Josh Williams, chief executive officer and co-founder of Alamofire, a Austin, Texas-based company behind the location-based mobile application Gowalla, stopped by our office last week to discuss his company and its future. (How Gowalla and similar apps work: You visit a place, you fire up your app and check in on your mobile phone, announcing to your friends that you’re at that location.)

Gowalla, which recently raised nearly $8.4 million in venture funding from the likes of Greylock, Shasta Ventures and Maples Investments, is still relatively young and has far fewer users than Foursquare. I’ve heard that the company has between 85,000 and 100,000 users — and that’s despite the backing of web celebrities (startup founders and angel investors) Kevin Rose, Gary Vaynerchuck, Chris Sacca and Jason Calacanis — who have been pushing it hard.

More (incl. video interview) ...

http://gigaom.com/2010/01/22/gowalla-williams-video/

TECHNOLOGIES tend to be global, both by nature and by name. Say “television”, “computer” or “internet” anywhere and chances are you will be understood. But hand-held phones? For this ubiquitous technology, mankind suffers from a Tower of Babel syndrome. Under millions of Christmas trees North and South Americans have been unwrapping cell phones or celulares. Yet to Britons and Spaniards they are mobiles or móviles. Germans and Finns refer to them as Handys andkännykät, respectively, because they fit in your hand. The Chinese, too, make calls on a sho ji, or “hand machine”. And in Japan the term of art is keitai, which roughly means “something you can carry with you”.

This disjunction is revealing for an object that, in the space of a decade, has become as essential to human functioning as a pair of shoes. Mobile phones do not share a single global moniker because the origins of their names are deeply cultural. “Cellular” refers to how modern wireless networks are built, pointing to a technological worldview in America. “Mobile” emphasises that the device is untethered, which fits the roaming, once-imperial British style. Handy highlights the importance of functionality, much appreciated in Germany. But are such differences more than cosmetic? And will they persist or give way to a global mobile culture?

Such questions bear asking. It is easy to forget how rapidly mobile phones have taken over. A decade ago, there were fewer than 500m mobile subscriptions, according to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). Now there are about 4.6 billion (see chart). Penetration rates have risen steeply everywhere. In rich countries subscriptions outnumber the population. Even in poor countries more than half the inhabitants have gone mobile. Dial a number and the odds are three to one that it will cause a mobile phone, rather than a fixed-line one, to ring somewhere on the planet.

As airtime gets cheaper, the untethered masses tend to use their mobiles more. In early 2000 an average user spoke for 174 minutes a month, according to the GSM Association (GSMA), an industry group. By early 2009 that had risen to 261 minutes, which suggests that humanity spends over 1 trillion minutes a month on mobiles, or nearly 2m years. Nobody can keep track of the flood of text messages. One estimate suggests that American subscribers alone sent over 1 trillion texts in 2008, almost treble the number sent the previous year.

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http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15172850

In February 2009, Jim McKelvey, who’d left the technology business and became a glass blower, lost an order because he couldn’t accept a credit card from a customer who wanted to buy his creation. He called his friend and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. The two talked about lost opportunities in the current payment ecosystem that is dominated by giants such as Visa, MasterCard and PayPal.

Within days McKelvey left St. Louis, moved to San Francisco to team up with Dorsey and Tristan O’Tierney and start working on what would eventually become Square. It took them a month to cobble together a working prototype. Dorsey worked on the back-end server, O’Tierney on the iPhone app and McKelvey worked on the hardware and on establishing relationships with payment partners.

“We went through the whole payments process and worked on designing a brand-new (person-to-person) payment system,” said Dorsey in a conversation earlier today. The San Francisco-based startup today came out of stealth with a tweet by Dorsey.

What Is Square?

It’s essentially a small magnetic reader that plugs into the headphone jack of an iPhone. When a credit card (or a debit card) is swiped through the reader, it reads the data and converts it into an audio signal. The microphone picks up the audio, sends it through the processors and then is routed to Square’s software application on the iPhone. From there the encrypted data is transmitted using either Wi-Fi (for iPod touch) or a 3G Internet connection to back-end severs, which in turn communicate with the payment networks to complete the transactions.

“We don’t store any information on the devices,” Dorsey said. And because this tiny white reader, which is small enough to hook up on a keychain, uses the headphone jack, Square can work with any device: Android, BlackBerry, Symbian Phones and even computers. “As long as we have software on that device, our reader works,” said Dorsey. Right now, they only have software for the iPhone & iPod touch. I have seen Square working at Dorsey’s café, Sightglass (my new favorite in San Francisco), and it works as advertised.

Who’s Square For?

When I asked Jack if this was a tool and a service for merchants or consumers, he answered “for both.” Dorsey has big ambitions and wants to enable a people-to-people payment system that marries the convenience of “plastic” and “mobile devices” for everyday transactions. He noted that often on Craigslist you buy something that costs a few hundred dollars -– say, a couch. Carrying that much cash for a purchase can be a risky. On the other hand, if the seller has a Square credit card reader and the Square app installed on either an iPhone (or an iPod touch), then she can easily accept credit cards.

More ...

http://gigaom.com/2009/12/01/jack-dorsey-on-square-why-it-is-disruptive/

This guest post was written by Roman Stanek, the founder and CEO of Good Data, a cloud-based business intelligence startup headquartered in San Francisco. Roman has been a tech entrepreneur for almost 20 years. He was founder and CEO of NetBeans (acquired by Sun Microsystems) and Systinet (acquired by Mercury Interactive and later Hewlett Packard). Read Roman’s blog here.

When I met Michael Arrington back in April, I told him he was crazy to dismiss the possibility of a first-class technology startup coming out of Europe. I was born and raised in the Czech Republic, I’ve spent the last 15 years working towards building a global hi-tech company. So naturally I took it a bit personally. But I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit since then.

The story usually goes that Europeans just don’t have the drive and commitment to spend enough hours necessary to get a fledgling company to an escape velocity and grow it from there. Our love of the two-hour lunch and Augusts in Provence is the evidence most often cited to prove this theory. But I believe that there are some very driven people in Europe who are willing to put enough time into it.

My problem with the European startup ecosystem is somewhere else. I actually believe that it bears some signs of a Cargo Cult. Here is the definition from Wikipedia:

A cargo cult is a type of religious practice that may appear in traditional tribal societies in the wake of interaction with technologically advanced, non-native cultures. The cults are focused on obtaining the material wealth of the advanced culture through magical thinking, religious rituals and practices, believing that the wealth was intended for them by their deities and ancestors.

More ...

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/01/avoiding-the-cargo-cult-and-getting-the-trans-atlantic-startup-model-right/

The hiring of Nada Stirratt as chief revenue officer at MySpace marks the completion of CEO Owen Van Natta’s efforts to remake the company’s executive suite.

Mr. Van Natta was hired in April to revive the struggling social-networking site, which is facing a dropoff in traffic and ad revenue. Since then, he has attempted to remake the face and culture of the company into a hub for technology, as it tries to lure back visitors as a destination for music, videos, games and other entertainment.

MySpace is owned by News Corp., which also owns The Wall Street Journal.

That has meant largely reshaping MySpace’s employee base and ramping up its technology focus. Mr. Van Natta cut about a third of the company’s staff in June and has replaced nearly the entire executive suite. He brought on Dustin Finer, a former Fox Interactive Media executive, to be chief people officer, charged with reviving its culture and recruiting employees that fit the new strategy.

“Like any business looking to re-invent, it takes time and talent to get there,” says MySpace Chief Product Officer Jason Hirschhorn.

In addition to new finance and tech chiefs, other recent hires include former Microsoft search executive Bill Bliss, who is in the midst of remaking MySpace’s search technology, as well as former AOL, Amazon and Apple executives.

MySpace brought on tech industry veterans and brothers Ali and Hadi Partovi, founders of online music service iLike, through its purchase of the service. Hadi Partovi now is working as senior vice president of technology at MySpace, based in Seattle, where he is leading an effort to bolster MySpace’s tech presence. Ali Partovi will work as senior vice president of business development in San Francisco, where he will look for potential partnerships.

More ...

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/10/15/myspaces-reboot-from-exec-suite-to-cubicles/?mod=rss_WSJBlog?mod=

VIACOM, a media conglomerate based in New York, has an unusual response to the downturn: it is launching a television channel. This month Epix will begin showing films from Paramount and MGM, as well as original programmes. It may get off to a slow start, since it has not yet signed up many cable and satellite distributors. But its creation points to one of the media business’s few bright spots.

Having fallen steeply after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, the shares of all the big American media companies have outperformed the market since March. But recession has struck some parts of the industry much harder than others, changing its shape. As a rule, media products that are sold in shops—CDs, DVDs and magazines—have suffered. Advertising is showing only tentative signs of recovery. The kind of media for which people pay a monthly bill, in contrast, has not only held up better but has in some instances prospered through the downturn.

Cable and satellite television was a good business going into the recession and is now triumphant. In the year to June 30th Britain’s BSkyB added more subscribers, obtained more revenue from each customer and reported more profit than the year before. Discovery Communications, which derives almost all of its revenue from cable, notched up a 13% increase in profits in the second quarter. In the past year the fortunes of big media groups have depended largely on the proportion of their revenues coming from pay television.

Cable networks obtain about half of their revenues from advertising and half from carriage fees paid by the firms that distribute their channels, which in turn get paid by subscribers. In the past year increases in carriage fees have outpaced inflation, offsetting weakness in advertising. At Time Warner’s cable networks, for example, advertising fell by $30m in the second quarter compared with a year earlier. Income from distribution rose by $144m. “People would sooner unplug their refrigerators than their cable boxes,” says Craig Moffett, an analyst at Sanford Bernstein.

As pay television has soared and just about everything else has fallen, even the most diversified conglomerates’ accounts have been transformed (see chart). News Corporation’s cable channels are worth more than broadcast television, film and newspapers put together. Although an advertising recovery will rebalance such firms somewhat, the underlying trend is clear. Media firms are investing in pay-television markets in Latin America, eastern Europe and Asia, which can be expected to grow. The number of channels in emerging markets is rising so fast it is actually boosting the firms that own the satellites (see article). Viewers and creative verve are drifting steadily from broadcast to cable networks. On October 5th Disney appointed Rich Ross, who ran its cable channels worldwide, to head its film studio—an acknowledgment of their success in producing lucrative new content.

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http://www.economist.com/businessfinance/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14587429&source=hptextfeature