Uncrunched

I wrote some tweets today at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin.

At a very high level, here are the problems I see with where Disrupt is going:

1. I get that this is turning into a very big business for Aol. But TechCrunch Disrupt should be a conference with a focus on editorial, not sales.

2. Editorial at TechCrunch seems to be completely submissive to sales. If sales wants something, it happens. Way too many sponsors on stage, for example. And the speakers are nearly constantly herded to “VIP events” that are really just sponsor events where sponsors pay to have a captive audience of well known entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. Speakers are being packaged and sold to sponsors, and they are complaining about it.

3. Picking the winner of the battlefield startup competition should be free of any influence of non-editorial people and judges. The only people who should be in the room to decide who wins the battlefield should be the judges and the editors, and the editors shouldn’t be voting or trying to influence decisions.

4. It should be completely reasonable for judges to discuss the option of not having anyone win the battlefield at all if the quality level isn’t there. TechCrunch management today didn’t allow that conversation to happen, saying it would send the wrong message. Those people shouldn’t even be in the room, let alone directing the conversation.

TechCrunch should be strong enough to withstand criticism, and I hope they understand that I give this advice out of love, not malice. In any event, I’m not going to participate in the battlefield in the future.

A few years ago Google had the opportunity to buy Twitter but passed on the opportunity because they were developing Google+ and didn’t think they needed it.

Today Google+ is supposedly the no. 2 social network after Facebook, but I don’t buy it. No one I know uses Google+ much, if at all. And I certainly don’t see people giving out their Google+ names on the cable news networks and other TV shows. Twitter dominates there.

Google+’s user numbers are juiced simply because Google forces the product on everyone, and if you use Google to authenticate yourself to third parties, you are using Google+.

Frankly I don’t see Google+ as being any more successful than Google Video was in competing with YouTube. I might be wrong, there might be a real base of hard core Google+ users out there who start and end their day on Google+, but I just don’t see it making any kind of mark on our culture at all.

Twitter, on the other hand, is the only really massive social network where the network effect has really kicked in. It is less than Facebook in some ways, and better than Facebook in some ways.

Google needs to buy Twitter just like they bought YouTube.

It won’t be cheap.

Twitter filed a surprisingly low range for its upcoming IPO today – $17 – $20 per share. That works out to a $11 billion valuation on the high end.

That’s lower than most people expected. And it’s just pocket change to Google. The company has added around $45 billion in market cap in just the last couple of months.

At the very least it would be a hedge against Facebook if Google+ fails (which I think it has). And on the upside Google could really let Twitter blossom, much like they have with YouTube.

Also, many people I’ve spoken with think that Twitter’s data alone would be worth tens of billions of dollars to Google’s search team.

Of course even if Google did make an offer to buy Twitter, Twitter would have to accept before it could happen. And Twitter’s current executive team is probably more interested in going it alone. “Giving up” and selling just prior to an IPO would feel like losing to them, I’d imagine.

But Twitter would still have to consider the offer because the board of directors has a fiduciary duty to shareholders. If Google offered substantially more than $11 billion, the board would find it difficult to justify turning them down.

As a user I’d like to see Twitter stay independent. But I’ve thought for years now that Google is crazy for not doing anything it could to buy Twitter. Who knows, maybe there really is something interesting going on at Google+. But I doubt it.

Disclosure: CrunchFund owns shares in Twitter. I personally own Google and Facebook stock.

Twice a year Y Combinator shows off its most recent batch of startups at a packed-house demo day in Mountain View. The goal of these startups is to attract investor and press attention. Sometimes, though, a particular startup wants neither, and stays in stealth mode until some later date.

URX, from the last Y Combinator batch, is one of those companies. There has been no press about URX at all, until right now.

Note: CrunchFund has invested in URX, although for now the company isn’t disclosing any other information about money they’ve raised.

URX is a mobile advertising platform. But it’s not about pushing app installs (~$300 million/year just for Facebook, around $1.2 billion/year industry-wide). It’s about getting users who already have apps installed on their devices to actually use and make purchases in them via product advertisements in other apps and websites.

URX helps app developers showcase all of the products in their apps with targeted ads. The desktop equivalent of this is Google’s Product Listing Ads, which have greatly simplified ad management for e-commerce operators on the web. Deeplinks are particularly compelling for mobile commerce companies (Retail, Travel, Local, Food, Deals, etc.) that want to jump in and offer a product to one of their users in real-time.

Facebook JUST announced that they’ll be supporting ads that deeplink to other apps:

However, app discoverability is only one of the challenges of building a mobile app. Developers are also faced with the challenge of getting installed users to return and remain active within their apps. According to a study by Localytics, a Mobile Measurement Partner, 66% of app users only open apps between one and 10 times.

Facebook’s announcement is a extreme validation of this nascent market. We can expect Twitter, Google and other platforms to provide this type of mobile re-engagement ad unit as well. URX is in a good position to include this new inventory on their advertising platform.

Why is this so important? With these new ad formats, there’s no easy way for developers to manage 1,000’s of deeplink ads for their products today. URX indexes the knowledge graph of apps’ deep content, and uses machine learning to recommend relevant products to individual users.

The potential market size is tremendously large. Mobile is gobbling up an increasing percentage of total ecommerce retail sales. By 2017 eMarketer is guessing that 25% of U.S. retail ecommerce sales will occur on mobile devices, up from 15% today.

And yet…the mobile advertising market is still way behind where it should be given the tremendous growth in mobile transactions. Tens of billions of dollars behind. URX believes that product ads will raise the price floor of mobile ad inventory.

Mobile advertising is no longer just about installs and other crude first generation tools. URX is a company that is poised to introduce what’s next in mobile advertising.

URX was founded by John Milinovich, Andrew Look James Turner and Nathanael Smith. Watch the video below for more information.