Web security provider Blue Coat Systems — itself acquired in a $1.3 billion deal by Thoma Bravo at the end of December 2011 — is making an acquisition today: it’s buying Solera Networks, a specialist in big data security, for an undisclosed sum (although we have reached out to the company to ask). The deal is expected to close in the next thirty days.

Solera, founded in 2005, had raised just over $51 million in VC funds, including a Series D of $20 million from Intel Capital last January.

This looks to be the fourth acquisition for Blue Coat and part of what appears to be a brief shopping spree by the company. Most recently — earlier this month, in fact — bought Netronome for an undisclosed amount. That service, focusing on programmable semiconductor products — will complement the Solera acquisition. The two startups already work together, with Solera integrating its monitoring technology into Netronome’s products to specifically target encrypted traffic.

In total, Blue Coat has spent some $268 million on acquisitions, not including today’s deal.

The Solera acquisition will add the company’s DeepSee platform to Blue Coat’s security range and will give it the capability to process large data files of network traffic to assess for security threats.

“The future of the industry is moving beyond just blocking malware and stopping targeted attacks to also identifying and resolving the full scope of the attacks in real time,” said Greg Clark, CEO at Blue Coat Systems, in a statement. “Retrospective capture and analytics are now an essential component of modern security architecture, and Solera has pioneered this field, creating a DVR for the network that records traffic and allows customers to easily mine that information.”

Together the companies will have a user base that covers 75 million users across 15,000 enterprise customers, including what Blue Coat says is 86% of the Fortune Global 500. The company says it rates more than one billion Web requests per day. Solera’s customer base includes the Departments of Energy, Homeland Security and Defense, Hitachi, Qualcomm, Overstock.com, Parsons Corporation and Zions Bank.

Steve Shillingford, CEO at Solera Networks, describes the company’s technology as a “security camera” on a network. “Along with the big data security analytics and intelligence needed to see zero-day threats and advanced cyberattacks in real-time, Solera DeepSee provides unmatched security forensics to help enterprises answer critical post-breach questions on the nature of the attack and how to prevent it in the future,” he noted in a statement.

The news comes at the same time that Blue Coat has revamped its whole security portfolio into five areas — Security and Policy Enforcement Center (for business continuity);
Mobility Empowerment Center; Trusted Application Center (for apps); Performance Center (for IT infrastructure); Resolution Center (for deep security analysis; likely where Solera will reside).

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Tweetwall, a Twitter display provider for events (you know, for “tweet walls”), which has been used by customers including CNN, PayPal, Yahoo, Intel, eBay, Microsoft, the Obama campaign, Sprint, and more, is today launching a revamped version of its service. The updated version of Tweetwall has been rebuilt from the ground up, and is also accompanied by a new iPad application offering AirPlay support, designed for smaller venues.

If you’ve ever been to a conference or other event where a big-screen TV or monitor was filled with live tweets, then you may have come across Tweetwall’s technology, without realizing it. However, prior to today, the service has only been available to larger organizations who have historically paid thousands of dollars for customized versions of Tweetwall, built to their own needs.

Founder and CEO Joel Strellner says that his business was almost like “a consulting company,” and attracted customers who wanted their own particular designs and configurations, as well as access to the Twitter firehose (which Tweetwall has via Gnip), so tweets wouldn’t get missed if their event began trending on Twitter.

He and his team would meet with the customers beforehand to determine their needs, then create a version of Tweetwall built to their exact customizations. Though the service offers analytics on the backend, it didn’t offer full moderation – and that led to some incidents in years past, when people figured out you could hijack an event’s Twitter stream and post disruptive messages.

The new product changes that, now adding full moderation capabilities.

“Over the last two years, we started getting the vibe that the way we were doing this isn’t the way we should be doing this,” explains Strellner. “We should be making it more of a self-service option – something people can sign up for, create a Tweetwall right away, and go with it,” he says.

The company inched in that direction starting last year, when it changed the pricing model, lowering the rate to a flat $500 per event in order to attract more of the smaller events. But even that price point was too high, given the competitive landscape containing a number of free options.

Now the new self-serve version of Tweetwall is just $49 per day, and offers a rebuilt backend with full moderation capabilities and detailed analytics. During the setup process, customers can choose from one of four layouts, all of which are highly customizable. Tweets load in faster, include images, and overall, the service runs smoother than before. Instead of the Twitter firehose, self-serve customers have access to Twitter’s direct streaming API, which Strellner says should be more than enough for smaller events.

Tweetwall is still an HTML5 application, meant to run on a computer connected to a big-screen monitor or TV. However, the company has also introduced an iPad app version of the service that works with Apple’s Digital AV Adapter or AirPlay, to display tweets on a TV or through a projector.

The new service was soft-launched into beta just last week, with 15 customers testing it, and today has around 40 sign-ups in advance of a formal announcement.

Since its debut back in 2008, Tweetwall has served hundreds of enterprise-sized customers, some like CNN, which would use the service year after year, paying each time for new customizations. The Providence-based startup, which raised just $165,000 in the early days some through Betaspring, has been profitable for some time. It also operates Twitter analytics service Socialping, which has around 1,000 customers and is self-sustaining, though now a revamp for it is also planned.

Going forward, the self-serve version of Tweetwall, including the iPad app, will be offered alongside the full service offering for those clients who need the advanced customizations. More info is available here, or you can download Tweetwall for iPad here on iTunes.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Open Compute will develop a specification and a reference box for an open networking switch and will do so from the ground up in the fashion of open-source software efforts, such as those developed by the Apache Foundation.

The OS-agnostic, top-of-rack switch will be the first developed as an open-source project with the spec developed by the Open Compute community.

“Closesd switches are still the primary way things work,” said Frank Frankovsky in an interview this week. Frankovsky is a Facebook vice president in hardware design and supply operations who plays a focal role at Open Compute. “…Networking has always had a black box nature to it. You give it a packet and it gives it back on the other end.”

According to a blog post by Frankovsky, Najam Ahmad, who runs the network engineering team at Facebook, will lead the networking project. The Open Networking Foundation and OpenDaylight group will participate with Broadcomm, Intel, VMware, and Cumulus Networks. Work on the project will begin at the first  OCP Engineering Summit, being held at MIT on May 16.

The networking specs will most likely be stripped down, compared to proprietary switches. “Scale is the hardest problem to solve,” Frankovsky said. “Simplicity allows us to trouble shoot faster.”

The network switch will be designed to be independent of the software that runs on top of it. That means customers can configure the technology in the manner that is appropriate for their purposes. The hope is that this “disaggregated,” switch will  allow for a faster pace of innovation. Frankovsky said that Facebook has found networking to be a bottleneck. The proprietary switches are not built for scale. More so they are meant for small clusters. Additionally, changes do not happen fast enough in the switches the network vendors offer. Requests go to the vendor who then prioritizes additions in the  new version.

There have been open-source hardware projects such as Raspberry Pi but none at the data center level. The need for open-source is precipitated by the surging growth of the Internet, which is forcing companies to process ever larger stores of data.

There are some companies not on the list of participants in the project. Dell, HP and Cisco are noticeably not present. My guess is we can expect to see some of those vendors joining in this open-source effort, especially as demand increases for infrastructure that is not locked down in proprietary fashion but is rather more plug and play.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

McAfee, the Intel-owned security specialist, has just announced that it is buying Stonesoft Oyj,a Finland-based specialist in firewall protection products, for $389 million in cash. The move will let McAfee expand its product line specifically in networked security products, to complement the antivirus services for which McAfee is best known.

It comes at a time when PCs are sitting side by side with other kinds of devices like tablets and smartphones on networks, and more information is moving off devices and on to networked, cloud-based systems.

“With the pending addition of Stonesoft’s products and services, McAfee is making a significant investment in next-generation firewall technology. These solutions anticipate emerging customer needs in a continually evolving threat landscape,” said Michael DeCesare, McAfee President, in a statement. “Stonesoft is a leading innovator in this important market segment.” He added that McAfee will integrate Stonesoft’s products into McAfee’s cloud-based Security Connected strategy.

More to come. Release below.

SANTA CLARA, Calif., May 6, 2013 – McAfee today announced the execution of a definitive agreement to initiate a conditional tender offer for the acquisition of Stonesoft Oyj (NASDAQ OMX Helsinki: SFT1V), a leading innovator in next-generation network firewall products, for an aggregate equity value of approximately $389 million in cash.

Stonesoft delivers software-based, dynamic, customer-driven, cyber security solutions to secure information flow and simplify security management. Stonesoft’s product portfolio of next-generation firewalls, evasion prevention systems, and SSL VPN solutions addresses businesses of all sizes. Through the pending acquisition of Stonesoft, McAfee expects to extend its leadership position in network security.

“With the pending addition of Stonesoft’s products and services, McAfee is making a significant investment in next-generation firewall technology. These solutions anticipate emerging customer needs in a continually evolving threat landscape,” said Michael DeCesare, McAfee President. “Stonesoft is a leading innovator in this important market segment. We plan to integrate Stonesoft’s offerings with other McAfee products to realize the power of McAfee’s Security Connected strategy. Stonesoft products will benefit from the collective expertise of more than 7,200 McAfee employees. Leveraging McAfee’s cloud-based Global Threat Intelligence service will provide our combined customers with unparalleled security.”

The rationale for the proposed acquisition is as follows:

Network security is a vital component of a comprehensive security solution. Next-generation firewalls solve critical customer needs and represent one of the fastest growing market segments in network security.
Stonesoft is a leading innovator in the next-generation firewall segment. Gartner positioned the company as “visionary” in the 2013 Network Security Firewall Magic Quadrant. Stonesoft achieved “Recommend” status in NSS Labs’ latest 2013 firewall tests.
With Stonesoft, McAfee expects to grow its network security business by delivering the industry’s most complete network security solution with three leading platforms: McAfee’s IPS Network Security Platform, McAfee’s Firewall Enterprise for the high assurance market segment, and Stonesoft’s next-generation firewall.
Based in Helsinki, Finland, Stonesoft is trusted by more than 6,500 customers across the globe. Stonesoft’s customer base can now benefit from an integrated, comprehensive security solution through McAfee. Similarly, McAfee’s extensive, global customer base will benefit from access to a highly-innovative next-generation firewall. Stonesoft’s innovative next-generation firewall, when combined with McAfee’s market leading IPS and high assurance firewall, provides customers with one of the most complete network security portfolios in the industry.

“The combination of the two companies allows Stonesoft to benefit from McAfee’s global presence and sales organization of over 2,200 employees, best-in-class threat research and technology synergies” said Ilkka Hiidenheimo, Chief Executive Officer of Stonesoft. “Combined, we believe we can offer our customers a world-class product portfolio with world-class support – all backed by Intel.”

About McAfee
McAfee, a wholly owned subsidiary of Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC), empowers businesses, the public sector, and home users to safely experience the benefits of the Internet. The company delivers proactive and proven security solutions and services for systems, networks, and mobile devices around the world. With its Security Connected strategy, innovative approach to hardware-enhanced security, and unique Global Threat Intelligence network, McAfee is relentlessly focused on keeping its customers safe. http://www.mcafee.com.

About Intel
Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) is a world leader in computing innovation. The company designs and builds the essential technologies that serve as the foundation for the world’s computing devices. Additional information about Intel is available at newsroom.intel.com and blogs.intel.com.

Intel and the Intel logo are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the United States and other countries.

About Stonesoft Corporation
Stonesoft Corporation delivers software based, dynamic, customer-driven cyber security solutions that secure information flow and simplify security management. Stonesoft serves private and public sector organizations that require high availability, ease-of-management, compliance, dynamic security, protection of critical digital assets, and business continuity against today’s rapidly evolving cyber threats. The company leads research into advanced cyber threats and the advanced evasion techniques (AETs) used in stealth, targeted cyber attacks. For more information visit. http://www.stonesoft.com.

Forward-Looking Statements
This document contains forward-looking statements based on current expectations or beliefs, as well as a number of assumptions about future events, and these statements are subject to factors and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements. The reader is cautioned not to put undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which are not a guarantee of future performance and are subject to a number of uncertainties and other factors, many of which are outside the control of McAfee or Intel.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

If, say, a company uses both Sharepoint and Salesforce inside a mobile app, to get that data into one app they need multiple levels of API integration. Because of the enormous boom in mobile and tablet apps, so-called ‘back-end as a service’ (BaaS) platforms like FeedHenry – which solve these problems – are hugely expanding. Thus, today FeedHenry has secured $9M (€7M) in a funding round led by Intel Capital, alongside a “seven figure” investment from existing investor Kernel Capital.

Other existing investors VMware Inc., Enterprise Ireland and private investors also participated and were joined by new investment from ACT Venture Capital. The funds will be used on an international roll out.

FeedHenry’s mobile application platform – built between Ireland and the U.S. – helps businesses build mobile apps that integrate securely to their business through the cloud. This is a competitive market that includes StackMob, Usergrid, Appcelerator, Sencha.io, Applicasa ,Parse, CloudMine , CloudyRec , iKnode, yorAPI, Buddy and ScottyApp.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Expect Labs has already received funding from the likes of Google Ventures and Greylock Partners, but the San Francisco-based startup (and TechCrunch Disrupt alum) announced this morning that Intel Capital, Samsung Ventures, and Telefonica Digital have made their own strategic investments in the company.

In case you haven’t been keeping tabs on Expect Labs, well, you should be. It was founded by Tim Tuttle and Moninder Jheeta in 2011, and since then the team has been tackling a hefty problem — they want to be able to listen to and analyze your conversations as they happen, and surface relevant information right at the moment you need it without you having to search for it.

Granted, some of these new strategic partners are more surprising than others. Our own Jordan Crook sat down with Intel Capital president Arvind Sodhani back in March, who revealed that the chipmaker’s venture arm had indeed invested in Expect Labs and strongly hinted that Intel would lean on the startup’s Anticipatory Computing Engine to bring what Intel refers to as “sophisticated voice control” to ultrabooks. Tuttle naturally wouldn’t confirm whether ultrabooks in particular would soon benefit from Expect Labs tech, but noted that Intel is “trying to develop more expertise in software” and realizes that voice, touch, and gestures will become dominant modes of interaction with new devices.

At first glance, Samsung’s interest in Expect Labs and its thoughtful approach to surfacing information seems like a no-brainer. As seen in blockbuster devices like the Galaxy S4, the Korean electronics giant has sought to stay at the front of the smartphone pack by packing its smartphones full of first-party software like the S Voice assistant. That sort of approach hasn’t always been very well-received, but baking the ability to chew on conversations and spit out information on subjects users have just spoken about into yet another Samsung app would be a very savvy move for a company that’s continually looking to push the envelope on software. It’s not just smartphones that will benefit either — Tuttle specifically calls out smart TVs as a potential recipient of Expect Labs tech.

Telefonica seems like a much more interesting case — it’s the fifth largest mobile network operator in the world with roughly 315 million customers across Europe and the Americas. To date Expect Labs has shown off the proactive power of its Anticipatory Computing Engine in app form, but that sort of approach simply wouldn’t work for many of Telefonica’s subscribers since a considerable chunk of them in developing and mature markets don’t own smartphones.

That’s not a problem, according to Tuttle. In fact, he views his sort of voice-centric tech as a “godsend” for telecoms like Telefonica. He envisioned a phone conversation (that could happen “very soon”) with someone about meeting at restaurant down the street — once the call is done, the phone can display a link to a map for the restaurant right within the dialer.

This buy-in from some very prominent partners speaks to the stickiness of Expect Labs’ vision of the future of computing. According to co-founder and CEO Tim Tuttle, we’re poised to see a dramatic shift in what sorts of devices we interact with and how we interact with them.

“We’re heading quickly toward this world where all of the devices around you will be listening to you,” Tuttle explained. That’s not to say that traditional modes of technological interaction is bound for extinction — Tuttle concedes that the keyboard and mouse aren’t going anywhere any time soon, but information won’t just be accessible from select locations.

“The issue is the places where computing devices show up in our lives aren’t just on our desks, they’ll be all over the place,” Tuttle said. “In all these cases you’re going to want to access your information without going to your desk.”

Now that Expect Labs has some additional capital to work with, Tuttle wants to expand the team (which currently consists of 12 people). Tuttle and rest of Expect Labs have made some astonishing progress over the past few months, but they’ve had to shift their priorities around too. Consider the fan-favorite MindMeld iPad app that Expect Labs showed off at Disrupt SF 2012: it’s still around, but the public launch the startup has been talking up for so long is no longer something they’re trying to do immediately.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

What a two weeks it’s been. Something happened that has been simmering for a while. The API market exploded. Intel bought Mashery for more than $180 million and CA acquired Layer 7. 3Scale received a new $4.5 million round of funding from Javelin Ventures. Programmable Web acquired Mulesoft. And then Facebook jumped in and bought Parse.

The acquisitions and funding point to a maturing market that is reflected in the ubiquity of APIs across the application landscape. It’s not a new market by any means. The space is filled with companies that have leveraged the API build out that has happened over the past several years. Instead this is an inflection point. There are more than 30,000 APIs, according to Programmable Web, the leading API directory and blog. Javelin Ventures Managing Director Noah Doyle said to me in an interview that analysts see the API market growing five to ten times over the next five years.

With that scaling in number of APIs comes a virtuous circle for the developers that build compelling apps and APIs. The APIs extend the apps reach as they become part of distributed data network. As more people use the APIs so the app developer generates more data. As the data increases in scope, often the service will become an API.

Facebook needs new streams of data to keep rolling out new digital products. Back end as a service providers like Parse provide SDKs and APIs that give developers access to infrastructure for storing basic data types, locations and photos. How Facebook uses this data is a question mark. But regardless, Pare serves as a constant replenishing source, nourished by the apps on the Parse platform that use APIs. Facebook now will decide how to package and segment that data to push more relevant advertising to its 1 billion users.

APIs Are Like Glue

APIs will be the glue to the Internet, said Programmable Web Founder John Musser. Musser, like Doyle, sees a new generation of APIs emerging that are fueled by demand, triggered by mobile devices, which serve in many respects as the new client/servers. Apps are hosted on cloud services and distributed across mobile devices that read and write data, sending and receiving information, connecting via APIs.

In the first generation, Mashery and companies like Apigee pioneered the API management space. Twitter and other web companies emerged in the second generation. In the third wave, enterprise vendors, like Intel and CA, are recognizing this big movement and entering the market to connect hardware and software systems.

Now the API movement is headed below the application to the machine level, Doyle said. It’s at this level that we see the emergence of the Internet of Things. Here, everything become programmable, able to send and receive data, integrate it and trigger actions.

3Scale provides the management of the API so developers can build logic on top, Doyle said. The company helps developers manage APIs out of the box so they can simply add data sets or services without needing to hand stitch things together.

The API Economy

The surge of activity marks a symbolic point for the API Economy, a term ApigeeVice President of Strategy Sam Ramji helped coin. He said in an email that this past week may have doubled the size of the audience paying attention to APIs and API infrastructure. “If a company doesn’t have an API, and their CIO or CTO reads about the news, they will be asking themselves ‘why don’t we?’” 

And it will be easier for them to build APIs with services popping up like Mashape and Webshell. Doyle spent three years at Google after the company acquired Keyhole, the startup he founded. At Google, Doyle helped develop Google Earth and worked on Google Maps.

“We exposed maps as a lightweight JavaScript,” Doyle said. “We thought of it as an embed code in a way. We thought it would be cool and great but were  shocked how quick it took off.”

It was the ease of use that made Google Maps accessible, Doyle said. Today, best practices are getting built-in so it is easy for the developer to build out sophisticated apps.

Complexity Is Inevitable

But it’s not all so simple. Complications await as development becomes ever more distributed across multiple APIs. It’s a hole MuleSoft sees it can help fill with its APIhub.

As I wrote last week, for MuleSoft, the Programmable Web deal provides a vehicle for it to offer what it calls a GitHub for APIs that will integrate its APIhub with Programmable Web’s API database and rich editorial focus on the correlating market space. For Programmable Web, it provides a stable home, a place where it can extend its API database to a community that can build out apps using the MuleSoft APIhub platform. It’s this integrated platform that the company expects to provide the guide and the community collaboration to make APIs easier to fit together.

Tasktop Technologies, an application lifecycle management (ALM) integrator, has launched an open-source effort called Software Lifecycle Integration (SLI) that would link the disparate tools in the software lifecycle management process. The new initiative is called M4 and is part of an open-source project under Eclipse-Mylyn. 

SLI is what Tasktop CEO and co-founder Mik Kersten calls an underlying service that acts as a universal linked data message bus that allows for real-time synchronization between different tools so people can immediately discuss problems with the code as they surface.  It’s these underlying integration platforms that will emerge as the API economy develops. Acquisitions and funding over these past two weeks signal the need to manage this complexity so it really is easier to build out apps that are as connected to our mobile devices as to the rest of the things in our lives.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Credit where it’s definitely due: this post was inspired by a Twitter conversation with Box CEO Aaron Levie.

Don’t look now, but something remarkable is happening.

Instagram had twelve employees when it was purchased for $700 million; all of its actual computing power was outsourced to Amazon Web Services. Mighty ARM has only 2300 employees, but there are more than 35 billion ARM-based chips out there. They do no manufacturing; instead they license their designs to companies like Apple, who in turn contract with companies like TSMC for the actual fabrication. Nest Labs and Ubiquiti are both 200-employee hardware companies worth circa $1 billion…who subcontract their actual manufacturing out to China.

Warren Buffett has long advocated investing in businesses with “moats” around their business model. Often that moat is an economy of scale; the notion that a hundred widgets cost a dollar each but a million widgets only a dime apiece.

Obviously that doesn’t apply to software, or music, or other virtual goods. What’s less obvious is that as time goes by, and technology and interconnectivity advance, it applies less and less to the physical world as well. Industrial capacities that not long ago were available only to gargantuan corporations are today open to anyone and everyone. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and the OpenStack providers compete to rent economies of scale for web services. Foxconn et al essentially do the same for electronics. So what happens when this trend expands into other sectors? What happens when there are Foxconns for furniture, or cars, or houses, or retail stores? And a Dronenet for transporting physical goods?

What happens is that moats dry up, and are bridged, and previously impregnable incumbents start looking very vulnerable to disruption indeed.

But wait. This is all too small. Let’s think bigger yet.

Compare and contrast Intel with ARM. The former is, historically, a vertically integrated design-and-manufacturing monolith which owns and controls everything they do, whereas the latter concentrates on being the best at the one thing they do. I have enormous respect for Intel but it seems clear that the world is trending towards ARM’s more decoupled model, wherein their designs (like TSMC’s manufacturing capacity) are made available to any and all customers.

The logical conclusion of that trend, however, is far more transformative than a mere reduction in optimal corporate size and scope: it’s this–

Will ownership turn out to be largely a hack people resorted to before they had the infrastructure to manage sharing properly?—
Paul Graham (@paulg) April 15, 2013

I might paraphrase that as “property isn’t theft; property is an inefficient distribution of resources.” It signifies a dichotomy between two very different modes of thinking–one where you own things, and one where you just use them, and share them when they’re not in use. This is old news in the tech world, which has been dispersing monolithic dedicated channels into hordes of flexibly routed packets for decades…

Fibers always come in pairs. This practice seems obvious to a telephony person, who is in the business of setting up symmetrical two-way circuits, but makes no particular sense to a hacker tourist who tends to think in terms of one-way packet transmission. The split between these two ways of thinking runs very deep and accounts for much tumult in the telecom world.

— Neal Stephenson, Mother Earth Mother Board, 1994

…but it’s enormously foreign and disruptive, verging on revolutionary, to most everyone else. (Indeed, a whole lot of people have probably just mistaken it for communism. It’s not.)

We’re getting pretty abstract here. Let me pick a particular example: this column by Casey B. Mulligan in the New York Times this week, which concludes that “driverless cars … will increase the number of vehicles on the road.”

It’s a fairly smart piece that suffers from what I call “unidimensional extrapolation,” and so misses effects like the trend I refer to above. Widespread use of driverless cars will inevitably lead to a sharp rise in ownerless cars. A major reason for owning a car is that you don’t need to go get one when you need one. Which sounds like a tautology today, but won’t when shared driverless cars will be able to zoom to your house on five minute’s notice when you need to go to the mall for an hour.

Ultimately, I’m confident that driverless cars will lead to much lower car ownership in urban areas; instead, large numbers of people will have fractional ownership of sizable pools of driverless vehicles, à la Berkshire Hathaway’s NetJets, and just summon them when they need them. This will codify and formalize the running cost of using a car…and since you won’t pay for them when you’re not using them, it in turn will lead to fewer cars on the road.

That’s just one example. More generally, I think it’s hard to deny that both industries (AWS, Foxconn, etc) and individuals (from AirBNB to Zipcar) are increasingly moving towards collective usage of large pools of widely accessible shared resources. Economies of scale as a service, as Aaron put it. So far the effects are limited to specific sectors and domains — but it’s only a matter of time before this wave of change reaches, and profoundly disturbs, entire industries hitherto untouched by its force.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Samsung Mobile is this week’s top gaining product and service page in the People Talking About This metric. No other product and service page came close to matching this page’s level engagement, earning almost 1.4 million more engagements over the week likely due to an ad campaign.

This list of top gaining product and service pages is compiled with PageData, which tracks page growth and engagement across Facebook.

#	Name	People Talking About	Daily Growth	Weekly Growth
1	Samsung Mobile	1,613,292	+202,573	+1,394,722
2	Intel	714,388	+9,853	+241,122
3	goodlife 好生活	319,672	+4,458	+209,132
4	Facebook	752,227	0	+185,199
5	GUESS Watches	189,739	-28,539	+143,143
6	BuzzFeed	248,554	-7,142	+110,145
7	YouTube	529,119	0	+94,339
8	African Pride	103,105	0	+88,368
9	GoPro	274,935	+26,816	+79,828
10	Visa	294,699	+10,697	+73,843

The content on the Samsung Mobile page heavily features the new Galaxy S4 phone which is to be released this week. There is a large discrepancy between any given post as some may earn almost 200k likes while others only receive 40k, suggesting the company is promoting some of these as page post ads.

Another interesting page this week is Buzz Feed. The page only has 267k page Likes and 248k in PTAT. The site does integrate with their own Facebook app that has 100,000+ MAU (monthly active users). It is also interesting to see that the page only occasionally shares links to articles on its site. Instead, it shares pictures from articles on its site.

If BuzzFeed were to focus on using Facebook as a distribution channel for links, it would possibly see increased traffic, though, the site produces a large mass of content everyday so this could lead them oversaturate themselves in fans news feeds.

Visit PageData to see more about the top talked about product and service pages as well as other categories.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Mountain View-based startup Swipp, which earlier this year launched its social interest platform for consumers to share what they think of “a person, place or thing”, has taken the natural next step by introducing Swipp Plus: a tool for businesses to mine the consumer data that its opinion graph generates. To fund the new product, Swipp has also announced an additional $2 million institutional investment, extending the $3.5 million it previously raised from Old Willow Partners.

Swipp says Swipp Plus is designed to “increase customer interaction and provide real-time customer insight around products, brands, and offers”. It joins the ranks of opinion monitoring tools for marketers to gather intel from social networks, such as Hootsuite et al. However the difference is that Swipp has built its own social sentiment platform as well as now a suite of tools to track opinion on it. Swipp’s “quantifiable sentiment layer”, as it describes its platform, may not have the huge user-base of Facebook or Twitter but it’s specifically designed to generate the kind of market research data that businesses crave. 

Although it’s possibly to pull consumer sentiment data off other social networks, Swipp not only has opinionated comments organised by topic but users also score the person/place/thing they are ‘swipping’ — generating Swipp’s quantifiable data. This allows it to measure and track opinion changes over time. It’s also capturing user location so Swipp can figure out what’s hot and what’s not in different global regions.

It’s unclear how many users Swipp’s consumer platform has accrued so far but presumably a lot less than social’s giants — so whether its data is particular compelling to businesses yet is questionable. That said, the Swipp Plus ‘self-service’ tool is free so there’s nothing to stop companies kicking its tyres. Swipp is also offering a Swipp Enterprise offering, tailored to the needs of larger businesses, which does carry a (bespoke) price-tag.

Swipp said the Swipp Plus suite allows users to track terms, create embeddable widgets, and gauge sentiment on a variety of topics, including products and brand names.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch