Bitcoins may be getting a lot of buzz, but the market for products that deal with old fashioned dollars and cents is apparently still strong.

To wit: Motif Investing, the Silicon Valley startup headed up by Microsoft alum Hardeep Walia that lets people invest their money in themed groups of stocks called “motifs”, has raised $25 million in a new round of funding led by Goldman Sachs.

This counts as a Series C round for Motif, bringing the total amount of money invested in the company to $51 million since it was founded in mid-2010. All of Motif’s previous investors, including Ignition Partners, Norwest Venture Partners and Foundation Capital, also pitched into this new round. As part of the investment Darren Cohen, Goldman’s managing director of principal strategic investments, is joining Motif’s board as an observer.

In an interview this week, Walia told me that Motif’s growth has been strong since it officially launched its platform to the public last summer. To date more than 7500 “motifs” have been created, which are investment indexes that let people invest in genres such as “Biotech Breakthrough” or “Housing Recovery” as opposed to buying individual stocks or putting complete trust in a mutual fund or ETF.

Motif, which Walia bills as a “Facebook meets eTrade meets Mint.com,” does not collect management fees, which is another thing that sets it apart from traditional money management vehicles. It makes money by charging a flat $9.95 fee to make a motif (which can include up to 30 stocks) and in several other ways, such as collecting margins on investments and selling value-added services and products. In the months since launch, the platform has attracted a diverse user base ranging from “ultra high-net-worth individuals” who primarily appreciate that Motif does not charge management fees, to “newbie investors” who appreciate the site’s natural language approach, Walia says.

With the fresh Series C funds, Walia says that Motif will work on further developing its product for financial advisors, which will let professional consultants use Motif’s investment platform with their own clients. There are other new products in the works, as well, he says. Motif’s own staff, meanwhile, has grown to 40 full-time employees, and the funding will also be used to continue to add talent (with a special focus, not surprisingly, on engineering.)

When asked about strategic options — after all, Goldman Sachs doesn’t exactly invest in companies without an eye on getting a return — Walia said that he’s focused on building Motif as “a company that lasts and is independent, so that we can continue to disrupt this space.”

That said, Walia, whose resume includes time on the M&A team at Microsoft, did acknowledge that Motif could make sense as an acquisition target, especially for established entities that deal in ETFs, stock brokering, and financial services. “A lot of people have found what we do quite fascinating… we are very attractive to certain players.” For now, though, Motif certainly has the vision — and funding — necessary to continue to grow as a standalone entity, and it should continue to be one to watch at the intersection of finance and technology.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Mike Jones is CEO of Science, Inc., a Los Angeles-based technology studio; he has no connection to the companies mentioned herein. Follow him on Twitter @mjones.

Gawker Media made headlines recently when founder Nick Denton offered his full-throated support of sponsored posts and “commerce journalism” and said he expected 10 percent of the company’s 2013 revenues to come from e-commerce activities.

Content and commerce have always had a symbiotic relationship that many traditional content providers tried to separate. The wall between editorial and business, otherwise known as the separation of church and state, is and always has contained back doors and windows in which compromises are made.

The slow adoption of all that the digital revolution has to offer – curation, aggregation, social, and automation – has also hobbled many traditional content providers. Depressed revenues, layoffs and shrinking bully pulpits are the results of an industry that doesn’t quite know how to monetize content beyond selling advertising space. Today’s successful digital companies know to blend content and commerce so that the content is compelling and, frankly, still sells stuff.

The Fab.com content email makes for a fascinating read while simultaneously seducing me into wanting to open up my wallet.

Fab.com is a prime example of this melding of commerce with content. It is one of the fastest-growing sites because, in part, it is one of the most interesting content emails that subscribers receive daily. Its mix of absurd, colorful, interesting, expensive and affordable products in their signature checkerboard design provides as much content experience as an Uncrate.com or Acquire.com and yet it is essentially a featured sales list. The Fab.com content email makes for a fascinating read while simultaneously seducing me into wanting to open up my wallet.

This mixture of content and commerce is driving a wave of editorial shopping and curation that is rewarding its forward-thinking managers with viral growth and revenue. Men’s lifestyle site Thrillist.com just announced that 45 percent of its $40 million a year earnings comes from the iPhone app for its e-commerce site JackThreads.

In the next five years, I see the intersection of commerce and content as follows:

Traditional content outlets, including magazines and newspapers, will find their way onto social media including Facebook, Youtube and Pinterest and build meaningful businesses within other companies’ platforms rather than just relying on their own digital destinations.
Editorial staff, from editors to reporters, will start out-shining their respective publication brands and will rise as tastemakers. As brands themselves, they will have the ability to generate revenue beyond their content generation.

Commerce will become embedded within content to such a degree that commerce will be seen as content.  Fab.com and BureauofTrade.com are precursors of this seamless merge of content and commerce.

It’s unquestionably an exciting, albeit uncertain, time for those in the content business. The brouhaha over the Atlantic and the Scientology advertorial is an example of the need for content and commerce to meld seamlessly so that trust and credibility are maintained.

As we see rapid growth in the number of people purchasing items online – an estimated 80 percent of Americans last year – content businesses will need to go deeper into monetization through commerce opportunities or be ready to issue more pink slips and close up shop.

[Image: Shutterstock]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Last night was the grand lighting ceremony for The Bay Lights, the $8.8 million art installation that will turn the historically drab San Francisco Bay Bridge into the world’s largest LED light sculpture every night for the next two years.

It’s clearly a work of art first and foremost, but there is a lot of technology at play here too. The 25,000 LED lights that are attached to the 1.8 mile western span of the Bay Bridge are all individually programmed with software algorithms that create a generative sequence making it so that the patterns never occur twice. The hardware aspect is also a technological feat, with the lights being held up by custom-designed clips and engineered to withstand harsh weather conditions for months on end. And the project, which is all privately funded, has attracted the attention and support of a number of San Francisco Bay Area tech industry power hitters including Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, SV Angel founder and longtime investor Ron Conway, Y Combinator partner and former Googler Paul Buchheit, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg, and others.

So TechCrunch TV swung by the press event preceding the official lighting ceremony to hear more about the project. It was a bit of a press scrum, but we elbowed our way in and were permitted to introduce ourselves and ask two questions of The Bay Lights’ artist Leo Villareal. He himself has a background in both art and technology — his formal education is in sculpture and interactive communications, but he has also spent time working in the software world at Paul Allen’s Interval Research in Palo Alto during the 1990s.

In the video embedded above, you can see the scene at the presser and hear Villareal talk briefly about the intersection of technology and art and the tech challenges of installing The Bay Lights.

I also liked a bit of what he said off camera during the press conference, when someone asked him what they should be “looking for” in the work and what his vision was. It seemed to really highlight the underlying connection between science and artistic beauty. He said:

“I’m interested in rules, and underlying structures. I have worked with software, and had amazing formative experiences [in the industry]… What people will be seeing are abstract sequences which are inspired by kinetic activity around the bridge. They’re very open-ended, and highly subjective.”

It really is a beautiful sight. It will be interesting to see if the Bay Bridge soon becomes as much of an inspiration to Silicon Valley and San Francisco’s visionaries as its traditionally more beautiful neighbor, “>the Golden Gate, has been.

Here is the livestream of The Bay Lights, which will be switched on every evening from dusk until 2:00am PT.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Apigee has launched a new big data analytics platform that extends the company’s mission beyond API management and into a new space that uses apps and data from APIs and other sources to gain context and insight.

Here’s the problem as Apigee sees it. Let’s say you have an app and an API. All is going well — developers are using it and as a result the app is getting great traction. Then, for no explainable reason, a few of the core members of the community have suddenly stopped having much interest.

The new service, Apigee Insights, looks at the community and draws connector points to create a better context about the individual and the community. It draws on different data points, such as from GitHub, API traffic, and Google analytics for its developer web pages to get a deeper understanding.

Anant Jhingran, Apigee vice president of products, said the goal is to get a 360-degree view of the developer. The results may have some noise, but it will also have signals to help customers form conclusions. Apigee Insights is a three-tier product that explores structured, unstructured and semi-structured data.

Apigee addresses the confusion many enterprise shops face at the intersection of IT and software development. The infrastructure is radically changing and apps are populating it to meet all kinds of needs. It may be to use time series data from a company like TempoDB that it can then use to connect to different apps. All that data is contextual. And as more data points connect, it will resemble a fabric that can glean all kinds of insights. Apigee Insights, which will also include a consulting component, helps customers stitch those disparate data points. This gives the customer the capability to see beyond the immediate, structured data from such sources as retail transactions that they have become so accustomed to viewing through relatively heavyweight technologies that have long served as the infrastructure for understanding the market and customer behavior.

This process worked okay in a pre-API economy, but, now, apps are part of a long, weaving, intersecting chain of apps that come and go depending on the level of API traffic and developer interaction. It’s what Apigee Vice President of Strategy Sam Ramji describes as API Darwinism.

The market Apigee is addressing is a big one but also filled with competitors vying to compete for customers that see the value in data analysis. There are the traditional data warehouse competitors like Teradata, EMC, Oracle and SAP. Competitors in the API management space like Layer 7 Technologies and Mashery both have data analytics platforms. Layer 7 offers analytics to help companies better understand performance issues. Mashery offers performance metrics, as well.

But Apigee’s service analyzes the data from different sources to help gain context. That will have a value for companies that realize the insights that can be learned from all that data that is being generated at unprecedented rates.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Ad analytics company Adometry, the combined entity created when Click Forensics acquired Adometry and kept its branding, has announced it has closed an $8 million Series D round, led by Shasta Ventures, with Austin Ventures and Sierra Ventures also participating. As part of the funding round, Shasta Venture’s MD, Jason Pressman, will join Adometry’s Board of Directors.

The company said it plans to use its latest funding to accelerate product development on its analytics platform, Adometry Attribute, as well as recruit staff and expand into new territories. It currently says it processes and analyzes “tens-of-billions of impressions and advertising transactions” per month on behalf of its customers.

Adometry sells tools to help advertisers and marketers determine how cross-channel media campaigns are performing and identify ways they can be optimized. Its approach to measuring campaign effectiveness involves aggregating data from multiple sources and signals, rather than just identifying the “last click” and giving that all the credit for the purchase.

Here’s how the company explains its analytics platform on its website:

Adometry Attribute uses a “data-driven,” probabilistic approach to determine what should receive the credit. Adometry identifies every conversion and “look-back” over the previous time period to find all the touch-points that user saw prior to the conversion. It then determines the probability of each conversion sequence – with and without an event – and then uses the ratio to determine the importance of the omitted event.

Advanced Attribution offers a number of benefits when compared to simple attribution models. To start, Attribute takes into account any and all available data streams, and analyzes all data instead of sample sets, yielding a highly accurate and insightful model for marketers to judge their marketing efforts by. Attribute is also integrated with numerous data providers and pulls additional third party data for increased accuracy, scalable marketing analytics and reporting depth that allows for truly actionable insights to be uncovered.

Commenting on the funding in a statement, Shasta’s Pressman said: “We believe Adometry has built a unique and sustainable business at the intersection of several exploding market dynamics. Using big data to optimize and influence advertising spend is the future of marketing, and many of the world’s largest brands already rely on Adometry’s robust platform and expertise. We are thrilled to lead this round of funding and excited about Adometry’s continued growth and success.”

Adometry’s full release follows below.

ADOMETRY RAISES $8 MILLION IN LATEST ROUND OF FINANCING
Funding to Fuel New Products and Expansion into New Geographies

AUSTIN, Texas – January 21, 2013 – Adometry, Inc., a leader in cross-channel attribution, today announced that it has completed an $8 million round of financing. The company will use the funds to accelerate its product roadmap, recruit top talent and expand into new territories.

The financing was led by Shasta Ventures and includes participation from Austin Ventures and Sierra Ventures. Adometry also announced Shasta Venture’s Jason Pressman will join Adometry’s Board of Directors.

As a result of the funding, the company plans to accelerate product development on its Adometry Attribute^™ platform, which provides marketers with acomprehensive lens through which to analyze and optimize the performance of their cross-channel marketing campaigns. Through unique integrations with leading programmatic buying platforms, advertisers can also automatically funnel performance data and optimization recommendations from Adometry’s platform to real-time bidding engines to optimize media and channel investments for active campaigns.

“Our focus has always been to deliver the best possible products for advertisers so that our customers and agency partners around the world are better able to understand and make decisions about their marketing spend,” said Paul Pellman, CEO of Adometry. “We are humbled by the overwhelmingly positive feedback we’ve received thus far and look forward to delivering even greater value through our Attribute platform by offering new capabilities and features in the coming year.”

“We believe Adometry has built a unique and sustainable business at the intersection of several exploding market dynamics,” said Jason Pressman, Managing Director at Shasta Ventures. “Using big data to optimize and influence advertising spend is the future of marketing, and many of the world’s largest brands already rely on Adometry’s robust platform and expertise. We are thrilled to lead this round of funding and excited about Adometry’s continued growth and success.”

For more information on Adometry, visit www.adometry.com or follow us on Twitter: @Adometry.

About Adometry

Adometry, Inc. redefines marketing analytics by combining and interpreting previously silo-ed sources of big data to generate actions that improve return on advertising spend and increase sales. Through its SaaS-based attribution platform, Adometry processes tens-of-billions of marketing touch points from online and offline media channels for some of the world’s largest advertisers to identify the true consumer purchase journey. Adometry’s scientifically proven methodology and flexible, easy-to-implement solution generates the industry’s most accurate insights, in the shortest amount of time. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Adometry is privately held and backed by Austin Ventures, Sierra Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Stanford University. For more information, visit www.adometry.com.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Earlier this month, angel investor Chris Sacca announced that his firm Lowercase Capital was launching a new Los Angeles-focused fund, and that he’d hired someone to run it. Now we know who that someone is — Matt Mazzeo, a business development executive at Creative Artists Agency.

It might seem odd for Lowercase to bring on someone from a talent agency, but Mazzeo’s job at CAA has actually been to bridge the tech and media worlds, helping startups navigate the entertainment industry and vice versa. He told me he’ll be doing something similar at Lowercase by investing the new fund (he isn’t disclosing its size) in companies that sit at the intersection of media and technology.

“I think the opportunities in LA are incredible,” he said. “It’s the heart of the entertainment community, and you’ve also got all these entrepreneurs who are sticking around after they graduate from UCLA and USC and Caltech.”

At the same time, even though Lowercase is “betting heavily” on the LA ecosystem, Mazzeo said that his investments won’t be limited to one geography, and that he expects to spend a lot of time in New York and the Bay Area, too.

Mazzeo said he will be the first partner Sacca has brought on at the firm. The two of them have been friends for several years, with a relationship built on “secret, late-night wine-drinking and jam sessions” at South by Southwest. When Sacca reached out with the opportunity, Mazzeo said he was attracted to the firm’s “unique way of just finding great young talent and nurturing them.”

The hire isn’t a sign that Sacca plans to bring on a bunch of other partners, Mazzeo said: “We’re going to continue the tradition that he’s built of being as lean and nimble as possible.”

Lowercase’s current portfolio includes Bit.ly, Chartbeat, Kickstarter, Uber, and many others.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Over the last couple of years a new trend amongst startups has been towards addressing incumbent industries. And there are few such traditional sectors as the world of fashion. Hence we’ve seen a great deal of activity in the space. We’ve seen the rise of apps to measure our bodies for clothes and personalise our fashion shopping experience. We’ve even seen fashion startups start to acquire each other. And tech is merging with fashion – heck, even models are starting to wear Google Glasses on the catwalk.

What the heck is going on? Well I’ll tell you: the disruption and transformation of an entire industry. Software is definitely eating this particular world. The latest symptom of this fever is the news that VC Index Ventures plans to offer up $50,000 to find the next hot little number.

This will be prize money in the form of a convertible note for the winning startup at the Decoded Fashion London event in November. It’ll be the first European event of its kind after starting in New York this year. Ten startups will pitch at the event, which unusually will have both tech and fashion media at the event, including TechCrunch. Also during the event the British Government – mindful that London is a fashion Mecca – is also planning to hand out awards to fashion tech companies. And it’s interesting that an event like this can attract the likes of Facebook, other VCs such as Advent Venture Partners and Tumblr.

Meanwhile, back in London fashion startups continue to proliferate, with the likes of EditD, Lyst and WIWT making increasingly bigger waves.

However, it’s not all been plain sailing. Recently Lookk (a startup out of Vienna which secured funding in London and scaled up) hit a rocky patch when it lost its CEO and co-founder Tamas Locher after realising the problem it was tackling was going to be a lot bigger (though the company is continuing under the other founders).

Lookk allows upcoming fashion designers to cut out the traditional network of buyers and sell clothes straight to consumers and actually making them as well.

But all successfully monetizing formulas so far in fashion – in contrast to Lookk – have been top-down approaches, as fashion has always been.

As Locher said in a farewell email to friends and the press, the pace of transformation was much slower than they had thought. “We were searching for an explosive formula on the intersection of social and e-commerce. We saw incremental positive effect of social on transactions but in our case they have certainly not been explosive,” he wrote.

There is no doubt fashion startups are definitely the new black. But there will clearly be a few discontinued lines in the future.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Mobile device management (MDM) company Mformation Technologies, which tried to juice millions of dollars from BlackBerry-maker RIM in a patent scuffle but ultimately failed, has been acquired by investment firm Clearlake Capital Group in an assets deal — the latest move aimed at capitalizing on the BYOD (bring your own device) trend.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed but Clearlake said it is providing “a significant capital infusion to accelerate” Mformation’s growth — in addition to carrying on serving its existing customers.  The investment opportunity here is continued growth of BYOD fueling increased demand within enterprises to manage the smörgåsbord of devices employees increasingly want to use for work.

“Mformation operates at the intersection of several key market trends — such as the proliferation of smart phones and intelligent mobile devices, Machine to Machine (M2M) wireless devices, and the advent of the ‘bring your own device’ phenomenon taking place in enterprises — which are driving the significant increase in demand for scalable mobile device management solutions,” said Prashant Mehrotra, Vice President at Clearlake, in a statement. “We believe the company is well-positioned to address this mission critical need for mobile operators and enterprises.”

“We found Mformation to be the clear market leader in the MDM software market, with a long history of offering scalable solutions to mobile operators and enterprises,” added Behdad Eghbali, Founding Partner at Clearlake, in a statement.

Clearlake has lopped off the company’s Technologies suffix — rebranding it plain old Mformation — but appears less keen to conduct major reconfigurations at senior management level, noting that existing management and operations team will “largely remain the same”. Mformation will also remain in its Edison, New Jersey headquarters.

Clearlake’s Eghbali and Mehrotra will join Mformation’s board of directors, and Eghbali added: “We look forward to partnering with management to aggressively scale the business and grow the global presence of this attractive new platform investment in the mobile software sector.”

Mformation products are currently being used to manage more than 500 million devices, according to the company.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Nir Eyal writes about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business at NirAndFar.com. He is the author of the forthcoming book “Hooked: How to Drive Engagement by Creating User Habits”. Follow him on Twitter @nireyal.

A few years ago, everyone was clicking. Today, we’re all scrolling. Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, and as of this week, Instagram and Medium – it seems everyone is getting on the infinite scroll bus. What is it about this magical design pattern that has so many consumer web companies using it?

Not too long ago, users were forced to reload pages to progress from one piece of content to the next. Web designers were advised against creating websites with information appearing “below the fold”, the portion of the page underneath what is displayed on the screen. As mobile phones and tablets gained wider adoption, it looked like the swipe might become standard fare. But that’s all changed now. Today, designers are dumping the click and flick and opting for the scroll for one simple reason – it works.

The Endless Search

The infinite scroll is interaction design’s answer to our penchant for endlessly searching for novelty. Certainly, there are technical reasons for the scroll’s increasing ubiquity. The rise of dynamic content, like a new comment entering the feed, necessitated a better solution than pagination built for static content. But to really understand why the scroll works so well requires a brief trip inside the mind and back in time.

Our brains evolved through the millennia into incredible prediction machines, designed to help us make sense of our environment. Our species benefited from our ability to make good decisions based on what we know is likely to happen in the future, thus, keeping us alive long enough to make babies and spread our genes.

To make correct predictions, the brain accesses memories, which allow us to deduce what’s coming next in an nearly instantaneous process of pattern recognition. The ability to learn is simply the conditioning of the brain to recognize cause and (blank).

You were expecting “effect” weren’t you? Of course you were. That’s because your brain has learned that these two words, “cause” and “effect”, tend to go together.

It’s this conditioning that creates cognitive shortcuts and habits, allowing us to process tremendous amounts of information all at once. Our brains move known causal patterns to long-term storage so that our attention can be devoted to learning new things.

And nothing holds our attention better than the unknown. The things that captivate, engross, and entertain us, all have an element of surprise. Our brains can’t get enough of trying to predict what’s next and our dopamine system kicks into high-gear when we’re waiting to know if our team will make the field goal, how the dice will land, or how the movie plot ends. Like a loose slot machine, the infinite scroll gives users fast access to variable rewards.

Interestingly, our brain isn’t wired to seek pleasure alone. In fact, much of our motivation comes from alleviating the pain of desire. Dopamine levels spike when we’re just about to find reward and plummet after we receive it. To get us to do just about anything, evolution uses this chemical cascade to induce anticipation, motivation, and finally pain alleviation. Somehow we call this endless merry-go-round “fun.”

Once You Pop

Few other methods for displaying information produce the curiosity to see what’s next like the infinite scroll. Like coffee and chocolate, the infinite scroll pairs particularly well with another increasingly-used design pattern, the masonry grid layout made famous by Pinterest. Cliff Kuang, editor of Co.Design, wrote, “… the Pinterest-style grid forces the eye to zig-zag through content, slowing down your scrolling but packing more images onto the screen at any given point.”

The barrage of enticing content speeds users up, enticing them to scroll, while the grid slows them down, retaining their attention and moderating their thirst for more and more stimulation. The visual tension is mesmerizing and addictive. Don’t believe me? I dare you to go to the Pinterest homepage and not feel tempted to scroll just once. It’s like opening a can of digital Pringles.

To Mobile and Back

The infinite scroll has benefited both mobile and web interfaces as designers seize the opportunity to make consistent experiences across both versions of their products. Once users learn how to use a product, they form habits related to their expectations of how the service works. It is here that design becomes a competitive advantage as users find it difficult to switch to a competitor’s product because it “feels weird” even if its functionally works just as well.

Recently, the tail wags the dog as the constraints of the mobile experience influence the design of websites accessed on large screens. Creating an interface optimized for mobile and porting these interface decisions to the web, makes good sense given the projections that mobile is becoming the primary way people access the Internet. While certainly not perfect for every scenario, its efficient use of the mobile screen, ability to load dynamic content, and addictive characteristics, means we’ll all be doing a lot more scrolling.

Photo credit: Alex E. Proimos

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The Twitter duo are back! We’re excited to announce that co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams are joining us on stage at Disrupt, after their widely publicized departure from leading Twitter to focus on social entrepreneurship. They’ll be speaking about their stealthy social-good incubator, Obvious (which invests in companies such as the recently launched online conversation platform, Branch), and why technology founders can make a huge impact on the world while making money.

And moderating the conversation will be fellow social-gooder Hunter Walk, a long-time Director of Product Management at Google who spearheaded YouTube’s product strategy for years. For anyone interested in the intersection of social disruption, business, and technology, this is a must-see panel.

Tickets to Disrupt SF are on sale here. And if you are interested in becoming a sponsor, opportunities can be found here as always.

Biz Stone
Co-founder, Twitter

As a progenitor of the early social web, Biz became an Internet entrepreneur in 1999 and went on to work for Google. Later, Stone co-founded Twitter which launched in 2006. In June of 2011, Stone co-founded The Obvious Corporation to focus on building systems that help people work together to improve the world.

An adamant believer that when we help others, we also help ourselves, Stone supports a new way of doing business with a higher level of ambition, and a better, more altruistic way to measure success. Beyond immediate needs, Stone advocates selflessness; insisting we follow this path in order to deliver deeper meaning in our work and in so doing, place value before profit.

Along with his wife, Livia, Stone was named a Huffington Post Game Changer for their work and impact in the field of public service. Together, the couple operate The Biz and Livia Stone Foundation supporting education and conservation in California.

Biz lives in Marin County, California with his wife Livia and son Jacob.

Evan Williams
Co-founder/Board of Directors, Twitter

Evan Williams is an American entrepreneur who has co-founded two of the biggest services on the Internet: Blogger (one of the first and largest blogging applications, which he ran for four years before selling to Google in 2003) and Twitter, at which he was the CEO for two years and now serves on the board of directors.

Evan was raised on a farm in rural Nebraska and has been recognized as one of Inc. Magazine’s Entrepreneurs of the Decade, one of the 100 most influential people in the world, according to TIME, and named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.

Evan is currently CEO of The Obvious Corporation, which spun out Twitter, Inc. in 2007. Today, Obvious is working on fostering systems that help people work together to improve their lives and the world.

He lives in San Francisco with his wife and son.

Hunter Walk (Moderator)
Director of Product Management, Google

Hunter Walk is the director of Product Management at Google, focused primarily on YouTube.

He joined Google in December 2003 after serving as a member of the founding team of Second Life at Linden Lab from 2001 to 2003.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch