In March, Yahoo made a big splash in its already dazzling list of acquisitions when it acquired Summly, a UK-based mobile startup led by 17-year-old founder Nick D’Aloisio that summarizes long texts to make them easier to read on mobile screens. Today, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer unveiled the first official fruit of that acquisition:

A 160-word summary of her hour-long, 2013 Q1 earnings presentation (original length, 2,000+ words).

So for those of you who don’t have the time or inclination to read the whole results transcript, or one of the many reports covering the earnings, but are still interested in what’s going on at Yahoo, here it is:

I’m pleased with the continued execution I see every day — our teams have been working very hard, especially in Q1. As a result of these initiatives and many others, the talent is undeniable — today, more applicants want to work at Yahoo, and more employees are staying. These teams bring an incredible mix of engineering and technical talent, which will help us accelerate our efforts in mobile development and contentpersonalization.The teams are already moving quickly to amplify the entrepreneurial spirit that’s so prevalent at Yahoo right now.
Designed to be more intuitive and personal, the new Yahoo experience is all about users’ interests and preferences. Yahoo is a consumer Internet company, and the consumer Internet is a growth industry. We’re on course to do what we said we would do — stabilize, and grow with the market.

[Did not make the cut: Yahoo's advertising revenue declines; the fact that search has outstripped display revenues; and that Yahoo currently has 300 million monthly active users on mobile as it gears up for a bigger push on the platform.]

In addition to Summly, which was acquired reportedly for $30 million, Yahoo in the last quarter also bought Snip.it, Alike and Jybe, “accelerating the Company’s efforts to build world-class technology and engineering teams in mobile and personalization.” That’s in addition to the wider push the company has also made to hold on to its own key talent and appoint a new raft of executives. It now has 11,300 employees on the books.

Read our full Yahoo earnings report here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

If you’re looking for stuff to do, in a new city or your own, there are various ways to get that info, including Yelp, Zvents, Frommer’s guides and more. Waterloo-based Rebellion Media would rather all that data was collected in a single hub, however, where travelers could get a quick look at everything they need for trip planning in a single place, based on a map-centric interface that’s fast and easy to use, which is why they created TripWhat.

TripWhat is a travel-oriented search engine for iPhone and web. There are lots of different travel apps out there, which is why I asked TripWhat co-founder Chris Reid about the decision to add another one to the mix. After all, even if there’s still a lot of demand for travel products out there among consumers, it’s beginning to get harder to distinguish yourself as an app in the travel category.

“One problem we really see is that a lot of this information is siloed, so you’ll have something like SeatGeek, you’ll have Wikipedia, you’ll have Yelp, you’ll have Urbanspoon and you’ll have OpenTable,” he said. “So everyone has their own siloed data set, a little bit of info and a little bit of value-add that the other one doesn’t, so if you’re trying to figure out what’s best in a region, normally you’d have to search across all these siloes to piece it together.”

TripWhat’s goal, then, is to unify all this data across separate contexts, meaning that if there’s a band playing an event that SeatGeek knows about, for instance, TripWhat will eventually be able to draw that info in and combine it with data pulled from other sources like Wikipedia and Last.fm for richer context. The ultimate hope is that travelers will be able to go to any city, enter a broad search term related to their interest, and be provided with smart results properly filled out with signals from any relevant data source, to help them build their perfect trip.

With TripWhat’s version one product, you can see the seeds of that larger goal at work; in densely populated areas, it already returns a number of results, and does so quickly, spanning events, restaurants and attractions. Users on mobile can also save their trip for later personal use, and on the web they can do the same, but there trips will be saved to the server and pushed back down to the iPhone app. Eventually, TripWhat hopes to be able to offer community-curated trips searchable by keyword – already it has built some of its own to show how this will look once the curation elements are in place.

Rebellion Media, which is a conglomerate of various startups from the Kitchener-Waterloo area, is using a lot of the natural language and data processing techniques it acquired when it picked up gadget shopping comparison startup Sortable last year. Its project with TripWhat is big and ambitious, but it’s starting with some solid ingredients, including a Google Maps for iOS-inspired design that suits the travel purpose of the app. If it can flesh out this first release to match its larger vision, it stands a chance of distinguishing itself in this crowded market.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

As part of today’s fourth-quarter earnings report, Facebook announced that mobile ad revenue has grown to 23 percent of the company’s total $1.33 billion in ad revenue (so about $305 million). That’s up from 14 percent last quarter.

One of the biggest sources of investor concern around Facebook has been whether its bottom line will take a blow as its usage becomes increasingly mobile, and mobile is indeed becoming dominant — this was the first quarter when Facebook’s daily active users on mobile exceeded its DAUs on the web. Mobile ad revenue is growing quickly, too, especially considering that it was nonexistent in March 2012, without quite catching up with traffic.

Total ad revenue was also up 41 percent from the same period last year, and accounted for 84 percent of all revenue.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Stoked by a bump in advertising revenues and increasing evidence that Facebook is making money from users on mobile devices, Wall Street investors sent shares of the company up by 9.8 percent in after-hours trading. Facebook is trading at $21.39, up from today’s close of $19.49.

Facebook posted third quarter revenue of $1.26 billion, up nearly seven percent from last quarter’s revenue of $1.18 billion and up 32 percent from the $954 million in revenue it posted a year earlier. A bright spot came in advertising revenue, where the company made $1.09 billion this past quarter, a 36 percent increase from the same quarter last year and also a sequential increase up from the second quarter’s $992 million in advertising sales.

The even better part is that 14 percent of the company’s total ad revenue came from mobile devices. That’s a little over $150 million in mobile ad revenue for the quarter. The older Sponsored Stories in the news feed and the newer app install and Page ads may be well on their way to becoming more than a $1 billion a year business.

Third-quarter net income on a non-GAAP basis (which excludes temporary costs for share-based compensation to employees) was $372 million, up from the $227 million in net income it reported a year earlier. This means its non-GAAP earnings per share (EPS) were 12 cents. On a GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) basis, Facebook posted a loss of $59 million during the third quarter. Again, that’s mostly because of share-based compensation.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Korean free-to-play online games giant Nexon, quietly outperforming Zynga since its IPO last December, has announced it’s acquired all outstanding common shares of gloops, a developer of mobile games for Japanese games developer DeNA’s social gaming platform Mobage. Nexon paid ¥36.5 billion ($468.4 million) in cash to acquire gloops, after the decision was unanimously supported by the boards of both companies. The transaction closed today.

gloops, which is based in Tokyo, launched its first game on the Mobage platform in early 2010 and has grown rapidly through successive launches. Titles include Japan Pro Baseball Card Battle, Warriors of Odin and Three Kingdoms Guild Battle.

Last month gloops announced an alliance with DeNA for international expansion — mainly targeting North America and Europe, with five titles in 2012 and another five planned for 2013, and also one title each on Mobage’s platforms in China and Korea. Under this alliance DeNA will provide user acquisition and international distribution capabilities to push games titles out to mobile users worldwide.

“This acquisition significantly accelerates Nexon’s mobile strategy, giving us immediate exposure to Japan’s large and fast growing mobile market,” said Seungwoo Choi, President and Chief Executive Officer of Nexon, in a statement. “gloops has established itself as one of the premier mobile game developers in the world and a key player in one of our most important growth areas, with a robust portfolio of hit titles and a strong track record of driving market innovation. We look forward to leveraging gloops’ outstanding capabilities and scale to expand the Nexon game experience to users on mobile platforms worldwide.”

“We are thrilled to become a part of the Nexon family,” said Shinsuke Kawakata, President of gloops, in a statement. “Providing compelling games for mobile users has always been our passion, and we look forward to being a part of an even larger organization as we work to continue bringing new and exciting titles to a growing base of players around the world.”

Last week a Korean newspaper, JoongAng, reported that Nexon and NCsoft were in talks to acquire a different gaming property — U.S. gamesmaker Valve — but Valve poured cold water on the speculation.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

U.S. smartphone users visited Instagram more often and spent more time on the service than they did with Twitter’s mobile products in August, according to a ComScore study reported by AllThingsD.

The Facebook-owned photo sharing app had an average of 7.3 million daily active users on mobile last month, compared to Twitter, which had 6.868 million mobile DAU. The report also found that users spent 257 minutes on average with Instagram via mobile last month. Users spent an average of 169.9 minutes viewing Twitter mobile content.

This highlights the rapid growth of Instagram and suggests Facebook made a good choice to acquire the company. Between its m.facebook.com site, native apps and now Instagram, Facebook dominates mobile usage. Many of the top third-party Android and iOS apps have also begun to integrate Facebook, either with single sign-on, Open Graph or other sharing options. It remains to be seen how Facebook will capitalize on this dominance and generate significant mobile revenue, but a recent test that uses Facebook data to target ads in third-party apps and mobile sites seems to be a start.

ComScore’s data only measured activity from U.S. users over 18. Instagram may have even more younger users than Twitter, though Twitter seems to have more international reach. Facebook can better monetize U.S. users, particularly those with smartphones where it can show rich mobile ad units. Facebook’s average revenue per user in the U.S. and Canada was $3.20 in the second quarter of 2012, compared to the worldwide average of $1.28. Facebook does not currently serve any ads within in Instagram, but we can imagine a Sponsored Story or Promoted Post type format working well, as we’ve written about previously. Many brands are active on Instagram and would pay to get more reach for their photos, similar to what they do on Facebook.com or the main Facebook app.

Instagram has gained more than 50 million new users since Facebook announced its plans to acquire the mobile photo-sharing network in April.

Image credit: AllThingsD

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Back in March, VEVO rolled out a huge new redesign, which saw the major-label-owned music video giant add continuous playback and beef up its personalization and social features. Thanks to tight new integration with Facebook’s Open Graph, VEVO quickly saw a big increase in the number of videos watched and shared via the social network. Simultaneously, the company has been making a serious push on mobile and recently began rolling out its new features across redesigned mobile apps.

In fact, mobile continues to be VEVO’s fastest growing platform, the company said today in its Q2 viewership report, with 18 million mobile and tablet apps downloaded to date — up 146 percent from Q2 2011.

According to the report, VEVO’s most popular mobile platform is iOS, and its mobile traffic nearly doubled in Q2 2012 from the same period last year, with over 1.3 billion streams globally. Meanwhile, VEVO saw 450 million mobile video streams globally in June.

The number of monthly active users on mobile have grown 33 percent to 5 million in June 2012 compared to June 2011, while the average number of videos watched on mobile each month increased 11 percent to 15 videos per user.

The numbers also reveal that watching music videos continues to be a social experience — even on mobile — as 87 percent of VEVO viewers watched video with someone else, while the same was true for 64 percent of mobile viewers.

Overall, 40 billion music videos were watched globally between July 2011 and June 2012, with 9.3 billion videos watched in the U.S. over that time period. Meanwhile, an average of 103 million videos are being watched on VEVO per day, with the platform’s global footprint now including 3 billion video streams globally each month.

Breaking that down, during the second quarter, the company saw its global monthly uniques reach 431 million in May and averaged 429 million for the quarter — an increase of 5 percent from the same time last year. VEVO’s global monthly video streams reached 3.3 billion in May, with an average of 3.2 billion for the quarter.

However, in month-to-month viewership, VEVO saw a decrease in overall traffic — which it says was less than 10 percent. It attributed this dip to both the “change in priority for what YouTube” — VEVO’s most important syndication partner — “promotes in its home pages” as well as seasonality, with Q2 generally having fewer music releases from big-name artists, something the company expects to increase in Q3 and Q4.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

More users are accessing Facebook from their phones than ever before, but during Thursday’s earnings call the company blamed a slowdown in both payments and ad sales on the shift to mobile.

Facebook’s revenues from payments increased by a scant 3.6 percent quarter-over-quarter, rising from $186 million in Q1 2012 to $192 million in Q2 2012, something CFO David Ebersman blamed on the shift to mobile gaming, and to platforms Facebook can’t monetize on. Facebook has tried to address the issue by developing its own HTML5-based mobile platform, but the technical issues surrounding HTML5 and poor discoverability in its platform have hampered its efforts.

In June game developer Wooga announced it would no longer distribute HTML5 games on Facebook, and was making its experimental HTML5 game Pocket Island open source. According to Wooga’s blog post, “installs were initially very low, as users struggled to find the game page… retention rates remained exceedingly low with around 5 percent of users returning to play the next day.”

It was a similar story with advertising. Revenues for Q2 were up 13.8 percent quarter-over-quarter to $992 million, but the total amount of ads Facebook delivered during the quarter actually declined.

“The overall number of ads delivered in the U.S. this quarter decreased two percent year-over-year despite a 10 percent increase in daily users and despite the increase in ads per page as daily web users in the U.S. declined in favor of mobile users, and we are seeing similar trends in other developed markets,” Ebersman said during the earnings call.

That shift is bad news for Facebook, as display advertising makes up the lion’s share of Facebook’s revenue stream, accounting for 83 percent of its total earnings in Q2.

During its second quarter earnings call, Facebook reported it now has 543 million monthly active users on mobile, an increase of 67 percent year-over-year and 11.2 percent quarter-over-quarter. Although the company did not reveal what percentage of its mobile users access the service through its iOS, Android and feature phone apps, we estimate there are about 95 million active feature phone users on the social network, based on analysis from the Facebook ad tool. In March, the company reported it had 83 million members who only accessed its site through its mobile apps or mobile website.

This post originally appeared on our sister site, Inside Mobile Apps.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Zynga’s chief mobile officer David Ko said that the company has reached 22 million daily active users on mobile. If you consider that Zynga has about 53 million daily active users on Facebook, it’s a pretty strong sign that the company is diversifying on the Facebook platform (although we can’t deduplicate these figures for players who use Zynga games on multiple platforms).

On top of that, the company announced a new partners program that will let third-party developers reach its network. Atari, Phosphor Games, Crash Lab and others are initial partners.

“It’s easier than ever to create an app and yet harder than ever to find an audience,” Ko said. “We want to create an ecosystem with best-in-class mobile developers and best-in-class mobile games.”

Becoming a mobile gaming platform puts Zynga in more direct competition with gaming companies like GREE and DeNA, which have their own mobile gaming networks. This is not to mention the fact that Apple has its own Game Center and that Facebook is moving heavily into mobile app distribution too.

Ko also gave a look at a couple upcoming titles including a new Matching With Friends title, that should build on Words With Friends’ audience. He also said that Draw Something is nearing its 10 billionth drawing.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Chartboost, a San Francisco-based gaming and ad platform, just poached Google Admob’s head of mobile platform and partnership strategy Clay Kellogg to be its chief revenue officer.

Chartboost, which was founded by some alums of an early mobile gaming company that Disney acquired called Tapulous, is a platform where mobile developers can cross-promote their work.

Gaming studios will usually do a direct advertising trade where they’ll market their titles in other developers’ games. Chartboost’s platform has grown to incorporate 4,000 app developers with 2 billion game sessions per month between them.

The company has gained traction at a time when the cost of acquiring users on mobile platforms has risen dramatically. Direct advertising trades give developers some of the benefits of having a large network of players, even if they’re still tiny. The company offers direct advertising trades for free, but developers can pay to promote their app in the company’s network on a cost-per-click or cost-per-install basis.

Maria Alegre, Chartboost’s chief executive, said the company had courted Kellogg for about two months. They had known each other for years though. Kellogg became part of Admob when it was just 30 people, well before it was sold to Google for $750 million in 2009.

Overall, Chartboost has 24 people and has raised funding from Translink Capital, SK Telecom Ventures, and XG Ventures. ”We’re not raising any more funding any time soon,” Alegre said. “We’re still profitable and we need to be focused on our business.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch