MyJobCompany is another take on the social recruitment idea. Its platform, which expanded beyond France and Latin America to the UK last week, enables anybody to become what it calls a “social headhunter” by recommending friends and acquaintances for a job. Or, put another way, by sending their social and professional networks job adverts, which if lead to a qualified application or actual hire, earns them a commission for doing so.

The way MyJobCompany’s platform works is as follows: A company with a position to fill posts a job ad to the site along with detailed information on the type of candidate and skills they wish to target, and how wide a reach they want the campaign to have. This request is then algorithmically matched to MyJobCompany’s thousands of social headhunters, based on their own social and professional profiles, ensuring that the process remains highly targeted. They in turn pass the advert on to (hopefully) suitable candidates via their own networks. The incentive to do so is a small fee for a referral that leads to a quality application, and a much bigger and lengthier commission for a successful hire — not unlike the recruitment agency model.

It’s not an entirely new idea, of course. There are a ton of startups and more established companies in the recruitment space, many of which have a social component. Sweden’s Jobylon, with its jobs “bounty” feature, probably comes closest, while U.S.-based RolePoint also has a similar proposition.

The idea also appears to be resonating with users: Since launching in France in January 2012, MyJobCompany has recruited 20,000 social headhunters to its platform. Meanwhile, its more recent Chile launch has seen it garner another 5,000 headhunters. Recruiters, however, who spend from €380 to several thousand Euros depending on reach and seniority of the social headhunters being targeted, tally around a more modest 300 to date.

In addition to its broader social recruitment offering, MyJobCompany sells a version to enable companies to run their own internal social referral programs, pitting it against something like Zao (among others).

In January 2013, MyJobCompany raised a €650,000 seed round from ESSEC Business Angels and Paris Business Angels.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Hey kids, there’s a new personalized shopping platform in town. Since it raised $1.7 million in angel funding, ads recommendation system ContextLogic has put its ads optimization technology to good use in a wishlist-making app called Wish.

As its moniker belies, Wish allows you to view a feed of goods specifically tailored to you and add them to various lists on the platform — like my list about Summer. Every time you add to a list or recommend an item, Wish’s natural language processing and machine-learning tech learns that that’s the type of thing you’re interested in and then shows you more of it. Like what happened to me and blingy iPhone cases (below). Yes, I did add such a silly thing to my Wishlist.

On the merchant side, Wish treats Wishlists as intent data and allows shopkeepers to run highly targeted offers through the platform, because of the simple principle that customers are more likely to buy some things they’ve already expressed a desire to buy. I’ve already received an email coupon for $5 off that tacky Swarovski peacock case in addition to 40 percent off a pair of Galaxy shorts I had also expressed interest in.

I’m very likely to buy those Galaxy shorts, is Wish’s value proposition. And Wish in return takes a 10 to 30 percent cut of those promoted sales, which it manages through an AdWords-like, self-serve ads platform.

People are adding between 5-10 million items to their Wishlists every day, recommending 250K products and saving 19.3 items on average daily. The app now has over 12 million users and, with five-star ratings on iOS and Android, is modestly making its way up the App Store rankings. It is now at No. 28 on iOS Lifestyle. For comparison, competitors Wanelo and Amazon Mobile are at No. 17 and No. 4, respectively.

“Engagement increased over 2013 as we increased the relevance of our recommendation system,” Wish co-founder Peter Szulczewski tells me, referring to the startup’s promising growth. “We consider these huge wins and proof that our approach is working.” He believes that after improvements in the relevance of Wish’s recommendation system, the startup is growing faster than Pinterest, Twitter or Google.

“The big change here is that, unlike on traditional e-commerce websites,” Szulczewski explains, “individuals are actually feeding very useful data back into the system in a fun way on a massive scale, which an algorithm can use to vastly increase the shopping experience.

“Google won search via relevance, because it was able to match millions of different queries with billions of web pages better than anyone,” he adds. “We are confident that Wish will win mobile commerce with a fun and relevant product, as well, because the problem isn’t all that different from Google’s challenge in search.”

And with everyone and their mother trying to crack the personalized shopping nut, the e-commerce challenge is probably just as hard. Can Amazon ever be dethroned? Will Pinterest capitalize on its vast and intimidating e-commerce potential? Does Wanelo need to go beyond social cures? What about the material things I secretly desire that can’t be gleaned from an algorithm? Glittery peacock cases are nice and all, but clicks sometimes fail to capture what exactly the heart, well, wishes.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg told us last year that serving small business is “just as important” as helping large advertisers achieve their goals. Since then we’ve seen the company make a number of changes to simplify Facebook marketing and advertising tools and conduct more outreach to help small and medium-sized businesses find value in the platform.

Today Dan Levy, Director of Small Business at Facebook, shared new stats about growth in the SMB market. There are now more than 2 billion connections between people and local businesses in the U.S. There are an average of 645 million views of these pages and 13 million comments on them each week. Facebook says about 70 percent of all monthly active users in the U.S. and Canada are connected to a local business on the social network.

Many SMBs are discovering the power of Facebook marketing through pages, Promoted Posts and highly targeted ads. Levy shared the story of Distinctive Gardens, a garden center in Dixon, Ill., which used only Facebook promotions for advertising during the annuals season and saw a 41 percent increase in revenue. A few years ago, the owners of Distinctive Gardens started a monthly event in town called Second Saturday where downtown stores display work from local artists. They also use Facebook to promote the events. This Saturday, a team from Facebook is joining local officials and U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger in Dixon. There, Facebook’s SMB growth team lead Kirsten Bury will participate in a Q&A for business owners, community organizers and others looking to better understand how to use Facebook strategically.

Facebook has been making a number of hires and adding positions weekly to increase SMB support and growth, including internationally.

Sandberg said revenue from local businesses was strong in Q4 2012, with the number of local businesses paying for advertising on Facebook doubling since the beginning of 2012, in large part because of Promoted Posts. At the end of January, Facebook said nearly 500,000 pages had tried the offering. Offers is another product popular among local businesses. Facebook will report its first quarter earnings on May 1.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Facebook has given advertisers new opportunities to run more relevant ads and test their creative in News Feed by allowing them to create “unpublished posts” that intentionally do not appear to all fans of their page.

Previously this option was available for ads on the right hand side of the desktop site, but it was not allowed for feed-based ads until last week. Even though News Feed is the most engaging placement Facebook offers, it had been difficult to use very highly targeted messaging or run multivariate tests there because a page was required to first create posts that could appear to fans.

With unpublished posts, advertisers can now reach users in News Feed without overwhelming their fans with dozens of different posts, which might not be relevant to them. For example, an athletic brand could make an unpublished post about a basketball product and only show that to fans who are interested in basketball, and then do a tennis-related post for tennis fans, and so on.

Although Facebook offers some page post targeting by age, gender, location and other demographic information, there is no organic way to target posts by interests or factors like Custom Audiences. But with unpublished posts that run as page post ads in News Feed, businesses can show users more relevant content. A service could show longtime users one version of an ad, new users another, and leads yet another.

Advertisers can also do more creative optimization by testing variations of copy or images.

Steve Irvine, Group Director of Global Marketing Solutions, Facebook Canada, spoke about unpublished posts during a fireside chat with AdParlor CEO Hussein Fazal at the Marketing on Facebook conference in Toronto today.

“It’s about really good advertising,” Irvine said. “It’s the ability to take a message that matters to the people it’s relevant to in the most engaging place on Facebook.”

AdParlor, a Facebook Strategic Preferred Marketing Developer, says it has seen initial success with unpublished posts as part of a campaign for a large e-commerce client looking to have consumers fill out a form and sign up for emails about deals on the site. Unpublished post ads had a clickthrough rate of 0.87 percent compared to organic post ads with a CTR of 0.30 percent. Unpublished post ads had a 16 percent higher conversion rate, with 22 percent lower sign-up costs.

“Unpublished posts,” also known as “dark posts” by some in the industry, first became available to advertisers working directly with Facebook in February 2012 when Facebook switched its premium homepage ads to a page post format. It became available via the API in July 2012, but was limited to ads in the Facebook sidebar until a week ago. Advertisers can now create unpublished posts in Power Editor or through the Ads API and promote them in any placement.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

What is the consequence of cyber warfare slowly becoming increasingly common? That was the basic question that guided the DLD keynotes of Eugene Kaspersky, the co-founder of security company Kaspersky Lab, and F-Secure‘s chief research officer Mikko Hypponen.

Kaspersky, who admitted that all his years of security research left him a bit paranoid, argued that the early viruses and malware of the 90s was the equivalent of a bicycle, with the criminal malware we now increasingly face being cars. Stuxnet and other currently active state-sponsored viruses, in his view, are like space shuttles and Red October, the recently discovered highly sophisticated malware that performs very targeted attacks, in his view, is like the space station.

Hypponen took a similar view. The “happy hacker” of the 80s and 90s, he said, is long gone. Instead, we now have to deal with criminals who try to make money from their malware and botnets, hacktivists who try to protest and governments attacking their own citizens and other governments for espionage and full-scale cyber warfare.

Asked about the highly targeted and personalized Red October attack, both Hypponen and Kaspersky currently seem to assume that it was a state-sponsored attack, especially given that it took a good amount of traditional espionage to target the embassies, European Union agencies and space and nuclear research centers around the world the malware attacked over the last few years. Still where it came from remains unclear, especially because it attacked sites in a multitude of countries. This, too, leads Kaspersky to believe that it wasn’t developed by Russia. Red October, after all, attacked a number of sites in Russia. In his view, it could be from Israel, a hacktivist group, or, he speculated, maybe the secret services of different countries were customers of a group of sophisticated hackers.

As for cyber warfare in general, one thing Hypponen especially stressed is the difference between cyber espionage and cyber warfare. Spying, said Hypponen, is not warfare. “Warfare is something different,” he said. “It’s when you start using malware, viruses and backdoors to target our critical infrastructure.” Today, he argued we are seeing the very first stages of a global cyber arms race. We are now seeing many other governments besides U.S. and Israel jump on the same bandwagon and now that other countries see that these attacks are successful, they want to jump on the bandwagon, too.

Stuxnet and the Manhattan Project

Hypponen went on to liken Stuxnet, the virus that targets Iran’s nuclear program to the Manhattan Project. The scientists involved in created Stuxnet, he argued, lost their innocence when they worked on this. It’s possible, after all, that Stuxnet killed people, though we can’t be sure about that. “The people who launched this must have understood and did it anyway,” said Hypponen. “We crossed some line as mankind when we started doing that.”

It’s just a matter of time before we cross this line again, Kaspersky thinks. The main question for him is if we ready to give up some of our technologies because they have become to dangerous? In human history, he argued, we sometimes had to stop using new technologies like the airship or the Concorde after major accidents. What if the threats on our cyber systems lead us to have to quit using some forms of IT and store government data on paper again? Are we going to put humans back in charge and handle tools mechanically instead of using robots and sophisticated appliances to run our electricity systems and factories? “Probably not”, said Kaspersky, but he is afraid that “the situation is going from bad to worse.”

Looking ahead, Hypponen believes that the next major war between developed countries will definitely include some form of cyber warfare, maybe to shut down electricity and defense systems before launching a conventional attack. “It won’t be a ‘clean’ cyber war,” Hypponen believes.

Asked whether we will experience a major and devastating cyber attack that will influence the general public in the next three years, Kaspersky showed his paranoid side and noted that those already happened. He blames the major East Coast blackout of 2003 on the Blaster virus. “We still don’t understand that we live in an absolutely different world,” said Kaspersky. “We are like Alice in Wonderland and don’t know how to behave in this different land.” On the positive side, though, he said that he believes “that we will survive.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

While the advent of smartphones and GPS promise a future of highly targeted local commerce, there have been few breakthroughs in the area, outside of some local deals and loyalty programs based on user checkins. And most of those have been based around bars and restaurants and other service-based industries. Few are focused on helping local shopowners to sell more apparel or jewelry. ShopNear.me is trying to change that, with the launch of a mobile app designed to connect users with local boutiques and independent designers.

The idea behind ShopNear.me is simple: Rather than going to big box retailers or shopping for goods online, it gives users an easy way to buy from boutiques and independent designers that are sold locally. By aggregating multiple small shops and brands, it provides a huge variety of goods that they might not have found otherwise.

But the pitch might be even better for local merchants and designers themselves, who generally don’t have the resources to roll out a web presence, set up an online store, or put out their own mobile app. Even if they did, good luck getting users to actually find any of those options in an incredibly fragmented market for fashion and commerce.

ShopNear.me not only provides them a platform to quickly make their inventory available both online and on mobile devices to local buyers, but in aggregating shops, it also gets their goods in front of users who might not have found them otherwise.

With an easy-to-use dashboard, sellers can add or delete inventory from the stores as it becomes available or is sold. And it integrates with Facebook as well, so that anytime new products are added, they automatically get added to the merchant or designer’s Facebook page, with a link to purchase through ShopNear.me.

Users browsing the app will be able to purchase goods directly, and will have the choice of picking products up from the storefront, or having them shipped to a local address. ShopNear.me takes a commission for all sales that happen through its platform.

Being local is important, as ShopNear.me founder Yuan Zhang wants to help independent shops and designers to grow their business with buyers. As a result, ShopNear.me is only available in San Francisco today. It has 40 about different shops and independent designers signed up here, and a lot more on the way, thanks to a recent partnership with local non-profit SFMade. As a result, Zhang expects to have products from more than 100 local merchants available through its website and app by the end of the year.

That said, ShopNear.me is looking to expand into other major metropolitan markets, with some of the obvious ones up first: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Austin, etc. It’s looking to onboard merchants in other cities soon, and is looking to eventually create a self-serve platform that will allow independents to post their goods without any hand-holding.

It’s also looking beyond fashion and accessories at other verticals that it can make the platform available to. That includes stuff like Home and Kids items. In the meantime, though, it’s just trying to get the local San Francisco experience right.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

We last heard from Pirq when the company announced a nice deal with Apple to offer its employees a special app for discounts on food at restaurants near its offices in Cupertino — a relationship that just might develop into something further, according to sources at the time. Today, however, we have some more news about Pirq expanding other parts of its service. The company has picked up an extra $1.2 million in funding from existing investor Rally Capital (a fund headed by former Nextel CEO Dennis Weibling); and it is adding a digital punchcard to its retail restaurant deals offering, as it prepares to take the service nationwide and to other categories besides food.

James Sun, the CEO, says the company is also preparing for another significant round of funding in the new year with to ramp up its service once more. Today’s $1.2 million takes the total invested by Rally into Pirq up to $3.2 million.

Pirq’s service, which offers discounts on food to users of its app, is different from deals from the likes of Groupon and Living Social, in that it uses an algorithm to measure when restaurants are less busy. This has the catchy name “SmartYieldTM Program.” In real-time, that service then combines that data with the location of app users to provide information on deals that they can come in and redeem near them (or whatever location they choose). The deals, meanwhile, get paid for at the point of sale, rather than in advance as you would do with Groupon.

The punch card getting added to the service today, Sun says, was borne out of conversations that Pirq has been having with its restaurant customers, who wanted to “monetize the frequency” of visits from some customers. That’s no surprise: loyalty services are a prime area in the retail sector and have been highly targeted by mobile app companies (companies like 5 Stars and Belly also chasing that business, and represent at least two of Pirq’s biggest competitive threats).

What’s notable here is that Pirq’s punchcard will actually work independent of the app. Restaurants will be able to link up with users and offer rewards for repeat visits; and it will also be able to track and analyse those visits by way of a user’s mobile phone number and a short messaging code. So if you have the app, the totals will tally there and you can rack up visits using a Microsoft Tag; but if you don’t have an iPhone or the app downloaded, you can still collect rewards via text messages to a short code.

After your visit, the retailer can also use the phone number to send you targeted offers to drive another visit.

Sun says Pirq is filing a patent for the punchcard part of the service, and he believes that the way it leverages a basic phone feature could be part of a bigger trend.

“I think the new trend in mobile will be about leveraging older features like SMS to enhance the app experience,” he says.

The rewards service and deals app are being rolled out now in anticipation of a wider national push for Pirq and an eventual move beyond food to other kinds of retail categories, capitalizing on the fact that all businesses reliant on footfall face ebbs and flows in traffic. “Starting next week our salesforce is contacting six different verticals,” Sun says.

What Pirq has yet to integrate into its deals and rewards service are payments. In one sense that is good: some don’t like to pay it forward in a Groupon-model. (That was one of the praises of Pirq the last time we wrote about it.) But on the other hand, it cuts out a potential revenue stream for Pirq in helping facilitate purchases.

“We’re still trying to figure out who will win the mobile payments space. It could be point-of-sale vendors, or Square, or Isis, or something else,” says Sun. “We’re still waiting on the winner before we try to say to the vendors: this is how our payment system will work.”

With its Apple relationship still intact, Sun wouldn’t say even a small speculative word to me about whether Apple’s Passbook service — or any other initiative from the company — might be the “something else” that could end up being the killer mobile payment method.

As for pricing, the loyalty service, which will start to get rolled out commercially in October 2012 along with a new iPhone app, is being sold separately from Pirq’s deals service.

It will be $50 per month, per location for any size business. Sun says that each participating location will also have an Android tablet to display with details for how the loyalty scheme works. That will work for chains like Taco del Mar and Little Ceasars, but he says Pirq is still working out how to offer a similar experience for places where you don’t approach a counter to pay. “That’s a more complicated process,” he says.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook’s search-based ads, Sponsored Results, became available through the Ads API and Power Editor tool last week, allowing a range of advertisers to test the new offering. Here we’ll look at the four main strategies we’ve seen companies take:

• Steal traffic from competitors
• Show up when users search for related pages or apps
• Get impressions by bidding on the most popular apps and pages
• Protect brand position with defensive bids

For background, Sponsored Results allows businesses to buy ads in the social network’s typeahead search results. Advertisers target exact pages, profiles, places or apps they want to show up next to, rather than bidding on keywords or phrases. They can also layer on Facebook’s demographic, interest and category targeting.

Ads optimization company Ampush Social is reporting clickthrough rates between 0.5 and 1 percent on Sponsored Results for a casual gaming app. Facebook analytics company PageLever tells us it has seen CTR between 0.8 and 2 percent on highly targeted Sponsored Results for a B2B campaign.

See some sample ads and understand their strategies below.

Steal traffic from competitors

With Sponsored Results, companies can pay to get placement when users search for their competitors. This is significant because Facebook search results used to be based on the actual text input from users. A search for Nike would bring up results for Nike’s Facebook pages, Niketown stores, the Nike+ app, or people whose names included “nike.” The search would never return results from Adidas or Reebok. Now this is possible with Sponsored Results.

These advertisers will have to pay close attention to what users do after they click on Sponsored Results. Since users are often searching for particular entities on Facebook, the hits on these ads could be accidental. For example, when users search for the Zynga’s CityVille game and hit enter — as frequent players are likely to do out of habit — they might end up in EA’s SimCity Social. That’s because Sponsored Results often appear above organic results, and hitting the enter key takes users to whatever appears first in the typeahead search window.

Show up when users search for related pages or apps

Some advertisers are trying to get their brand seen when users search for something somewhat related, but perhaps not a direct competitor. It’s unclear how effective this is since most users approach Facebook search differently than Google. Facebook search helps users find specific entities but is not good for looking up things within a general topic or category like “running shoes.” If users are searching for a particular page or app, seeing an ad for something slightly related might not have an impact at that point.

Get impressions by bidding on the most popular apps and pages

Knowing that people use Facebook search very differently than other search engines, some advertisers seem to be trying to maximize their reach by targeting the top pages and apps on the social network. Advertisers can select additional demographic and interest-based targeting, so these ads might be reaching the right audience, but perhaps not at the right time.

Protect brand position with defensive bids

Other businesses recognize that Sponsored Results give competitors a chance to intercept their traffic. We previously suggested that this might lead companies to pay for the ads just to ensure they aren’t being overshadowed by Sponsored Results, which often appear above organic results. Unfortunately, companies will have to pay for clicks on their Sponsored Results when they used to get search traffic for free, but this may be necessary, especially for social games since their business is directly tied to getting people to visit apps on Facebook.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Fotopedia, the company best known for it’s travel-focused iOS photo apps, launched its new ad model for the iPad today that will allow advertisers to buy highly targeted ads to its over 12 million users in more than 120 countries. The company, which recently updated many of its apps for the new iPad’s Retina display, says that it’s regularly seeing 10% click-through rates for the ads its featuring in its apps. Fotopedia launched and tested this new model with Flipboard, Jetsetter and National Geographic as its first advertisers.

Advertisers will be able to target users based on geography, their interests, device (iPhone or iPad) and language (English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, Spanish and French). Jean-Marie Hullot, Fotopedia’s CEO and a former Apple executive who worked with Steve Jobs at NeXT and Apple until 2005, notes that 60% of the company’s traffic is now generated on the iPad. The company’s apps, he also stressed, are very popular in China, Japan, the U.S. and many European countries. Last month, the company also announced that it now gets over 250,000 visits per day and 200 million image views per month.

As for how successful these new ads are, National Geographic Traveler’s editor-in-chief Keith Belows says the company’s Fotopedia campaign results in “tens of thousands of downloads” in just three days.

The ads themselves feature the kind of high-end photography that Fotopedia has become known for and are generally nonintrusive. Fotopedia suggests that advertisers set a budget around $10,000 to $20,000 per week for their campaigns.

Since its launch, Fotopedia has made a slight pivot away from the coffee table book-like large apps it used to produce to smaller and more focused magazine-like apps that are regularly updated with new content. This more focused approach to the apps is likely also helping the company to reach more targeted audiences and the regular free in-app updates are getting users to look at the apps 4.5 times per month.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

This afternoon at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012, our own Josh Constine sat down with David Kirkpatrick, author of “The Facebook Effect,” to discuss what they thought about the future of the newly IPO’ed social network. Specifically, the two focused on the potential for Facebook’s advertising platform, its competitive advantages over incumbents and competitors, and its potential acquisition targets which could help its platform expand.

What’s Facebook’s Post-IPO Strategy?

Josh started off by asking Kirkpatrick what he thought was the most important thing Facebook should do going forward. David responded that Facebook shouldn’t do anything differently, even going so far as to say that doing so would be the “most perilous mistake they could make.” However, in terms of how the IPO could potentially affect the company’s focus, and specifically CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s focus on product, was the fact that Zuckerberg now has to “sell a lot of ads.”

As a public company, analysts will be making quarterly earnings projections, and Zuckerberg will have to waste a lot of time thinking about that, said Kirkpatrick. Whether Zuckerberg likes it or not, he will have to think about money now, Kirkpatrick lamented, a role that the CEO had historically dedicated to COO Sheryl Sandberg. However, Josh pointed out that shift may not be a bad thing — Zuckerberg hasn’t “applied his big brain to monetization yet,” he noted.

Facebook’s Uber-Precise Ad Targeting

The two then moved onto sharing their thoughts about the Facebook advertising platform, which had Josh asking what Kirkpatrick thought Facebook had done that was really special in ads. Responded the author, “to create an environment which can be so accurately targeted for advertising is an innovation in itself.”

He added that it’s also effectively an unmonetized innovation at this time, and he’s confident that there’s a lot of revenue opportunity there in the future, too. Kirkpatrick said that he felt that even something as simple as putting an ad in your News Feed was an innovation.

How Facebook Will Get To Be Worth More Than $100B

In discussing new monetization streams for the network, the potential for an offsite ad network that could one day rival Google’s AdSense was huge. There are already 9 million businesses and advertisers on the Facebook ad platform today, said Kirkpatrick. But highly targeted ads – the kind you would see on Facebook itself – could potentially freak people out when they showed up on the wider Internet, Josh pointed out.

Kirkpatrick agreed to a point, but said that most people, including the average Facebook user, don’t seem to really care. There’s a tidal wave of “anti-targeting mindset,” especially in Europe, said Kirkpatrick, but it seemed to be mostly among the press, the government, and the “influentials” (which he dubbed the “punditocracy”). “A lot don’t understand Facebook or advertising that well,” he said of this group, painting them with a rather large brush. Kirkpatrick also said that not only does the average Facebook user not care about ads, in some of Facebook’s largest markets, it’s not a concern at all. Indonesia, for example – Facebook’s fourth largest country –  has no issue with Facebook’s advertising.

Who Should Facebook Buy

Finally, in terms of what companies Facebook should acquire next, both agreed that moving into physical payments would make sense for the company.

As for the recent Instagram and Karma acquisitions, Kirkpatrick called them “unexpected and surprising,” saying that they’re really app related, which he thought was odd. “What’s really important for Facebook is being a platform,” he said. He thought the biggest investments would be to “augment their platform capabilities, not their app capabilities.” But he concluded that some things, like photos, may be so important to the platform that they felt they needed to spend a billion dollars on it.

“Tumblr is an interesting company for Facebook to think about,” Kirkpatrick stated. He also thought that Facebook couldn’t help but be obsessing over Pinterest right now, but Josh vehemently disagreed. Instead, Josh’s picks were some sort of peer-to-peer payments company like Venmo, and an offsite ad network technology that would give Facebook the ability to scrape data from websites outside its walled garden to let Facebook serve relevant ads to visitors who aren’t logged in.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch