•
A visit to the typical homepage for a venture capital firm most likely provides a well designed landing page that spells out the firm's mission with links to its portfolio companies and VC bios. Secondary to this general information is a page dedicated to press releases from the firm, or in many cases, a company blog with relevant posts. First Round Capital , however, recently redesigned its homepage to place a much heavier emphasis on real-time information from news sources and its VCs, and portfolio companies. Sponsor The feed works in a similar fashion to Facebook's news feed in that information is presented in a reverse chronological order. It includes news from its portfolio companies, third party news articles, as well as blogs, tweets and even Foursquare checkins from its team of VCs and entrepreneurs - all of which can be subscribed to using RSS . Also included in the feed and on its own dedicated section of the site are job postings from First Round's portfolio. "One of the most helpful things a VC can do for a portfolio company is to help them find key hires," writes First Round Managing Director Josh Kopelman. "And the jobs section of our site contains well over 125 current job openings within our portfolio." The job postings complement First Round's Key Hire Wire , a weekly newsletter released a few weeks ago containing job openings with its companies. First Round also helps its portfolio out by placing these openings on a Twitter account dedicated to blasting these openings out to the Twittersphere. The revamped site also contains a new portfolio section with some interesting ways to navigate through the firms numerous companies. A standard list of current and former companies is supplemented by options for viewing a tag cloud of industries and other keywords, a map of company locations, or a feed of company tweets. First Round, which recently snagged the top position (by a wide margin) on Larry Cheng's list of the top VC firm websites based on average monthly traffic, is leading the way for VC firms with its innovative approach to its homepage. What better way to show potential companies that you not only invest in innovation but that you participate in it yourselves? And venture firms aren't the only group that can learn from First Round's redesign. A news feed of aggregated content from various networks can be a unique approach to the homepage of any company. In startup culture, most entrepreneurs and employees have their own blogs, Twitter accounts, Foursquare accounts, as well as of a number of other social network accounts. Rather than linking out to individual employees and making visitors click out to a slew of different sites, why not provide a handy news feed of relevant information from your employees? The new site is an excellent one-stop location for startups and entrepreneurs to find pertinent blogs and news, especially for those looking to Foursquare-stalk their favorite VC at the local coffee shop. First Round has created a definitive resource for anyone looking for information relative to the firm, its employees or its companies - a model any company could easily replicate. Let's just knock-on-wood that Facebook doesn't go waving its shiny new patent in anyone's face too soon. Discuss
Excerpt from:
Facebook-Like News Feed Headlines First Round Capital's Redesigned Homepage
Tags:
facebook,
firm,
first-round,
jobs,
leading-the-way,
likely-provides,
Round,
snagged-the-top,
social,
Tips
•
Millions of people click click click their way mindlessly through repetitive casual games like FarmVille every day. Such games spread like a virus, infecting Facebook news feeds and eating up big chunks of the precious little time on earth that players were blessed with before they face their inevitable, if temporarily forgotten, mortality. Josh Williams used to develop software like that. A graphic designer by training, his website for sharing iconography grew popular enough that he turned it into a game called PackRat. Half a million people spent far too much time on the site, but bigger companies grew faster and quickly swallowed up the "zombification" category of casual games. (My categorization, not his.) Now Williams is building something different, perhaps the opposite of FarmVille. Sponsor Williams is the CEO of Gowalla , one of the newest and smallest of the several entrants into a market referred to as "location based social networking." Gowalla encourages people to go outside. It's a mobile game where players are rewarded for visiting new locations in the real world and for adding new spots to the Gowalla database. Users can find out who goes to particular places around town, where else those people like to go and what people think of those different spots. Gowalla vs. Foursquare vs. Facebook As of the end of last-year , Gowalla users had checked-in at 150,000 locations in more than 100 countries around the world. Your millage may vary. The coffee shop I'm in right now has been checked-in to by 30 people, only 2 of us in the last week. Competitor Foursquare shows 4 users checked-in and present right now . At least in this spot, Foursquare has seen 20X as many check-ins as Gowalla. True to the backgrounds of the company's founders, Gowalla is very focused on design. Its badges, like stamps on a passport displaying where a user has checked-in, are beautiful. Its user experience is simple but clear and enjoyable. Foursquare may be much bigger and have more commercial partnerships but Gowalla is much prettier and does certain things better, like importing friends from other social networks. What about Facebook? Williams says he's as sure as anyone that Facebook is working on location as a feature. Ted Morgan, CEO and founder of location data provider Skyhook Wireless, says his company has been talking to Facebook and Twitter about location for years. Twitter recently hired developer Ryan Sarver to run its developer platform after Sarver spent 4 years at Skyhook. Williams says that when Facebook launches location, he hopes that many people will want to use Gowalla as the interface to post to Facebook. They needn't wait, Facebook Connect integration is live today, but full-on entry into the location market by Facebook is going to be a very big deal. The Rise of Location Based Services Gowalla has raised more than $10 million from a variety of investors large and small, several of whom also invested in Foursquare. Morgan says these kinds of services are blowing up location in a bigger way than ever before. "Around the dot com era they thought location based services were going to take off," he told us today. "That was premature but the telecoms have been talking about user privacy and preparing for a time of location services for ten years." Morgan's company pocketed a part of Gowalla's war chest today when the social network announced that it was deploying Skyhook Wireless's location software in the Android version of Gowalla. Skyhook has driven around the country and cataloged the location of more than 80 million wifi hotspots. It then tells its customers where they are with precision, based on the MAC addresses of nearby wifi signals. Gowalla queries Skyhook for a device's location, to supplement the GPS data, Skyhook sends that data back and then Gowalla interprets it to suggest businesses and other venues that a user is probably at. Skyhook is now baked into the iPhone OS but Morgan is still selling the service to other platforms and application developers. He says that for the first 5 years of his now 7 year old company it was a hard sell. "I was waving my hands a lot," he says, "trying to convince people that good location is important." Now the company is serving up location data hundreds of millions of times each day, thanks entirely to the proliferation of mobile apps in general and the iPhone in particular. Hundreds of millions of location checks per day, millions of check-ins on applications like Gowalla. And what's the point? Williams the Gowalla CEO says that the company hasn't done a good enough job explaining the desirability of the service's badges. Some users get it and some don't, he says. "We'll be doing new things this year that make it more clear, but it's all about encouraging people to get out and experience new things." He tells stories about a user alerted that they were near Michael Jackson's birthplace and driving several miles out of their way to visit it. About a couple who have quit their jobs and now aim to check-in in every state in the US and every province in Canada. Gowalla users can get social credit for doing things like going out into the woods. "And then they're out in the woods," Williams says, "and we think that's great." Discuss
Here is the original post:
Gowalla is the Anti-FarmVille
Tags:
analysis,
facebook,
jobs,
location,
MAC,
Michael Jackson,
platforms,
proliferation,
skyhook,
social
•
The Obama Administration told the country on Wednesday about all of the jobs saved since the U.S. Congress passed the stimulus package one year ago. This got us to thinking about how the technology world is faring in these hard times. Unfortunately, some of the largest technology companies in the world don't want their story to be told. In this post we tell the story about the racial and gender makeup of technology giants in Silicon Valley; and how diversity has changed over the past several years. Sponsor Recently, federal regulators ruled in favor of five technology companies that waged an 18-month battle to block a San Jose Mercury News Freedom of Information request for employment information. The federal regulator ruled that collecting the data would cause "commercial harm" by potentially revealing the companies' business strategy to competitors. According to the San Jose Mercury News , Google, Yahoo!, Apple, Oracle and Applied Materials argued that the race and gender of its work force is a trade secret that cannot be released. It's a decision that borders on the absurd. It's unbelievable that the racial makeup and gender of a company would reveal its strategy to competitors. We highlight this news to point out how the lack of diversity in the tech sector prevents minorities from enjoying the high salaries and benefits that come when working for large technology companies. Plus, as the Mercury News reports, it prevents us from understanding what the civil rights legislation should be in this day and age. Technology companies like Apple did not exist back in the 1960s when civil rights legislation first passed. The issue about diversity in the tech economy is especially relevant when you look at what communities are suffering the most during this current recession. Joblessness among blacks is twice that of whites. The Mercury News eventually did get access to Department of Labor data and the results show how great the gap is in the Silicon Valley: "The Labor Department data ultimately obtained by the Mercury News shows that while the collective work force of 10 of the valley's largest companies grew by 16 percent from 1999 to 2005, an already small population of black workers dropped by 16 percent, while the number of Hispanic workers declined by 11 percent. By 2005, only about 2,200 of the 30,000 Silicon Valley-based workers at those 10 companies were black or Hispanic. In addition, among the roughly 5,900 managers at those companies in 2005, about 300 were either black or Hispanic -- a 20 percent dip from five years earlier. Women slipped to 26 percent of managers in 2005, from 28 percent in 2000." We look at Google, Apple and Oracle as leaders in technology development. How they fare in terms of diversity is a matter that unfortunately will be kept in the shadows under the cloak of trade secrecy. Discuss
Go here to see the original:
Information Blocked: The Racial & Gender Makeup of Google & 4 Other Tech Giants
Tags:
companies,
freedom,
jobs,
labor,
mercury-news,
obama,
race,
tech,
yahoo