BRISBANE AUSTRALIA SPAWNS A NEW FACEBOOK LIKE CONCEPT USING LIVE VIDEOS AS THE COMMUNICATION MEDIUM

A first name isn’t the only thing Mark Cracknell has in common with Mark Zuckerberg.

Like the Facebook founder, Cracknell is a young man with big dreams and a background in computing. He also has a website, Kondoot, which, like Zuckerberg’s famous social network, enables users to share their lives online.

Mark C may not have emulated Mark Z’s stratospheric success just yet, but the comparison is already being drawn – by no less than the Wall Street Journal – after the 21-year-old Brisbane-based entrepreneur and partner Nathan Hoad returned from the US with $3.2 million in funding for their site.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

GOOGLE PLUS IS A SOCIAL GIANT MAKING LEAPS & BOUNDS

Google is a latecomer to social networking but its new site, Google+, is growing much more rapidly than Facebook, MySpace and Twitter did in their early days, technology experts said.

While Google+ may be the fastest-growing social network ever, it remains to be seen whether it can pose a serious threat to the social networking giant Facebook, which has more than 750 million members.

Andrew Lipsman, vice-president for industry analysis at tracking firm comScore, said Google+, which was launched by the internet search and advertising titan on June 28, had 25 million unique visitors as of July 24.

During a panel discussion on Google+ hosted by Wedbush Securities yesterday, Mr Lipsman said it took other social networks much longer to reach 25 million users: 22 months for MySpace, 33 months for Twitter and 37 months for Facebook.

“Obviously, this is a very strong growth trajectory,” Mr Lipsman said. He cautioned, however, that Google ”has a really large user base it can build off” with its 1 billion users worldwide.

And it still has a “really long way to go to be competitive with Facebook”, he said.

“Google+ is the fastest by a long shot but it’s important to realise that fastest may not always be best,” he said.

“Sometimes, that slow build can lead to a strong network effect that pays long-term dividends.”

Most Google+ users – 6.4 million – are in the USA, followed by 3.6 million in India, 1.1 million in Canada, 1.1 million in Britain and more than 920,000 in Germany, according to comScore.

Mr Lipsman said many Google+ users appear also to be users of Google’s email program Gmail and display a “very strong early adopter profile”.

He said the ratio of men to women was about two to one and that 60 per cent of Google+ users were between the ages of 18 and 34.

In the US, the highest numbers of Google+ users are in the tech-savvy cities of San Francisco and Austin, Texas, he said.

Steve Rubel, executive vice-president for global strategy and insights at public relations firm Edelman, said Facebook was not “vulnerable immediately” to Google.

“I don’t see [Google+] taking significant share from Facebook in the next 18 months,” Mr Rubel said.

At the same time, “what we have seen is that over the years there’s never been a social network or community that has had significant staying power”, he said.

“There’s always a shuffling every two or three years, a changing of the guard.

“We saw it with MySpace,” he said of the one-time social networking leader that has been eclipsed by Facebook and has been haemorrhaging users ever since.

Mr Rubel said Google was compelled to try its hand at social networking because Facebook was restricting the access of its search engine to Facebook content.

“What’s happening is more content is being created behind Facebook’s walls than ever before and a lot of that content is invisible to Google,” he said.

“Conceptually, at least, they’re building kind of an alternate web … There’s also an entire web that is app-based on mobile phones. That is also invisible to them.”

Mr Rubel said it was conceivable that more content would be invisible to them in five or 10 years than what the search engine can see today when created on Facebook or inside apps.

“So they had to make a play to get more people to create content on their site,” he continued. “It’s to get more people to spend time on Google.”

In unveiling Google+, Google stressed the ability it gives users to separate online friends and family into different “circles”, or networks, and to share information only with members of a particular circle.

One of the criticisms of Facebook is that updates are shared with all of one’s friends unless a user has gone through a relatively complicated process to create separate Facebook groups.

AFP

YouTube founders’

Delicious new venture

Yahoo! has sold Delicious to YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, who promised to continue and grow the popular social bookmarking site.

Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.

Hurley and Chen, who sold YouTube to Google for $US1.65 billion in 2006, said they planned to integrate Delicious with their new San Mateo, California-based internet company AVOS.

“We’re excited to work with this fantastic community and take Delicious to the next level,” AVOS chief executive Hurley said in a statement.

“We see a tremendous opportunity to simplify the way users save and share content they discover anywhere on the web,” Hurley said.

The YouTube co-founders said they would seek to use Delicious to “develop innovative features to help solve the problem of information overload.”

“We see this problem not just in the world of video, but also cutting across every information-intensive media type,” Chen said.

Yahoo! said it will continue to operate Delicious until July, when users will transitioned over to AVOS.

Yahoo! said the sale of Delicious was part of a product strategy that “involves shifting our investment with off-strategy products to put better focus on our core strengths and fund new innovation.”

“We believe this is the right move for the service, our users and our shareholders and look forward to watching the Delicious technology develop,” Yahoo! said.

Delicious, which has millions of users around the world, was launched in 2003 and bought by Yahoo! in 2005.

AFP   Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

Visa backs Twitter

co-founder’s mobile venture

(Reuters) – Visa Inc has thrown its weight behind a mobile payments venture created by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.

The credit-card company has made an unspecified investment in Square, a two-year-old service that helps businesses and consumers pay with credit cards on a mobile phone or Apple Inc iPhone, both companies said in a statement.

In return, a Visa executive gets to sit on the advisory board at Square, which is also backed by Sequoia Capital and Khosla Ventures.

Square’s service employs a miniature magnetic card-reader that plugs into a device, such as an iPhone or Google Android phone. CEO Dorsey in March returned to the microblogging sensation he helped create, taking up the post of executive chairman — in addition to his responsibilities at Square — to oversee product development.

(Reporting by Edwin Chan. Editing by Robert MacMillan)

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha