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Marco Arment on Tumblr

Tue, 21 May 2013 06:27:37 +0700

Tumblr co-founder Marco Arment looks back at the creation and development of Tumblr from 2007 until its acquisition yesterday by Yahoo. Arment, who left Tumblr in 2010 to focus on his own projects, sees a positive outlook from the deal, likening it to the YouTube deal with Google instead of Yahoo’s own Flickr, even though Flickr has persisted and just received its own renewed attention under current Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer. The unusually worded press release and blog post announcements from both Mayer and Tumblr CEO David Karp gave Arment a strong sign that this is not an ordinary deal and this will prove to be an important one for both Yahoo and Tumblr.

techcrunch: Tumblr’s adult fare accounts for 11.4% of the...

Tue, 21 May 2013 06:27:07 +0700

techcrunch:

Tumblr’s adult fare accounts for 11.4% of the site’s top 200,000 domains, adult sites are a leading category of referrals. More here.

theatlantic: Where Yahoo’s Tumblr Ranks Next to Twitter,...

Tue, 21 May 2013 06:27:04 +0700

theatlantic:

Where Yahoo’s Tumblr Ranks Next to Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest

The problem with Venture Capitals and today's youth

Mon, 20 May 2013 20:33:00 +0700

Gigaom reader Ashfaq Munshi responding to a blog post by Om Malik on how venture capitalists would react to a pitch by Nikola Tesla:

The problem is not just the VCs. Young people these days do not spend enough time thinking about the big picture. They are not taught the fundamentals or, more appropriately, they do not care about the fundamentals, because it is too easy to cut and paste in this open source world. How and why things work eludes most college graduates. ask them how something like a battery works, how a computer works etc and you get bizarre answers. Have one of the young hot shots explain to you caching, paging or garbage collection and they just don’t know. what they don’t understand is that for the past decades all that we have done is push computing bottle-necks around and that with the advent of new techniques or technology a new bottleneck (similar to that of perhaps a decade or two ago) will appear and create wonderful new opportunities. But, you have to understand the entire picture to see this happening. How many young people care to think this way? Not many I fear. my 23 year old tells me that guys of my generation know computing far better than those of his. Sad. Hard problems require depth, lots of work and plenty of time. Do the young people today have any desire for this? Unclear.

The VC community does nothing to help this problem. A quick buck, spray and pray investing or lemming like investment, actually extinguishes the desire for creating. The key here is creating versus getting rich. After all betting on 10 startups with $500K investment in each is “more capital efficient” than one in which a $5M stake is necessary. Where has “venture” gone from venture capital?

Does the world need so many Y-combinator clones? What if the purpose of an incubator was to run a year long contest for the most innovative idea that could be found and then have that idea funded at the appropriate level with proper coaching and guidance so it could succeed? would we be better off? I think so.

Let’s think big, get our kids to think big and then place fewer bigger bets that will change our lives for good.

WordPress CEO on the Yahoo-Tumblr acquisition

Mon, 20 May 2013 20:15:27 +0700

WordPress CEO on the Yahoo-Tumblr acquisition:

Prior to the confirmation of Yahoo’s deal with Tumblr, WordPress CEO Matt Mullenweg revealed that while on average he saw 400-600 blog post transfers from Tumblr to WordPress every hour, on Sunday that rate reached 72,000 posts in the hour preceding his post. As with news of platform acquisitions, exodus like this isn’t uncommon.

Mullenweg also said that at $1.1 billion, Yahoo scored a significant discount over the value of the acquisition over the coming years. In other words, he thinks the deal is a steal as Tumblr could easily create ten times that value in the next five years or so.

marissamayr: I’m delighted to announce that we’ve reached an...

Mon, 20 May 2013 19:30:00 +0700

marissamayr:

I’m delighted to announce that we’ve reached an agreement to acquire Tumblr!

We promise not to screw it up. Tumblr is incredibly special and has a great thing going. We will operate Tumblr independently. David Karp will remain CEO. The product roadmap, their team, their wit and irreverence will all remain the same as will their mission to empower creators to make their best work and get it in front of the audience they deserve. Yahoo! will help Tumblr get even better, faster.

Tumblr has built an amazing place to follow the world’s creators. From art to architecture, fashion to food, Tumblr hosts 105 million different blogs. With more than 300 million monthly unique visitors and 120,000 signups every day, Tumblr is one of thefastest-growing media networks in the world. Tumblr sees 900 posts per second (!) and 24 billion minutes spent onsite each month. On mobile, more than half of Tumblr’s users are using the mobile app, and those users do an average of 7 sessions per day. Tumblr’s tremendous popularity and engagement among creators, curators and audiences of all ages brings a significant new community of users to the Yahoo! network. The combination of Tumblr+Yahoo! could grow Yahoo!’s audience by 50% to more than a billion monthly visitors, and could grow traffic by approximately 20%.

In terms of working together, Tumblr can deploy Yahoo!’s personalization technology and search infrastructure to help its users discover creators, bloggers, and content they’ll love. In turn, Tumblr brings 50 billion blog posts (and 75 million more arriving each day) to Yahoo!’s media network and search experiences. The two companies will also work together to create advertising opportunities that are seamless and enhance user experience.

As I’ve said before, companies are all about people. Getting to know the Tumblr team has been really amazing. I’ve long held the view that in all things art and design, you can feel the spirit and demeanor of those who create them. That’s why it was no surprise to me that David Karp is one of the nicest, most empathetic people I’ve ever met. He’s also one of the most perceptive, capable entrepreneurs I’ve worked with. His respect for Tumblr’s community of creators is awesome, and I’m absolutely delighted to have him and his entire team join Yahoo!.

Both Tumblr and Yahoo! share a vision to make the Internet the ultimate creative canvas by focusing on users, design — and building experiences that delight and inspire the world every day.

http://yahoo.tumblr.com/

Press Release

Tumblr Staff: News!

Mon, 20 May 2013 19:18:49 +0700

Tumblr Staff: News!:

staff:

Everyone, I’m elated to tell you that Tumblr will be joining Yahoo.

Before touching on how awesome this is, let me try to allay any concerns: We’re not turning purple. Our headquarters isn’t moving. Our team isn’t changing. Our roadmap isn’t changing. And our mission – to empower creators to…

sigh

Sun, 19 May 2013 23:45:14 +0700

aulia-m:

Breaking: The Yahoo board has approved a deal to pay $1.1 billion in cash for the blogging site Tumblr. wsj.com
— Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) May 19, 2013

alfabytes: Thought via Path

Sun, 19 May 2013 23:45:08 +0700

alfabytes: Thought via Path:

aulia-m:

So @ariefr said if he was running Tumblr he’d sell for a billion to Microsoft and let them deal with the porn.

If you were running Tumblr and Yahoo dangles a billion USD in cash in front of you, would you sell?

Consider Instagram selling to Facebook for $300 million in cash and $700 million in…

Bitcoin By Adam L. Penenberg May 15, 2013,...

Fri, 17 May 2013 10:58:57 +0700

Bitcoin
By Adam L. Penenberg May 15, 2013, pandodaily.com

Yesterday the Department of Homeland Security served the Dwolla mobile payment service with a court order requiring it to immediately cease all account activities with the Mt. Gox bitc …

PandoDaily has a whole list of articles talking about Bitcoin, the virtual currency created back in 2009 out of frustration with physical currency which lose value each time more is produced. There’s even a Super Mario video to explain what it is.

For Chris Dixon the next big thing might be bitcoin Cale Guthrie...

Fri, 17 May 2013 10:53:48 +0700

For Chris Dixon the next big thing might be bitcoin
Cale Guthrie Weissman, pandodaily.com

At this month’s PandoMonthly in New York, Dixon, a partner at Andreessen-Horowitz, talked about the need for a diverse investment portfolio, and part of the thrill of working for such an influential venture capital firm is keeping tabs on what cou…

Andreessen Horowitz partner Chris Dixon talks about Bitcoin in the latest edition of Pando Monthly. He likens the virtual distributed currency to a Starbucks card with increasingly wider acceptance. Bitcoin is fascinating to observe, it has its share of supporters and detractors, not to mention drama. It is unstable, relatively new, mostly unknown. Dixon thinks it will be the solution for e-commerce.

Pick your poison: messaging will be fragmented, expensive, or...

Fri, 17 May 2013 10:45:03 +0700

Pick your poison: messaging will be fragmented, expensive, or locked-in
By Dieter Bohn, theverge.com

Moves from Google this week don’t bode well for chat apps
The hottest space in mobile tech right now is messaging, with all the apps that let you skip past high-priced SMS and send texts for free (or very cheap). Just this week, we’ve heard th…

Everyone is trying to deliver a messaging app and as a result, consumers are forced to decide which app to use when communicating with certain people due to preferences and tendencies to use certain apps over another. Relying on email isn’t a solution since most people don’t use email and there is also a growing group of people who avoid email for various reasons. So here we are texting each other in silos, having to use different apps. There is no unified messaging network like there is with email and that creates a problem. While the GSMA is trying to deliver a unified solution with Joyn, it’s not exactly taking off, requires cooperation between every single mobile carrier in the world as well as mobile device manufacturers, and it’s certainly dwarfed by the popular apps even after a few years of rollout.

Google Says SMS Integration is ‘Coming Soon’ to...

Fri, 17 May 2013 10:18:31 +0700

Google Says SMS Integration is ‘Coming Soon’ to Hangouts
Jon Russell, thenextweb.com

UPDATE 2: It seems we were on the right track with this. Google employee Dori Storbeck has confirmed SMS integration is coming soon, as well as outbound calls. She revealed the nuggets when responding to questions from users on…

As Google confirms that Hangouts will support SMS eventually, this puts the new app in a much better position against all other messaging apps and may even undermine Facebook Messenger and iMessage simply because it is a much more integrated messaging app with more communications solutions. Google Hangouts is available as a replacement app for GoogleTalk but for some reason Android users will have to install the app from the Google Play website instead of the app within their devices. Google Play app currently does not allow users to update GoogleTalk to Hangouts, the Install button is missing.

Billions: How exactly do Apple and Google count app...

Fri, 17 May 2013 10:10:46 +0700

Billions: How exactly do Apple and Google count app downloads?
Matthew Panzarino, thenextweb.com

Yesterday, during the Google I/O keynote, Google announced that it had hit 48B downloads of apps on the Google Play Store. During the same keynote, the counter on Apple’s site ticked over to 50B App Store downloads.
But there has been some…

Apple on Wednesday announced that it has recorded 50 billion app downloads from the App Store but hours prior to Apple’s announcement, Google said that it had seen 48 billion downloads from Google Play. So what is considered a unique download and which apps count towards those numbers? In short, built in apps don’t count, updates don’t count, and one app downloaded to several devices using a single account counts only once.

Something about green and white with communication...

Thu, 16 May 2013 16:20:42 +0700

Something about green and white with communication apps.

Screenshot by Yoga Nandiwardhana

Some mobile messaging stats from June 212

Thu, 16 May 2013 10:50:50 +0700

Some mobile messaging stats from June 212:

For anyone who might need some stats about mobile messaging, here’s a few put together by mobithinking. It’s quite insightful for references on any discussion on this subject. This was primarily based on Portio’s research released in early 2012 but the 2013 research was just released in late April, so if you have access to that, you can compare it and update certain figures and add to them. Here’s the last year’s accompanying blog post from Portio.

Mobile Messaging Apps: A Primer Natasha Lomas,...

Mon, 13 May 2013 22:31:51 +0700

Mobile Messaging Apps: A Primer
Natasha Lomas, techcrunch.com

The global mobile messaging app space is the new social battleground. Startups that would have had little chance of unseating Facebook’s dominance on the web are attacking Zuckerberg’s empire by refocusing social networking around…

We’ve been publishing stories on mobile messaging over the past week and we still have a handful scheduled for this week, so this guide to the world’s largest mobile messaging apps from TechCrunch is a nice complement to our coverage.

AngelHack comes to Jakarta. 8-9 June 2013. Register on...

Mon, 13 May 2013 15:59:55 +0700

AngelHack comes to Jakarta. 8-9 June 2013. Register on Eventbrite to participate in the hackathon.

The future, made of glass. A really cool video by Corning, the...

Fri, 10 May 2013 16:49:44 +0700

The future, made of glass.

A really cool video by Corning, the maker of gorilla glass, a day in the future where every piece of technology is made from glass. I can totally the future from this video, and maybe the future is not so far ahead.

Freeware is hosting IceHouse and Koprol founder Fajar...

Thu, 09 May 2013 10:34:50 +0700

Freeware is hosting IceHouse and Koprol founder Fajar Budiprasetyo on Friday, 17 May. Register for a spot at http://freewarejakarta.eventbrite.com