Quora‘s library of knowledge has been trapped behind inadequate topic search, but now any keyword generates a list of frequently asked questions and answers about the subject thanks to today’s launch of full-text search on iOS and Android, and its web debut in March. Richer search became crucial as Quora usage is up 3X this year and it has grown to 350,000 topics, each with too many questions to browse.

Before the roll out of full-text search, Quora’s Marc Bodnick tells me “you would almost have to go off Quora” and use Google to find specific content. That’s not such a pain on the web, but one-third of Quora’s traffic comes from mobile where switching back and forth between apps is a pain. Now all of Quora’s users can search for the keyword “Winterfell” instead of the topic “Game Of Thrones”, or “engineer interview questions” instead of “recruiting”.

When users search for a specific word, they’ll get a list of 10 of the most popular questions or answers including that word. The results are essentially an auto-generated FAQ. Bodnick beams “Showing you the best 10 questions about a topic is a great way to start learning.”

For example, searching for the Game Of Thrones’ northern castle “Winterfell” brings up frequently asked questions like “Why was Winterfell burned?”. The ranked list of results gives people an overview of a subject, showing them the best questions first, whereas browsing a topic factors recency and your friends into the question ordering. A search for “Bangkok” returns questions like “What are fun things to do in Bangkok?”, “What’s the best hotel?”, “What’s the best secret place?”, “Is it safe at night?”, and “What tourist traps should I avoid?”.

The reason the feature works at all is because of Quora’s question merging system. If users try to add a question that’s already been asked, Quora will direct them to the existing question. Users can also set duplicate questions to redirect to the canonical instance of the query.

This sets Quora apart from other Q&A sites like the long-standing and relatively terrible Yahoo Questions. There you’ll find questions with nearly identical meanings phrased in different ways (some with unintelligible grammar), fragmenting the knowledge they’re supposed to compile. The lack of proper question merging elsewhere hurts the user experience in many ways. It wastes people’s time asking questions that already exist when they could simply be pointed to existing answers. It dupes them into writing redundant answers. It divides a question’s audience so answers get fewer votes and the best answer is less likely to rise to the top. And it discourages deep answers because authors know their work won’t be found by people who would appreciate it.

Quora’s question merging and full-text search combine so people instantly get answers if their question has already been asked, know their invested effort will be fruitful, and congregate into a critical mass to vet answers. Bodnick tells me mobile search is Quora’s first big feature launching simultaneously on iOS and Android, though it took longer to launch because “we wanted to make it faster.”

With search comes a big monetization opportunity, as Quora could show ads targeted to people with serious intent to educate themselves about a certain subject. A search for “fly Hawaii” by someone looking for tips for the best way to reach paradise would obviously get advertisers for travel sites drooling. But Quora won’t be showing any search ads for now. Bodnick tells me Quora priorities don’t include making money yet.

Instead it’s focused on “growth, making the product great, and mobile. Our general view is that in creating a great site of knowledge, your goal is to get as much knowledge as possible. That should create significant financial opportunities for the company, but we’re not worried about the specifics right now.” Thanks to its $50 million Series B led last year by Quora’s founder and CEO Adam D’Angelo, the site doesn’t need to rake in cash right away. Momentum is strong, though, as D’Angelo said yesterday in a video about working at Quora “we are three times bigger than we were a year ago on all of our usage metrics.”

The mission to grow the world’s knowledge isn’t limited to Q&A. A few months back Quora launched a blogging platform, and Bodnick tells me the feature’s traction “is growing with the site. We keep growing and attracting new bloggers.” It doesn’t sound like it’s gone massively viral, but is a smart addition to the site. “There’s lots of blogs about design, photography, politics, sports, movies, and finance” Bodnick says. Their posts are also indexed in search, giving an even wider audience to people who have insight to share but don’t have a huge Twitter following or public presence.

Quora’s quest to teach has attracted a team that’s grown to 50 and will go up by 15 by the end of the summer. Bodnick says his squad isn’t antsy to get the dollars flowing. “The people we hire believe in the company, believe in the mission, and are overwhelmingly long-term oriented.” Quora’s talent could chase an acquisition and a huge payday elsewhere, but some people just want to watch the world learn.

Download the updated Quora for iOS and Android, which now include full-text search

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

“FBX was my baby that I staked everything on. We shipped it fast, scaled it up, and now the baby talks and can walk to school, but I don’t feel I need to babysit it,” says Antonio Garcia-Martinez, product director of Facebook’s ad exchange who announced he’s leaving the company today. After selling his company AdGrok to Twitter, then defecting to Facebook two years ago, Antonio deserves a vacation.

“‘To my friends: my work is done. Why wait?’ - George Eastman, suicide note” is how Garcia started his customary goodbye post on Facebook today. But I wanted the deeper story, and he agreed to grant me an interview.

For starters, Garcia tells me “I’m still totally long on Facebook as a company. Anyone who bets against Facebook probably deserves to lose their money.” So while many high-ranking Facebookers have departed in the year since the IPO, he doesn’t want his exit perceived as a sign that Facebook is losing steam.

It was the company’s potential to change the world and its hacker culture that attracted him the in the first place. After attending UC Berkeley, Garcia did a stint on Wall Street at Goldman Sachs. His Facebook profile describes his position there as “Pricing quant on the corporate credit-default swap desk. Yes, I was part of that whole mess.” The financial sector implosion led him to Adchemy, where he’d develop the chops to start his own ad tech company, AdGrok.

The startup helped businesses automate Google AdWords selection and bidding, and was accepted to Y Combinator. Eventually, the young CEO accepted a $10 million acquisition bid from Twitter, but it didn’t prove a good fit for Garcia. Facebook jumped at the chance to poach him and he became the social network’s first product manager of ad targeting.

Garcia-Martinez tells me it’s these kinds of talent deals that keep Facebook feisty. “They acqhire or acquire lots of startup CEOs. They want that ‘crazy startup, do whatever-the-fuck it takes to get it done, no fear, maybe slightly abrasive and aggressive DNA. If you’re a small startup considering selling your company, there’s definitely far worse places to work than Facebook,” he tells me. While great people that joined Facebook the startup are leaving, they’re being replaced with great people who know they’re going to work for a big company. Antonio says “at the Facebook engineering level are some of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with.”

Eventually he found the project that would define his time at Facebook: FBX. At the time, Facebook’s ads were firmly stuck in the demand generation part of the purchase funnel. The company knew who you were and what you liked, but not what you wanted to buy next. Facebook Exchange would change that. In his goodbye post, he writes of “building an ad exchange with three engineers in one frenetic month” — a serious feat.

In June 2012, FBX began public testing. It let Facebook advertisers target users based on cookies dropped by websites they’d visited. If you almost booked a flight to Hawaii but didn’t pull the trigger, FBX could hit you with ads for discounted Hawaii flights and hotels the next time you visited Facebook. Facebook finally knew your purchase intent, and could sell it for high rates that companies would pay out of budgets reserved for retargeting.

“It is working very well. No question it’s been a success for Facebook,” Garcia tells me. And ad platform data and interviews back him up. The FBX ads Antonio willed into being delivered big returns and had ad platforms betting their businesses on Facebook.

Yet we’re not seeing Facebook doubling down on FBX as I would have expected, and perhaps that’s the real reason Garcia is heading out. Right now, FBX doesn’t work at all on mobile, which seems like a huge miss considering that’s now where the majority of Facebook’s engagement is. FBX retargeting data can’t be combined with standard Facebook biographical targeting, either. There are privacy concerns with that, but if Facebook was really committed to FBX, I think they would have been hammered out by now.

As is, FBX is immature, and if Facebook isn’t going to apply the resources to help it grow up, I can understand Antonio’s desire not to play nanny.

Regardless of the exact reasons for his departure, it was time for Antonio to go galavanting. If you’ve met him or follow him on social media, you know he’s an adventurer who loves fast cars and tall mountains. He writes, “What comes after? Probably a few months in either forest, ocean, or desert. And then another ride on that startup roller coaster that got me here in the first place.”

As for what kind of problem he’ll tackle, he says it’s “not necessarily going to be in ad tech. It’s been four to 5 years [in that space] which is pretty long by my ADD standards.” He cites Cloudera founder Jeff Hammerbacher’s popular quote: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads…That sucks.” Instead, he tells me, “My next thing could be something in hardware. It’s never been easier to turn bits into atoms.”

I’ve covered Facebook ads closely for the last three years and it’s remarkable to see how far it’s come in no small part thanks to Antonio. What was once a fledgling channel has turned into a global powerhouse that’s redefining marketing with friends. And while he’s off to go exploring, he’ll probably miss working on something with the impact of what’s built at 1 Hacker Way. He assures me, “It will be the age of Facebook. It will be the next Google. It will define a generation of technology. “

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

CBS is today introducing a new iOS application for iPad and iPhone, which brings its television programming to mobile devices, offering full episodes for streaming a week after they originally air. Shows that air daily, including daytime and late-night programs, will be available 24 hours after airing, the network says.

The company also adds that it plans to expand this application to support both the Android and Windows 8 platforms later this year.

The new app offers many, but not all, of CBS’s top television shows. The company notes that the app will offer NCIS, The Good Wife, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, How I Met Your Mother, The Young and The Restless, The Late Show With David Letterman, Survivor, Elementary, and others. But some of CBS’s leading properties, including The Big Bang Theory and The Mentalist, are not available.

In addition, unlike streaming TV content often found on services like Hulu, Netflix or Amazon Video, for instance, CBS’s app is designed primarily to allow users to catch up on an episode they missed – it’s not offering all the episodes from a current season, or from seasons past.

The app will also offer viewers a social experience, starting with the launch of the Fall TV season later this year. At that time, the company will integrate social feeds, live events where fans can engage with CBS talent directly, and other second-screen experiences specifically for shows like CSI, Criminal Minds, Hawaii Five-O and NCIS: Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, users are able to personalize the app by creating a section of their favorite shows. They can tweet about the show or share to Facebook from the app, as well, or join in discussions with other viewers.

“Our online viewers not only want to watch their favorite shows on multiple devices, they want deeper engagement with the programs they love,” said Jim Lanzone, President of CBS Interactive in a release. “The new CBS App gives them the best of both worlds, letting people watch CBS shows on the best screen available for them, with a host of extra features that give them a richer viewing experience whenever and wherever they tune in.”

Notably, the move also allows for a new way for CBS to generate ad dollars for its content, as the app is offering ad-supported, or “sponsored,” programming. At launch, Buick will be CBS’s first partner on these efforts, whose participation means there will be reduced commercial breaks, as compared with traditional TV for the first several weeks after launch.

“We have been methodically and strategically finding new ways to satiate the appetite for our content on new platforms, while tapping into the tremendous revenue provided by doing so,” said Leslie Moonves, President and CEO of CBS Corporation. “Our announcement today achieves both of these objectives, while protecting our very healthy current ecosystem.”

CBS is the last network to launch some sort of streaming TV experience of its own on mobile devices. ABC has its ABC Player app, NBC has an app, and Fox has Fox Now. They all offer varying degrees of access to their television content, but none provide complete lineups of what the network has to offer.

CBS has been moving to bring its TV content to streaming services in recent months. In November, the company finally signed a deal with Hulu after years of remaining the broadcast holdout on the service. Like this new app, the Hulu deal didn’t include access to some of the network’s most popular shows, like Big Bang Theory, which remains difficult to watch on mobile devices (as is the point, apparently). However, this and many other top shows are available for streaming from the CBS.com homepage.

The company also signed an expanded deal with Amazon this February, bringing a handful of new properties, including America’s Next Top Model, Everybody Loves Raymond, Jericho, The L Word, Undercover Boss, and United States of Tara to Amazon’s Instant Video platform. Amazon and CBS previously had an agreement that offered users access to some new and much back-catalog content, including things like Star Trek, Frasier, Medium and Cheers. It also struck a minor deal with Yahoo to bring entertainment programming to Yahoo’s online property omg!.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

President Obama just concluded a group interview with a handful of bloggers on Google+. The 40-minute follow-up to the State of the Union covered a broad range of new issues: drones, Mark Zuckerberg, patent trolls, immigrant gay rights, gun control, the distribution of wealth, and even why the president is so “chill.” More than any interview I’ve seen in recent memory, the Google+ hangout gave a deeper insight into his own philosophy and process, even if it was when he deliberately dodged questions. The very quotable interview is likely to vindicate a lot of political interest groups. Below, we’ve collected the best of the interview.

Why Obama Is ‘Chill’

The president got his nickname “No Drama Obama” from his unwaveringly steady attitude. For the first time, he addressed this personality trait after being asked how growing up in multi-ethnic Hawaii shaped him. “Part of it is that the weather’s nice, so that just chills you out.”

Why He Loves The Internet

“I’m an ardent believer that what’s powerful about the Internet is its openness and the capacity for people to get there and just introduce a new idea with low barriers to entry.”

Distribution Of Wealth And The Minimum Wage

Obama addressed his contentious belief in the even distribution of wealth after fielding a question about his proposed minimum wage hike:“It does not have a big impact on employment, but it does have a big impact on a proportion of our workforce that works full time but right now is still in poverty.”

He then said, that minimum wage “may have some modest impact on their profits. But the fact of the matter is if we’re going to have a society in which we have broad-based prosperity, those same businesses also have to worry about, do customers have money in their pockets?”

Heart-Breaking Immigration And Not Being Emperor

In response to a question about why he has deported more immigrants than President Bush, he said, “I’m President of the United States. I’m not emperor of the United States. We have certain obligations to enforce the laws that are in place even if we think that in many cases the results may be tragic.”

Computer Science, Zuckerberg and Video Games

When asked whether Obama would support making computer science a language requirement for the education system, “I think it makes sense, I really do.” “The concept of vocational education got a bad rap,” he continues, noting that high school should be relevant to even those who don’t pursue a higher degree.

Referencing a dinner with Mark Zuckerberg, “he taught himself, primarily because he was interested in games.” Obama says teaching vocational technology skills is important, “not only to prepare young people who may choose not to go to a 4-year college to be job ready, but it also engages kids, because they feel like, ‘I get this, this is not just me slouching in the back of the room while somebody’s lecturing’…I want to make sure that they know how to actually produce stuff using computers and not simply consume stuff.”

Patent Trolls

“They don’t actually produce anything themselves. They’re just trying to essentially leverage and hijack someone else’s idea to see if they can extort some money out of them.” Obama mentioned the last major overhaul of patents, the America Invents Act, but noted, “Our efforts on patent reform only went about halfway to where we need to go.”

On His Political Philosophy

Obama draws inspiration from “the writings of Lincoln,” Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail and the Bible.

Summarizing what he believes is Lincoln’s core philosophy, “we are this nation that is built on freedom and individual initiative, and free enterprise, but that there are some things we do in common together, whether it’s building railroads and setting up land-lease colleges or making sure [there are] investments in science. And that our nation only works when everyone has that same opportunity.”

On Perpetual Bureaucracy And Ending The Penny

When asked about why the United States doesn’t ditch the penny to save the federal government millions of dollars, the president admitted, “I don’t know.” Continuing, “One of the things that we see chronically in government is, it’s very hard to get rid of things that don’t work so that we can then invest in the things that do.”

Bumbles On Civil Liberties

When it came to a testy exchange on drone strikes against Americans and gay rights for immigrants, Obama completely dodged the questions. “I’m not someone who believes that the president has the authority to do whatever, or whatever she wants, whenever they want, just under the guise of counterterrorism.” When pressed for more about the contentious drone policy, he didn’t offer any specifics.

The same was true in regards to a question about ensuring gay rights for immigrants in the upcoming comprehensive immigration reform bill. Instead of answer whether he would press for rights, he said he would “not be too heavy-handed in a way that might end up breaking up these discussions.”

Noticeable pauses and ambiguity during civil liberties questions reveals a president struggling to cope with one of the biggest issues with his own base.

Some dodging aside, the Google+ hangout was one of the most authentic exchanges I’ve ever seen with the president. Kudos to the president’s digital team and Google for proving that new media can live up to one of the biggest challenges a journalist can face.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Microsoft has been ramping up its retail presence in the past year, and has today announced that it will introduce five new stores to the U.S. over the course of 2013.

The exact dates of the store openings have not been disclosed, but the company promises they’ll be ready to go by summer.

Here are the new locations where Microsoft will have a retail presence:

• Natick Mall, Natick, Massachusetts
• Ala Moana Center, Honolulu, Hawaii
• Pioneer Place, Portland, Oregon
• The Somerset Collection, Troy, Michigan
• Woodfield Mall, Schaumburg, Illinois

This comes on the heels of a recent announcement of six new U.S. stores, in San Antonio, Miami, Beachwood, San Francisco, Salt Lake City and St. Louis. That’s a total of 11 new stores in 2013, to go along with the 29 already-operational Microsoft stores in North America.

The company said in 2011 that it has plans to open 75 new retail stores over a two- to three-year period. 2013 has only just begun, so unless Microsoft plans on launching nearly half of its goal in 2014, I would expect to hear a few more announcements like this one in the coming months.

Here’s what Redmond had to say about it:

Our customers continue to tell us that they value our stores for connecting them to the best of Microsoft. This delights us to no end. From the newest touchscreen laptops, desktops, and tablets running Windows 8, to Windows Phones, to Xbox and Kinect consoles and accessories, to a wide array of first and third-party software titles, our goal is to introduce you to the best choice, value and service we have to offer.

Microsoft is clearly making a big push in the retail segment, but in terms of the competition, they’ll have a ways to go before the have the same retail presence as Apple. In fact, Apple has retail stores in every one of the five new locations.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) has lost 60 percent of its users, going from 1 million in 2003 to about 400,000 today. And IRC channels? In 2003 there were 500,000; now there is half that number. This is due in large part to the advent of the Web, social media, and tools that can do a lot more than plain text can do.

IRC Is Not Dead

But is it dead as Royal Pingdom declared last week? I hear about IRC all the time in the geek world. I asked on Twitter and Facebook if people use it and, sure enough, the open-source and developer crowd shot right back that it is still their chat world of choice.

Geeks from Chartio, Basho, Canonical, Citrix and active members in OpenStack and Cloudstack all said they use IRC. Canonical’s Alan Pope:

We have ~600 employees and hundreds more community people. IRC makes sense for us to communicate effectively, daily.

But IRC is not all that it used to be, morphing into services such as Campfire.

Hello, Robot

Then Redmonk Analyst Donnie Berkholz pinged me about Chatbot, a GitHub chat project ruled by Hubot, which the GitHub ops team developed. Campfire is the defacto communications tool for the ops team. Hubot is a bot that sits in the middle, showing the team what has happened instead of telling them. Hubot is open source, written in CoffeeScript on Node.js. It is a standardized way to share scripts between everyone’s robots. At GitHub the team uses Hubot to connect its various tools that the team has written over JSON APIs. It also connects to external APIs.

According to the Hubot web page:

We ship Hubot with a small group of core scripts: things like posting images, translating languages, and integrating with Google Maps.

The real fun happens when you add your own scripts. We maintain a repository of community Hubot scripts that you can add to your own robot. Be sure to personalize your Hubot, too; your company’s robot should be a place full of inside jokes, custom integrations, and general merriment.

Chatbot is of particular use considering the way people work. A GitHub DevOps team may have members in Hawaii or Portland all working on the same project. Log into Campfire and a team member can see the new roll outs to the infrastructure. They can check the status of the branch’s last build. They can see how a GitHub app is performing.

Chatbot allows for Hubot to become part of the conversation in Campfire. If you do work in a shell or a website, you have to tell people what you have done. In Chatbot, Hubot does that for you.

Campfire is effective because it can show images and do things you just can’t do in the plain-text world of IRC.

But all of IRC’s roots lie in this modern form of automation. Berkholz said this to me in an email interview:

Because of IRC’s open protocol and heavy use by developers, automated interfaces to IRC called bots have become popular over the years. Initially they were simply used to maintain control of an IRC channel (i.e. chat room) on networks without the concept of channel registration, but they’re regularly used in the context of software development to do things like report every commit or every new bug. Two of the most popular extensible bots are Eggdrop (Tcl) and Supybot (Python).

#ChatOps and Hubot are part of the next generation of bot, designed not just for reporting and queries but also for taking action. Although Hubot was initially written for 37signal’s Campfire chat rather than IRC (an adapter now exists), 37signals even described Campfire at its launch as IRC for the masses, so the distinction is unimportant. The concept of #ChatOps is based around Hubot’s use primarily as a sysadmin tool rather than a developer tool, thus integrating chatrooms and IT operations into #ChatOps.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Instagram today responded to concerns raised by users and the press after it proposed updates to its terms of use and privacy policy on Monday. In a blog post from CEO Kevin Systrom, the company clarified it does not intend to sell users’ photos and it plans to update its new terms of service accordingly.

It was widely misreported that Instagram, now under ownership of Facebook, would “sell” users’ photos to advertisers. These stories went viral and users threatened to quit the service. The language in question was:

“Some or all of the Service may be supported by advertising revenue. To help us deliver interesting paid or sponsored content or promotions, you agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata), and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you.”

CNET went as far as to suggest, “That means that a hotel in Hawaii, for instance, could write a check to Facebook to license photos taken at its resort and use them on its Web site, in TV ads, in glossy brochures, and so on — without paying any money to the Instagram user who took the photo.”

That is false. Systrom clarified in his post today:

“Our intention in updating the terms was to communicate that we’d like to experiment with innovative advertising that feels appropriate on Instagram. Instead it was interpreted by many that we were going to sell your photos to others without any compensation. This is not true and it is our mistake that this language is confusing. To be clear: it is not our intention to sell your photos.”

As we wrote about on Monday, what Instagram has in mind is more like Facebook Sponsored Stories. For example, an advertiser might pay to promote stories about users following their brand or liking one of their photos. The legal disclaimer is necessary because Facebook was recently hit with a class action suit where users claimed they deserved compensation for having their name and photos included in ads this way. Facebook agreed to a $20-million settlement, which includes a cash payment of up to $10 to Facebook users who objected to this use of their information. It continues to use people’s names and images along with Sponsored Stories.

We suggested there might also be a way in the future for advertisers to pay Instagram to highlight user-generated photos to a user’s friends. Systrom explained today:

“We do not have plans for anything like this and because of that we’re going to remove the language that raised the question.”

The company will update its terms of service — which are set to go into effect on Jan. 16 — to address these points and make it clear that users’ privacy settings persist. Instagram only shares photos with the people users have approved to follow them. Its new terms of use and privacy policy do not change this.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

It seems like just a month ago that Peek launched as an editorially curated, aspirational travel site with a transactional business model. Actually it was! But don’t let that stop you from reading the rest of this article, because it’s doing something new.

At launch, Peek had only a few destinations for travelers to check out, with some in Hawaii and a few in California. But it provides travelers going to those places with some smart editorial, some high-quality activities to choose from, and some insight from celebrities and tastemakers who know those locations best. That list bit — what Peek calls “Perfect Days” — has been extremely popular so far, as users have flocked to check out what Jack Dorsey likes to do in San Francisco, or where Devon Aoki gets drunk in Napa.*

But “perfect days” aren’t just for celebrities, right? Anyone can have a perfect day every now and again. And so Peek is now allowing everyone to contribute and curate their own favorite activities for visitors to the site.

Peek has rolled out a section of the site just for Perfect Days that are created by the community for cities all over the world. And it’s giving users the tools to create their own curated lists of things to do in the cities they love. On the Perfect Days section of the site, users can easily build lists by adding places and short descriptions that accompany the location. The site works by pulling in Foursquare location data and images to make Perfect Day locations look good. And at the end of each Perfect Day, the site builds a pre-populated map of the area for easier navigation.

That means users will no longer just be limited to the half-dozen or so destinations that Peek has created editorial for, or struck deals with local merchants at. It also means they’ll have insights into locations submitted by the broader Peek community. And for Peek, the new feature gives it a view into which places and activities resonate with users as it expands into new markets, helping it to determine what content should appear in new city guides.

Peek was founded by Ruzwana Bashir, who previously worked at Gilt Groupe, Art.sy, Blackstone, and Goldman Sachs, and Oskar Bruening, who worked at VMWare and Symantec. The startup has raised $1.4 million in seed funding from investors that include Jack Dorsey, Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, SV Angel, and Khosla Ventures.

==
* Lying. Most of Aoki’s Napa stuff involves moving and hiking and not actually drinking wine.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

You probably won’t see the revenue bump in Facebook’s earnings report today from all its new monetization schemes. But with this quarter’s rollout of Gifts, a mobile ad network, app install ads, FBX, and Sponsored Results, Facebook tried show the world that it has new engines to power profits. Earnings and share price may drag for a while longer, but here’s how they have the potential to kick into high gear eventually.

Facebook VP of corporate development Vaughn Smith said at a conference last week, “It’s funny to reflect back that in the first quarter of this year we had no ads on our mobile product.” Wall Street sure didn’t get the joke. Facebook’s user base is shifting to the small screen, and investors were right to worry the social network might not have a way to squeeze dollars from them there. That’s partly why its share price has stumbled to $19.32 down from $38 where $FB IPO’d.

So Facebook has been pushing itself through a transformation to become a company that thinks mobile first. From a product development standpoint, that shift has been rapid. A year ago it was designing for the web and then porting those designs to mobile. Now Facebook spec’s out products with mobile as the priority. Most teams ship their own mobile code too, instead of relying on a specific “mobile” team like it did last year.

But transforming into a mobile money-maker takes longer and Facebook still has to prove it’s possible. When it builds new commerce channels, it has to raise awareness and then get people actually opening their wallets. When it offers new ways to advertise, it must demonstrate to businesses that the ads deliver return on investment, and then recruit big spenders to buy them. It could take several quarters for the bump from new monetization schemes to appear in the bottom line if they even work.

Facebook’s existing mobile ad formats are performing well and all the ads tech companies say businesses are eager to buy them. But Facebook needs whole new ways to make money if it’s going to get to a more reasonable price-to-earnings ratio.

So let’s take a look at the five big revenue drivers Facebook announced or implemented this quarter, and how close they are to actually giving it a revenue boost:

Facebook Gifts

Launched September 27th, Facebook Gifts is the company’s big entrance into ecommerce that lets users buy presents for friends when it’s their birthday, wedding, engagement, graduation, other special occasion, or just whenever. Users see alerts about these special occasions and a chance to buy Gifts on the top right of the desktop homepage and at the top of the mobile news feed. The gifts range from digital gift cards to physical shipments of flowers, chocolate or toys that Facebook sources from and has delivered by its partners. Facebook earns an undisclosed, varying revenue cut on each gift sold.

Facebook Gifts has big potential because it knows who people are likely to buy gifts for better than anyone else. Whose statuses we like, who we have the most friends in common with, who our family members are, and who we’re tagged in photos with all factor into its affinity rankings. Many people visit daily and spend lots of time on Facebook, so there are plenty of opportunities to get them to purchase.’

Facebook also built the shopping experience around convenience, using profile data to suggest what people should buy friends. Young dude? It’ll say to buy him Bourbon-barrel aged maple syrup. Middle aged woman? A Starbucks card or box of chocolate might be the top recommendations. It could get people to buy gifts when they otherwise might just say “happy birthday”, and could pull dollars away from Amazon, gift card providers, flower delivery services, and brick-and-mortar stores.

Unfortunately, even if a reasonable percentage of US users bought a few Gifts a year, the margins may not be big enough to seriously move the needle. There’s also no international roll out in sight. In any case, that would definitely complicate shipping and many markets don’t have the disposable income to buy Gifts. Facebook may need to find a way to convince people in its key markets to buy as often as once every two months for Gifts.

Status: Gifts is still being slowly rolled out to U.S. users. By the end of next quarter it should have reached most of the U.S. and we may hear if people are actually buying Gifts.

Mobile Ad Network

Announced September 18th, Facebook’s mobile ad network allows advertisers to pay it to improve the targeting of ads they buy within non-Facebook mobile apps and sites. It solves a major problem for both ad buyers and sellers — namely that ads are often inaccurately targeted. That means a buyer’s message doesn’t reach the right audience and they don’t get clicks. Meanwhile, ad hosts like apps and website can’t charge advertisers for clicks and the irrelevant content worsens the experience for their users.

While traditional ad networks make educated guesses about who their visitors are, Facebook knows a ton about its users because they volunteer their data. With Facebook’s bio, social, and app usage data, this new mobile ad network lets marketing messages be pinpointed to appear to 30-year-old engaged women, 26-year-old guys who Like surfing and live in Los Angeles, or 22-year-old recent Harvard alumni who use apps similar to one made by an advertiser.

The mobile ad network is huge for Facebook because it earns the company more money without forcing it put more ads or commerce options in its own apps. That lets it maintain the quality of its user experience, and avoid drowning out organic social content with paid ads. As the Internet is increasingly accessed through apps that need ways to monetize, Facebook could earn a lot of money by getting them to host its ads.

Status: Facebook’s still calling this a test, and only a few trusted partners can use it. Facebook hasn’t released details of the ad network’s partners, design, or performance, and it is unlikely to have produced noticeable revenue yet. But mobile ad spend nearly doubled this year, and Facebook could rollout expand the similar ad network for the web that it’s testing on Zynga.com. By next quarter there should studies available on its performance. It should also be accessible to more advertisers and visible on more apps. In 6 months we’ll see if it’s gained traction.

App Install Ads

Announced on August 7th, app install ads allow developers to pay to inject “Install Now” ads into the mobile news feed. They show their app’s name, icon, description, Facebook App Center rating, and friends who use them. When clicked they lead straight to the App Store or Google Play market where users can download the apps.

If the mobile web is all about apps, Facebook wants to be the way developers pay to get people to discover and install them. There’s already a huge industry around paid app discovery that Facebook is vying for a cut of. It could succeed by leveraging the amount of time users spend browsing its mobile apps and the knowledge of which apps their friends use.

Mobile app install ads are also Facebook’s first serious foray into showing non-social ads in the news feed, which includes some risk.. Friends don’t have to have Liked a developer or used an app for ads promoting it to show up in someones feed. As showing too many of these pure ads could drive users way, the revenue Facebook could earn on them is constrained.

Status: Last week all developers gained the ability to buy app install ads. Expect studies on their performance to arrive soon and Facebook to highlight the money they’re generating in its Q4 earnings.

Facebook Exchange

Though it was revealed late in the previous quarter on June 13th, we didn’t hear the first results from the Facebook Exchange (FBX) cookie-based retargeted ads program until late August. FBX lets advertisers target their ads on Facebook to users who’ve recently visited specific websites. For example a travel company could target users who viewed but didn’t buy a flight to Hawaii with ads promoting that same flight.

The early rumors said they were working very well, and by September Facebook permitted the demand-side platforms that buy the ads to share performance results, which were extremely promising. For some advertisers, each dollar they spent on FBX ads brought in $16 in sales. And I’ve heard that while DSPs are still learning how to use FBX, they are getting as good of results from it as they get from Google’s retargeted ads that they’ve been buying and optimizing for years.

FBX lets Facebook break into the realm of advertising to people with purchase intent, similar to search ads. Because the return on investment can be linked more directly to ad spend, advertisers may be willing to pay more for FBX ads than the traditional brand advertising seen on Facebook. Many advertisers have specific budgets for retargeted ads that Facebook can now tap into. If it can provide conclusive evidence that FBX works better than Google’s ad exchange, massive spend could pour in.

Status: Over a dozen DSP partners can now buy FBX ads, initial results are strong, and more advertisers are getting excited about the program. They’ll still need time to learn how to master the ad format, but we may see notable revenue from the product on the earnings call. By next quarter spend should ramp up and FBX could become a significant part of Facebook’s business.

Sponsored Results

Facebook doesn’t have a full-fledged web search engine yet, but on August 22nd it officially launched its Sponsored Results ads for the site’s search typeahead. These let businesses pay to have their Page, app, or other Facebook property appear above organic results when users search for a specific property. For example, gaming company Playdom currently pays to show its game Marvel: Avengers Alliance at the top of typeahead results when people search for “Mafia Wars”, a game by its competitor Zynga.

Initially announced in the previous quarter, these last few months saw the rollout of the API for buying Sponsored Results, and the first reports of the performance. Optimal attained click through rates between 0.7% and 4.1%, well over 10x better than standard Facebook sidebar ads. Meanwhile Nanigans saw CTR exceed 3% in some campaigns, and found the ads could cost less than standard ads.

Sponsored Results are a powerful way for businesses to divert traffic to themselves and away from competitors, making them a lucrative buy in cut-throat industries. Their performance and advertiser interest bodes well for the money-making potential of a real Facebook web search engine — something CEO Mark Zuckerberg said is in the works and investors are salivating over. But for now, there may not be enough people searching in the typeahead for these to be hugely profitable.

Status: Sponsored Results can now be purchased through the Ads API and Power Editor, and are now appearing in the typeahead results of search for many popular apps and Pages. They may have already generated a little revenue, which could grow next quarter. More important, though, is how they foreshadowing a serious Facebook search ads business — a completely new monetization channel.

It’s Gonna Get Worse Before It Gets Better

Until these products gain traction, Facebook’s earnings may not be too impressive. And next month, nearly 1.2 billion additional shares will become eligible for sale by employees and investors when a big part of the company’s stock lock-up expires on November 16th. That means the share price is likely to dip lower.

$FB may rise again once this major post-lockup flood subsides and these new money-makers kick in, but at least until then Facebook will need to sell Wall Street on the future, not the present. It has to communicate that the evolution of advertising and commerce depend on the data only Facebook has.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Silicon Valley, residents of California, and citizens in 11 other states can now register to vote online. California, the newest state to ease the inconvenience of voter registration, launched their online portal today. “Today, the Internet replaces the mailbox for thousands of Californians wishing to register to vote,” California Secretary of State Debra Bowen said. “Today we are taking the next step in the never-ending evolution of democracy and reaching every Californian.”

Voters have been able to register online for years but had to complete the process with a partially filled-out registration form that was mailed to users. Unfortunately, studies have shown that netizens didn’t take the extra step and such hybrid online-offline efforts could actually decrease voter registration.

Among the more innovative uses of online voter registration was developed by the state of Washington. Voters there can register through Facebook with an app that populates the regular online form with data gleaned from a user’s Facebook account. Another effort, Ourtime, a voter initiative organization, has teamed up with websites, such as Lady Gaga’s, Yahoo, and (Aol-owned) The Huffington Post, to embed links to voter registration for citizens of states permitting online registration.

California, Arizona, Colorado, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Oregon, Utah, Washington, Nevada, Maryland, and New York allow online registering, and Connecticut, Delaware, and Hawaii are on the path, according to Jarrett Moreno of Ourtime.

So Silicon Valley nerds, if you haven’t registered to vote, what are you waiting for? I just registered online, and, I gotta tell ya, it feels better than being massaged by angels at Disneyland. Go to the California Secretary of States website and register now.

[Image Credit: Flickr User erin leigh mcconnell]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch