Uncrunched

All this year TechCrunch and others were covering the weekly SecondMarket auctions for Facebook stock. 2.7 million shares, for example, cleared in aggregate the first five auction at prices ranging from $21.01 to $28.26 per share.

The auctions have continued, but there haven’t been the dramatic price increases or decreases needed to trigger the rabid coverage. But today, for the first time I believe, SecondMarket was unable to clear any shares at all in the auction.

The weighted average offer price for this week’s auction was $33.91, roughly in line with the clearing price for last week’s auction. But the weighted average bid price was just $28.15. Zero shares cleared the market, meaning no shares changed hands.

Why? The WSJ article this week pouring cold water on rising startup valuations, and suggesting that venture cash was drying up, was almost certainly the cause. Whether or not there was much truth to the article, things like that can and do freak buyers out and cause them to step back. No one wants to buy at the top of the market.

What really matters is whether or not things pick back up next week or the week after. And whether or not sellers will take lower prices in the $20s to cash out of Facebook.

Gary Flake, a long time Technical Fellow at Microsoft, sent me an invite to his new Clipboard service today. The company has been on my radar for a while now, but they’ve kept things pretty quiet. Today was the first time I was able to see what they’ve been working on.

It’s an internet clipping and bookmarking service, sort of Delicious meets Pinterest. There have been scores of these types of startups before, but none of them were quite efficient or beautiful enough. At first and second glance, Clipboard looks like a winner.

With a click of your mouse you can highlight any part of a web page (it helps you by grabbing obvious content areas, and save it to your clipboard. The usual stuff, tagging and annotation, is available if you want. You can then make the clips private or public, share them, etc. And you can view them in a variety of ways, including a boring list or a Pinterest-style layout.

It has some real bugs still – it doesn’t grab posts from TechCrunch well, for example. And when I grabbed a screen from the MoMa website it showed a 404 error on Clipboard (meaning it’s pulling it real time from the original source, I guess, not taking a static picture of what you saw at a certain time).

But…It’s GOOD. Really good. A definite keeper. I’ve already used up most of my invites, but if you can find someone who’s using the service already, hit them up for one.

See GeekWire for their take.

Update: From comments:

Clipboard engineer here.

Clips are not just screenshots – they preserve the original markup and style. In real time, we translate the selected portion of the HTML and CSS of the source page into a self-contained unit that is both compressed and can safely coexist with other clips. For example, notice that all the links are preserved in this clip:
http://www.clipboard.com/clip/LR-B8x4FlQsi9NHM0YYHNxQZ806b3pRw61He

We even preserve embed and objects.
Youtube video: http://www.clipboard.com/clip/LR-Ipfjh4bp-vpwg2XZSaQssLBqu2A8tKdDe
Live map: http://www.clipboard.com/clip/LR-KylLO_bqPkN0m5S3BjhOSpVleZmN-925e
Stock chart: http://www.clipboard.com/clip/LR4afhOoCYqJ-LDy

Because we capture all the relevant markup and styles, a clip will persist even if the original page goes away.

The Wall Street Journal quietly enabled a personalization feature today (or at least this is the first time I’ve noticed it). Articles are now automatically sorted based on what they think you’ll like to read. It’s powered by Los Angeles based startup Gravity.

If you’re not familiar with Gravity – it was founded in 2008 by three former MySpace executives and has gone through many iterations. Originally the company was a site where people could chat with others about topics of interest. Then they turned the engine they created to determine people’s interest graph and planned on helping other sites personalize content.

CEO Amit Kapur, formerly the COO of MySpace, wrote a guest blog post on TechCrunch last year talking about his vision around the future of personalization.

It turns out that sites want this feature. Earlier this year they began talks with the WSJ and others, and they contacted me about adding the feature to TechCrunch. We were aggressively pursuing a deal as of the day I was terminated, and I had hoped that we’d be the first to launch.

That didn’t happen apparently (and I have no idea where things stand with TechCrunch and Gravity). But I’ve been checking the WSJ site to see when it would launch there.

To see it in action go the the WSJ and scroll down to the part of the site where there’s a grid of topics with stories underneath (or just search for “personalized” and you’ll see it right away – “The sections below are personalized for you. Learn more >.”

WSJ News Personalized for You
The articles and sections in this area of WSJ.com have been selected based partly on the stories you have previously read on the site. We take your privacy seriously and while this personalization feature uses cookies, it does not connect your WSJ.com reading history to your name or other personally identifiable information.

If you prefer not to see personalized content on WSJ.com, please click here to opt out. To learn more about our privacy policy, click here. This personalization service is powered by Gravity, a WSJ.com partner. Please click here to see Gravity’s privacy policy.

There’s more here on the Gravity site about the partnership. That’s also the place where you can opt out of the service if you want to.

As you read stories on the WSJ site, and then share those stories or “like” them, Gravity is watching. Try clicking on a bunch of sports stories, for example, and you’ll see the sports section move up to the top and the top stories will be related to the things you’ve clicked on (I clicked on a bunch of NBA stories, for example).

For now it looks like the WSJ is just using Gravity in that one area of the home page. At TechCrunch we were planning on rolling it out on the site as a whole. Important stories (determined by us) would still be positioned on top. But if you only seem to read stories about Apple, there’d be a concentration of those stories, too.

Gravity is charging a fee to publishers to use the service – a quite steep fee. But the data that you get back on what individuals like is a potential gold mine. You can then use that data to hyper target ads to those people. The person who only reads Apple stories, for example, would get a lot of iPad and iPhone 4GS ads.

That combination of features – providing users with a more interesting website, and getting back a ton of interesting data about those users, made it a no brainer from my perspective.