TechCrunch
Intel To Buy Security Company Sensory Networks For $20M
Intel has acquired Sensory Networks for $20 million to further extend its security capabilities.
Sensory Networks, based in Palo Alto, was founded in 2002 as a hardware company, providing high-performance technology that maps networks by looking for patterns such as spam, malware and other types of intrusions, said Matt Barrie, one of the company’s co-founders who is now chief executive officer at freelancer.com. Over time, the company moved from a hardware to a software model. Today, the technology runs at 160 gigabytes per second on Intel processors.
Barrie said the challenge with a startup in the high-performance networking space is getting the attention of a company like Cisco that could get considerable value in integrating the security technology. Intel, though, has long-term credibility that would help in forging a relationship with such a networking giant.
The company’s clients include McAfee, which Intel acquired for $7.7 billion. In that light, the acquisition by Intel makes sense when considering the chip maker’s focus on security. In May, the company acquired Stonesoft a firewall company for $389 million.
Intel has made some big bets on security technology . But often overlooked is the company’s focus on software. Software helps Intel differentiate and be more than just a chip provider. That’s important as software increasingly does what was once required of hardware to do.
In Race With Twitter, Facebook, Like, Fluffs Its Social TV Numbers
On the same day that Twitter and Nielsen are debuting their first TV Ratings report emerging from the two companies’ partnership, Facebook is slyly releasing official numbers designed to give its own TV efforts a boost.
Facebook claims that AMC’s hot “Breaking Bad” finale was a hit across its social network, generating more than 5.5 million interactions from 3 million+ users. Twitter, meanwhile, saw 1.47 million tweets in comparison from 682,000+ uniques for the same show. What does this mean for Twitter, whose forthcoming IPO is heavily dependent on its TV partnerships and ad business? Is Facebook moving in for the kill?
Well, maybe. But Facebook’s numbers feel a little fudged here.
For background, Facebook announced that it will begin sending out weekly TV reports to the U.S.’s top four networks this week – a move that was not coincidentally disclosed just ahead of the Nielsen Twitter TV Rating report’s launch. Facebook says it will send data to ABC, NBC, Fox and CBS as well as a few other select partners, in order to demonstrate to what extent social conversations around TV programs are now taking place on its own network.
For example, Facebook found that ABC’s “Dancing With the Stars” generated over a million interactions across 750,000 users on its network. Previously, reports had stated that Facebook sees five times as much TV-related activity on its network than on Twitter. But as TechCrunch’s Josh Constine said before, that’s not a fair comparison.
I can’t believe Walt was a woman the whole time. Awesome ending. #BreakingBad
— Zach Braff (@zachbraff) September 30, 2013
A Like Is Not Equal To A Tweet
To state the obvious, Facebook is much bigger than Twitter: 1.15 billion monthly actives versus Twitter’s 200+ million. One could argue its numbers for almost anything will be bigger. But really, it’s Facebook’s looser definition of active engagement that makes comparing its figures to Twitter’s a problem. Facebook, you see, counts nearly any engagement with its content among its “interactions” – it includes not only those posting status updates themselves, but also others who then like, comment or re-share that post to their own networks of friends.
Facebook counting a “like” as an “interaction” is like Twitter counting a “favorite.” It’s not an ideal metric to lump in with Facebook posts or re-shares, but, rather, should be treated as a separate category of interaction.
After all, there are a number of reasons why you may like someone’s Facebook status, and it’s not always directly related to the TV content they’ve shared. You might like a post because your friend also cracked a funny joke of some sort along with their note about the show they’re watching, but that doesn’t mean you’re also a viewer or a fan. Or the post might contain more information beyond the TV show identified through basic keyword matching, and it’s the other part of the post that you’re actually “liking.”
Many social networks like to fluff their numbers when it serves a purpose. Google reports steady increases in Google+ growth, for example, making it sound like Google+ (the destination website) is a bigger player in social than it really is. In reality, Google+ numbers are growing because Google+ is being baked in as the social layer across Google products ranging from Gmail to, most recently, YouTube comments.
Facebook’s Social TV Data Could Become Better In Time
At launch, Facebook’s TV reports are not on par with Twitter’s. It will not include other data like how many people saw activity where a TV show is being discussed – something Twitter and Nielsen’s TV Rating report is already doing. And tracking this metric will be more difficult on Facebook, because its filtered News Feed doesn’t show users every post from friends.
There are also hints that Facebook has had to work quickly to overcome potentially bad data here, indicating that its move to court TV networks is more reactive than proactive in this situation. In The WSJ’s relaying of Facebook’s news, it noted that before fine-tuning its system, which relies on keywords, Facebook had problems where it reported CBS’s “NCIS” too highly because “NCIS” is a string of letters found in the more often mentioned term “San Francisco.” (To address this issue, Facebook had to create a database of characters and other keywords related to each show in order to not end up with false positives.)
That said, as Facebook ramps up its efforts in this space, its data could become more valuable in the long run because there’s more of it, and it includes profile demographics. The company has already unleashed anonymized data to select news outlets and marketers for other purposes, so there’s no reason why it couldn’t do the same for TV networks now.
Twitter Winning The Second Screen For Now
Meanwhile, as Facebook gets up to speed with social TV data, Twitter is building out a business based on being the preferred “second screen” app. To serve up TV ratings and analysis, Twitter partnered with Nielsen, which owns SocialGuide, for TV ratings. It acquired companies like Bluefin Labs and Trendrr to further beef up its social TV efforts. With Twitter Amplify, it’s allowing broadcasters to embed short video clips in their tweets in near real-time. And it partnered with CBS on Amplify just this month. It’s also privately experimenting with a DVR-like functionality that would allow you to replay TV-related tweets as you watch a show after its original airing.
In addition, Twitter rolled out TV Ad Targeting programs this summer, which let U.S. advertisers target those who just saw their TV commercials while watching a given show. Twitter has a semantic understanding of what people are talking about here, too. Most importantly, being pushed the ad twice seems to work well, according to early reports. Nielsen found that the combination of TV ad and follow-up tweet delivered 95 percent stronger message association and 58 percent higher purchase intent than TV ads alone.
With all these initiatives underway, Twitter, though smaller and less diverse (the site sees a disproportionate number of young female users CBS’s chief researcher officer told The WSJ), is for now ahead of Facebook in terms of making a business out of the social TV data it has on hand.
Social Analytics Startup Socialbakers Hires Its First CMO, Former Adobe VP Neil Morgan
Socialbakers, a social analytics startup headquartered in Prague, is announcing that it has hired its first chief marketing officer — Neil Morgan, who recently left Adobe.
The company says it has 190 employees in 10 offices worldwide. When I spoke to founder and CEO Jan Rezab last week, he described it as as the largest independent player in the market (following the acquisition of competitors like Buddy Media) and as a “hidden gem”. By hiring Morgan (who he described as “a star”), Rezab is probably hoping to remove the “hidden” part of that description.
Morgan was most recently vice president of digital marketing solutions for Europe, Middle East, and Asia at Adobe, a role in which he led marketing efforts for Adobe’s Marketing Cloud products (yes, it’s kind of meta). His marketing experience also includes time at Oracle, Chordiant, Siebel, and Omniture (which was acquired by Omniture).
Socialbakers allows big brands to monitor their activity, and that of their competitors, on social networks. Last week, it launched a new Ad Analytics product. Rezab suggested that the ads that will be successful on social media are the content-driven ones that show up in newsfeeds. So Socialbakers’ Ad Analytics is focused on ads that run in Facebook’s News Feed for now, with plans to add new platforms every eight to 12 weeks.
The product also includes features for testing different ad types and managing campaigns.
“Basically, we’re trying to make ads more intelligent,” Rezab said.
SparkLabs Presents Its Second Demo Day In Seoul With Eight Startups
SparkLabs, the accelerator that brings Silicon Valley mentorship to Seoul’s young startup ecosystem, presented its second Demo Day presented.
It also added 12 new people to its roster of over 100 mentors, including Dr. Sang Cha, the creator of SAP HANA, one of the enterprise software’s core platforms, Pat Kinsel, Entrepreneur-In-Residence at Polaris Partners and co-founder of Spindle (which was recently acquired by Twitter), and Ty Ahmad-Taylor, Head of Smart TV Services At Samsung Electronics. Each of the up to 15 startups that participates in each SparkLabs class is matched with four to six mentors during the three-month program.
Past SparkLabs participants that have been covered on TechCrunch include KnowRe, an adaptive learning platform for math that announced an $1.4 million investment from SoftBank in January and WePlanet’s Step Journal.
The latest batch of startups “reflect major trends in Asia in terms of what you’ll see in coming years, such as growth in the e-commerce space, new targeted social networks and completely new innovations,” said Eugene Kim, Principal at SparkLabs.
One company presenting today that has already launched a product for a worldwide audience is DesignplusD, the creator of productivity app MemoZy, which has reached the App Store’s top slot for productivity apps in 12 countries. The app announced new features including a registration-based service, a new “Timeline” and synchronization between users’ iPhones and iPads.
Currently live in beta, TrakInvest is a global social investment platform for equities built on a learn-share-earn model. Users receive a phantom cash allocation to start investing and have access to 12,000 research reports updated daily through TrakInvest’s partnership with Reuters. The startup recently signed a deal with Religare, one of the largest brokerage houses in India, to allow its users to execute real money trades through TrakInvest.
Lateral’s search platform COGO is also currently available for sign-ups in beta. COGO automatically retrieves, indexes and organizes your search sessions.
Other startups presenting today include:
iBabyBox, a social marketplace for baby items created by Yong Hyoung, the founder of Korea’s first major social network CyWorld.
HeyBread, an e-commerce company that delivers fresh organic bread from premium bakeries to customers. The startup plans to expand into new categories.
MangoPlate, a restaurant discovery service for Seoul that launched a new UI and service. Their app is currently available on iOS and Android.
StyleWiki, a social wiki for fashion fans that just launched an Android app and will soon have a Web version.
Zoyi, which recently launched Walk Analytics to help stores glean data from offline data like foot-traffic, visit duration and engagement. Walk Analytics is currently targeted at businesses in Seoul because of its high population density and strong mobile penetration.
