MKTG

The final panel of GigaOM’s Structure 2010 brought together five people who run a diverse groups of clouds — from Yahoo’s self-contained infrastructure that runs all its sites to The Planet, which offers cloud services for small businesses.

Hey guys, we should really work together, was Intel’s message at Structure 2010 in San Francisco, where GM of high density computing Jason Waxman correctly identified himself as the elephant in the room (something at least one panelist had called Intel earlier in the conference).

If Facebook VP of technical operations Jonathan Heiliger were a superhero, his name would be “Scaler-man.” Today Facebook has some 500 million users, twice as many as last July. But even so, Heiliger says the company should have planned better for the challenges it faces now.

IBM isn’t looking very far to find opportunities in cloud computing. In its first year offering cloud services, the company has been helping existing businesses in health care and other industries move towards service models for their infrastructure and products.

The Federal Trade Commission said today it had settled with Twitter over security lapses last year that led to hackers accessing accounts on the service including that of President Barack Obama. The terms seem to be a slap on the wrist and a strong scolding.

Facebook last week named Bret Taylor its CTO, marking his ascension internally as its big-picture technical thinker. We took a trip down to Palo Alto last week to talk to Taylor about his plans for the role, as well as all the other timely Facebook topics.

Facebook last week named Bret Taylor its CTO, marking his ascension internally as its big-picture technical thinker. We took a trip down to Palo Alto last week to talk to Taylor about his plans for the role, as well as all the other timely Facebook topics.

Facebook last week named Bret Taylor its CTO, marking his ascension internally as its big-picture technical thinker. We took a trip down to Palo Alto last week to talk to Taylor about his plans for the role, as well as all the other timely Facebook topics.

Facebook last week named Bret Taylor its CTO, marking his ascension internally as its big-picture technical thinker. We took a trip down to Palo Alto last week to talk to Taylor about his plans for the role, as well as all the other timely Facebook topics.

When Zynga launched FarmVille, it hoped for 200,000 daily active users in the first two months. For each of the first 26 weeks FarmVille added 1 million new users. The story of Mark William’s last two years has been trying to support such unpredictable growth.

After many years of promise, mobile payments are finally finding their stride — but it’s not just one stride. In writing about the space, I admit I’ve been confused many times by what people actually mean when they say “mobile payments.” So here’s a glossary.

After the iPhone 4 presentation at Apple’s WWDC in San Francisco today, I hit the town to talk to app developers in the event center about their perceptions of Steve Jobs’ latest and greatest device. Here’s a video to give you a flavor of the scene.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs takes tremendous pride in his public performances, and it pays off. His product presentations are usually seamless and even hypnotic. But today at WWDC, one glitch almost took Jobs down: too many Wi-Fi networks due to attendees packing their own.

It’s easy to look around at the consumer Internet and see that things are hopping. The private investment research firm CB Insights today gave us a stat to work with: 26 percent of all early-stage deal flow in the first quarter was for seed investments.

Though mobile advertising is growing fast, it’s not yet keeping up with the growth of mobile usage. $3.8 billion will be spent on the U.S. mobile web in 2010, up from $2.6 billion in 2009, but a whole lot less than $25 billion in online advertising.

Before Raymie Stata was named Yahoo CTO today, he stopped by our office for a broad discussion (we didn’t know at the time about his impending promotion). Stata won the CTO role for moving Yahoo from “a set of vertical silos to a horizontal platform infrastructure.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg didn’t stand up well against the beaming lights and the piercing questions at the D Conference last night. We’re not going to give him a free pass on that, but we do think he provided some good direction on Facebook and mobile.

Google has acquired Invite Media, a young startup that helps display advertisers optimize how they spend their money across different exchanges and platforms in real-time. Invite Media in a way completes Google’s advertising suite, but it also poses questions about lock-in given existing DoubleClick products.

Pandora, the music streaming provider and Silicon Valley darling, has raised additional late-stage funding of an undisclosed amount. Pandora CEO Joe Kennedy said in an emailed statement the funding would be used “to invest in resources we need to continue to execute on our strategy.”

Facebook has set out a clear path to make the web social, and it’s extremely well-positioned to make that happen. But it’s not all bad news for competitors, even small startups — because the prospect of competing with Facebook is driving alliances to create open alternatives.

Facebook has set out a clear path to make the web social, and it’s extremely well-positioned to make that happen. But it’s not all bad news for competitors, even small startups — because the prospect of competing with Facebook is driving alliances to create open alternatives.

Zong and Boku, the mobile payments competitors, have found a new place to go head-to-head: the Android platform. Both companies are today announcing trials of support for in-app transactions on the iPhone, billed to users’ mobile carriers securely.

The only way to innovate in the TV industry is to make consumers want to pay full price for set-top boxes versus the ones they get virtually free, according to Apple CEO Steve Jobs. And the new Google TV doesn’t transcend that model, he says.

The only way to innovate in the TV industry is to make consumers want to pay full price for set-top boxes versus the ones they get virtually free, according to Apple CEO Steve Jobs. And the new Google TV doesn’t transcend that model, he says.

Beyond just connecting us through voice and text, our mobile phone numbers are quickly becoming our identities and our wallets. Now they can also receive physical gifts! Well kind of — Giiv, a newly funded year-old startup, allows users to send each other virtual gift cards.

PeerPong, a new Q&A site with an adorable name, is launching a public beta today. The company’s premise is to bring users’ questions to qualified experts on any given topic given their talking about it publicly online — right now, on Twitter.

Things are finally coming together for Fluidinfo founder Terry Jones, who just closed an $800,000 round of funding led by Betaworks and launched his product, the FluidDB “platform for the web of things,” at TechCrunch Disrupt, after 13 years and three complete rewrites in the making.

Digg founder Kevin Rose is pushing forward his first major launch since taking over as CEO and instituting layoffs. Digg version 4, due “very soon,” looks to be a personalized news page that’s a combination of Google Reader, the Facebook news feed and Twitter.

Opera, the little browser that could, has a cheeky response to Google’s Chrome speed tests. In contrast to Google’s MythBusters-as-art aesthetic, Opera goes a little more Royal Tenenbaums-in-Norway. The result of Opera’s own speed test? The browser is also “much faster than a potato.”

5to1, a company founded by former Fox Interactive executives including Ross Levinsohn, is out raising funding again. The San Francisco-based startup helps publishers find better ads for their sites, and has raised the first $68,000 of what looks to be a $3.45 million convertible note.