTV). This takes SkySQL’s war chest to €6 million and will mean they can expand their business supporting existing MySQL users.

At the same time they’ve brought in Patrik Sallner as new CEO, who was previously VP of Professional Services at F-Secure Corporation which delivered cloud storage solutions to large telcos. Ulf Sandberg, current CEO at SkySQL, will now move to head up the US operation as President of SkySQL Inc.

Admittedly SkySQL has mainly a service business right now, serving old MySQL customers in much the same way that RedHat services Linux customers.

But they plan to put in place a Cloud based product (yes, they will turn into a platform startup) which will gradually take on the heavy lifting and provide an alternative migration path to people who don’t want Oracle.

This is one to watch. And watch Oracle get redder in the face as the years tick by…

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

We’re at the Palace Hotel for the 2011 Web 2.0 Summit where the lineup for the next three days consists of  almost everyone on the entire Internet. In case you didn’t get to be a part of the in-person action, you folks at home can follow along from the Livestream above, starting at 2pm PST.

Today’s speaker highlights include Supyo’s Sean Parker, Salesforce’s Marc Benioff and About.me’s Tony Conrad.

Full schedule below. 

2:00pm Plenary
Room: Grand Ballroom
Opening Welcome John Battelle (Federated Media Publishing Inc.), Tim O’Reilly (O’Reilly Media, Inc.)
2:10pm Plenary
Room: Grand Ballroom
Sean Parker, Co-founder, Supyo Sean Parker (Founders Fund), John Battelle (Federated Media Publishing Inc.)
2:35pm Plenary
Room: Grand Ballroom
John Donahoe, President & CEO, eBay John Donahoe (eBay Inc.), John Battelle (Federated Media Publishing Inc.)
3:05pm Plenary
Room: Grand Ballroom
Marc Benioff, CEO, salesforce.com Marc Benioff (salesforce.com), Tim O’Reilly (O’Reilly Media, Inc.)
3:25pm Plenary
Room: Grand Ballroom
Paul Otellini, CEO, Intel Corporation Paul Otellini (Intel Corporation), John Battelle (Federated Media Publishing Inc.)
3:45pm Plenary
Room: Grand Ballroom
Pivot Tony Conrad (about.me, True Ventures & Sphere)
3:50pm Plenary
Room: Grand Ballroom
Ross Levinsohn, EVP of Americas, Yahoo! Ross Levinsohn (Yahoo!), John Battelle (Federated Media Publishing Inc.)
4:20pm Plenary
Room: Grand Ballroom
High Order Bit Christopher Poole (4chan & Canvas)
4:30pm Plenary
Room: Grand Ballroom
High Order Bit Deb Roy (Bluefin Labs)
4:40pm Plenary
Room: Grand Ballroom
High Order Bit Genevieve Bell (Intel Corporation)
4:50pm Plenary
Room: Grand Ballroom
High Order Bit Brad Rencher (Adobe Systems Incorporated)
5:00pm Plenary
Room: Grand Ballroom
U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, Oregon Ron Wyden (U. S. Senate), John Heilemann (New York Magazine)
5:25pm Plenary
Room: Grand Ballroom
Closing Remarks
7:00pm Dinner
Room: Grand Ballroom
Web 2.0 Summit Dinner with Special Guest: Dick Costolo Dick Costolo (Twitter), John Battelle (Federated Media Publishing Inc.)

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

GeoVector just announced a partnership with Microsoft to bring their patented AR technology to Windows devices. The company specializes in AR-based navigation and has a special “building recognition” software that can identify sites based on their shape and size. For example, as you see in their patent info, you could point a phone at the capital and identify various buildings and tag them with URLs.

The company currently has an AR-based iPhone app called World Surfer that allows you to hold up a compass-capable phone to any scene and ID points of interest, stores, and restaurants.

According to a release, “Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) has entered into a licensing agreement with GeoVector Corporation, the world leader in Augmented Reality and pointing-based local search solutions for mobile devices. The non-exclusive multi-year agreement gives Microsoft rights to use concepts covered by GeoVector’s patents.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Incubated within big data company Greenplum (acquired by EMC in 2010) and following 15 months of product development, Silicon Valley-based Alpine Data Labs launches its solution for “Big Data Predictive Insight” in the United States today.

The company is also announcing that it has landed $7.5 million in Series A funding from Sierra Ventures, Mission Ventures and Sumitomo Corporation Equity Asia. The company is also backed by Stanford University.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Tagged, the San Francisco-based social network that is most notable because of its ability to grow profitably during the Facebook era, has closed its first acquisition. dotSyntax, the corporation that created the popular Digsby instant messaging and social client, is now part of Tagged. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but all seven dotSyntax employees will join Tagged.

Tagged CEO Greg Tseng says that they intend to keep the Digsby software as a standalone product, and also incorporate features into Tagged over time. Says Tseng: “They have expertise and technology in real-time communications which we want to use to push into instant messaging, group chat, video chat, etc. IM is our most requested feature on Tagged.”

Digsby has 3 million registered users today (Tagged has over 100 million), and the company has raised $500,000 in funding.

If you’re unfamiliar with Digsby, there’s a good overview video here showing how the product works. It allows users to interact with social networks, webmail and instant messaging services. Websites can also integrate Digsby into their sites.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch