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Posts Tagged ‘One Million’

OpenTable Seats 2 Million Diners Via Mobile Apps

In less than six months, online restaurant reservation site OpenTable has seated an additional one million diners via its mobile apps. In late October, OpenTable had reached the milestone of seating one million diners via its mobile offerings, a year after its iPhone app launched. It took only four and a half months to seat another million diners. Additionally, the site says that based on an estimation of a $50 average check per diner, OpenTable claims that diners using its mobile applications have generated more than $100 million in revenue for its restaurant partners.

OpenTable allows diners to find and book reservations at more than 11,000 different restaurants in multiple countries via mobile applications for the iPhone, Palm, Blackberry and Android. Other smartphone users can book reservations through OpenTable’s mobile-optimized Web site.

The company also reported strong earnings this afternoon, with Q4 2009 revenue coming in at $19.2 million, representing a a 32% increase over Q4 2008 revenue, which was $14.5 million. OpenTable’s total revenues for 2009 were $68.6 million, up 23% over 2008 revenues of $55.8 million. In 2009, OpenTable increased its number of participating restaurants in North America by 17%, with a total of 10,850 partners by the end of 2009. The number of international partners also increased, rising by 44% to 1501 participating establishments. Total number of diners in North American were 11.8 million, a 39% increase from Q4 2008.

Last year, OpenTable filed for a healthy IPO, despite recessionary conditions in the markets. OpenTable is a solid internet company that has a viable business model. On the restaurant side, OpenTable delivers reservation management software to establishments through a Web browser and collects monthly subscription revenues, similar in theory to the offerings that software companies like Salesforce sell to clients.

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It’s Not Easy Being Popular. 77 Percent Of Facebook Fan Pages Have Under 1,000 Fans

In this age of instant Internet celebrity, anyone can become famous for 15 seconds (to rework Andy Warhol’s oft-quoted maxim). But what does famous mean exactly when anyone can have a Facebook fan page—those public pages on Facebook set up by brands, media outlets, celebs, and wanna-be celebs. As it turns out, being popular is not as easy as it looks. A full 77 percent of Facebook fan pages have less than 1,000 fans, according to an upcoming report by Sysomos, a social media monitoring and analytics firm.

Once a fan page is set up (here’s ours), anyone on Facebook can become your “fan,” which is like following someone on Twitter in that it doesn’t require a reciprocal friendship. Sysomos analyzed 600,000 fan pages on Facebook and came up with the distribution curve in the chart above.  The vast bulk of fan pages have between 10 and 1,000 fans.  Only 4 percent have more than 10,000 fans, and less than 1/20th of a percent have more than a million fans.  It breaks down as follows:

• 95% of pages have more than 10 fans
• 65% of pages have more than 100 fans
• 23% of pages have more than 1,000 fans
• 4% of pages have more than 10,000 fans
• 0.76% of pages have more than 100,000 fans
• 0.047% of pages have more than one million fans (297 in total).

The Internet has long been defining celebrity down, and now we know by how much (if you accept that Facebook, the world’s fourth most popular Website with more than 300 million members, is as good a proxy as there is for the Web as a whole).  To be Facebook famous, all you need is a moderately popular fan page, with the biggest chunk of those pages (42 percent) having between 100 and 1,000 fans.  Another 30 percent have between 10 and 100 fans.

The categories Facebook fan pages fall into are remarkably evenly distributed.  Celebrities, products, stores, restaurants, bars and clubs, websites, music, organizations, and non profits each make up between 6.9 percent and 7.5 percent of fan pages by category.

So-called celebrities only make up 7 percent of all fan pages.   Of course, there are also some real celebrities (both dead and alive) who attract massive followings to their Facebook fan pages. Okay, there’s only 297 of them.  For instance, Michael Jackson has the biggest fan page with 10.4 million fans, and that’s not counting the probably-overlapping 4.7 million who are fans of R.I.P. Michael Jackson (We Miss You). The action movie star Vin Diesel clocks in at 7 million fans, which is more than Barack Obama (6.9 million) or Megan Fox (5 million). Yes, people on Facebook are idiots (Megan Fox is much hotter than Vin Diesel). In contrast, the most popular person on Twitter, Ashton Kutcher, has 4 million followers, and Obama’s Twitter account only has 2.75 million—although that’s without even trying.

The biggest product page is Facebook’s own page, with 5.8 million fans (hey, is this rigged?), followed by Starbucks with 5.1 million (the page is filled with wall comments such as, “MMMMM Pumpkin Spice Latte!”).  Sysomos drilled down further, looked at the 297 pages with more than one million fans, and properly categorized them—or at least tried.  It turns out many of them (39.2 percent) are uncharacterizable such as “Nights Out With Friends.”  But the rest can be broken down into music (16.7 percent), celebrities 16.0 (percent), products (11.9 percent), TV shows (8.5 percent), films (3.4 percent), and games (1.4 percent).

And that’s just like it is in the real world. If you have more than a million fans, chances are you are either a rock star or an actor.

And unlike on Twitter, where popularity is correlated with how many times you Tweet, Facebook fan pages tend to be updated only once every 16 days.  And that’s really the big difference between Facebook fans and Twitter followers. On Twitter, you follow someone because you want to hear what they have to say. On Facebook, you fan them just to show your support of affinity.  Too often, it’s a throwaway gesture.  But then, fame is fleeting.

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A review of location-based networks — and why they haven’t grown

Location based social networking keeps getting tremendous hype, but the question is whether it will live up to its potential.

The buzz continued this week when Loopt, one of the earliest location-based social networks, announced the acquisition of GraffitiGEO. Loopt recommends places to go based on your location, and informs you of friends around you. Several industry observers have raved about the potential of location-based social networks for businesses and advertising. “Context awareness is critical when you want to buy something, and advertisers get higher targeting based on our patterns and social contexts,” said Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Nadav Aharony in a recent BusinessWeek article.

Yet, Loopt’s user base of more than one million users is a little more than a rounding error when compared to more than 150 million Facebook users, for example. This begs the question, why aren’t location-based networks growing like they were expected to?

We decided to try out several of these apps ourselves and talk to the companies and several industry experts to find out. And what we found out is that there seem to be four factors holding these networks back: Users are hesitant to join unless their friends are already on board, businesses won’t join up without a critical mass of users, many phones still can’t handle the necessary technology, and there are privacy and behavioral concerns.

Users are slow to join up

I installed Loopt on my iPhone when it was launched more than a year ago. I stopped using it soon after, since none of my Facebook friends or Gmail contacts were on it. Now it has more than a million users, so last week I installed it again — along with several other apps — but I didn’t have much luck this time either. The closest I came to a successful experience was with another mobile networking application, Foursquare, where I was able to find a few friends — most of whom haven’t yet responded to my invites. I’m inclined to think it’s not because they don’t like me but because they signed up for the service and never checked in again.

My original thought was that most users of such networks belong to a different demographic — younger and hipper than I am. So I decided to ask a few hipper, younger folks I know whether they were active with any location-based social network. Of those who responded, all but one said they’d never used any of these networks. “It would be great to have a mobile application that can tell me whether some of my friends are at a local bar so that I can join them,” said one of them, Joy Xi, 22 and a recent Harvard graduate, who is traveling around the world before she starts working with a strategy consulting firm in New York City. But she hadn’t heard of any of the location-based networks I mentioned to her, and though she was excited to hear some of the “perks” of joining such a network, she didn’t sound too tempted to join one unless her friends were already on board.

The one “hip, young” person I talked to who had used a location-based social network before, on the other hand, seemed to have very specific interests that made the service valuable to her. She’s Courtney Skay, second year MBA student at MIT Sloan. She uses Foursquare and is already “mayor” of at least three places (with Foursquare’s service, if you check into a location more often than anyone else, you get the mayoral rights to that spot). Courtney loves to eat out and even maintains a personal blog on food. “I often (use Foursquare to) see where my friends eat, and then check their reviews to decide whether I should go there as well,” she said.

So is there any location-based social network that can solve this chicken-and-egg problem? Here are some of the key players (scroll down for more screen shots of the various apps):

Foursquare, founded by Dennis Crowley, the winner of Top 35 Innovators Under 35 award by MIT Technology Review magazine, starts with a home page where you can see places of interest in your neighborhood. So even if you don’t have any friends on the network, you still have something useful to start with. Contrast this with Loopt, which starts with a map of friends. Loopt does allow you to check into a place of interest, but the feature seems to be more of an afterthought. Foursquare also allows engaging game mechanics — the right to be mayor of a place you especially like, for example.

Going takes things a step further, but lacks Foursquare’s game mechanism. In addition to checking in places, it lets you to look for cool events happening near your location. “We approach the whole social life area, not just location.”, says Roy Rodenstein, MIT Media Lab graduate and co-founder of Going. Going has its own ticketing engine, maintains guests lists for events, and allows comments on photos to show if they are cool or not. The company says it has nearly a million users and will soon have broader AOL community contributing as well.

Gowalla, unlike Foursquare, does not let you “check in” unless you are actually at the place that matches the coordinates you’re searching — to keep people honest. “We do not limit usability on a city-by-city basis like Foursquare. We want our users to share the places they visit, regardless of where they go — be it a restaurant, a store, a national park or a sporting event,” said Josh Williams, the CEO of Alamofire, the owner company of Gowalla. Gowalla also supports trips, such as the Austin Bar Hop and time-limited events, such as a U2 concert.

Whrrl, created by Pelago, and the first app to be accepted into Kleiner Perkins’ iFund program, claims that its mission is different from most other location-based social networks. Whrrl lets users share their lives in the form of “stories” around places and people through pictures and text. “Users can join together and collaborate to tell a story, which makes the Whrrl story a form of participatory media,” says Heather Meeker of Pelago.

Aloqa, Geodelic, and Where take yet another approach to solving the chicken and egg problem. They look more like portals for several location-based services. Where, for example, if primarily focused on local search, while social features are secondary, says Lacy Garcia of Ulocate, creator of Where. Aloqa offers a search and discovery service for mobile phones that proactively notifies users of friends and favorites close by. It also offers APIs for third parties to create their own channels, which users can join based on their preferences. For example, I can add J. P. Licks to my channels, and I can then find out where the closest J.P. Licks is to my location. The home screen would show me different channels that I can drill down into to see which places are close by. Geodelic (below right) offers similar capabilities.

I see three effective strategies in play to tackle the critical mass  problem:

Strategy 1: Build apps that can offer value on their own (stand alone) so that they don’t face chicken and egg problem in the first place. Aloqa, Geodelic, and Where are taking this tack. These applications should be able to draw in an audience purely on the basis of their location data. Once they get wider audience, they can focus more on the social element to make those apps more addictive.

Strategy 2: Introduce virality and game mechanics so that friends can multiply quicker. Though the idea of a stand alone app is appealing, it can also be severely limiting. Foursquare, Going, Gowalla are doing a good job of not only starting with a home page that provides value even without friends (so can act as a “stand alone” app), but also of using virality of social connections. Foursquare, in particular, goes even further by offering engaging gaming mechanics. I think they have a brilliant strategy, and are the company to watch in the space.

Strategy 3: Provide apps on several platforms and carriers etc. to widen the reach and pull in more users. To be sure, this is easier said that done! Foursquare and a few others lack platform access: they are available only on limited phones. If an app is available only on the iPhone, what is the likelihood that you’ll find your friends on that network? Loopt, meanwhile, has a lead here because it has invested significant time to make sure its application is available on several carriers, including partnerships with Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel. Loopt was very early to get to market and to start building these relationships, and deserves credit for that. This puts them at a scale advantage. Further scale and network effects can be leveraged by partnering up with players such as Facebook, MySpace, or mobile operators, who have a huge existing base of users, each of whom already has a large address book that will get more location-aware with time. Google’s location-aware mobile app Google Latitude is the elephant in the room here. It has the advantage of Google’s large user base and brand name but doesn’t seem to be focusing so much on social aspects. Instead, it seems poised to commoditize on “Who is nearby” and location technology. And that brings us to the question of what business models are most likely to drive success.

Partnering businesses need better incentives

Getting users on board is hard. But there’s no point in even trying to get users if you can’t get businesses involved (restaurants, clubs, bookstores and many other locations who could benefit from some extra foot traffic). By bringing businesses on board, you can offer incentives to users, and therefore make it more likely that users will join your network. That is why location based apps need to get creative in their business models if they want to succeed in the long term. Foursquare seems to be working on the kind of partnerships that will be mutually beneficial to users and businesses. For example, a local Starbucks might offer you a free coffee if you are “mayor” for the week. However, I think the business models and logistics so far haven’t really been worked out. Consider the following two opportunities:

Making a location app the equivalent of a Safeway Club Card. Currently several grocery stores offer membership cards to track user purchasing patterns so that they can offer them custom recommendations and also make purchase and operations decisions that fit with buying behavior. Right now, though, there’s no way for a Pizza Hut to track how many times you go there and what you buy. With a proper arrangement and product enhancements, location based apps can easily provide such statistics to restaurants. For example, Going can sell users’ check-in information to restaurants and, in turn, give free or cheap offers to users who choose to participate. This will also help restaurants manage their supply chain more efficiently.

Making timely offers. Imagine being in a vicinity of a movie theater or Fenway Park. Let’s say the movie theater has some unsold seats for an upcoming movie. It can send discount ticket offers to anyone in the vicinity who’s signed up for such service. My guess is that several people who are shy about disclosing their location today will probably sign up for such incentives. It’s a clear win-win situation for local businesses and consumers.

The underlying technology is only just maturing

A few years ago, finding the location of a mobile phone was extremely challenging. The technologies you need to determine location are complicated; some carriers block developers from determining location, and in many cases find-location transactions can cost from 3 to 6 cents, according to Laura Diaz, Partner Relations Manager at NAVTEQ. This makes location apps cost prohibitive and technically challenging for most the developers. Apple’s iPhone and, to a large extent, Google are helping change that. See the figure below from Eric Carr, VP of Location Technologies at Loopt, for a comparison of technologies.

Apple, for example, has not only given developers free use of location based APIs but has also provided a layer of abstraction so that developers don’t have to worry about the intricacies underlying the technology. Apple’s API, with the help of Skyhook Wireless, gets the best and fastest location information using one of the several methods available. Google on the other hand collects user generated data to build its network base station database that can then be used to find the location of a mobile user. With its Android mobile operating system, Google is making further progress in commoditizing location information. This explains why so many location-based apps are just now coming to market.

Even as location technology is becoming cheaper and easier, it still remains a challenge for a lot of existing and older phones, and several international markets. “Desktop based” social networks, such as Facebook and MySpace, had — to a large extent — no such problem, and were therefore able to gain scale quickly. If location-based networks want to tackle the scale problem, they’ll have to invest more resources. Going, for example, provides a WAP-based interface that can work with most cell phones with browsers. Loopt spends considerable resources on making sure its app works on several platforms. However, it’s only a matter of time before most phones become “smart”, and location based technology becomes a commodity.

Users not keen on being tracked

One final reason location-based networks might be having a hard time getting more users is that it’s hard to change user behavior. Many users are either not very comfortable with disclosing their whereabouts, or perhaps mistakenly think that the app is tracking them all the time (this is usually not possible unless you agree to give explicit control to the application). Perception of location-based privacy needs to change for these apps to take off. A few years ago, I thought it was totally insane to leave messages to your friend on public walls on Facebook, for example. Now it’s become a norm. I wouldn’t be surprised if a similar transition happens in location-based apps. However, I think the industry needs to change the general perception and fear among users and publicize incentives — such as the chance of a free coffee at a local Starbucks.

Matthaus Krzykowski contributed to this story.

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LinkedIn Hits 50 Million Users; Still a Roach Motel

One million new people signed up for LinkedIn accounts already this month, taking the professional social network past the 50 million user mark. LinkedIn has some of the most valuable user data in all of social networking, not just because its members are disproportionately wealthy, but because the site is one of the only places you can find a person’s occupational information and history.

“What do you do for a living” is one of the most potent questions a person can be asked and online that means LinkedIn. Unfortunately, in this era of data portability and connected social networks, LinkedIn isn’t playing very nicely.

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Every time I see a new social application online I think “it sure would be nice if a person’s job title and employer were displayed along side their profile on this service.” Where is that information? LinkedIn! Who won’t let startups access that info? LinkedIn!

Programmatic access to LinkedIn data is reserved for a very select few high-profile API partners. The company appears to operate under the assumption that only heavyweight partners could move the needle for its bottom line, not a thriving ecosystem of independent innovators. Hardly surprising for a company that spends so much of its time in public talking about how wealthy its users are.

FriendFeed used to include updates to your LinkedIn profile in the activity streams it displayed. That was great, but there was nothing official going on – FriendFeed was scraping LinkedIn. When LinkedIn added a layer of obfuscation over its HTML, FriendFeed took the hint and stopped, the now Facebook-owned company says.

Why not make LinkedIn all the more valuable by making it the currency that social sites all around the web make us of? Would that not drive all the more people to LinkedIn itself, to fill out their profiles there? It’s possible that LinkedIn has done a serious analysis of the benefits of a developer ecosystem vs. very limited partnerships and come to the conclusion that it has – but it still seems like a real shame.

Imagine the innovation that could be made possible by developer access to LinkedIn!

Congratulations to LinkedIn for hitting 50 million users. Now please open up the data! Otherwise we’ll have to cheer for a more open competitor to challenge your dominance in this market.

Discuss

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Foursquare’s Impressive Roster Of Angels Continue To Be Revealed. Latest: Kevin Rose

There was a lot of action surrounding the first seed round of funding for Foursquare, the location-based social network. From what we’ve heard, there were a number of investors upset that they couldn’t get in on the round, which was relatively small at $1.35 million. But what we didn’t know was everyone who was involved in the round, but more names continue to come out.

While Foursquare eventually disclosed that the main investors were Union Square Ventures and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, there were a set of individual angel investors that the company wouldn’t talk about. Last week, it was revealed that one of those investors was Twitter creator Jack Dorsey. Another is Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley’s former partner at his last startup Dodgeball, Alex Rainert. Both of those are confirmed. Ron Conway and Delicious founder Joshua Schachter are believed to have participated as well. And now a fifth has just outed themselves: Digg founder Kevin Rose.

Rose revealed his investment during his presentation at FOWA in London. (Which itself is rather interesting, titled “9 Ways To Take Your Site From One To One Million Users” — kind of like the post he did for us, 10 Ways To Increase Your Twitter Followers.)

Foursquare is proving to have quite an impressive roster of investors. Meanwhile, the service may or may not have gotten a shout-out in The Simpsons the other day. The key to the scene is that the episode was apparently heavy with social network references, such as Twitter and Facebook. Even though they do appear to be talking about the actual game of four square, it may be a sly reference. Those chattering about it on Twitter seem convinced.

[photo: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid]

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EchoSign Reaches One Million Users For E-Signatures

EchoSign, the web-based electronic signatures and signature automation service, has surpassed one million users. The startup, which launched back in 2006, has also helped sign and close more than $200,000,000 worth of contracts in one month.

EchoSign’s electronic signature service lets you append digital signatures to contracts and other business documents, store them in digital form, and manage those documents without printing them out and faxing them. The startup has a freemium model, where the you can use a basic service for free but pay anywhere from $14.95 to $300 per month for a subscription service that includes extra features such as PDF encryption and password protections.

EchoSign’s CEO and co-founder Jason Lemkin says that the electronic signature movement experienced momentum as more businesses adopted SaaS and cloud computing applications. For example, EchoSign has gained significant popularity on Salesforce’s App Exchange. EchoSign is also integrated with web-based productivity suite Zoho.

To date, EchoSign has raised $8.5 million in funding. The startup faces competition from DocuSign and VeriSign.

EchoSign: The Way the Web Signs from FromEchoSign on Vimeo.

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As Other Real-Time Search Engines Fizzle, OneRiot Gets Some Early Traction

While there have been many real-time search engine launches over the past few months (Scoopler, Topsy, Collecta, CrowdEye), most of them so far have fizzled (see Google Website Trends chart above). After an initial burst of curiosity, interest tends to dive. One exception, however, is OneRiot, which appears to be gaining some early traction in the real-time search race.

This race has just begun, of course, and other real-time search startups are chasing hard. But OneRiot is already serving up results for more than one million search queries a day (see chart below). This would be a rounding error for any major search engine, but at least it is going in the right direction. Its investors think so. They ponied up another $7 million in a new round at the end of last month

OneRiot started to be noticed when it added link search from Twitter last May. But its search volume didn’t really take off until it launched its API, allowing other sites to tap into its real-time search and add it as a feature to their own Web app or site. OneRiot has 40 API partners, including Microsoft (sometimes bundled with IE)., browser add-ons Yoono and Shareaholic, and desktop apps like Nambu and EventBox.

All of these API partnerships add up. In fact, about 80 percent of OneRiot’s searches are coming through its APIs rather than directly on its site. OneRiot is building up market share by offering real-time search to others. (Rival Collecta is preparing to do the same thing by offering its own APIs soon). Search is a volume game, where the more search queries you can process, the better your results become. So OneRiot wants to power as many real-time searches as possible.

To the extent that OneRiot can familiarize people with the concept of real-time search in as many places as possible, that’s a good thing. But ultimately it needs to drive people back to OneRiot.com where it can control the entire experience (and the cash).

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Lazyfeed Goes Live For Everyone

We’ve been seeing a lot of projects and startups trying to speed up RSS feeds. Today, a service is launching that addresses some of the issues with a different user-interface. Lazyfeed, the realtime interest feed reader that launched last month in private beta at our Real-Time Crunchup, is opening up publicly today for anyone who wants to sign up.

Instead of signing up for a long list of blogs and news feeds, all you have to do on Lazyfeed is type in a topic and Lazyfeed will show you the most recent posts and articles with that tag from the one million blogs that it now indexes. (This number is up from 100,000 blogs at launch). Headlines and excerpts containing that tag appear in the main window, and if you want to follow that topic, you can save the tag in a column on the left. As you save more tags, your interests appear as a list, which reorder themselves according to the latest posts.

So instead of a list of blogs, you have a list of interests, and Lazyfeed goes out and discovers content for you around those interests. For any given tag you put unto the search bar at the top, it also supplies you with related tags just underneath that you can click on to explore further. If you don’t like a particular blog, you can remove it from your results. Another new feature since the private beta launch is that you can now share any post on Twitter, Facebook, or email.

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