- 24
- Nov
The Truth
One of the most powerful politic advertisements that I have ever seen.
Archive for Internet
- 15
- Nov
Stumbleupon for sale?
According to Techcrunch Stumbleupon is for sale for $50 million
Two sources have confirmed that the rapidly growing StumbleUpon recently approached at least one large Internet company to be acquired. The asking price was $50 million.
The deal doesn’t appear to have been widely shopped – one potential acquiror said that they met with the company recently, but only to explore possible business development deals, and that an acquisition was not discussed. I spoke briefly with StumbleUpon CEO Garret Camp this afternoon but he refused to comment, saying “we do not comment on rumors.†Fair enough.
The real story may be a disconnect between the company’s executives and investors. StumbleUpon has only raised a single seed round of financing – $1.5 million – and angel investors often informally shop a company, with or without the company’s permission, in the hope of an early cash out.
Whatever is going on, StumbleUpon certainly isn’t stumbling in its growth. It is now a significant source of traffic for many startups (an entrepreneur recently told me that 15% of his traffic last week came from StumbleUpon). Garret told me today that the company has 1.5 million registered users and an average of 3.5 million page views per day. They expect to be cash flow positive within the next few months.
- 25
- Oct
Firefox 2.0 Closing Tab Hack
First of all I’d like to say that Firefox 2.0 is a great improvement as far as I can see.
But there’s a little annoyance that’s still bothering me after using 2.0 for 2 days. The developers changed the way you close the tabs. I was used to the nice and shiny X on the far right side of Firefox 1.5. But they thought it would be better to move the close button to the active tab.
I found an easy way to change it back to the way it was.
1. Type about:config in your address bar and hit the enter button
2. Look up browser.tabs.closeButtons , as you can see the value right now is 1
3. You’ve got to double click on the 1 and change the value to 3
That’s it!
- 15
- Oct
Firefox: Mission Accomplished
When the folks from Mozilla prepared to launch their open-source Firefox 1.0 browser two years ago, their hope was to gain enough market share to compel Web sites to adopt open standards–rather than standardizing on Microsoft’s proprietary Internet Explorer browser technology. Job done. Firefox has anywhere from a 10% to 18% worldwide market share among browser users, depending who is counting, and almost every Web site that matters makes it possible for Firefox users to fully access their pages. The turning point came earlier this year when banks and financial services outfits including American Express and Fidelity switched over. Now, with the impending arrival of the Firefox 2.0 browser, you can expect Firefox to gain even more share and make it even more difficult for Microsoft to call the shots, technology-wise, on the Web.
Firefox 2.0 is expected to arrive in late October or early November–whenever it’s ready. But demand for the older version doesn’t seem to be slackening in advance of the release. Chris Beard, vp of marketing and product management, reports that Mozilla is averaging about 350,000 downloads a day from its site, up from about 200,000 per day a year ago. Mozilla figures it has about 70-80 million active users. Most of them are in the early-adopter and Web 2.0 crowd, but there’s also evidence that people within large enterprises are using the product. The peak use day for Firefox is Wednesday–indicating that people are using it at work.
One of the keys to Firefox’s initial success was its community marketing initiative. People signed up to help market and distribute the software via their Web sites or blogs, and contributed to help pay for advertisements in mainstream media outlets. The organization now has 180,000 registered community marketing volunteers. One contest last year resulted in 300 video commercials being produced–some of which have appeared on YouTube and other popular video sharing sites. Beard’s now trying to figure out how to get some of the commercials aired on cable TV and other video outlets.
Firefox is one of the best proof points I have seen that viral marketing works.