Twitter Will List Its Shares At $27, Valuing The Firm At $14.7 Billion, Reports Indicate

Twitter might have wanted a quiet IPO, but massive demand for the relatively limited shares in its flotation are driving its listing price higher. According to CNBC, Twitter will go public at $27 per share, far above its initially expected $17 to $23 range. Quick math indicates that such a price would value Twitter at roughly $14.7 billion. Twitter would raise around $1.9 billion at $27 per share, provided that it doesn’t increase the number of shares that it intends to sell shortly. Facebook, for example, also raised its offering price before its IPO and the number of shares that were for sale. However, Twitter’s current updraft is due in part to the smallness of its offering, so I would not expect that. It should be noted that Twitter underwriters have the option to purchase an additional 10.5 million shares should certain conditions be met. As a company, Twitter’s losses are currently accelerating as it expands its international advertising offerings. A stronger IPO, which would raise more funds for the company, could help it accelerate its revenue growth by providing cash flow flexibility. That said, a larger IPO in terms of dollars raised also raises the specter of a potentially larger fall. Whatever the case, investors are speaking quite loudly: Twitter shares, please.

Readying For A Busy 2014, Google Ventures Adds Two New Investment Partners

Google Ventures had added two new investment partners to its roster, bringing on Shanna Tellerman and Dave Munichiello to the ranks. The firm is also announcing a new EIR, Nikhil Chandhok, who led YouTube’s Music efforts for four years. Tellerman previously was the founder and CEO of of Sim Ops Studios (Wild Pockets), a spin-off from Carnegie Mellon University that focused on democratizing 3D game development. Sim Ops was acquired by Autodesk in 2010, and Tellerman worked at the company as product line manager responsible for launching the cloud platform and Autodesk 360 applications. Munichiello joins Google Ventures from Kiva Systems, where he spent four years at e-commerce robotics company (which sold to Amazon for $775 million). He previously also served in the Air Force and on a joint special-ops team. GV’s general partner David Krane explains to me, both Tellerman and Munichiello are technical, product leaning and entrepreneurial, which is the general mold of what the firm looks for in an investment partner. In addition to sourcing deals, Tellerman is focusing on working with the Google Glass Collective, investing in consumer and retail startups, and helping match portfolio startups with brands/companies like Burberry, Akamai and others for potential strategic partnerships. Munichiello is focusing his investments across artificial intelligence, security and enterprise. Both will be working on investments for GV across all stages, Krane adds. And Tellerman has already done five deals (undisclosed for now) and Munichiello has closed two and is a board observer at Premise. Google’s new EIR, Nikhil Chandhok, was previously the Global Head of Product for Music, Paid Content and Live Platform for YouTube, and was on the YouTube team for seven years. In addition to spearheading music, Chandhok was also instrumental in launching YouTube’s iPhone app, the development of VEVO, and launching paid subscriptions, among many other products. It’s unclear yet what Chandhok will be building, adds Krane. With Tellerman, Munichiello and the addition of former CrunchFund partner (and my former colleague) MG Siegler to its investment team, the firm has added three rising stars in the investment world. As I wrote a few months back, it’s wise for VCs to think strategically about adding younger talent to additional talent expansion, Krane says that the firm will continue to add to the partnership. Currently, Krane says Google Ventures has $1.2 billion under management, and is just about to enter a new year with a new $300 million commitment from Google (the company) for the fund. But he adds that it’s not unimaginable that the size of the fund will continue to grow as the firm makes more late stage investments like its recent $258 million round in Uber.

Over 5% Of Instagram Ad Views Have Led To Likes, Signaling Big Potential

Instagram ads are off to a strong start. CEO Kevin Systrom said about the early ads that “Over 5% of the impression led to Likes on these ads that we've run. That's pretty tremendous considering most of the ads we see on the internet we ignore.” At the GigaOm Roadmap conference Systrom also said many of the comments were people asking where they could buy the Michael Kors watch. Instagram analytics company Nitrogram looked at the Kors ad yesterday and believes it was seen 6.15 million people and received over 218,000 Likes, as SocialFresh reported. That would imply 3.57% of views led to Likes of the photo, which isn't far off Systrom's stat. In conversation with Om Malik, Systrom discussed that ads are just one more step in the transition of Instagram into a world-changing company. ”We're now at 150 million+ active users. [We've gone from a] cool startup in Silicon Valley into something that affects the mainstream” Systrom said. He also noted that over 55 million photos are shared to the service per day now. Om asked whether the ads roll out was “working out”, as last month Instagram announced ads would come to the service, and the first ones appeared last week. Systrom explained “Are they making us hundreds of millions of dollars per day? No, but that wasn't the goal. We announced we'd take it slow doing it the right way. We measure the ‘how it's going' by how the roll out is going and how we're making this transition.” Of course, that high Like rate might be due to novelty of some extent. That ad was a damn pretty photo of a watch too, and Instagram will have to keep the quality high for users not to feel like their feeds are being polluted. Ideally, ads would be better looking than the photos your friends share. As for the longevity of his product, it's parent company, and competitors, Systrom said “I don't think there will be a Facebook replacement, or a Twitter replacement, or an Instgram replacement.” Instead he believes how people spend their time on their phone may just shift and be reallocated, rather than any of these services drying up and dying out completely. What's Next For Instagram? Events And Search Systrom was candid about what Instagram isn't doing perfectly right now, and its opportunities to improve. “How do we surface live events overseas? How do we tell you there's a riot going on in London? How would we let you tune into the World Series? How would we let you tune into what's going on right now, what interests you? How do you find the things on Instagram that will keep you coming back?” Systrom asked, foreshadowing this experience would be getting better. “Today we have hashtags and hashtag search, and people and people search, but it's hard to find [interesting things] without being good at searching for hashtags” Systrom explained. He went on to say his mom and some people don't necessarily want to search via hashtags, or even understand how. Perhaps what he's hinting at is a more keyword-based search or even a Facebook Graph Search-style semantic search feature where you type in queries in common language to find photos. One other area Instagram is interested in is meta data about photos, including the location where your photos were taken, and your proximity to other users when you took them. “Proximity and location are both opportunities” Systrom said. However, the service doesn't just want to suddenly make every photo geo-tagged. As I wrote last year, discovery by location could make Instagram users feel much more connected to the world around them. For now, it just shows a photo map of where your own shots were taken. To conclude, Systrom addressed his belief that focus is critical in building a startup. ”When you're building a product you can't just ramble on. You need a central thesis… about what you're trying to prove the benefit is to the consumer.” So while Facebook seems to want to be Twitter with public content, and Twitter seems to want to be Facebook with a rich visual feed, Instagram just wants to be Instagram.

Apple Addresses iWork For Mac Criticism By Pre-Announcing The Return Of Many Features

Apple has posted a new page on its site, detailing features of iWork that it says it will be restoring over the next six months. This is likely in response to the outcry by power users of its products that it has ‘stripped' them of many useful functions. Pre-announcing features of any product, even software, is extremely rare for Apple. Late last month we noted that the scaling back and redesign of iWork for Mac was not without precedent. We also noted that this would likely be followed up by Apple adding back features of the software that make it attractive to heavy users. This appears to be the beginning of that process. On the page, Apple notes that the iWork apps were rewritten from the ground up for 64-bit and to support a unified file format between iOS 7, OS X and iWork for iCloud. “These apps feature an all-new design with an intelligent format panel and many new features such as easy ways to share documents, Apple-designed styles for objects, interactive charts, new templates, and new animations in Keynote,” says Apple. “In rewriting these applications, some features from iWork '09 were not available for the initial release. We plan to reintroduce some of these features in the next few releases and will continue to add brand new features on an ongoing basis.” Apple had drawn ire from long-time users of iWork for Mac, with many claiming it was abandoning them in the interest of simplifying or ‘dumbing down' the apps to look and feel like iOS. Though it's true that they were stripped of some advanced features and functionality, Apple appears to have plans to return those to the apps over time. Here are the features it plans to add back to each of the apps, which appear to be ‘a start', but definitely won't bring the apps back to full parity with the old versions, yet: Pages Customize toolbar Vertical ruler Improved alignment guides Improved object placement Import of cells with images Improved word counts Keyboard shortcuts for styles Manage pages and sections from the thumbnail view Numbers Customize toolbar Improvements to zoom and window placement Multi-column and range sort Auto-complete text in cells Page headers and footers Improvements to AppleScript support Keynote Customize toolbar Restoring old transitions and builds Improvements to presenter display Improvements to AppleScript support Apple also notes that the old versions of iWork for Mac remain installed on your Mac, and you're welcome to use those for the time being. It also addresses file-format compatibility. You can revert any files that were converted to work on the new versions of the apps to ‘iWork '09′ format for editing in those apps.

AssuredLabor, A Mobile Job Hunting Platform For Latin America, Beefs Up Revenue, Board

Assured Labor, a job hunting startup that began out of MIT and helps 25,000 employers hire across Latin America, has been doubling revenue month over month for four of the last five months and is beefing up its board. The company has about 750,000 job seekers across two main platforms in Brazil and Mexico. Because job seekers in these markets might not have access to desktop computers, Assured Labor has built a mobile centric platform where users can get text alerts on when there are positions that might be relevant to them. Many of the listings are for jobs in sales or administration. CEO David Reich says the company is adding about 1,000 employers a month. The company picked up $5.5 million in funding from Mexican private equity firm Capital Indigo, Great Oaks Venture Capital, Nexus Venture Partners and Kima Ventures about six months ago. “We're running at a fast clip and are able to consistently deliver way better opportunities to low wage job seekers than anyone else in the market,” said Reich, who just moved to Mexico City from New York about two months ago. The company's adding a few veterans, Steve Pogorzelski and André Andrade, from the recruiting and telecommunications world. Pogorzelski was the international group president of one of the biggest Web 1.0-era job hunting sites, Monster, through its heyday from 1998 through 2008. He's now the CEO of ClickFuel, an Massachusetts-based online marketing company. The other new board member, André Andrade, was the COO of Movile and was an executive at two of Brazil's largest wireless carriers, Vivo and Claro. He's now a CEO at Titans Group, which creates value-added services for mobile carriers around the world.

Google Updates Its Octane JavaScript Benchmark, Adds Asm.js And TypeScript Tests

Google debuted version 2.0 of its Octane benchmark suite today, a set of 17 tests that measure how fast a browser can execute JavaScript code. The first version of this benchmark launched just over a year ago. In this new version, the team put an emphasis on tests that measure latency, but Google also added tests for a number of new JavaScript technologies. Octane 2.0 now measures how well the browser handles code written or compiled in the Mozilla-backed asm.js JavaScript subset, for example. In addition, Google added a new test based on Microsoft's TypeScript compiler to measure raw execution speed, code parsing performance and the browser's memory subsystems. The addition of asm.js is a pretty interesting move for Google. This project is Mozilla's attempt to bring JavaScript in the browser to near-native performance and unsurprisingly, Firefox – which supports asm.js out of the box since version 22 – greatly outperforms Chrome (by about 10,000 to 25,000 on a 2012 Macbook Air). To measure asm.js performance, Google is using zlib sample code from Mozilla's Emscripten test suite. While Google itself hasn't officially shown any interest in supporting asm.js and has instead argued that it would rather make all of JavaScript run as fast as possible, the addition of this benchmark does show that the team is keenly aware of this project and seems to have at least some interest in making asm.js code run as fast as possible in Chrome. Besides these two additions, Google engineers and “latency buster” Hannes Payer also writes that the team fixed a number of existing benchmarks “to help ensure that they measure what they were intended to.” These include the GameBoy emulator, a regular expressions test, as well as Octane's CodeLoad, DelataBlue and NavierStokes tests. You can find a complete list of all the tests and their descriptions here. I haven't run any formal tests yet, but on my Macbook Air, Firefox 25 and Safari 7.0 score just over 10,000 points, while Chrome 30 scores just over 14,000 (on my Surface Pro, Internet Explorer 11 scores about 8,500 points and Chrome 30 once again gets to around 14,000).

Y Combinator-Backed Origami Labs Acquired By eFamily, But Service Lives On

Not all exits have to see a product disappear. Case in point: Origami, the family-focused social service that arose from Y Combinator-backed mobile social network Everyme's earlier efforts, has been sold. The acquirer, Indiana-based eFamily, has taken over the company's branding and software, and will continue to develop and support the product, which is good news for current users. However, the Bay Area team from Origami Labs is not joining eFamily – instead, they were quietly “acqui-hired” by Nest several weeks ago. The entire six-person Origami Labs team, including founder and CEO Vibhu Norby, is now at Nest, working in various engineering and design roles. Norby says that Origami Labs had other good offers on the table for his company, but none that would have kept the product alive. “eFamily was the best one that we had there,” he says. For background, Origami publicly launched its family-focused sharing service earlier this summer after a year of development. The product was something of a spin-off of Everyme, a private messaging and photo-sharing app that never really took off, despite having raised $3.66 million in outside funding. But Everyme allowed the startup to gain some early insights it used to build Origami. For example, the company found that around half of Everyme's users were families, so Origami was built with that group's needs in mind. The new service offered a web and mobile platform (iOS and Android) that allowed families to post text, photos and videos, create photo albums, and receive email digests. Early on, Origami found a foothold with new parents who represented a majority of the site's earliest adopters at launch. Said Norby at the time, new parents take and share the most photos, but they also had the biggest desire for privacy. Shortly after launching, Origami also acquired competing service FamilyLeaf, another YC startup. The two companies worked together to help transition FamilyLeaf users to Origami, but FamilyLeaf's team moved on. That startup had around 7,500 registered families at the time of its own acquisition. Today, the two services have over 40,000 users combined. Origami also had 40,000 sign-ups from its beta program, but that doesn't speak to its paying users or actives, which are “significantly less.” Users were charged $5 per month for their private family websites – a price point that wasn't well-suited to a venture-backed company storing a lot of documents, Norby now believes. He also sees some similarities between the shutdown of Everpix, another photo-sharing service whose closure was announced just yesterday, and what they were building at Origami. “We've been working for two and a half years in this space, and it was rough,” says Norby. “We had a good business. It's not a VC business…The prospect of raising another round for our company was very difficult,” he adds. Also like Everpix, Origami had hosting costs to deal with, though not as substantial. The company still had money to run the business for a few years, but with the offer from Nest and the dim chances surrounding the next funding round, it make sense to move on. The team was able to return some capital to investors, on top of the acquisition price eFamily paid for the Origami assets, which is undisclosed. (It was an all-cash deal, however.) Unlike Origami, eFamily is a small, bootstrapped company and not eFamily CEO David Hosei's only focus. A serial entrepreneur and real estate investor, he's not one to put all his eggs into one basket, he tells TechCrunch. Now at eFamily, Origami's software is reviving a legacy product first founded in 2006, then incorporated as eFamily.com LLC in 2010. The company had previously offered similar tools allowing families to connect and share their memories online, in the form of private family websites. Today, the company reports having over 30,000 registered accounts, and over 300,000 “profiles.” Those profiles include both users and other family members, alive and deceased, who have been added to eFamily.com's family trees on its older product. The company now plans to bring those family trees to its new Origami-infused service, and will be transitioning its current user base, largely freemium, to a paid product. Users will be asked to pay $5 per month (or $50/year) for these private sites, a figure Hosei thinks is reasonable. They can also bring in their current domains for the same price, or buy a new domain through the service for a fee. “[eFamily] was a freemium service before, but we decided that model isn't going to work long-term for us. This software is really beautiful, and works well on multiple devices,” says Hosei, noting why he thinks the new eFamily is worth paying for. He also adds that the service can sustain itself indefinitely if they can grow it to at least 4,000 paying users. The Origami website has now been transitioned to eFamily.com, and the mobile apps are being updated now.