VentureBeat

Profitable (!) chat service Paltalk buys back shares from investor

You usually don’t think of profit when you think of instant messaging services, but Paltalk has been making money for years through its subscription service — and the company has just bought back shares from investor Softbank Capital Partners, also at a profit for the firm.

While other instant messaging companies, like Meebo, have focused on growing their consumer bases fast and then developing revenue streams such as advertising, Paltalk has done it differently. The New… Continue Reading

Should Facebook employees sell stock to DST now? (Probably not)

Facebook doesn’t plan to go public for years, so it’s trying to keep employees happy in the meantime by letting them sell stock to Russian investor Digital Sky Technologies. Employees who own common stock can sell for $14.77 per share, starting now and continuing until sometime in August, DST tells me. The investment holding firm has previously bought around two percent of Facebook’s investor-class preferred stock for  $200 million, and it plans to spend up… Continue Reading

Ron Conway’s top ten ways to make money from real-time data

I’m here at TechCrunch’s “Real-Time Stream CrunchUp” event in Redwood City, California. Investors Ron Conway and John Borthwick are on stage, talking effusively about how Twitter — and real-time services in general — will end up being a big industry. The technology for instantly being able to share information back and forth, Conway says, is now where Google was in 1998 — the beginning of a huge rise.

I have to admit that I don’t quite… Continue Reading

Ain’t no thang: Socialthing sort of becomes AIM Connect

This past April, AOL began testing out a social toolbar for web sites, under the name of a lifestreaming service called Socialthing, which it acquired in 2008. The toolbar is now going through a rough transition into something else, although it’s not totally clear what’s happening. At least judging by the live test that AOL has been running on its country music site The Boot. The Socialthing name has been dropped (and some features broken)… Continue Reading

FriendFeed introduces real-time search

Lifestreaming service FriendFeed is introducing real-time search, so you can search for anything on the site and see it instantly. Real-time search is also live for advanced search options, including search terms that you can save and track through FriendFeed, and on its blog widget.

From the company:

Just enter a search query as you always have, and see new results instantly stream in at the top of your screen in real-time. No need to constantly click… Continue Reading

Facebook to get simpler privacy, sharing features

Today, Facebook is announcing simpler ways for users to share information. I’m on a briefing call with a bunch of other reporters, listening to Facebook chief privacy officer Chris Kelly and product manager Leah Pearlman walk us through a presentation about the specific changes the company is currently testing out.

The big news is a new, simplified menu for sharing pieces of information, and a clearer menu for what sort of personal information about yourself can be… Continue Reading

Meebo launches toolbar ads today, ramping up revenue

Meebo is taking another big step towards making its instant messaging service profitable. It’s officially launching a new product that runs interactive pop-out ads within its IM toolbar available on partner sites. You might be on a racing site, for example, chatting with friends about car models, and you’ll see an ad for Toyota’s Prius — with AT&T, it’s one of the two marquee advertisers now using the service.

The toolbar ads were first announced in… Continue Reading

Themes: Another way that FriendFeed is getting more like Gmail

Lifestreaming service FriendFeed is getting more and more like Gmail, the popular email service that the startup’s founders built back when they were at Google. Today, FriendFeed is getting themes so users can personalize the site interface — like what Gmail introduced last year. Last week, it introduced file-sharing, so you don’t need to upload and share files through email or other services.

The themes themselves aren’t a huge news item (unless you’re a FriendFeed user,… Continue Reading

Facebook gets new CFO: Genentech veteran David Ebersman

Facebook chief financial officer Gideon Yu left the company this spring, in somewhat strange circumstances, with Facebook saying it wanted a CFO with public company experience. Now it has one: former Genentech CFO David Ebersman.

While Ebersman worked at biotechnology company Genentech for 15 years, his experience was on the business side. He rose through the ranks as a business analyst and product manager before becoming chief financial officer in 2006 through its sale to Roche… Continue Reading

Googler Prashant Fuloria joins Facebook, working on monetization

Google product management director Prashant Fuloria quietly slipped across Highway 101 last month, from the Googleplex in Mountain View to Facebook’s new headquarters in Palo Alto, as Inside Facebook first reported today. He’s keeping the same title, and a somewhat similar focus.

At Facebook, he’ll be helping to lead general monetization product development, including the social network’s still-young payment system as well as its advertising features, the company says. A Googler since 2003, Fuloria has worked… Continue Reading

WordSmyte: Find the right word to expose bad things

A single clever word or phrase can reshape how people think about an issue. A just-launched site called WordSmyte intends to take advantage of this phenomenon — and it’s focused on things that people hate.

So, maybe this site will help people articulate and spread the word about things that suck — and make the world a better place.

Here’s how it works. First, you write a definition of the concept you’re trying to describe, with the… Continue Reading

Facebook gets an experienced European lobbyist

It was inevitable, given Facebook’s rapid growth around the world and especially in countries around Europe. The company has hired an experienced lobbyist, Richard Allen, to represent it to the European Union in Brussels, Belgium, according to The Guardian.

Once a technology-focused member of the British parliament, Allen had been leading Cisco’s “policy work on advanced technologies in the EU” since 2005.

His new boss at Facebook, prospective California attorney general candidate Chris Kelly, tells the Guardian the rationale behind… Continue Reading

Twitter’s long-term traffic still growing

Twitter users, most of whom signed up for the site and then apparently stopped visiting, are actually coming back, new data from comScore suggests. There’s been a lot of evidence that Twitter’s growth is tapering off by several measurements: monthly unique visitors, searches, and mentions in the media. But as VentureBeat guest columnist Jesse Farmer postulated in May after crunching a lot of Twitter data, the mass of people who aren’t early adopters could just be taking… Continue Reading

ICANN has Rod Beckstrom as new president and CEO?

[Update: Beckstrom has been confirmed as the new ICANN president and CEO.]

ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers — the governing body for the rules regarding domain names, among other things — is about to announce a new president and chief executive. An AP report yesterday and another today in The Australian both point to Rod Beckstrom, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and author, who most recently served as the first cybersecurity director for the… Continue Reading

Grou.ps comes together with funding, business models

There are a wide variety of create-your-own social networking companies out there, with the most prominent one being Ning. But a relatively young — and very scrappy — new competitor called Grou.ps is one the rise. It is seeing 25 percent growth in unique visitors per month; some one million registered users have created 40,000 groups. And, the San Francisco-Istanbul company has finished raising its first round of funding, adding $1 million from Golden Horn… Continue Reading

Facebook to offer better sharing filters

Facebook wants people to share more information, because more sharing means more data to use in targeting ads, and more chances to serve up those ads. So today, it’s making sharing a little bit easier by allowing people to limit the information they want to share to specific groups of friends on the site.

In a beta test it is beginning to roll out, the company will let you use the “Publisher” sharing box at the… Continue Reading

Facebook looks for more international ad revenue

Facebook Ads, the social network’s advertising system, could start making more money soon. The company is letting people buy ads in 14 more currencies, including major ones like the euro — this is a big expansion from just having people purchase ads in US dollar units.

Independent calculations of Facebook’s revenue suggest — based on the company’s own statements — that it could make up to $500 million in revenue this year. Most of it comes… Continue Reading

With big cuts, what’s next for MySpace’s international efforts?

MySpace plans to lay off around 300 of its 450 international employees, and close at least four of its 15 international offices as the it tries to figure out how to survive falling traffic and revenue numbers. It laid off about the same number of people last week in its US offices, leaving around 1,000 employees as of today.

The social network spent the last couple of years trying to get more international users through building… Continue Reading

Conduit toolbars to get more content

For those of you who love browser toolbars, expect more options soon. Conduit, a company that lets web sites make their own, customized toolbars is letting its clients add a couple more features now. Sites can both syndicate their content to other sites that have Conduit toolbars, or include content from those sites.

Google, Yahoo and many, many other companies have their own toolbars, but these options might keep more people using Conduit. (Note: this form… Continue Reading

Super Rewards’ advertising offers come to Twitter games

As inevitable as spammy invites, advertising offers are now coming to games that use Twitter. Super Rewards, a leading provider of offers for games on Facebook and other social networks, is launching its service with 140 Mafia, a mafia-style Twitter role playing game.

Just like in Mob Wars on Facebook and a variety of copycat applications on various social networks, 140 Mafia has you go around its virtual world committing crimes, earning money — and special… Continue Reading