This is a guest post by GoodData CEO Roman Stanek

For everyone giving European entrepreneurs a hard time, consider this: Christopher Columbus created a model for the modern entrepreneur to follow.

Think about it.

Columbus spent seven years pitching his business plan to Genoese bankers (the world’s first angel networks) before convincing Castile’s King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella to fund his crackpot scheme. He underestimated the risks of the voyage — stocking only 60 days’ worth of food and water. And he had the confidence to turnaround a mutiny when common sense told everyone else to quit.

Rational people don’t take these risks. Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, thrive off of them.

Over the years, I’ve realized Columbus was the entrepreneur’s entrepreneur — with the same personality traits that, for better or worse, we all share. I also recognized that insight into his personality can give all entrepreneurs greater understanding into their own motivations, enabling them to chart their own course to success.

So here are four lessons entrepreneurs can learn from Columbus.

Lesson #1: Confidence attracts money.

Columbus had the superhuman confidence he needed to raise the funds for his venture. His conviction that he could reach Asia by sailing west into the unknown, (at a time when sailors still hugged the shore), eventually persuaded Ferdinand and Isabella that a new route to Asia would disrupt Portugal’s monopoly on Asian exploration and give Spain new sources of commerce.

Today, that same self-assurance helps all entrepreneurs raise money. In fact, I’m convinced that the higher your confidence, the more likely you are to attract bigger valuations, build larger companies and gain customers.

Lesson #2: ‘Unreasonable’ risks achieve the impossible.

Like all entrepreneurs, Columbus also miscalculated the risks of his westward voyage, assuming the earth’s circumference to be only about 18,000 miles. This might surprise some, but I believe this is a critical component of an entrepreneur’s personality.

We constantly underestimate the risks involved when we start our ventures. It’s a kind of cock-eyed optimism that enables us to tackle hurdles when the more-cautious around us tell us we could never succeed. More than that, it pushes us and the people around us to achieve the impossible — much the way Steve Jobs’s “reality distortion field” drove colleagues, partners and suppliers to create insanely great products.

Lesson #3: Your belief in yourself is contagious.

An absolute faith in our vision also defines us as leaders. With it, for example, Columbus fended off a near-mutiny by convincing his crew that newly sighted birds and floating vegetation meant Asia was (literally) over the horizon. This may have been the first case in history of an entrepreneur being able to pivot a venture to capitalize on changing conditions. Today, every entrepreneur I know possesses this certainty to some degree.

It’s that certainty — in ourselves and in our vision of what the world will look like in six months or six years — that makes us successful leaders and able to rally our teams in adversity, drive them to excellence and attract customers.

Lesson #4: Technology founders have a competitive advantage.

The traits discussed above clearly define today’s entrepreneur. But I also know that the quintessential startup personality isn’t enough for success. Founders also need a deep understanding of the technologies and markets they aim to disrupt. Five hundred years ago Columbus was a navigational genius who understood the westerly Trade Winds better than just about anyone else.

Today, technical entrepreneurs have similar advantages. Andreessen Horowitz says they always invest in technical founders because they have the knowledge, the commitment, and the passion to achieve their goals. That’s especially important in the tech industry, where there’s a new trend almost everyday, and you can’t rely on business advisors to tell you how to steer your company. Instead, it’s for us to suss out which steps hold promise and which will lead to disaster.

Sadly, that’s where Columbus got it so terribly wrong. Despite his glowing reports back to Spain, Columbus had no riches to send back from the New World. In desperation, he forced Native Americans into slavery to dig for gold. And he was hated for it. Entrepreneurs can learn from that, too, and make it a point to never act out of fear.

Columbus might not have been the great hero that early history books make him out to be. Even so, I praise him. By charting a route to the New World, he showed that confident entrepreneurs willing to take great risks — and who can pivot at a moment’s notice — can achieve world-changing disruptions.

Isn’t that what being an entrepreneur is all about?

Roman Stanek is the founder and CEO of GoodData, a company that offers a range of business intelligence software and reporting tools to help companies monetize big data. Prior to this, he was the founder of NetBeans.org, sold to Sun Microsystems, and Systinet, which was acquired by HP. Follow him on Twitter @RomanStanek 

Christopher Columbus via Shutterstock 

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We’ve been saying this for a while now: Foursquare isn’t about badges and mayorships anymore. You need only look at the company’s latest round of funding for confirmation.

Foursquare announced today that it has raised $41 million in a fourth round of funding led by private equity firm Silver Lake Partners. With the additional funds, Foursquare has time to actually build up its business by focusing more on ad operations, sales, and local search features.

Most of the investment is in the form of a multi-year loan from Silver Lake, while the rest is made up of convertible debt from VC firms including Union Square Ventures and Andreesseen Horowitz.

By going for debt funding, rather than equity, Foursquare obfuscates the debate about its value, , Bloomberg reports. Foursquare was said to be worth around $600 million during its last round in 2011, when it raised $50 million. So far, the New York City-based company has raised $112.4 million.

On his blog, Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson explains why the convertible debt funding was a good idea for existing investors this round:

That means this round is not dilutive to the Foursquare management at this time. But it will be dilutive when the debt converts into equity, most likely at the next equity issuance. For the investors, we get the comfort of knowing that eventually our investment will become equity and we will not have to price it. Someone else will.

Foursquare made a big splash at the South by Southwest conference in 2009, when the notion of checking into locations and competing with your friends for virtual points and badges seemed fresh. But even though the company now has 33 million users and integration with 40,000 apps, its main source of revenue — ads within search — has been a disappointment. The company reportedly only made $2 million in revenue last year, an anonymous source tells Bloomberg.

With Foursquare’s newest iOS app this week, we’re already seeing the company focus more on search rather than check-ins. Expect even more relevant ads to pop up within Foursquare’s search feature as well — the company’s CEO and founder, Dennis Crowley, tells Bloomberg that it will open up ads to all of its merchant partners, as well as grow its sales team from 10 people to 40.

The company is betting that its rich location data, along with knowledge of your social connections, will make it primed for predicting where you’d like to go next. Foursquare’s chief revenue officer, Steven Rosenblatt, also notes that customers either click on an ad, or visit a display store, 3 to 5 percent of the time within 72 hours. In comparison, typical mobile ads see a click-through rate under 1 percent, according to Chitika.

“To us, this is like when Google came and revolutionized web search,” Crowley wrote on the Foursquare blog today. “Suddenly, you could find things on the internet. The real world is the same way. Four years ago when we started Foursquare, it was really hard to discover a new retro arcade that opened up on a side street, or to make sure you weren’t overlooking the best dish on the menu, or to know a good friend was just around the corner. Sometimes, we think of Foursquare as having the ability to give people superpowers for exploring the real world.”

Photo: Nan Palmero/Flickr

Trapit launched its new publisher suite today, the startup’s first business-to-business product that lets publishers and brands create personalized, more engaging reading experiences.

“The web is generating more content per day than ever before,” said founder Hank Nothhaft Jr. in an interview with VentureBeat. “There are plenty of web aggregators and distribution networks, but as far as I am concerned, these are one-trick ponies. They are not solving problems as far as publishers are concerned. We use artificial intelligence to create branded personalized content experiences for audiences; it’s like machine-assisted editorial, and the impact on engagement is tremendous.”

Trapit was born out of the prestigious research institute SRI International, the same organization that spun out the Siri virtual assistant technology later acquired by Apple. Trapit combines artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and personalization technology to act as a discovery engine for the web. When Trapit launched in 2011, it was a consumer product that sorted through the massive amount of Internet content to surface articles that were specifically relevant to each individual user.

With this latest offering, Trapit will sell its tools to businesses that want to recommend content to their readers from multiple sources, without redirecting users to other sites, syndicating, or working with an ad-network. Nothhaft said that after Trapit released an iPad app in July 2012, the company received an outpouring of interest from the media industries about how they could use the technology to enhance their own native and digital experiences. Nothhaft jumped on this opportunity to generate revenue, without making money through consumers or advertising.

Using Trapit’s publishing tools, customers can curate topics that are important to their audience based on key words and topics. The engine dives into a 140,000 vetted sources that won’t necessarily pop up in search engines, and delivers the content in real-time to interested users. Nothhaft said that while social networks user other people to filter the web, that method of surfacing content often turns out to be an “echo chamber,” and search is gameable. Additionally, syndication agreements, third-party plugins, and ad networks surface “junky” content that adds little value to the publisher or the reader. Trapit’s advanced technology provides a superior, more authentic alternative.

“Trapit is able to understand the context of an article more deeply than a set of keywords and keeps the user around longer, to create a relationship,” he said. “We monitor how users interact with content and apply that feedback differently, as well as data on what they are opening, how long they are spending, what they share, what they delete etc… We develop a rich understanding of the user and those interests in real-time, and surface articles within moments. This personalizes content to each individual users. No two Trapit feeds are exactly the same, and no other service can claim that.”

Publishers appreciate the fact that app is white-labeled and doesn’t redirect users or dilute the integrity of their brand. Nothhaft said that he takes a broad view of what a publisher is, and in addition to working with traditional media properties, Trapit also has customers like Deloitte which uses Trapit to power an internal iPad reader. The app personalizes business news and internal reports, so a consultant who is out in the field can quickly access information that is relevant to them without spending the time to search.

Furthermore, the software enables publishers to extend their publishing into mobile without spending a large amount of money. Clients can publish content to branded iPad and web apps, as well as email and social networks, to build community around their topic. And of course, analytics are part of the package. Trapit is based in Palo Alto, California.

Photo Credit: Trapit

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Foursquare wants to topple Yelp to become your go-to local search app, but something’s holding it back: Foursquare itself.

For most people, Foursquare is still that semi-creepy app that gives you badges when you check into places. But that’s the old Foursquare. Developed over the last year, the new Foursquare has quietly evolved into one of most effective and elegant local search tools out there — only no one knows it yet.

This is a problem that Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley is well-aware of. “Foursquare is much more than mayorships and badges. It’s a perception issue. We’ve definitely been phasing a lot of that stuff out,” he said while on stage at SXSW last week.

Why the shift in emphasis? Because there’s just not that much money in mayorships and check-ins. At the core of the new Foursquare is Explore, Foursquare’s local search service. Foursquare Explore is powerful and robust — so much so that I don’t even think of using services like Yelp or Google+ Local when I’m trying to find somewhere new to go. Looking for a bar that’s nearby and similar to the ones you already like? Explore shows you the way. (Explore is also very good at pointing out places even when it has no user data to go on. Just try out its new-ish log-in free web interface.)

Explore is one of the best things that’s ever happened to Foursquare.

As I noted when the app added reviews to its venue listings, Foursquare was once the app that people used when they got somewhere. Now, Foursquare wants to be the app that sends them there in the first place.

This is where the money ties in. Much of Foursquare’s revenue comes from targeted coupons, which are tied into Foursquare’s now-massive trove of location data and preferences. All those check-ins you did back in 2009 didn’t just disappear — they’re making Foursquare what is today.

With the check-in data, combined with deals with local merchants (and credit card companies like American Express, Mastercard, and Visa), Foursquare is setting the stage for its inevitable rebirth. Now it just needs get its users back.

As of last November, only about 8 million of Foursquare’s then-25 million registered members used the app once a month, according to the Wall Street Journal. That’s 32 percent — not a great number, and probably not one that’s changed all that much now that Foursquare has crossed the 30 million-user threshold.

Most friends I asked still think Foursquare is about stalking their friends, collecting badges, and being the Mayor of the local Burger King — but that couldn’t be further from reality. Foursquare is different! It’s changed! It wants you back!

And that’s the real tragedy here. While making money has traditionally been Foursquare’s biggest challenge, the more pressing one going forward is going to be shifting the perception of the service that Foursquare itself so effectively created.

Photo: Box dudes/Shutterstock

Gritting your teeth long enough to ask the resident music snobs what they’ve been listening to usually provides much better results than most social music discovery technologies.

Music startup TastemakerX understands this. It has created a social game that specifically appeals to those precious music snobs.

Essentially, TastemakerX lets people pull music from several different sources (Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud) to play songs they believe the community would enjoy. Snobs (which I should probably start referring to as users) get rewarded by participating in a “fantasy football league” for music artists that allows them to assign value to their favorite bands in the form of records, add songs to a collection, and more. Users get rewarded with “notes” for positive interactive with the service, such as if their artists or songs get played a lot by the community, a high level of activity on the service, and other things. You use the notes to “buy” more records. If you are an awesomely good music snob, you’ll continue picking music the community likes, thus improving your status as the most cultured and musically savvy person among your friends.

I don’t really understand the whole concept of framing fantasy football around music, because it just doesn’t translate well. First of all, this isn’t a music service for people who only like to listen to Jock Jams. Second, football players that are more athletic and talented really are more valuable than sluggish second-stringers that rarely see any time on the field. But music aficionados may end up really getting into the new Tastemaker, which will allow the service to create more enjoyable music discovery algorithms that play songs/artists you’ve never heard of and really like. (I also believe the “fantasy music league” angle is superior to the “music stock exchange” angle the company was promoting last year.)

TastemakerX has also secured a new $1.25 million round of funding that it will use to improve development of its music discovery technology platform as well as forge new partnerships. The new funding included investments from Baseline, True, Guggenheim, and AOL.

“With exponentially more music being made today than 30 years ago, music discovery has gotten considerably more difficult despite technology’s great advances,” said Tastemaker founder and CEO Marc Ruxin in a statement. “Games inspire people to search harder and accumulate more knowledge and therefore force discovery in new ways.”

Founded in 2011, the San Francisco, Calif.-based startup previously raised $1.8 million in 2012, making for a total of $3.05 million in funding to date. TastemakerX’s advisers include John Battelle, Marc Geiger, Andrew Anker, Mich Mathews, Michael Kassan, Ian Rogers, Paul Bricault, Ted Rheingold, and Mike Lazerow.

Original snobby douchebag music guy photo via ollyy/Shutterstock; Illustration by Tom Cheredar

TweetDeck has just introduced a new set of search filters for columns.

The official Twitter client for desktops’ new features, a Twitter rep said via email, “make it easier for you to find the exact content you’re looking for — be it tweets and certain words or phrases, or images and videos.”

With the new filters, you can set up columns to contain or exclude keywords, media types, and retweets.

Say you’re running a Twitter photo contest for a legal services company using the hashtag #yolonolo. You can set up a new column to show only tweets — no retweets allowed! — containing the term “yolonolo” and containing images, so you to quickly see all your contest entries in a single column with no clutter.

Then, when a ring of trolls co-opts the hashtag for an Anonymous hack called #OpNoYo, you can tell TweetDeck to exclude the term “OpNoYo” from the column and boom! Your column once again is filtered to contain just the photo entries for your contest.

You can also filter for video content and for tweets with links. The new features are available now in TweetDeck’s Chrome and desktop apps.

Here’s a look at the new column filters:

“Today’s release, as well as our recent release of content filters for search columns, is part of our ongoing efforts to bring the features and capabilities of our AIR app to TweetDeck web,” said a TweetDeck rep today on the company blog.

“We’ve pushed regular updates each of the last 24 weeks, squashing bugs and introducing oft-requested functionality such as real-time updating of tweets in columns, keyboard shortcuts and navigation, search improvements including type-ahead and people search, a new interface and the options to change font size and column width, a more extensive quick actions menu on each Tweet, performance upgrades, full profile header images, and more.”

Twitter acquired TweetDeck, previously an independent Twitter desktop client, in mid-2011. Since then, the company has placed restrictions on the use of its API by third-party developers; these restrictions make it difficult or impossible for third-party developers to introduce and maintain Twitter clients. Thus, TweetDeck as an official Twitter client is in a sweeter position than ever before.

While I was impressed with Thirst’s gorgeous Twitter client when it launched over the summer, the app was ultimately just that — a very pretty Twitter client.

Now Thirst has revamped its iOS app to create a social network for personalized news discovery, taking advantage of the language processing tools it previously developed along with the experience of building a client for a major social network. It’s also launching a web client to satisfy desktop news junkies.

“Under the hood, you don’t read the same feeds as Google Reader. We find the topics relevant to you,” Thirst Labs chief executive Anuj Verma said in an interview with VentureBeat, hitting on how Thirst differs from competing news apps like Flipboard and Pulse. “You don’t really have to hunt for the content.”

Thirst is now a social network of its own instead of just another window for viewing Twitter. Verma said that this is another major way that the app is different from other news readers, though it’s only a matter of time before apps like Pulse attempt to rally their many users into a social network.

Just like its first app, the new Thirst app is full of great imagery and a design that begs you to touch it. Upon opening the app for the first time on your iPhone or iPad, you can connect it to your social networks and instantly have access to a wide variety of topics (currently the app has a dedicated section for breaking stories from the State of the Union and New York Fashion Week). Finding and reading news stories within the app is a pleasant experience, and you can easily like, dislike, share, and comment on stories with it.

Like many other discovery apps, Thirst learns from the stories you read and interact with to deliver more relevant content to you. That analysis technology was one of the major reasons the company sought to be more than just a Twitter app.

“We wanted a higher ceiling, something that had bigger potential and could be its own company some day,” Verma said. “The original app had this core [semantic analysis] technology underneath he hood, and we took a step back and said our tech is pretty good — we realized we can look at anything and find out what users are talking about.”

The San Francisco-based Thirst Labs has raised $950,000 in seed funding from BlueRun Ventures, Steve Newcomb, and Jason Krikorian.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Three billion check-ins and tens of millions of tips ought to add up to something. In Foursquare’s case, that means the “Best of” series, which highlights “the most awesome places in cities across the U.S.”

The location-based social network, which has downplayed the competitive aspect of its service in which users get “points” for checking into various locations, has been focusing on local exploration and discovery. This new part of its website, launched today, helps people explore other places as well.

That means, apparently, that Mi Cocina is the best Mexican restaurant in Dallas. And that the 3 Crow Bar is the best nightspot in Nashville, Tenn.

“We use signals like tips, likes, dislikes, popularity, local expertise, and nearly three billion check-ins from over 30 million people worldwide to determine how much people love a place,” Foursquare said in a blog post. “The Best of Foursquare pulls together lists of the places people love most in cities across the U.S., from cafés and pizzerias to museums and bookstores.”

The new service is great for checking out what might be a good place to visit when you travel. But it’s also yet another nail in the traditional Yellow Pages-style directory — and a direct shot across the bow of a Yelp, which has owned local business recommendations, especially in the entertainment space.

Frankly, it also makes even clearer the competition between Foursquare and the more hotels-and-flights focused TripAdvisor as well as even the new graph-search-enabled Facebook.

Now, if only Foursquare could figure out a truly viable business model to go with all its wonderful data.

The new app for business owners, which allows them to monitor Foursquare check-in activity, check out top customers, and monitor analytics data, and the recently added feature enabling businesses to promote events might help with this.

When I contacted Mike Mayzel, StumbleUpon’s director of communications, he said the layoffs were not the initial stages of a death spiral:

StumbleUpon is restructuring to enable the company to become more streamlined, focused and to better execute against its goals in 2013. As a result of these changes, the company will be profitable and will operate more quickly and efficiently and experiment more aggressively. We continue to grow and remain focused on providing the best discovery experience on the Web.

StumbleUpon reached 20 million users in late 2011 but has suffered somewhat as Reddit has become the Internet’s go-to hub for interesting content. Its audience skews a little older than Reddit’s, and its last few redesigns, including one just four months ago, have met with mixed reviews. Still, it has continued innovating with stunning mobile apps and a new Windows 8 app.

Unfortunately, despite all the work and innovation, StumbleUpon’s traffic graph looks like the Marlboro Man’s cigarette in the anti-smoking ads:

Source: Compete.com

StumbleUpon traffic, according to Compete

That’s 9.7 million unique monthly visitors at the beginning of 2012, dropping off to 5.8 million at the end of the year.

The restructuring may be about refocusing, getting quicker, and experimenting more aggressively, and being profitable is wonderful, but unless StumbleUpon can reverse this traffic decline, this layoff won’t be the company’s last.

photo credit: muffytyrone via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple is in talks with with Foursquare to bring local data into Apple’s Maps application, reports the Wall Street Journal.

Apple has already integrated reviews and other local information from Yelp within its maps, and according to the WSJ it has also been in talks with other companies swimming with local data.

It makes sense for Apple to tap Foursquare next — the company emerged as the winner in the location check-in wars a few years ago, but now it’s positioning itself more as a local discovery service. Foursquare has a significant amount of data and more than 25 million users, but only eight million of those are active at least once a month. Foursquare desperately needs more partners and revenue, and a deal with Apple could give it room to breathe as it tries to entice users.

But while Foursquare integration would be intriguing, I’m hoping Apple is also working hard to improve the quality of its map app. Apple’s iOS 6 map app was widely criticized for the quality of its data (and it was a big reason why Google Maps for iPhone has been so popular). Ultimately, having accurate and bug-free map data is far more important than any whiz-bang social integration.

Photo: Nan Palmero/Flickr

Smartphones and apps sometimes separate us from the physical world even as we walk through it. But Google has created a virtual tool that will help us appreciate the wonder of reality.

Google’s new Android app Field Trip is a docent for your smartphone, telling you all the fascinating, relevant, and historical information about the world you’re living in as you move through it — without having to ask.

Tell Field Trip what you’re interested in — architecture, history, entertainment, deals — and as you move through your day, the app will bring up fascinating tips or shopping opportunities as you move from place to place. It requires no searching, no Googling, no quick check of Wikipedia: just information that you’ve asked for, appearing when you might want to see it.

It’s not local search; it’s local find — no questions required.

Field Trip has one of the most impressive introductory videos that I’ve ever seen. It tells a fascinating story about the vision behind the project, and it’s well worth a couple of minutes of your time. Keep watching to the very end, or you won’t understand what’s going on:

Google has partnered with the Food Network, it’s own Zagat, and Eater to find the best places to eat, and Cool Hunting, Inhabitat, and Remodelista, among others, for funky stores and products. Atlas Obscura – the self-described “compendium of the world’s wonders, curiosities, and esoterica” — and the Daily Secret add in flavor and seasoning, and Vayable adds unique hand-picked experiences such as custom tours, and local, insider events.

The danger, of course is annoyance: If the app tells too much, or if too little is relevant, users will turn it off. But it can be turned off, and the categories can be personalized to your interests. I’m optimistic this will turn out to be a very, very neat tool for both vacationers and those who are rediscovering the places in which they live.

The app is only available in the U.S. at launch, and while it is currently Android-only, an iPhone version is coming “soon.”

photo credit: Aesum via photopin cc

With almost 740,000 active apps in the Apple ecosystem and similarly huge numbers in Google Play, how does a mobile app developer stand out? If you’re part of a large company, you might just turn that problem over to the marketing department. Unfortunately, many if not most app developers are small three- to five-person teams.

And that small indie team is exactly who Human Demand is focused on.

“The biggest problem in the market is app discovery,” Human Demand’s chief executive (and prolific angel investor) Howie Schwarz says. “Out of those millions of apps and tens of thousands of developers, only a handful have any marketing people or budget.”

So Human Demand, which launched in private beta in August after being in stealth mode for six months, helps developers advertise their apps — like many other mobile ad services such as JumpTap, AdMob, TapAds, and StrikeAd. But Schwarz says his company’s focus on small independent developers is among his companies’ key differences from its competitors.

“Most mobile media buying is blind … so you don’t know where your ads are running. And smaller developers have no real opportunities due to high minimum buys.”

So Human Demand has built a system for small developers, who don’t even need to register to begin. Developers simply drop in their app store web address, and Human Demand grabs all the relevant data: operating system and device support, app description, images, categories, and more. After setting country, budget, and tracking, the system generates banners for developers (or they can use their own). Add a credit card and the ads start.

“You can see results on each and every app in real time,” says Schwarz. “You see the name of the app where your ad is shown, your cost per install, per publisher, and per app. So instead of setting bid prices you set goals.”

Schwarz says most mobile ad agencies such don’t show the name of the publishers and apps they’re displaying ads in because they don’t want ad buyers to cut out the middleman and go direct. And, he argues, their minimum budgets are much higher.

“We’re for the developer who wants to use their credit card for $50.”

[Editor's note: I've used AdMob for mobile campaigns before, and that service at least allows any size of campaign.]

One question I had for Schwarz was spurious clicks and click fraud, which is an increasing issue. Human Demand handles that concern in a very interesting way.

“Since we’re focused on performance, you’re not buying clicks but impressions and downloads,” says Schwarz. “Our platform is looking for performance, and when it’s not performing, nonperforming publishers are blocked.”

Essentially, Human Demand builds a global blacklist out of the 35 billion bid requests it sees every month, and when it sees either poor performance of bad behavior, the company prefilters the inventory … and simply stops bidding on publishers who don’t generate installs.

It’s a novel approach, and it’s helping double Human Demand’s business month over month.

photo credit: Cristiano Betta via photopin cc

It’s the worst-kept secret on the Internet today, but Twitter has just announced some new search and discovery tools for its microblogging service (they hate it when we call it that).

On the company blog today, we read that Twitter is adding to its search tools a flurry of new features, including autocomplete, spelling correction, related items, real names and usernames, and results from people you follow.

“We’re constantly working to make Twitter search the simplest way to discover what’s happening in real time,” writes Twitter engineer Frost Li. “These updates make it even easier to immediately get closer to the things you care about.”

The crux of the matter is simple: Around half of Twitter users are using the service as a supersimplified RSS reader, not as a mechanism for broadcasting their own thoughts to an uncaring world. Since the company wants to grow — and wants to continue to grow more mainstream — it’s in its best interests to make Twitter the simplest, best RSS reader anyone could ask for. And today’s announcements about finding and following topics take the product a bit closer to that goal.

Here’s some more info on exactly what the new features bring:

• Autocomplete features that show both people and search terms.
• Automatic spelling corrections, so you see results for the correctly spelled search term.
• Related suggestions showing topics with similar search terms.
• Results showing real names and usernames.
• Tweets from people you follow, not just the top tweets for your search term.

Search and discovery were among the many major feature overhauls we saw when the “new-new Twitter” launched just six months ago. At that time, the company was promoting its all-new Discover tab as a way to show users the most interesting, popular, and personally relevant stories on the site, based on each’s individual’s usage patterns and behavior.

We’ve known about today’s launch since last night, when Twitter engineering manager Pankaj Gupta tweeted a broad hint about the upgrade and announcement. We’ve been obsessively refreshing the Twitter blog ever since, which made for a sleepless night and a nervewracking morning for some of us in the VentureBeat newsroom.

Search and discovery are both a big part of Twitter’s plan to continue its growth and get normal people to understand and use the service. As of last fall, around half of Twitter’s users didn’t actually tweet. Rather, they used the service in the same way hardcore nerds would use an RSS reader.

For example, before last year’s redesign, folks around the world were hearing about the Middle Eastern and North African revolutions, especially about Twitter’s involvement in the uprisings. “But you had to know to go to Twitter and type in #Jan25,” said Twitter CEO Dick Costolo in a chat about Twitter’s old search tools. “We want to make that a lot easier.”

As Costolo put it in a recent interview, “We connect people everywhere to what’s meaningful. … We want Twitter to be the world in your pocket.” He also noted that the things that make Twitter “the world in your pocket” are unique to Twitter and that the team wanted to build better experiences around those unique aspects — hashtags, asymmetric social following, and so on.

“A year ago, when you signed up for Twitter, the first thing you’d see was the big ‘what’s happening’ box,” Costolo explained. “People didn’t know what to do next. They didn’t have any followers, and they weren’t following anyone. Nothing happened. Now, we get new users to think first about following their interests. Get a timeline and start engaging that way.”

Discovery and search are now supposed to be two of the key ways new users are brought into the Twitter user experience. We’ll see how the real world reacts to today’s changes and, more importantly, what the changes do for the microblogging service’s signup and engagement metrics.

Top image courtesy of Ilse, Flickr

Popular social network Twitter will unveil significant changes to search and discovery as soon as today, according to a tweet by engineering manager Pankaj Gupta.

“Search & discovery in @twitter set to change forever after tmrw,” Gupta wrote on Twitter on Thursday evening. “Team — congrats and enjoy the enormity of ur impact few understand today!”

Search and discovery are incredibly important features for the network, and many times a search on Twitter is more valuable than a Google search because you can see real-time responses to things that are happening now. Discovery is important too, and with a well-implemented design, discovery can make you want to spend more time browsing a network.

Gupta’s tweet suggests that the changes will take place either today or tomorrow, but we’d be more likely to bet on today because more people will be around to write about the changes.

We’ve contacted Twitter for more information about the changes and will update this post if the company gets back to us.

Twitter bird photo: Beau Giles/Flickr

You’ve seen Google +1 buttons all over the Internet. If you’re a Google+ user, you’ve probably clicked a few, and if you’re not, you’ve just ignored them.

+1 buttons serve as a recommendation engine to Google: This is good content. A click on one signifies that you think the website or page you’re surfing is valuable and worthwhile.

That click is not shared with other users by default, although there can be a public record of them on your Google+ profile page (depending on your Google+ preferences). Sharing your +1′s is a secondary step, which then places the recommendation into your Google+ activity stream … in just the same way that a liked website or article appears on your Facebook wall.

The new feature that Google added yesterday transforms the +1 experience from one that primarily impacts Google (as Google learns about valuable content) and your Google+ contacts (as users share what they are +1′ing) to an internet-wide discovery service that helps all web surfers find the best, most valuable content on any given website.

And it works whether they’ve signed up for Google+ or not:

Now, instead of just providing sharing features for other places, the +1 button reveals the most-recommended content on the website you are currently surfing. You find it simply by mousing over the +1 button — no Google+ account required, and you don’t need to be logged in to Google+.

VentureBeat reached out to Ryan Brack, Google’s manager of global communications, for a comment: “+1 recommendations, currently in platform preview, will help users discover content from the sites they love and gives publishers the opportunity to drive deeper engagement with their audience.”

All site owners need to do is add a +1 button to their website, which many have already done.

This accomplishes a number of things.

First, it has the potential to endear Google to website owners, as Google enables deeper discovery of their content. Perhaps more importantly, however, it helps Google+ nonbelievers get a taste of what the search giant’s social network is all about: content discovery.

For that reason, this change has the potential to grow Google+, as Google continues to try to build a social answer to Facebook.

Google says the feature is currently in testing and will go live in a few weeks.

But you’re likely to hear more about this new service for discovering and sharing online content, as it’s growing by 150,000 users each week — and just today added significant new features to make social surfing recommendations to help users discover and enjoy new web content and sites.

Formerly called InfoAxe, Flipora grew from a service that helped users simply find sites they’ve already visited. You’ve likely experienced this problem: You found a great site, but can’t find it later. And you can’t find the data you know is available on that page. InfoAxe helped you search your history.

The company rebranded to Flipora late last year, and today it announced a significant new direction: social discovery of new web content. VentureBeat spoke to Jonathan Siddharth, one of the cofounders.

On the surface, the new Flipora features are much like StumbleUpon. Users select interests from 57 different topic areas and then surf the web within the Flipora service on those topic areas. Content inside Flipora is based on what others users find interesting.

Instead of “stumbling” to find new content they like, users “flip” web pages:

But there’s a key difference between StumbleUpon and Flipora…and indeed Twitter, Facebook, or any other service that web surfers use to find new content. Instead of articles or videos being entered via contributor’s choices — a post, a tweet, or a stumble — Flipora lives inside users’ browsers and shares an aggregated view of all users surfing habits, which builds a vast array of website popularity data.

Flipora announced the change to their own users like this:

We’ve been making it easy for our users to go back to where they’ve been in the past…what we’re announcing today is a way for users to discover where to go next ….

The key is in the web-browsing history that originally was only for your own personal consumption, to help you find previously viewed pages and information. Now that data is collected, uploaded, and stored with others users’ data. And similar to an Amazon.com people-who-liked-X-product-also-liked-Y way, it generates new suggested sites for all users.

And that’s lot of data. Flipora currently has 8 million users. To operate the social-discovery engine, the company indexes 20 million web pages daily — an amount equivalent to six times the size of Wikipedia.

The key questions, of course, are the same as those Facebook faced when it enabled “frictionless sharing“: What happens to privacy when everything is shared? And similarly, what happens to quality when there is no discrimination between what is shared and what is unshared?

VentureBeat asked Siddharth and his co-CEO, and Vijay Krishnan these a few questions:

VentureBeat:
You seem to be almost half the size of StumbleUpon without near its attention. How have you grown so large so quietly?

Siddharth:
Correct. Flipora, previously Infoaxe, is probably the largest consumer Internet company that no one in Silicon Valley has heard of. [Smiles] We are a small team relative to the size of our user base, and we’ve just not had enough time to focus on anything besides working on the product and scaling for the growth we’re seeing.

Until we raised our $3 million round in late 2010, our full-time team in Silicon Valley was just Vijay and myself. We had some really great engineers working remotely. Once we raised the round, we hired them full time. In hindsight, we should have probably done a better job of getting the word out in Silicon Valley, since it helps greatly with hiring. Additionally, our user growth is also extremely spread out across the world, rather than being confined to the U.S. alone. We have users from over 200 countries worldwide.

Our growth has been largely organic. Flipora’s web history search engine is a unique product with very few competitors who are able to do it at scale.

We’ve been beta testing the discovery feature for a while and that has been really good at drawing new users. We offer great recommendations and give users easy tools to share them on Facebook and Twitter. People who click through to the recommended webpage are shown other related recommendations that keeps them engaged, in a manner similar to YouTube where users who come to see a video [and] end up clicking through and consuming related videos shown on the side.

VentureBeat:
Flipora has enjoyed growth in 2012. Why is it happening now?.

Siddharth:
We did a massive redesign of the core web history product in late 2011, vastly improving its ease of use and beta testing the discovery feature. Both of these are the key contributors to growth. Flipora’s web history product was already a uniquely differentiated product with very few alternatives. The redesign and product enhancements greatly helped usage and growth.

We crossed 8 million users last week and are growing by 25,000 users/day. We see users using the beta version of the discovery product flipping as many as 300 pages a day which is extremely encouraging to us. In our beta tests, our unique product innovations like the side bar that lets you preview the recommendations coming next while also allowing a user to easily skip over items that are not interesting greatly increased usage.

Our recommendation engine quality is also going to keep improving. What we have live now is just version one. We are working on big updates to our algorithms that will drastically improve recommendation quality in the coming months. The product does get better the more you use it, as it learns your interests from use.

VentureBeat:
How does Flipora address privacy concerns.

Siddharth:
The answer is transparency and offering easy ways for users to opt-out of sharing any data they are not comfortable sharing. We take privacy very seriously at Flipora and have had a very meticulous approach to this right from day 1.

1. A user’s web history is private by default and is never shared with anyone. We don’t share data with third parties. You explicitly choose what you want to share. The fact that right from the time a user signs up, we are upfront about being a web-history search engine, and the fact that the user experience with our product is most effective when they save their browsing history with us, has greatly enabled users to be comfortable with the data that we collect.

2. We offer a “record” button that can be turned “off” if you want to go off the record.

3. We offer a private “block list” of sites that you can set up. Page views on those sites are not recorded even if you accidentally had record on. More important, this “block list” resides on your browser. Even Flipora does not know what the block list is.

4. The recommendation engine only uses aggregate, anonymized browsing data.

5. In the last decade, Internet users as a whole have fundamentally got more comfortable with the idea of some of their information being accessible to consumer Internet companies, which has indeed powered the growth of several billion dollar consumer internet businesses.

Web-based e-mail providers have made Internet users much more comfortable with having their private e-mail stored on remote servers, rather than on their local machines. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter, personal finance management services like mint.com…have made users much more comfortable with the idea of sharing their personal information with consumer Internet companies, as long as the data is secure and the product offers them compelling value. These, coupled with the fact that we are up front about what data you collect and our clear privacy policy and terms of service, have gone a long way in alleviating privacy concerns regarding our product.

VentureBeat:
What about reality bubble issues? Can or do you introduce serendipity into the pages you show people?

Krishnan:
We try to balance exploration and exploitation in our recommendations. We recommend websites that are related to what the user is in the mood for at the moment while still showing a small number of recommendations from other topics. For example, if we think the user is enjoying recommendations from the “cars” topic more, the user receives more recommendations from “cars” while still seeing recommendations from other topics in case she wants to explore other interests.

Algorithmic discovery has greater potential to widen a user’s horizons than social discovery, discovery based on what websites your friends share on Facebook or Twitter. With social discovery, there is a lot less serendipity since your friends are unlikely to share certain types of content. Your friends typically would not share content on Facebook or Twitter that they think would be uninteresting to their friends, politically sensitive, etc. So you see a much narrower spread of topics.

VentureBeat:
What are your long-term goals?

Krishnan:
Web history search will be the platform that helps us build an amazing Discovery Engine that truly understands a user’s interests, both explicitly declared and implicitly learned. We believe Discovery to be the natural evolution of web search itself. Web search works only when you know what you’re looking for and you know it exists. With our Discovery Engine, we can automatically push the most relevant websites to a user at the right time when she’s in the mood for it. With web history search, Flipora makes it easy for users to keep track of the great websites they discover and the data generated by this will continue to improve the discovery engine.

We think, just like Web search, Discovery will be an integral part of the web browser, answering the question of “where should I go next?” With the data advantage that we have — attention data from web browsing history — and the technology to mine that data, we are superexcited about some unique innovations we can offer in the discovery space. The discovery space is still very nascent making it ripe for disruption.

We are at 8 million users now and expect to double that in a year.

 VentureBeat:
Thank you for your time!

“Social discovery” has two definitions. On one hand, it’s used to mean services like Highlight that help you to find other people. However, the broader definition is services that help you find just about anything by using recommendations from friends.

Friends are, in general, good at recommending things, since they know you so well. However, this technique suffers from two limitations. First, as social networks grow to include people outside of one’s close circle of friends, discovery won’t be as accurate. Second, with a diverse stream of friends, you’ll probably have foodies who can help you discover new and interesting restaurants, but those same people may not be audiophiles who can help you discover great music.

The second problem can be overcome by adding a curation element; that is, a user can select a subset of friends who know about the topic in question. Though you avoid the high-school-friend-on-Facebook problem, social discovery+curation also has issues. The burden is left to the user: It’s difficult to curate each social discovery application to have the right set of people to generate good recommendations. Also, I may not have friends who have the knowledge I need. For example, I could certainly get good restaurant recommendations from friends in New York City, but none of my friends may ever have been to Tulsa, Okla.

What’s the solution for this? I’d like to suggest that we’ve already entered and are accelerating in an era of algorithmic discovery. Algorithmic discovery generates intelligent recommendations based your social network, broader social networks, and your own personal tastes and preferences:

• Instead of having to worry about which of my friends are accurate predictors of what I like, an algorithm should be able to curate that list for me.
• Discovery can happen outside of my social network. There may be someone I’ve never met who is actually an excellent predictor of my tastes.
• Everything I’ve liked or disliked in the past will help to inform the algorithm, which goes beyond potentially limited recommendations from friends.

Think of it this way: you’ve got your own personal concierge who knows you very well, is an expert in what you like, and also knows what everyone else has liked or disliked.  That would be an incredibly powerful tool, because it harnesses me, my friends, and the broader collective knowledge.

Social discovery is a necessary step on the way to algorithmic discovery. Data scientists can only start to create algorithms when they have a large set of data about people’s likes and dislikes. With so many people sharing on Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter, that’s a foundation on which discovery engines powered by actual user preferences can be built.

Social discovery is exciting right now, but I don’t believe this will be an endpoint. And algorithmic discovery isn’t just a pipe dream. Movie recommendations on Netflix, news recommendations on Zite, and many other services with similar recommendation power are popping up. Personally, I look forward to more and more of these applications helping me with recommendations in all areas of my life, so that I can finally begin to discover what I’ve been missing.

Mark Johnson is CEO of Zite, a personalized magazine for the iPad and iPhone. You can follow him on Twitter at @philosophygeek.

[Top photo credit:  jokerpro/Shutterstock]

Screengrab of trending chillwave on Exfm

Back in October music discovery service Exfm attempted to transform itself from a browser extension to a full fledged web service. Apparently the kids like what they’re hearing, because the site has gone from around 75,000 active users to more than 300,000. On the strength of that growth they have raised $1.5 million from their existing investor Spark Capital, more than doubling their total funding to date.

“We’re seeing a lot of opportunity as streaming music becomes more mainstream,” founder Charles Smith told VentureBeat by phone. “We’re able to pull songs from places like SoundCloud and Bandcamp using their APIs. Then we can feature the best stuff on our destination site and give our users a great chance to stumble on new music.”

Exfm began life as Extension Entertainment, a Chrome extension that followed users across the web gathering up the tracks from sites they visited and making them easy to play and share with friends. Like any good pop artists, it has been busy reinventing itself. It took the moniker Exfm, then mobile with an iOS launch last summer. This began to introduce new channels for discovery, like a Tastemaker section.

“It’s my favorite social music experience,” Spark Capital’s Bijan Sabet told VentureBeat. “Just like news often breaks first on Twitter, I’m finding new artists are emerging within the Exfm community before it hits mainstream radio.”

The funding will be used to prepare for synchronous development across the web, Android and iOS. Exfm recently hosted its first music event in partnership with bands at New York nightclub Pianos.”One of the things we’re hoping to do this year is to build out our relationships beyond the tech industry to work with the music industry as well. We realized that we have the power to drive an audience to live events and that is a powerful thing,” Smith said.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The other night, over a heated (ha ha) conversation about soup, a new acquaintance asked me, “So, what’s the best soup in San Francisco?”

Being a huge fan of soup (I lead an exciting life), I wished I had an answer to that question. But how to find out? Ask all my fellow soup fiends at the next Soupaholics Anonymous meeting? Organize a soup crawl of every restaurant in the city?

In the end, it was a question for Foodspotting, an app that until now has borne the somewhat inaccurate subheading “the Instagram for foodies.”

Yes, the app is replete with pictures of drool-worthy restaurant dishes, but today’s redesign makes it easier than ever to lurk without snapping pics yourself, to discover new dishes, to filter out the noise, and to get recommendations from real experts on foods you love.

To wit, I could open the app and search for “soup” to see great soups at nearby restaurants.

While browsing soups, I can see how many people in general recommend a particular soup; I can also see how many true soup aficionados recommend the soup and whether a soup is recommended by a partner publication, such as the SF-insidery 7×7 magazine or Travel and Leisure. If I’ve been around town for a while and am familiar with the soupscape, I can filter my search to show only the latest, newest soups.

And then, I can put my phone away, waltz into a restaurant, and boldly order the beet bisque, knowing beyond hesitation that I will soon be tasting one of the very best soups in San Francisco.

“Even the idea of food porn, it sounds like you’re looking just for the sake of looking,” said Foodspotting co-founder and CEO Alexa Andrzejewski in a recent conversation at her startup’s SF office. ”I want to get people out in the world, trying the food they find.”

Here’s a brief demo of the new app at work:

Within the redesigned app, you can also permanently hide dishes or entire categories if you don’t want to see them recommended for you. Don’t like sea urchin or beef tripe? Just tap twice, and you’ll never see those foods in your feed again.

Andrzejewski calls these features “Pandora-like”.

“If you just want to use it to discover, you can keep a checklist of great dishes around the city… For those who aren’t big foodies, if you’re just looking for someplace to eat, it works on that level, too,” she said.

Andrzejewski also said the app comes in handy when you’re at a new restaurant with a perplexing panoply of menu options and don’t know what to pick.

“It’s like a picture menu for anywhere,” she said. “You can sit down at a restaurant and without looking over anyone’s shoulder, you can see the must-try dishes. I think that’s the use case with the biggest market.”

And while many apps these days are focusing on showing you recommendations from your friends, the Foodspotting app recognizes that even the closest of friends can have radically different palates. While you can get recommendations from your buddies, Andrzejewski said, “What’s more relevant than being friends is knowing that I’m similar to you in taste.”

For revenue options, two-year-old Foodspotting has tapped ScoutMob for partnership. The startup is testing local “specials” at restaurants. All the user has to do is show the special on the phone screen to the participating food vendor, and he or she gets a discount.

“We’re also building relationships with restaurants, helping restaurants communicate with people who are looking for food,” Andrzejewski revealed.

As our conversation continued, we meandered down delicious tangents — sushi burritos (Foodspotting recommends one near the VentureBeat office in the city’s financial district), goat cheese ice cream with raspberry sauce, the quest for the perfect Shanghai soup dumpling (“I’m actually a dumpling expert on Foodspotting,” said Andrzejewski, who has “spotted” amazing dumplings around the world), and a pie milkshake at local hotspot Chile Pies.

All these dishes are things I probably wouldn’t find, even in my own city, without using an app like Foodspotting. During the conversation, I found myself taking notes not just about the app, but about all the foods I wanted to look up on the app when I got home.

Ultimately, the best thing about Foodspotting is that it’s helping us find these amazing treats within our favorite neighborhoods or in new cities.

“When people say we’re the Instragram of food, it sounds like this is a niche thing that’s only for foodies,” said Andrezejewski. “I don’t even like the word ‘foodie’… I think everyone wants to try the best thing when they go out.”

Image courtesy of Jolie O’Dell.

Streaming music site Last.fm has launched a new Web app for people who are bored with their music library and looking for some fresh tunes.

One of the first streaming music services, Last.fm grew in popularity for its ability to let users customize radio stations and carry their listening data (called scrobbles) to other music services for an enhanced experience. But with the influx of competing streaming music services (Pandora, Turntable.fm, Spotify), Last.fm hasn’t made many waves. The company hopes to change with its new Last.fm Discovery app.

The app is basically a HTML5-optimized music player geared toward lesser known indie bands and music groups. Songs are sorted by more than two million user-generated tags, rather than a group of familiar genres such as rock, alternative or jazz. The service features music from over 500,000 artists. It’s currently advertisement-free and available worldwide.

“[The app] introduces you to bands from around the world by letting you browse through musical styles that you may already know or want to learn more about,” said Last.fm Product Lead Matthew Hawn in a blog post announcing Last.fm Discovery. “You won’t find the latest X-factor winner or the latest plastic boyband manufactured by evil scientists in a lab somewhere. Our tags system encourages the weird and the wonderful, the micro-communities and new scenes that are springing up as fast as new, independent bands are formed.”

The Last.fm Discovery app seems like an improved version of the “Tag Tuner” feature from competitor Blip.fm — a service that turns user-submitted streaming music links from other services (like Grooveshark and YouTube) into playlists. Since Last.fm hosts its own music, its music player isn’t likely to have many of the playback issues that plague Blip.fm.

“The changes reflect what our users are looking for [when they] have some free time and … want to be entertained,” StumbleUpon founder and CEO Garrett Camp told VentureBeat.

StumbleUpon’s service lets people discover and share new web content based on a broad spectrum of categories. Users click a “stumble” button to discover new content and then have the option of voting and commenting on the selection. In October, the company announced that it reached 20 million active users and had over 1 billion “stumbles” per month.

The first thing users will notice about the redesign is the logo. Gone is the familiar blue and green “SU” logo, which has been replaced with a simple orange circle with a more elegant “SU” design.

The site’s user interface also got an overhaul. The Stumble bar — which serves as the service’s main navigation tool — has far fewer buttons, which makes the voting buttons much more prominent. The Stumble button is first on the bar, followed by the selected category of link discovery, voting buttons, simple share and comment icons and the name of the user who submitted the link. The bar also has an integrated Explore Box, a feature StumbleUpon added back in August that allows users to search for more specific categories.

Another significant update is the addition of Stumble Channels, which is a way to directly explore content from sites, celebrities and brands. There are currently over 250 channels, which have been hand-picked and authenticated by the StumbleUpon staff to assure quality. Each channel is curated by the celebrity or brand, but it exists separate from the overall discovery algorithm. Eventually, the channel feature may be rolled out to all users, who may wish to create a specific channel for their band, website, etc.

Overall, the changes indicate that StumbleUpon is keenly aware of its active user base. Unlike Delicious or Digg, StumbleUpon isn’t trying reinvent itself in an attempt to grab new users and/or higher levels of engagement. The site has a healthy level of both user growth and activity.

All StumbleUpon users can try out the revamped site as of today.

StumbleUpon was acquired by eBay in 2007, only to be bought back two years later by original founders Garrett Camp, Geoff Smith and Ram Shriram, as well as Accel Partners and August Capital. StumbleUpon now operates as an independent company. The company closed a $17 million round of funding in May 2011 and has raised $18.5 million total funding to date.

StumbleUpon’s service lets people discover and share new web content based on a broad spectrum of categories. Users click a “stumble” button to discover new content, and then have the option of voting and commenting on the selection. The service launched an Explore Box feature in August that allows people to get even more specific with how they seek out new web content.

The company, which had 10 million users in June 2010, attributes most of its user growth to a combination of new features, mobile usage and new employee talent, according to StumbleUpon VP of Business Development and Marketing Marc Leibowitz.

“There’s been more content sharing from everyone across the web, and I think people are turning to services to filter the fire hose of information that’s coming at them,” Leibowitz told VentureBeat. “So, I think we’re definitely benefiting.”

The company said it has more than doubled its number of monthly “stumbles” (the number of times someone finds content by clicking the stumble button) from 400 million in June 2010 to over a billion. That’s a thousand stumbles per second, StumbleUpon said.

StumbleUpon was acquired by eBay in 2007, only to be sold back two years later by original founders Garrett Camp, Geoff Smith and Ram Shriram, as well as Accel Partners and August Capital. StumbleUpon now operates as an independent company. The company closed a $17 million round of funding in May 2011 and has raised $18.5 million total funding to date.

Image via StumbleUpon

Zuckerberg’s keynote presentation focused on the influence you have over your friends, and your ability to find various types of content through them, including news.

“We think that Open Graph creates a great opportunity to rethink the way we discover and read news,” said Zuckerberg in his speech.

With the Open Graph you are able to see trends in your news feed. Zuckerberg showed how his own news feed aggregated content and showed him what was most popular among his friends. It will also show you all of the articles under a specific topic, should there be one trending.

News that is not trending doesn’t fall by the wayside. Instead, it will appear in the ticker section, or the scrolling bar on the left hand side of the news feed. When an article of interest shows up, you can hover over the ticker, see the full activity and click on the article. Many publications are developing apps for Facebook as well, allowing readers to view an article from within Facebook.

Zuckerberg showcased a few of these apps at f8. Many are canvas apps, or apps that appear within Facebook on a blank page like a fan page, though Facebook is excited about any app focusing on the serendipitous discovery of news through preexisting social relationships.

Washington Post: Social Reader

The Washington Post released its Social Reader, an app that allows users to read any content published by the Washington Post, as well as content from its properties. In keeping with finding content through friends, the app will publish stories that you are reading directly to your news feed. It does this with permission, which you grant upon installing the app.

Your reading behavior also dictates a specially aggregated section of content for you to discover. In order to create this list, Social Reader will look at posts both you and your friends have read, interests and preferences showcased on your Facebook profile and news trending that day.

Yahoo: Into Now

Yahoo’s Into Now is a mobile app that focuses on sharing TV preferences. But now, Into Now will show you not only what your friends are reading, but sync your Yahoo news activity with your own Facebook updates. Into Now does this through an opt-in process, giving it access to your profile.

You can delete updates made your behalf and see a full stream of your activity in the “You on Yahoo! News” section. There is also a tab dedicated only to what your friends are reading on Yahoo news. The purpose is, again, to give you opportunity of discovery through friend’s preferences.

NewsCorp: The Daily

The Daily originally existed as a news subscription for the iPad, released in February of this year. NewsCorp has now turned this into a separate canvas app for Facebook users.

“Newscorp is publishing the web version of this app only inside Facebook because they believe that eventually everyone is going to discover news that they’re going to read through their friends,” said Zuckerberg.

The app’s editors post news about news, sports, gossip, opinion, arts and life, and apps and games.

More apps to come

This is just the beginning for Facebook news. Zuckerberg thanked more than a dozen different news publications for building social news apps on Facebook. NewsMix, a Flipboard-like magazine for Facebook, launched this week using data from fan pages liked by both you and your friends.

Zuckerberg was candid, “Knowing that you helped a friend discover something new…is awesome.”

“We’re interested in going public in some reasonable time frame, we’ve hired a chief financial officer,” he said during a Q&A session. “Unless the sky is falling, I think we’d be able to go public.”

The past six months have seen a number of high-profile trading debuts from the likes of business social network LinkedIn and cloud music provider Pandora. Social games maker Zynga and group-buying site Groupon also filed to go public, and both are looking to raise massive amounts of cash. But those companies were riding a wave of positive sentiment that has bolstered IPOs.

Recent turmoil in the markets has raised questions as to whether that wave of positive sentiment has evaporated as euphoria surrounding those IPOs has died down. There was even talk about whether the window for new initial public offerings had closed, with Zynga and Groupon both planning to delay their IPOs due to poor market conditions.

Those fears are mostly unfounded, because there will always be demand for companies with unique business plans that will survive poor market conditions and competitors. That could include the likes of Zynga, one of the dominant forces in the social gaming space, or LinkedIn’s business social networking. LinkedIn has mostly weathered the market turmoil and is still trading nearly double its IPO pricing.

“My sense is that if you have a very compelling story, a robust business and there’s moats around it and it isn’t going away over night, the IPO window is still very much open,” Stoppelman said.

Yelp has more than 800 employees right now and 63 million unique monthly visitors. There are more than 1 million new reviews posted to the site every month, he said.

[Photo credit: Matthew Lynley]

“We have platforms and portals for almost anything in the world, from indie music to pictures of cats. Yet with conferences, which is a trillion dollar global industry, no one has succeeded in creating that one point of entry,” Martin Ferro-Thomsen, chief executive and founder of Conferize told VentureBeat. “I thought that was crazy, considering the immense impact conferences can have on peoples’ personal and professional lives, and decided I couldn’t wait for anyone else to solve it.”

Conferize is a completely web-based aggregator of conferences. Through the free web portal, users can review conference agendas, organizer emails, original websites, social media feeds, photos, videos, available presentations and more. The website is currently in alpha, or its first round of testing.

Ask any person in public relations, and they’ll tell you finding conferences without knowing exactly what you want is a tough charge. Google searches are often noisy, and while many conference websites do give a lot of information, the ease of having it all in one place is Conferize’s strength. The website has a search of its own conference directory, where you can look for events, venues and users as well as tags on each conference so you can search by topic. Conferize also lets you friend other members to watch where they are headed.

Once you’ve found the conference you want, you can choose to show you are attending it, as well as follow the conference to watch for updates to the agenda and see any social media chatter about the event.

Other websites such as Lanyrd.com and Allconferences.com do offer conference discovery and a healthy listing of conferences happening in different countries. These websites, however, are a little more static. Lanyrd.com is the most active, but still points visitors away from its own website, toward the outlying websites created by conference organizers.

Conferize was founded in 2010 and is currently located in Copenhagen, Denmark with plans to move its headquarters to San Francisco, Calif. The company currently has four employees and is self-funded. So far it has raised $150,000.

Conferize is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2011 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

The funding included Lady Gaga manager Troy Cater, former Facebook monetization officer Tim Kendall, venture capitalist Fred Wilson and musical group The Roots. The company focused on New York-based venture capitalists and investors because it is based in New York and wanted to be able to regularly interact with their investors, it said.

“We’re based in New York. That’s the home of music. We wanted to have someone close to us,” Turntable.fm co-founder Billy Chasen said (pictured). “There are good investors too, like Fred Wilson, he really knows product.”

Turntable.fm creates a virtual chat room that lets a few users become disk jockeys for the room. They can play music from the Internet, ranging from classical music to hip hop to indie rock. If you play a popular song, you get points and become more popular among other Turntable.fm users. The company makes money by recommending songs for purchase on iTunes and other music services.

“We go to concerts together, we go to music parties, then the digital revolution came and everyone became isolated and alone,” Chasen said. “That hurt discovery. What we tried to do is bring that social value back to digital music.”

Turntable.fm now picks up around a million music streams every day, Chasen said. There are more than 300,000 “rooms” where individuals are playing songs, he said. Starting today, anyone in the United States can sign up and start playing without an invitation from a friend.

Chasen and his co-founder, Billy Goldstein, formerly worked on Stickybits, a bar code tagging program that was also funded. But Chasen and Goldstein decided to abandon that project after there wasn’t enough consumer interest in the product, he said.

Turntable also launched its iPhone app earlier today.

But Apple shelved the technology and fans have had to wait for a long time to find out what Apple will do with it. The 9to5 Mac blog now says it believes the Siri technology will be reborn in the upcoming iPhone 5 under the name “Assistant.” If this speculation is true, then Apple could have a very cool discovery technology that will help users find what they want more easily and quickly. And that should set Apple’s phones apart from its rivals yet again.

9to5 Mac said it obtained a screen shot that showed a test screen for a new iOS feature. The source of the information warned that the technology was still in development and might not be done in time for the iPhone 5.

Siri was developed by SRI, which has worked for years on virtual assistant technology. Dror Oren, who directs tech licensing at SRI International, said at our GamesBeat 2011 conference last week that SRI — a research institute spun off a long time ago from Stanford University — has a lot of other AI technology that should be able to solve the problem of discovery — where there are so many apps that users won’t be able to find the ones they really want.

Based on information from an unnamed source, the blog said Apple plans to integrate the Siri technology into the fall release of iOS 5, which is expected to be the version of the operating system that will run on the iPhone 5.

Siri takes advantage of another technology, Nuance’s speech-to-text voice recognition system. You can make a request by asking for a “nice Italian restaurant” and Siri will come back with recommendations. You can then ask Siri to book a particular restaurant at a certain time and it will do so.

Assistant will reportedly use information from a user’s device such as location, contact info, and music metadata to formulate a profile of the user that will help the AI technology make the best guess about what the user wants. The AI will improve its results over time as it learns more about what the user likes. If it works, then Apple will have some pretty cool sci-fi-like technology to show off once again.

See a video of Siri below.

If Heyzap helps game developers find users and helps users find new games amid the masses of offerings in mobile app stores, there could be some serious money in it for the San Francisco company.

“We think we can deliver Netflix-style personal recommendations that users will appreciate,” said Immad Akhund, co-founder of Heyzap, in an interview. “No one else is attacking game discovery in this way.”

Other companies such as Flurry offer game recommendations based on user purchases and other activity. But Akhund said Heyzap believes it can come up with more accurate recommendations because it takes into account how often you check in with a certain game. If you play that game seven times a week, Heyzap is more likely to suggest games that are similar to that title.

An iPhone update will come later. Heyzap uses collaborative filtering to predict which games you’ll want to play next. It takes into account your play history, including how often you play a title. If you have been checking into Millionaire City by Digital Chocolate, Heyzap will make a recommendation to you based on data from people with similar gaming tastes. The more you check in, the more accurate the recommendations. Heyzap also looks at what your friends are playing.

Heyzap, which focused previously on monetizing flash games on the web, launched its first mobile check-in app back in March, and its software development kit is now designed into 310 games. Heyzap has powered millions of game installations and Akhund said that it doubles the rate of app downloads a user makes.

Heyzap is also adding location information for its check-in data. Users can see what their friends are playing and, if the user grants permission, they can also see where people are playing games. That could be useful for people who want to play in tournaments or multiplayer sessions.

Heyzap has raised $3 million from investors including Union Square Ventures and Naval Ravikant of Angellist in 2010. It also raised $650,000 in 2009 from the same investors. It was founded in September 2008.

Getting your app discovered is still a lot harder to do on a mobile platform than it is on a social game platform such as Facebook. That’s not news to us, since VentureBeat has held two DiscoveryBeat conferences and identified dozens of ways to get apps noticed. But bright minds continue to focus on this problem, which is one of the toughest of the era of apps. Whoever solves it will wind up generating a ton of revenue.

In our most recent mobile-app discovery panel at last week’s GamesBeat 2011 conference in San Francisco, we tapped into the latest thinking on this tough issue.

Our panel (pictured right to left) included Jussi Laakkonen, CEO of Applifier; Immad Akhund, co-founder of Heyzap; Dror Oren, executive director of ventures, licensing, and strategic programs at SRI International; and Colin Digiaro, chief operating officer of MindJolt, which recently bought SGN. Eric Goldberg (far right), managing director of Crossover Technologies, was the moderator. Here’s what they said:

One of the best ways to get your game discovered is to have a great game. Great games spread by word of mouth with very little advertising or cross-promotion. Since more people play them, they spread more easily. And since people play them for a longer period of time, the friends of that player are more likely to notice that a person is obsessed with a game — and then they may try it out as well.

The mobile user still faces the problem of trying to find the equivalent of a single product on the shelf of a store in a city full of shopping malls. Discovery on the web was a tough problem until search engines such as Google came along, making it easier for people to find exactly what they wanted among millions upon millions of web sites. But the equivalent of search for apps isn’t nearly so advanced.

Goldberg said an informal survey he made showed that the most popular way to get a game discovered is by having it featured by the platform owner, such as Apple. But the odds of getting picked by Apple are so low that it’s like winning the lottery. The second most popular way was incentivized installs, which were banned as too manipulative by Apple. The third was word of mouth marketing, the fourth was free apps such as FreeAppADay.com; and the last was social networking.

Laakkonen noted that OpenFeint’s revenues for 2010 were just $282,500, even though the company (acquired by Japan’s Gree for $104 million; yes, that is 368 times revenue) had thousands of developers with more than 90 million users. OpenFeint delivered something like 6 million paid installs if all that revenue resulted from referrals from its customer base. It’s unclear how many free app installs OpenFeint referred, but it was likely a significant multiple of paid installs. Laakkonen said it was disheartening since the revenues were so low, but he noted that the traffic was pretty good.

By contrast, Tapjoy, which offered pay-per-install marketing until Apple shut it down (it has now moved to Android) said at MobileBeat 2011 that its services in mobile discovery have led to more than 141 million installs resulting from more than 25 billion impressions with users. That was for the six months ended June 30. Tapjoy was popular because it was an almost-scientific way to get a game properly promoted, in contrast to the scary and random techniques such as word-of-mouth and being featured by Apple.

That contrast between OpenFeint (which is more about social game development tools) and Tapjoy, which was much more directly focused on marketing apps, shows that while some companies talk a lot about enabling discovery, some platforms can do it much better than others.

Digiaro said that some lessons from Facebook discovery techniques can apply to mobile, such as an emphasis on sharing, badge rewards, and scores. Games that allow users to express themselves will also be shared more and spread in a more viral way.

“As we think about game development for mobile, we think about the same things we do on Facebook, like when do you prompt the user, how do you prompt, what do you say when you prompt,” Digiaro. “It’s a little bit of a different model, but we have had good success with our first game” from the newly acquired SGN mobile game business.

Laakkonen said the best way to spread a mobile game now is to take your phone and show a game to your friend — word of mouth.

“The question is how do I communicate to people who I care about this game,” Laakkonen said. “You need to be right there in the moment when someone is bored and you can show them something else.”

The good thing is mobile users try out a lot of games. The bad thing is attention spans are short. This isn’t to say that there are no good ways to get mobile apps discovered.

OpenFeint provides game feeds, or news about games, to its users. Applifier is providing a banner (pictured right) across key screens on games to try to cross-promote new games to users. The tough thing is that Applifier has maybe a ninth of the screen size to cross-promote apps on mobile in contrast to promoting apps on Facebook.

Getjar runs the second-largest app store behind Apple. The company makes money as game publishers pay extra to have their games highlighted on its site. GetJar recently started an experiment where it will give away millions of copies of high-end mobile games from Glu Mobile. Smule tries to get its music apps noticed by uploading videos to YouTube.

Flurry  tries to improve game discovery by understanding users through analytics. Flurry’s analytics software is used by thousands of developers whose apps are being used by tens of millions of users. So Flurry knows what’s on the users’ phones. It has added AppCircle  as a recommendation engine, analyzing the user’s taste in apps and then recommending apps that it thinks the user will like.

Akhund said that Heyzap’s game check-in app has driven 2 million installations of games at no cost to the game developers. The app works by letting users declare what game they’re playing to their mobile friends. Akhund says Heyzap is good at highlighting the most popular games at a given moment.

Oren said that SRI International is continuing to develop and spin off artificial intelligence and virtual assistant technologies that can help users discover apps that they want.

SRI, a renowned Silicon Valley research institute that spun out of Stanford University, developed AI technology that could serve as a virtual assistant for humans. It spun the division off as Siri (pictured right), which launched a free iPhone app in February 2010. The voice-recognition app allows you to ask for something, such as a restaurant reservation, and Siri finds the place for you and makes the reservation. Much like a good location-based service, Siri can help you discover things you didn’t know were there. Apple bought Siri last year and is reportedly using it to develop more new services.

If you apply AI to understanding what kind of games a user wants to play, you can solve discovery, Oren said. The AI can search for what the user wants and then return with the right information in a very efficient manner.

“Take Siri and amplify it 10 times more, adding stuff like the “if you like this” recommendation engine that Amazon.com uses,” Oren said. “You can use something like geo-location as a mobile discovery helper. These are things that are context-oriented that can be applied to the specific user.”

The hard thing is that to do AI discovery well, the AI has to know a lot about the user. Right now, the AI can’t get that kind of information easily. SRI is spinning off several companies in the next six months to 18 months that are doing discovery, Oren said, though the initial emphasis is not on mobile discovery.

Laakkonen said he was encouraged by the popularity of virtual goods on mobile. By their very nature, virtual goods are social. People win them or buy them and want to share them with their friends. By sharing virtual goods, they can share apps and thereby help those apps get discovered.

“That will drive a better communication system as developers see they make more money if people play together,” Laakkonen said. “The problem is, we lack the communications channels. Facebook Connect fell flat, as it hasn’t driven discovery.” Attempts to create communications channels include OpenFeint’s social sharing system, Apple’s Game Center (pictured right), Ngmoco’s upcoming Mobage mobile social network, and other similar things.

“I am optimistic those communications channels will evolve because game developers need them so badly,” Laakkonen said.

Digiaro said he thinks Facebook will improve what it has to offer on mobile phones in the future, and that will give game developers a much-needed better communications channel.

If the discovery issue gets solved, lots of dollars will follow. In Japan, DeNA has succeeded in selling a lot of virtual goods and promoting a lot of games to users; the result has been $1.3 billion in revenues and $650 million in pre-tax profit.

If consumers like the $4.99 a month service, then mobile carriers can use it to barge back into the mobile commerce business, taking back a role in selling consumer apps that platform owners such as Apple took away from them. Game makers, meanwhile, could use the service get their games noticed by a larger crowd of gamers.

“We want to solve the problem of the discoverability of games on Android,” said Zvi Levgoren, chief executive of New York-based Exent, in an interview.

Game discovery was one of the big issues we highlighted at last week’s GamesBeat 2011. With 18,000 games in the Android Market, it’s hard to get noticed. Since GameTanium highlights a smaller number of high-quality games, it makes life easier for consumers who are looking around to find better games.

Exent will make 75 games available for the subscription service on Android phones and it will sign up partners such as mobile carriers to launch the subscription service under their brand names. The white label service is similar to the GameTanium service that Exent provides for web-based games for providers such as Verizon.

The company unveiled the service at the start of the Casual Connect show in Seattle this week, where mobile, social and casual game companies are gathering for an annual event.

The “games on demand” service offers unlimited game play of some of the most popular games on Android. The titles include hits such as Farm Frenzy, Speedx 3D, and The Secret of Grisly Manor. Consumers can try it out for free for now.

Levgoren said the service will use a variety of merchandising techniques to highlight games. By year-end, he said the service will have more than 200 Android games. The GameTanium brand will be visible as an underlying brand, but partners such as mobile carriers can co-brand the service with their own names.

Exent currently provides 2,000 PC games on demand on the web. Its partners include Verizon, Mediacom, and T-Mobile. That service has more than 1 million subscribers and its average lifetime value of a customer is $100. Now with the extension to mobile, Exent hopes game developers will see more engagement, higher average revenue per user (ARPU), more brand loyalty and customer retention.

Exent is the PC games on demand provider to many of the world’s leading operators, including Verizon, Mediacom, and T-Mobile. With the launch of GameTanium Mobile, operators can extend their brand, games offering and subscriber engagement to new screens, increasing average revenue per user (ARPU) and strengthening brand loyalty and retention.  Jason Henderson, games and music services product manager at Verizon, said that his company has offered games through GameTanium on the web since 2005 and he looks forward to its mobile counterpart.

Mobile carriers such as Verizon Wireless used to be kingmakers in mobile game commerce. But Apple bypassed the carriers by setting up the App Store. Now, by licensing this Exent service, mobile carriers can get back in the game. GameTanium Mobile has built-in services such as programming expertise, carrier channels, brandable user interfaces, and a good billing system.

“We provide mobile operators with the type of service that lets them re-inject themselves into the mobile value chain,” said Levgoren.

Since the service is available as a subscription, the $4.99 a month pricing will let mobile game makers get a higher lifetime value from their games, even though the share of revenue they get from the subscription fee is lower at first. That’s because the subscribers are expected to pay for the subscriptions for a longer amount of time.

Google’s Android Market is in much need of better monetization. There are a lot of free apps that are monetized through advertising. But services such as GameTanium aim to reduce the hassle users have to go through to find good games. And GameTanium Mobile is designed to be similar to a subscription service like Netflix, Levgoren said.

Levgoren says that Android Market is mostly comprised of demos, spam, broken apps or boring games. That’s why GameTanium focuses on the best on Android. Daria Yurashanskaya, director of partner relations at Alawar, said that the mobile service could greatly increase the number of people playing the company’s Android games.

Other mobile platforms and devices, including tablets, are coming soon. Exent was founded in 1992. Its rivals include OnLive, Valve’s Steam, Big Fish Games, Oberon, Wild Tangent and Real Networks’ Game House.

Exent’s investors include Intel Capital, Cisco, Time Warner and Venture Capital Firms, such as NEA, Concord Ventures, Magma Venture Partners and Avansis Ventures.