A great fit. marissamayr: I’m delighted to announce that we’ve reached an agreement to acquire Tumblr!  We promise not to screw it up.  Tumblr is incredibly special and has a great thing going.  We will operate Tumblr independently.  David Karp will remain CEO.  The product roadmap, their team, their wit and irreverence will all remain the same as will their mission to empower creators to make their best work and get it in front of the audience they deserve.  Yahoo! will help Tumblr get even better, faster. Tumblr has built an amazing place to follow the world’s creators. From art to architecture, fashion to food, Tumblr hosts 105 million different blogs.  With more than 300 million monthly unique visitors and 120,000 signups every day, Tumblr is one of thefastest-growing media networks in the world.  Tumblr sees 900 posts per second (!) and 24 billion minutes spent onsite each month.  On mobile, more than half of Tumblr’s users are using the mobile app, and those users do an average of 7 sessions per day.  Tumblr’s tremendous popularity and engagement among creators, curators and audiences of all ages brings a significant new community of users to the Yahoo! network.  The combination of Tumblr+Yahoo! could grow Yahoo!’s audience by 50% to more than a billion monthly visitors, and could grow traffic by approximately 20%. In terms of working together, Tumblr can deploy Yahoo!’s personalization technology and search infrastructure to help its users discover creators, bloggers, and content they’ll love.  In turn, Tumblr brings 50 billion blog posts (and 75 million more arriving each day) to Yahoo!’s media network and search experiences.  The two companies will also work together to create advertising opportunities that are seamless and enhance user experience. As I’ve said before, companies are all about people.  Getting to know the Tumblr team has been really amazing.  I’ve long held the view that in all things art and design, you can feel the spirit and demeanor of those who create them.  That’s why it was no surprise to me that David Karp is one of the nicest, most empathetic people I’ve ever met.  He’s also one of the most perceptive, capable entrepreneurs I’ve worked with.  His respect for Tumblr’s community of creators is awesome, and I’m absolutely delighted to have him and his entire team join Yahoo!.    Both Tumblr and Yahoo! share a vision to make the Internet the ultimate creative canvas by focusing on users, design — and building experiences that delight and inspire the world every day. http://yahoo.tumblr.com/

A great fit.

marissamayr:

I’m delighted to announce that we’ve reached an agreement to acquire Tumblr! 

We promise not to screw it up.  Tumblr is incredibly special and has a great thing going.  We will operate Tumblr independently.  David Karp will remain CEO.  The product roadmap, their team, their wit and irreverence will all remain the same as will their mission to empower creators to make their best work and get it in front of the audience they deserve.  Yahoo! will help Tumblr get even better, faster.

Tumblr has built an amazing place to follow the world’s creators. From art to architecture, fashion to food, Tumblr hosts 105 million different blogs.  With more than 300 million monthly unique visitors and 120,000 signups every day, Tumblr is one of thefastest-growing media networks in the world.  Tumblr sees 900 posts per second (!) and 24 billion minutes spent onsite each month.  On mobile, more than half of Tumblr’s users are using the mobile app, and those users do an average of 7 sessions per day.  Tumblr’s tremendous popularity and engagement among creators, curators and audiences of all ages brings a significant new community of users to the Yahoo! network.  The combination of Tumblr+Yahoo! could grow Yahoo!’s audience by 50% to more than a billion monthly visitors, and could grow traffic by approximately 20%.

In terms of working together, Tumblr can deploy Yahoo!’s personalization technology and search infrastructure to help its users discover creators, bloggers, and content they’ll love.  In turn, Tumblr brings 50 billion blog posts (and 75 million more arriving each day) to Yahoo!’s media network and search experiences.  The two companies will also work together to create advertising opportunities that are seamless and enhance user experience.

As I’ve said before, companies are all about people.  Getting to know the Tumblr team has been really amazing.  I’ve long held the view that in all things art and design, you can feel the spirit and demeanor of those who create them.  That’s why it was no surprise to me that David Karp is one of the nicest, most empathetic people I’ve ever met.  He’s also one of the most perceptive, capable entrepreneurs I’ve worked with.  His respect for Tumblr’s community of creators is awesome, and I’m absolutely delighted to have him and his entire team join Yahoo!.   

Both Tumblr and Yahoo! share a vision to make the Internet the ultimate creative canvas by focusing on users, design — and building experiences that delight and inspire the world every day.

http://yahoo.tumblr.com/

HTC's Blink Feed and content services

The HTC One looks like a great phone. Most interesting, however, is that it signals yet another move by a hardware player into the content services game. 

Microsoft is providing content through their Bing apps in Windows 8. Samsung has many exclusive deals to provide apps and services across it’s devices*. Now HTC has partnered with publishers to provide content right to the home screen of their devices.

The message is that it’s not enough for hardware makers to provide good hardware. They need to differentiate and provide end-to-end hardware, services and content experiences.

Interestingly, while Apple is the most obvious example of an integrated experience, they don’t provide content in this way to the user. 

*Disclosure: Yahoo!7 has exclusivity deals in place with Samsung.

Steve Jobs loathed Google at the time of his death

Brad Stone:

At the time of his death, Jobs had come to loathe Google, which he felt was copying features of the iPhone while withholding a key feature of Google Maps that allows smartphones to dictate turn-by-turn directions aloud. Jobs also discussed pulling Google search from the iPhone, but figured that customers would reject that move, according to two former Apple executives.

We knew that Jobs wanted to go thermonuclear on Google, but Stone provides some insight on just how far he was prepared to go to nix their services completely from the iPhone.

More mobile devices equals more news consumption

The Pew Survey looked at news consumption on smartphones and tablets, and has confirmed some things I had suspected - people who own tablets as well as smartphones are consuming more news, more often.

Almost one-third of people who acquire tablets find themselves reading more news from more sources than before.

The study paints a bright picture for news consumption on mobile devices. These emerging devices are allowing people to stay more up-to-date and consume more news than ever before. 

News is a large part of what people do with their mobile devices. Fully 64% of tablet owners get news on their devices at least weekly, including 37% who do so daily. The numbers are similar for smartphone owners – 62% consume news weekly or more and 36% do so daily. For both tablets and smartphones, news is among the top activities people engage in on the devices.

Users are expecting the news to be delivered no matter where they are or what device they are using.

It’s the emerging concept of the ‘multi-platform user’, someone that wakes up with their iPhone, catches the train to work with the iPad, browses the net on their work PC and comes home to their laptop. 

While the iPad has driven this, the introduction of cheaper Android tablets such as the Kindle Fire and Nexus 7 is going diversify the market. 

Messaging war between Apple and Facebook

Ellis Hamburger:

Facebook has been rapidly updating its messenger platform, and shows no sign of stopping.

Apple needs to release an iMessages client for Windows and Android, and then it will have a fighting chance of becoming the ubiquitous messaging platform to rival SMS.

For a messaging system, cross-platform is key. SMS can be relied upon because it works on everyone’s mobile device, without this iMessages will never fully replace SMS. Facebook has a better chance of ubiquity as more devices will have a Facebook client installed than an iMessages client.

The clever thing Apple did was bake in iMessages to the SMS app in iOS. This means that if you’re on an iPhone you don’t need to think about sending someone an iMessage, it just happens automatically.

However if you’re on an iPad or Mac and want to message someone, then you need to think about which messenger platform to use. If you haven’t messaged them before, you’ll need to reach out to your iPhone to try SMS first. You could also try Facebook if they are a friend. This platform dependancy is where iMessages loses, it needs to be a process where you don’t even think about it.

Every time you seek an alternative to contact someone is another reason that iMessages is not the next SMS yet, not even the next BBM.