What you need to know

Distimo, an app store analytics provider,  took a look at the differences between the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace and Windows Marketplace for Mobile (6.x). They found out that games are much more  popular on the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace than they were on the Windows Marketplace for Mobile (6.x). The games range in price from from $2.99 – $6.99.

Angry Birds Day will be on Saturday, December 11th. There is some speculation that at the Angry Birds game for Windows Phone 7 will be announced on Angry Birds Day, or that a console version of the game will be announced.

Stack Overflow , a questions and answers website, crossed the 10 million unique visits per month mark.  Stack Overflow has Q&A's for a variety of different communities. They are currently covering 34 different sites.

Gather , a social news site, raised $2.4 million. The company is looking to move its core business, and shifting focus to become an demand platform for other publishers. Gather currently allows writers to submit content in exchange for ad revenue.

Socialwise has raised $3.4 million. The company makes pre-paid credit cards for  teen spenders. The cards have increased parental control.



Google launched a new addition to the Google App's lineup, Google Finance. The new app features Portfolios, stock charts, and up-to-the-second market news.

Zappli, the maker of the myShopanion social shopping app, raised a $500,000. This was the seed round of funding.

 
The One on One Marketing marketing company raised an undisclosed amount for sales leads for higher education. The company creates sales leads, which are delivered primarily through ClassesandCareers.com.

Art.sy, a fine art discovery site, raised  $1.25 million. The list of prominent  angel investors in this round includes Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Jack Dorsey, and Wendi Murdoch, the wife of Rupert Murdoch.

ZipList,  an online grocery list manager, raised over $2 million. Investors include Geoffrey Allen, CEO and founder of ZipList; Steven Murray, general partner at SoftBank Capital; and Janet Balis, EVP of sales and marketing at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.

Four reality-check tips for startups

Entrepreneurs need to see clearly through the passion

 Entrepreneurs often share similar traits.  We are very focused on our ideas and are aggressive in implementing them.  In September, The New York Times printed a piece that truly resonated with me as an entrepreneur.  The article, entitled, “Just Manic Enough: Seeking Perfect Entrepreneurs,” echoed this same sentiment and more. 

Entrepreneurs “are common in certain manias, though in milder forms and harnessed in ways that are hugely productive. Instead of recklessness, the entrepreneur loves risk. Instead of delusions, the entrepreneur imagines a product that sounds so compelling that it inspires people to bet their careers, or a lot of money, on something that doesn’t exist and may never sell," according to The New York Times. In other words, sometimes we get so caught up in our passion, and we’re so manic that we cannot see our own missteps along the way.
I’ve learned many lessons throughout my career – important lessons -- and some that have been difficult to swallow.  But it’s these lessons that allow me to take a step back and reflect on where my business is headed, and that I encourage fellow entrepreneurs to take into consideration in their ventures:
It's okay to ask for help. Seek advice and input from experts and mentors - folks who are entrepreneurs but also who have other relevant expertise.  Consider formalizing these relationships with a Board of Advisors.  Meet with this group regularly and not just when you are in a crisis.  Their experience and guidance will allow you to make sound decisions that could have a long-term impact on your success.
Spending money to make money. What can wait?  Watch expenses like a hawk, especially in the early days.  Avoid costly physical space, long-term contracts and adding permanent headcount wherever possible.  Every dollar counts when you’re trying to build a business.  Be sure you’re spending money in the areas that will truly help your company grow.
Stuck in business polygamy? Time to make a choice.  It is very hard to start a successful business when you have another full-time job, allowing you to focus on the new venture only on nights and weekends.  Everyone has a different risk profile, but at some point, you have to give up security and focus on the new business, or it likely won't work.  This is critical.  If you’re really going to make your new venture work, you’ve got to commit to it 100 percent.
Don’t be afraid to make changes to your original plan.  Entrepreneurs quickly discover that more often than not, things won’t go according to plan. Make it a point to review your progress objectively on a regular basis and make adjustments to your plan as you see fit.  You had the idea and the creative instinct.  Trust your “gut” and to put the idea into action.
Entrepreneurs, while passionate and risk tolerant, are also creative problem solvers.  Next time you find yourself in a pinch, take it from someone who’s been in your shoes; these tips will help you to stay on track and ensure you’re making the decisions that are best for your organization.

 

ComScore ranks top 50 Web properties for Oct.

Humor, politics, and gambling apparently seized Web users' attention in October

 

So if you can combine all three and throw in a Big Mac (that reference will be explained below), you should be able to harness the whole Internet community in one fell swoop.
ComScore released its ranking of the top 50 Web properties for October on Monday, revealing some interesting Internet trends for the month.
Humor websites led the rankings with 60 million users visiting a humor-related site in the month of October, which is up 25% from September, making it the second fastest growing category (next to online gambling sites…go figure).  Comedy Central took the largest share of users with 10.8 million visitors, a 26% increase from September with the much anticipated “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” in Washington DC, led by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.  Break.com came in second with 7.5 million visitors, up 65% from September.
The rankings also reveal that people really do care about politics.  American political news sites saw a jump in October with the impending Midterm elections, drawing 27.4 million unique monthly visitors, which is up 12% from September.  CNN Politics took the bulk of those users with 7.8 million uniques, up 3% from September, followed by PoliticsDaily with 5.1 million uniques (up 10% from September), and RealClearPolitics.com with 3.1 million uniques (up 79%).  BarackObama.com saw a massive increase in uniques, jumping 221% with 2.1 million uniques.
And while those people were reading up on propositions and candidates, they were also waging bets against their mortgages on online gambling sites.  With the World Series of Poker in full gear in October, online gambling sites saw a sweeping influx of users, up 114% from September with 32 million uniques, making it the highest growing category for the second month in a row.  FullTiltPoker took the lead with 4.7 million users, followed by PokerStars with 2.5 million users.

And, evidently, while those people were checking up on their local candidates for governor and  awayall their fine flatware, they were also scarfing down Big Macs.  No, not really (I mean, there may have been a few who did all of this at once, but it’s highly unlikely).  McDonalds was among the top ten highest gaining websites in October, leaping 91% to 6.5 million visitors in October, compared to September 3.4 million visitors.  Other top gaining websites included PartCity.com, which skyrocketed in October to 6.3 million users from 2.8 million in September.
Overall, the top 50 Web properties were led by Google sites, with over 180 million visitors, followed by Yahoo sites with 179.6 million visitors, and Microsoft sites with 170.6 million visitors.  Facebook took the number four spot with 151.1 million visitors, for the first time passing the 150 million monthly visitor mark.  AOL came in at number five with 110 million visitors, Amazon came in at number 11, eBay took the number 16 slot, and Demand Media came in at number 17.  Twitter took the 46 slot with 25.1 million visitors.
In terms of ad focus rankings, the Google Ad Network led the category with a reach of 93.4% of online Americans, followed by Yahoo Network Plus with an 86.3% reach, and AOL Advertising with a reach of 86.2%.

 

General Motors shares jump on Wall Street return

General Motors stock is rising sharply as the icon of American manufacturing returns to life as a publicly traded company.
The stock jumped from the initial public offering price of $33 to $35.80 shortly after GM Chief Executive Dan Akerson rang the opening bell Thursday on the New York Stock Exchange.
The trading caps a remarkable turnaround for the company, which left bankruptcy 16 months ago with the help of a $50 billion government bailout.
The U.S. government and GM's other owners sold 478 million common shares to investors for $15.8 billion. The share price needs to rise above $50 for the government to get all its bailout money back. That could take a couple of years.

Who's God: Facebook or Google?

Which omnipotent, omnipresent, digital deity will reign supreme? Google has all of your private data (searches, email) and Facebook has your public data (your profile, your friends.)
With the upcoming launch of its new homepage, and its ambition to connect the world with the "continuous stream of information," Facebook is sure sounding a lot like Google, whose mission is to organize the world's information, and who was once referred to as "God," by New York Times writer Thomas Friedman in his column, "Is Google God?"
These days, you might ask yourself: Is Facebook God?
After all, Facebook is becoming a large database of information, and it's becoming so by taking a lot of notes from Twitter's real-time features and FriendFeed's aggregated sharing features.
Next week, Facebook plans to launch a new homepage, with a big emphasis on real-time streams and sharing.
Besides the new home page, which is more organized to allow people to share and receive real-time streams, Facebook has created new profiles for public figures and organizations.
From Zuckerberg's post: "Once called Pages, these new profiles will now begin looking and functioning just like user profiles. Just as you connect with friends on Facebook, you can now connect and communicate with celebrities, musicians, politicians and organizations. These folks will now be able to share status updates, videos, photos or anything else they want, in the same way your friends can already. You'll be able to keep up with all of their activity in your News Feed. This means that you can find out that Oprah is reading a book backstage before a show, CNN posted a breaking story or U2 is working on a new song, just as you would see that your friend uploaded new photos from her trip to Europe."
The Facebook evolution
Given the launch and Zuckerberg's recent blog post, I thought it was a good time to look back on just how Facebook evolved, since I first met with Mark Zuckerberg at the time he was about 21/22, and started following Facebook.
Back in 2006, when I was a columnist at MarketWatch, I predicted that social networks would be a great way to distribute news. I certainly wasn't alone. Back then Facebook was already testing out ways publishers could easily share their news with the Facebook community, and it launched "news feed," which I was a big fan of. At the time, I said that Facebook's news feed was turning it into the equivalent of a tabloid, except that the news being consumed wasn't about our favorite celebrities, but about ourselves. 
As I said at the time, "We live in an age where what we do, and who we are, is the news. What's the difference in how people get it?" Fast forward, and this statement is truer than ever.
I just didn't account for a tiny unknown company called Twitter. 
Now we can see how information, and importantly news can be distributed in lightning speed thanks to Twitter, which captures the ambient noise... err news from CNN, and information from me, to celebrities, like Britney Spears with 200k-plus followers, to politicians to television shows. Posting links to stories has become a dominant form of sharing information. Then FriendFeed came along last year, and showed us that automating the process of sharing every activity on the Web was even smarter and more efficient.
Clearly Facebook, which has tried to buy Twitter, has been taking notes closely, as you can see from the new homepage.
Zuckerberg wrote a nice update on his blog regarding Facebook's evolution, and the changes taking place in 2009. At the start, in 2004, Facebook was a directory for Harvard students. Over time, people could share photos, videos, etc. By 2006, Facebook allowed the activity to be shared in a news feed. In 2007, Facebook "popularized the Social Graph," wrote Zuckerberg. "The idea is that these connections—whether friendships, affiliations or interests—exist already in the real world, and all we're trying to do is map them out," he wrote.
In 2008, Facebook redesigned a person's "wall"  so others could quickly understand what's happening with that person. The wall "was a big step in our evolution because it moved Facebook in the direction of helping people share immediate experiences with one another: a thought, a status, a photo, a note, a feeling," wrote Zuckerberg. 
As Facebook continues to bring people together - it has 175 million members today, quite a leap from under 10 million in 2006 - you can see its mission to collect the world's information and make it accessible.
"As people share more, the timeline gets filled in more and more with what is happening with everything you're connected to," wrote Zuckerberg. "The pace of updates accelerates. This creates a continuous stream of information that delivers a deeper understanding for everyone participating in it. As this happens, people will no longer come to Facebook to consume a particular piece or type of content, but to consume and participate in the stream itself."
It's a grand statement, for sure. Hmm.
And, like I said above, it sounds a lot like Google's mission statement to organize the world's information. But Facebook seems to be more intimately connected with the individual.
So, who's God now? 

Facebook worth between $10-$15 billion? Microsoft may think so

The value of a premiere social networking site became clearer this week after a media report said Microsoft has held talks with Facebook about investing between $300 million and $500 million for as much as a 5% stake in the startup. That would value Facebook at up to $10 billion, although CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his advisers may hold out for a valuation as high as $15 billion, according to the report on WSJ.com. 

As lofty as that valuation range is, it's in the same ballpark as the roughly $12 billion that News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch thought his MySpace unit was worth when the media mogul reportedly offered to swap it for a 25% stake in Yahoo earlier this year.   That makes the $580 million News Corp. paid for MySpace in 2005 a steal.

Facebook's investors may soon get their own home run valuation. While MySpace is still larger as measured by unique users and page views, Facebook is growing faster and has gained a lot of momentum after opening up its platform to application developers.
The WSJ.com reported that Google might also be interested in Facebook. If true, it wouldn't be the first time it's competed with Microsoft for a hot Internet property. Microsoft paid $6 billion for Web ad firm aQuantive earlier this year after losing a $3.1 billion bidding war for DoubleClick to Google. Microsoft and Facebook -- both founded by Harvard drop-outs -- have an existing agreement under which Microsoft is paying around $200 million over three years to place ads on Facebook's site.

All this illustrates the rich valuations investors are applying to Web sites that have no profits but are parlaying user-generated content into explosive growth.
The fun question now is whether Zuckerberg will soon join Microsoft's Bill Gates as a dropout-turned-billionaire tech entrepreneur.

Online ad revenues hit record high

A report finds that online ad revenue for Q3 2010 is up 17% from last year

In the last couple of weeks, reports have shown that the economy has grown by 2% this year and consumer spending is up by 2.6%. ComScore announced last week that the online display market saw a 22% increase in ad impressions in Q3 2010, compared to the same time last year. And the good news keeps getting better (knock on wood): IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) and PwC US announced Wednesday that Internet advertising revenues hit $6.4 billion in Q3 2010, representing the highest quarterly result ever for the online advertising industry.

The record represents a 17% increase since Q3 2009, when Internet ad revenues that had been steadily rising since 2002 suddenly bottomed out due to the economic recession.

“Advertisers are shifting more of their brand messaging online, accounting for this welcome surge in a difficult economy,” said David Silverman, a partner at PwC, in a prepared statement. “This trend reflects the accelerating shift in consumer behavior towards the internet and away from traditional media.”

While the announcement comes as a big leap from 2009, it falls in with a steady upward trajectory for the whole of 2010. Last month, IAB and PcW released a report showing that Internet ad revenues for the first half of 2010 had reached $12.1 billion, setting a record high for half-year revenues and representing an 11.3% increase since the first half of 2009. While the 2010 half-year revenues were 11.3% higher than 2009, Q2 2010, specifically, saw a 13.9% increase from Q2 2009.

Display ads raked in $4.4 billion in the first half of 2010, representing a 16% increase from the first half of 2009. Digital video leapt 31% from 2009 to 2010, and search advertising took in $5.7 billion in the first half of 2010, representing an 11.6% increase from the same time period in 2009.

“The Internet has transformed consumers’ lives and how they experience entertainment, information and brands,” said Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO of IAB, in the company’s most recent announcement. “Marketers have embraced digital media because that’s where they can engage with their consumers. This vibrant, innovative industry is creating jobs and contributing to the growth of the U.S. economy.”

The announcement comes on the heels of comScore’s recent announcement that display ad impressions for Q3 2010 were up 22%. Facebook led publishers with 23.1% of the market, followed by Yahoo, which took 11% of the market.

Founded in 1996, IAB consists of over 460 media and technology who, together, sell 86% of all online advertising in the United States. PcW provides tax and advisory services.