Connie Loizos
Earlier this year, we started Behind the Screens to get to know some of the many people creating most of the value at Silicon Valley startups. In the past, we’ve featured the lead developer of the popular Zynga game “Mafia Wars.” We’ve also interviewed the media engineer of Automattic, best known for its open-source blogging […]
It’s unsurprising that John Doerr was a top-ranked sales executive at Intel before joining Kleiner Perkins. The trained electrical engineer and Harvard MBA sells nearly every Kleiner investment like his life depends on it. Yesterday was no exception. At KPs’ iFund event, in which the firm announced it had raised an additional $100 million to […]
Think the U.S. is Twitter crazy? Turns out the rest of the world is even more so. Indeed, according to a study released earlier today by the Paris-based consultancy Semiocast, most of those tweeting — 70 percent, says Semiocast — live outside the U.S. Semiocast says it drew its conclusion after analyzing 13.5 million tweets […]
It doesn’t overlook Central Park, but a penthouse apartment atop the old St. George Hotel in Brooklyn Heights wouldn’t be too bad, either, and now it can be yours, early Facebook/LinkedIn/Zynga employee, for $2.5 million. All you need is a whole lot more money than that for a full-scale renovation. (See pictures here.) You’d enjoy […]
You may not know ThreatMetrix, but plenty of companies are already well-acquainted with what it does and how it can help them, from popular social networks and dating sites to retailers to financial services companies, including peHUB parent Thomson Reuters.
Here’s why: Los Gatos, Calif.-based ThreatMetrix stops online fraud by “fingerprinting” the devices used to commit it, and according to some -- including the folks at PayPal and Gartner Group security analyst Avivah Litan -- ThreatMetrix appears to be doing it better than its competitors.
The 36-person startup is just getting started, says 55-year-old CEO Reed Tausing, who joined the company the data privacy company Vormetric and was the CEO and fifth employee of now publicly traded Callidus Software. We talked for a bit this morning. Read our conversation after the jump...
In recent weeks, three class action lawsuit have sprung up around the user-generated reviews site Yelp, whose sales reps are being accused of trying to strong-arm small businesses into advertising at the site. Not doing so, say these businesses, caused positive user reviews to get buried under piles of less flattering critiques, if not to […]
Living in San Francisco and writing about Silicon Valley, it's easy to forget that not everyone in the country is obsessed with spanking new technologies, but a new Nielsen report on smartphone adoption underscores that point: as of right now, just 21 percent of American wireless subscribers are using an iPhone, Blackberry, Droid, or other smartphone.
That's changing quickly. At the end of 2008, just 14 percent of wireless subscribers in the U.S. were using smartphones; Nielsen anticipates that by some time next year, that figure will jump to north of 50 percent, given that 45 percent of respondents to one of its surveys said their next phone will be a smartphone. (This assumes that those respondents are unlike my mom and dad, who've
A few days ago, we talked with the mayor of Peoria, Ilinois about his city's efforts to persuade Google to build its ultra-high speed broadband network in its backyard.
The hundreds of municipalities that are vying to become a test bed for Google’s ultra-high speed broadband network had until week's end to make their case to the search giant. In addition to some other low-key efforts, Peoria hoped that flying a banner over the Googleplex in Mountain View at lunchtime on Friday might just draw the right amount of attention to its town.
It's too soon to say whether the effort -- which involved an additional plane to film the first -- will pay off; Google has until the end of the year to make a decision. Given how hard Googlers tend to work, it's also hard to know how many of them actually spied the banner.
Either way, if you've ever wondered what Google's sprawling campus look like from 3,000 feet in the air, take a look after the jump:
If there’s one point that Kwedit founder Danny Shader would like to communicate above all else, it is that his one year-old company -- which already has been excoriated by Stephen Colbert and favorably reviewed in the NYT -- is a serious operation with two potentially lucrative ways to change how we pay for things.
Shader's message may be hard to stick. Kwedit, which went live on February 3, has received attention mostly for one aspect of its business: Kwedit Promises. The feature allows anyone over age 13 to pay for digital goods online by extending them small amounts of credit. Later, using the company's Kwedit Direct system, he or she can pay back what was borrowed using Mom or Dad's credit card; by sending in cash through a Kwedit-supplied envelope; or by printing up a barcode that can be scanned at a nearby 7-Eleven, which accepts cash payments, then alerts Kwedit that a particular “promise” has been kept.
Municipalities vying to become a test bed for Google’s ultra-high speed broadband network have until tomorrow to provide information about their communities to the search giant. After that, it begins the process of deciding where to build. With hundreds of cities in the running, many are pulling out all the stops to endear themselves to […]