Zuckerberg Now Owns 29.3 Percent Of Facebook, Representing $18 Billion

Facebook announced in an SEC filing that founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg now owns 29.3 percent of Facebook shares (NASDAQ:FB), up from a 28.2 percent stake on the day of the IPO. With 632.7 million shares currently trading at $28.50, it represents a bit more than $18 billion.

Remaining the largest shareholder is one of Zuckerberg’s most impressive achievements, not only for his personal wealth, but for his voting power as well.

Back in May when Facebook started trading, its founder used to own 443 million shares and 60 million unexercised options. As the company’s shares started trading at $38 a share, it represented $16.9 billion, making him one of the youngest multi-billionaires. Again, this is only for his stock-based wealth.

Even though the stock had a roller coaster year and the company recently released more shares, Zuckerberg increased his wealth in shares thanks to stock-based compensation. Shares were trading above $30 a share for most of the month of January. Now at $28.50, it seems like Facebook shares have finally found a stable price around the $30 mark.

Facebook’s IPO price was $38 a share when the company started trading in May. But in August, the stock fell to its lowest price at the time — $19.69 — as the initial lockup expiration of 271 million shares kicked in. Other lockup expirations brought a few days of downturn.

Yet, investors looking for short-term profit based on potential share price drops and short selling have slowly moved away from Facebook shares since October, leaving committed investors on board. These days, price changes reflect more closely product updates and earnings.

Back in September, Zuckerberg declared that he wouldn’t sell his shares for the next 12 months in order to dampen lockup expirations and drive confidence. That’s why his virtual wealth will continue to increase and decrease alongside Facebook shares in the coming months.

Apple’s Retail Strategy Proves That If They Build It, You Will Come (And Spend)

Apple is a unique company in that even if you break down its individual lines of business and view them as distinct from the whole, it can still be regarded as immensely successful in a number of different areas. As a hardware company, it’s a success; as a software and services provider, it’s a success; and as a retail chain, it’s a success. And Apple’s physical retail presence shows such steady upwards growth that it, rather than any product, could be the site of the company’s greatest innovation over the next few years.

Speaking at a Goldman Sachs investor conference on Tuesday, Cook went into detail about Apple’s retail plans, addressing the growth and success of the company’s stores, as well as plans for expansion and changes to their deployment strategy for 2013. Asymco’s Horace Dediu visualized the numbers shared, charting the progress of key metrics like store openings, store visitors international distribution and more in a blog post yesterday.

One of the most important metrics Dediu tracked is depicted in the graph representing store visitors vs. stores open. After initially expanding their physical presence more quickly, and averaging fewer visitors, attendance quickly cut up and for the past two years, stores have been averaging around 1 million for every location open. Apple’s strategy this year involves not only opening new locations, but closing existing ones and replacing them with larger outlets, which should make for an even higher visitor-to-store ratio in the future if trends continue.

In terms of money invested in Apple’s retail efforts, we see a trend that could result in much more of the kind of innovation I alluded to earlier. The Asymco chart for spend on “Property, Plant and Equipment” shows a huge recent spike in money committed to “machinery, equipment, and internal use software,” as opposed to normal, steady growth for land, buildings and improvements to said facilities.

Since late 2009 when we begin to see the curve start to trend upwards more sharply, Apple has introduced its own iPod touch-based check out and inventory system (replacing a legacy version based on Windows CE hardware), moved to iPad-based information consoles, changed the structure of its stores to de-emphasize checkout and highlight Genius and One-to-One customer interaction, launched self-serve EasyPay shopping for customers, introduced in-store pickup, and just generally changed the way the world thinks about brick-and-mortar stores. No big deal.

Remember too that Apple’s retail leadership has been somewhat in turmoil recently. Apple’s SVP of Retail Operations Ron Johnson, largely credited with much of the retail division’s creation and success, left the company back in June of 2011. A search for his replacement ultimately resulted in the controversial hiring of Dixons CEO John Browett in January 2012, after a six-month search. Finally, John Browett was dismissed from that role in October 2012, after less than a year on the job. Apple is still looking for a replacement for Browett.

Apple is making commerce more invisible, and yet winning more shopper dollars.

It may seem like lack of a clearly defined top man in retail would lead to uncertainty, but Apple Retail had its best year ever in 2012 amid all these shakeups, and CEO Tim Cook said that the retail locations in particular have helped the iPad enjoy its runaway success since launching in 2010.

Cook talked about the label of “retail” not being sufficient to describe what Apple is building with its stores, and more and more, that’s becoming true. Just like the company tries to hide elements like the file system in iOS, or deliver CE devices that aren’t upgradeable or modular, opting instead for a smooth, appealing and user-friendly outward appearance, it’s also taking commerce out of the store experience as much as possible. And yet as a reward it’s winning more customer dollars.

You can measure innovation in terms of a revolutionary new smartphone, or a dramatically different PC design, or you can measure it in the aggregate effect of a sustained effort to change an age-old practice. Apple’s retail efforts are the latter kind, and its spending patterns suggest there’s plenty more of that to come.

Method Raises $3M Series A To Help It Spread CRM Solution Beyond QuickBooks To Other Accounting Platforms

Method, a Toronto-based CRM solution, today announced the closing of a $3 million dollar investment round led by Klass Capital. The company, which is the number-one rated such app for Intuit’s QuickBooks platform, will be using the cash injection to help it jumpstart a platform redesign, and the development of integrations with other leading bookkeeping software like Wave, Xero, FreshBooks and Intaact.

The startup already numbers its users in the thousands in the U.S., and also hopes to aggressively expand into South America, Europe and Asia with the help of the funding, thanks to an increase in hiring across all functions. The team has recently grown to 25 to help satisfy increasing demand, according to CEO and founder Paul Jackson. Demand is on the rise because Method offers a specific take on CRM that appeals to SMBs who don’t want to worry about learning new systems as their needs change, or bringing on heavyweight in-house tech expertise.

“What we do is we allow non-developers to create and customize apps using drag-and-drop building blocks rather than code,” Jackson explained in an interview. “So if you think of a small business, rather than layering on another app on top of their many apps to solve problems, they can just customize an existing screen or an existing process in their existing CRM. We feel this allows them to be more agile and more efficient, since we allow them to have a system that adapts to them.”

While Method has been around for a few years, this marks the first time the company has taken on investment from an outside source. Jackson said that in order to pursue the company’s goals at the pace he wanted, it made sense to go after outside funding. The company is gearing up for a number of major new product releases in the near future, including app and product launches during the first half of 2013.

“We have a really early-stage mobile presence, but on the new platform, the first iteration of the new platform will be mobile,” Jackson said of the company’s upcoming plans. “So it’s a native app, with HTML5 inside of the wrapper for the parts that customers can customize. We’re gearing up for a major launch in the summer, and we’ll be releasing new features bit-by-bit before then, with the first big bit being the mobile piece in April.”

Method’s customizable approach is innovative, but seeing how well it translates to mobile could be a key indicator of the company’s future success. This funding should help make sure the company has the proper expertise and resources to build an effective mobile offering for the long-term.

Vimeo Acquires Animated GIF App Echograph As Mobile Video Sharing Space Heats Up Thanks To Vine

Vimeo has acquired GIF-making app Echograph, in a deal whose terms were not disclosed, the company announced today. The price paid for the iPhone and iPad app from Clear-Media was not disclosed, but as a result of the deal Vimeo will now be offering the previously paid app (which was $2.99) for free via the App Store.

Echograph’s team will transfer to Vimeo, and its creator Nick Alt will go from being Clear-Media CEO to VP of Mobile at Vimeo, focusing on their mobile efforts not just on iOS but across all mobile platforms. Vimeo told TechCrunch that the deal made sense for it because the company really loved the quality of the app, and there was a natural fit since Echograph is all about providing creators with high-quality tools for motion content.

The Echograph team will remain based in L.A., giving Vimeo more West Coast presence as a nice side-benefit of the deal. Vimeo will continue to offer Echograph as a separately branded product, too, for the time being, and said they aren’t making anything public about their future plans for integrating the two brands or cross-pollinating content between them. Alt’s role will be about extending Vimeo’s mobile efforts further, however, and in a press release he’s quoted as saying that he’s looking forward to developing “a new fleet of amazing mobile video apps.”

The timing of this deal makes it seem like this might in part be an answer to Twitter’s recent introduction of Vine, the six second video clip sharing service. Vimeo has a strong presence on the traditional web, but an acquisition of a mobile-first video product and the talent that comes along with that is likely an attempt to help it make sure it doesn’t get left behind as bigger brands like Twitter (and Facebook likely to follow) try to tackle mobile video sharing on their own.

There’s not much indication of how much uptake Echograph had on its own, but competitors like Flixel and Cinemagram have both attracted considerable press attention, decent-sized user bases and even sizeable funding rounds. It’s early days for Vine still, but it also appears to have made quite a splash at launch. Backed by Vimeo’s expertise in attracting an auteur audience, Echograph could carve out a unique niche among these other players with a focus on creator experience.

Opera Sings The Final Song With Its Rendering Engine, Decides To Shift To WebKit

Opera is that company that everyone knows about but never really stopped to understand why it is so important. The Norway-based company has always been an ankle-biter, pushing the envelope and calling out the big guys for injustices put upon web developers and Internet surfers. It’s not a sexy position to be in, but Opera has always stood its ground.

Today, Opera has announced that it will be slowly abandoning its own web-rendering “Turbo” engine in lieu of WebKit, the core development platform used by Chrome and Safari. In a way, today is a sad day. The company might have fallen on its own sword for the greater good, one final time.

By never having the pole position in the “browser war,” Opera had the freedom to try new things and make noise about the issues that really matter, including being able to choose your default browser on the desktop. There was a time when Microsoft PC users had no option of which browser to use; Internet Explorer came bundled with the operating system. It was an anti-trust situation — a monopoly if you will. Opera stood up and fought.

How hard has it fought? Here’s a quote from then-CEO of Opera, Jon von Tetzchner, from a 2007 press release which announced Opera’s EU anti-trust complaint against Microsoft:

We are filing this complaint on behalf of all consumers who are tired of having a monopolist make choices for them. In addition to promoting the free choice of individual consumers, we are a champion of open Web standards and cross-platform innovation. We cannot rest until we’ve brought fair and equitable options to consumers worldwide.

This quote is what Opera stands for, and with today’s announcement, a little bit of Opera died. Von Tetzchner left the company in 2011 and the company became decreasingly aggressive in the years after. When von Tetzchner left, he sent a very strong-worded and poignant email describing how things had fallen apart:

It has become clear that The Board, Management and I do not share the same values and we do not have the same opinions on how to keep evolving Opera.

From its own blog post, you can tell how hard this decision was to make, as it was something that was better for users and developers, both of whom Opera cares deeply about:

On the same day as announcing that Opera has 300 million users, we’re also announcing that for all new products Opera will use WebKit as its rendering engine and V8 as its JavaScript engine. It’s built using the open-source Chromium browser as one of its components. Of course, a browser is much more than just a renderer and a JS engine, so this is primarily an “under the hood” change. Consumers will initially notice better site compatibilty, especially with mobile-facing sites – many of which have only been tested in WebKit browsers. The first product will be for Smartphones, which we’ll demonstrate at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona at the end of the month. Opera Desktop and other products will transition later.

Opera has always pushed so hard to make its browser fast, as if to make the web sing for people all over the world, no matter what type of device they’re on. The company has also made tabbed browsing something we’re all used to, by making it faster than everyone else did at the time. By choosing to develop its product on top of WebKit, it is, in essence, giving up. It’s not a stretch to say that Google was able to pass Microsoft with its Chrome browser because all of the work that Opera has put into the space, tirelessly fighting for more cross-platform friendliness and putting an end to a No. 1-by-default situation.

A sentiment of sadness is being shared by developers and former Opera employees:

Sad day for my former team at Opera and for the web to lose a rendering engine.

—
Anne van Kesteren (@annevk) February 13, 2013

However, not everyone is crying about the move, considering the fact that if Opera can bring its tenacity to developing for WebKit, everyone wins. Sr. Director of User Interface Engineering at PayPal, Bill Scott, shared these thoughts with us:

I am a big fan of webkit because I am focused on the user’s experience more than I am with being a standards purist. I know that some of my colleagues feel like that we as web developer’s failed because we did not ensure all of our experiences worked on Opera. But what they forget is that this is a marketplace. Companies can only reasonably test on just a few platforms. At the end of the day our users shouldn’t have to pay for our fractured platforms. In no other software area do we have to deal with this many “standards”. Moving closer to a single platform means we can spend more time building experiences rather than showing off our encyclopedic knowledge of browser variants to one another.

Netflix took the approach in late 2009 to settle on webkit as their SDK for all TV experiences which folded nicely into mobile & tablet strategy (by and large this is webkit). I know that the web team there had some browser envy since the TV team could just code for webkit. But being able to settle on webkit really made development move a lot faster.

If we can take the talent of the Opera team and apply it to webkit this will be a big win. And if we could just get IE to switch then we will have arrived at near-nirvana.

The tide has turned today, but we know that without Opera’s work on keeping browsers speedy and open, yet standarized, there wouldn’t be a Firefox or a Chrome or any other alternative browser. The “nirvana” that Scott mentions is a place where developers know exactly what they’re coding for, without worry that they’ll have to refactor everything for a completely different platform. If Microsoft were to shift to WebKit, you can thank Opera. Again.

[Photo credit: Seattle PI]

Bislr Launches Tools To Build Marketing-Optimized Websites, Raises $3.5M From Tim Draper And Others

Bislr, a startup that’s officially launching today, was built to solve one of the problems that CEO Michael Sharkey said that he himself faced in his past startups — the need to quickly build a website that integrates the different applications that marketers use.

So Bislr integrates with existing marketing automation (MA) and customer relationship management (CRM) tools, layering on a drag-and-drop website builder and additional analytics. The idea is to allow marketers to launch new campaign websites without having to consult a developer, and those sites collect relevant customer data and be easily edited based on that data.

The company is also announcing that it has raised $3.5 million in Series A funding led by Southern Cross Venture Partners, with participation by Tim Draper and Terry and Katrina Garnett.

Sharkey gave me a quick demo covering a number of the major features. The basic building blocks of a Bislr websites include the company’s “social apps”, which allow marketers to easily embed content from your social networking accounts onto the company website — so if they come up with a brilliant promotional video, they’re not driving traffic to YouTube, but to their own site. And the websites are automatically optimized for mobile and other

Behind the scenes, Bislr also creates a profile of each visitor and “everything they’re doing when they’re touching the site,” Sharkey said. When possible, it also pulls social data from around the web about each visitor — so businesses can see in real-time tweets and Facebook updates from people visiting their site. And the service makes it easy to act on that data, too. For example, if a business wants to test out different wording or different designs, Bislr can run A/B tests on a small group of users, then automatically select the version that’s better.

Sharkey founded the company with his two brothers. They’ve been testing out the system with a few small businesses, he said, but now they’ve opened up and are ready to serve larger customers.

e27 Gets $615K, Plans Southeast Asia Expansion

Singaporean media outfit, e27, has raised about US$615,000 (S$760,000) through a funding round with investors in the region, and plans to expand into Southeast Asia.

The round was raised with B Dash Ventures from Japan, Pinehurst Advisors in Taiwan, Ardent Capital in Thailand and Dan Neary in Singapore. e27 has been around since 2006 and runs a news site on tech startups in Asia, and organizes conferences.

Mohan Belani, e27’s CEO and co-founder, said that he is looking to hire editorial staff in Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines. The company’s focus, however, will remain on its annual flagship event called Echelon, he added.

Last year, about 3,000 people attended Echelon, which also drew 50 startups and 150 investors. Echelon 2013 will be held on June 4 and 5 in Singapore this year.

After this funding round, B Dash Ventures CEO, Hiroyuki Watanabe, will join e27’s board. Current members are Nic Lim (8capita) and founders, Belani and Thaddeus Koh.

Belani said that the company has been bootstrapped so far, except for a small angel round raised in early 2012 by 8capita.