It’s official. Quora has raised a $50 million Series B round at a $400 million valuation, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal. The founders themselves have confirmed. Peter Thiel has joined the round and co-founder Adam D’Angelo put in $20M of his own money.

Quora is creating valuable Q&A content, but is this really the a product that can eventually take on Google? I question the intent of the user base and if that intent is valuable enough to create a threatening AdWords type product for advertisers to profit of the user base. At this point, I don’t think it’s anywehre close, but let’s keep an eye on it.

Pebble sales have surpassed $10M and the team has delivered the following message: “Just wanted to let everyone know that our current plan is to limit the total number of Kickstarter rewards to around 85,000 Pebbles. As soon as the total exceeds that, all rewards will change to being ‘sold out’. Right now you have claimed 75,000 watches, that leaves only 10,000 more before Pebble is sold out!”

What an amazing ride for the YC team that had trouble raising funding for their original Pulse watch. With $10M in sales to date, Kickstarter as a platform should really be perking ears of investors who previously thought hardware startups have a bumpy road ahead of them. BestBuy is no longer the exit strategy as this company has proven you can hit scale when you tip the interest of the crowd on such a popular crowd funding platform. We have a few more friends building excellent hardware companies and are excited to see them address Kickstarter when the time is right.

A success story for any game developer who hasn’t hit the big leagues yet with a landmark iOS or Android title. OMGPOP’s overnight success of their drawing game commanded a $200m+ acquisition price by Zynga. Congrats to Dan Porter and team. More on the story:

“The OMGPOP team has created a game that’s fun, expressive and engenders real social interaction,” said Zynga CEO Mark Pincus said in a news release. “Draw Something has captured the imagination of millions of people around the world. We love the way they’ve worked playful and relevant culture into their games from Devo to Daft Punk, from Lin to Beckham. We’re honored to have the opportunity to partner with and support such an innovative team of creative inventors.”

A very interesting piece out of PopSci today. See the infograph below for the future of excretion.

In a rare guest post on TechCrunch, the genius behind Sun Microsystems and Khosla Ventures (Vinod Khosla ), shared his most favorite investment areas. Here is a TL:DR version:

1. Data Reduction or Filters (Siri, Donna, Recorded Future, and many others): “Reducing, filtering and processing data streams to deliver the information or action that is relevant to you.” The web has been expanding what we have access to. It is time for tools (our proxies or agents on the web) to start reducing the amount of information coming at us. News or article feeds, TV shows, YouTube, “must watch” emails — these can all be prioritized for us like our proxy was a virtual assistant who knows our current context and our preferences. Even serendipitous feeds will have a higher probability of being interesting.

2. Big data or Analytics (Ness, Billguard, The Climate Corporation, Kaggle, Datasift): “Analyzing massive amounts of structured and unstructured data to deliver unique services or analysis.” Per the OATV website, so many of the most transformative applications today rely on massive cloud databases — often generated by user participation — with meaning extracted from that data by predictive analytics and powerful machine-learning algorithms. We see the back-ends of many of these applications becoming the functional equivalents of subsystems in a kind of internet-scale operating system driving not just the web but mobile devices. Location, social networks, identity, and personalization are just the tip of the iceberg.

3. Emotion (Foodspotting, Ness, Instagram): “Services that evoke strong emotions in users,” which is often a component of other categories, can also be enough of a driver to be mentioned separately. I include here the applications that because of their emotional appeal are adopted more rapidly or easily (more pull from users than push to them) as a major component of the application.

4. Education 2.0 (it’s early, but Altius, Khan Academy, CK12, Udacity): “Education models that dramatically reduce the cost and increase the availability of quality learning.” The puzzling question is why education has not already changed. My guess is we have not experimented enough with non-linear, rapidly evolving, out-of-the-box approaches but have instead tried to force-fit ‘multi-media textbooks’ and other traditional (often broken) ideas into the “computerized” model.

5. TV 2.0 (Miso, Flingo, Maker Studios, both first and second screen apps as well as content production & sourcing): “TV as an interactive and social experience both on the primary and the second screen.” Most U.S. Internet users, I am told now, have a second screen in front of them when watching TV. Whether it is true or not, it soon will be, and the interaction that is possible will allow for all kinds of creativity and user engagement shows/applications/techniques. More importantly, program production, be it video for TV, audio for radio, or text for next-generation news formats (tomorrow’s “newspapers”?) could be crowdsourced or gamified.

6. Social Next (intersecting with all the interest graph stuff and verticals like Github, Coursekit, and Researchgate): “Social as a useful and productive part of lives—enabling collaboration and deep community building around the world in specific areas.” I include here new uses of social such as Github to do a cooperative task or the kind of social learning Coursekit and others are trying to encourage. I suspect we will see the power of social harnessed for many applications beyond just the Facebook friends network or the Google+ circles implementation.

7. Interest-based networks (where Meebo is pivoting to, Twitter, Snip.it, State): “User driven content that maps to people’s interests both for a better user experience and better targeting.” I was impressed by a post by Naval Ravikant and Adam Rifkin on interest graphs and why they are different from social graphs. I do think a number of startups will either target interest graphs to create a network different from Facebook’s and others will use these graphs as monetization strategies.

8. Health 2.0 (Jawbone UP, Nike Fuelband, Empatica, BodyMedia, MC10, Fitbit, iBike, Recon, Withings, Alivecor): “Exponentially growing data will yield personalized lifestyle suggestions, improved outcomes, predictive diagnostics and applications we can’t imagine.” Health applications will flourish in many directions and are laid out in a separate post. From more data (especially more baseline, or “healthy” data), “health”-care instead of “sick”-care, more DNA and proteomics data, to mobile-based “second opinions” substituting for doctors and more traditional health systems, we will see an influx of non-sick status data and applications leading to what is called the Quantified Self.

9. Internet of Things/Universal ID/NFC/Smart sensors (a technology with the applications still to emerge): “Sensors and authentication technologies which will interconnect everything and remake our interaction with the world around us.” Sensor networks aren’t just for cargo containers anymore. Sensors have found their way into every aspect of our lives — whether it’s the phone in our pocket, the digital photo frames on our desks or the barcodes embedded with information in our local grocery stores, often complemented by NFC, Bluetooth LE, Wi-Fi and other networks.

10. Personal Collaborative Publishing (Pinterest, Tumblr, storify, Snip.it): “Truly free press with no barriers to entry and personalized interest-based curation.” This trend seems to be moving forward fairly rapidly. I’m not sure if it will become more or less verticalized or what new dimensions will emerge but the potential clearly remains promising. Self-publishing on Amazon is becoming real.

11. Utility Apps (Siri, Seatme, Ifttt, Uber, and many, many more): “Leverage device ubiquity and context to deliver valuable services.” It goes without saying that we will continue to see more and more utilities that are just plain helpful to us. I do wonder how many major new categories of utilities there will be. Ideas anyone, for major new categories? Utilities will provide personal assistance, productivity and maybe even decentralized work (new clones of Mechanical Turk or Skype!). They will aggregate experts into marketplaces (see below) or crowdsourced services or just plain telemedicine and remote reading of your radiology scans (yes it is hard to separate any of these applications into clean areas – overlap is inevitable).

12. Marketplaces & Disintermediation (Interview Street, Kaggle, Etsy): “Remove the middle man, increase market efficiency and produce better results, faster“ Marketplaces are about economic efficiency (and active engagement) and more and more of them will keep emerging. My favorite new marketplace is Kaggle, where 13,000 data scientists can compete with their talents and the best ones can benchmark themselves and hopefully get paid accordingly.

Read the whole post here:

This company is credited with inventing the home computer, and with coining such technological terms as mouse, desktop and icon. Apple Computers was founded on April 1, 1976 in Cupertino, California by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. By the next year, they had produced the successful Apple II. When the company went public in 1980, it created the most millionaires of any company that came before it. Apple has become well-known in recent years for its technological contributions such as the iPod, iPhone and iPad, and continues to pave the way for changes in the industry, even after the death of company founder Steve Jobs. In this video, WatchMojo.com learns more about the origins and history of Apple.

• Apple has released their quarterly results, and to say they knocked it out of the park is an understatement. Without analyzing too much, just take in the raw numbers. Revenue: $46 billion. 15.4 million iPads sold. 37 million iPhones sold. 5.2 million Macs. Google reported its fourth-quarter 2011 revenues rose a disappointing 25%, to $10.58 billion–and sales net of payments back to other sites that are ad partners was only $8.13 billion, noticeably less than analysts’ forecast of $8.38 billion. Profits of $9.50 a share also came in far short of the $10.49 Wall Street was expecting. (news from PandoDaily and Forbes)
• Apple and Google are by no means done. These are the companies of the future despite some recent controversy over Google’s new search initiatives and Apple’s labor practices. I’m bullish on both.

“Zynga Inc said it bought four small mobile game companies for an undisclosed sum as the top maker of Facebook games seeks to expand its lineup on smartphones and tablets..The company’s top mobile executive David Ko told Reuters on Wednesday it had acquired German company Gamedoctors in December. Gamedoctors, based in Bielefeld near Hanover, makes the game ZombieSmash. The company also bought Page44 Studios, which is based in San Francisco, in September. That studio created the “World of Goo” game for Apple’s iOS platform. Zynga acquired HipLogic, another San Francisco-based games company, in August. Ko also confirmed Zynga purchased New York based Astro Ape Studios in August to develop new titles” -Reuters

Zynga is making a vast majority of their money on silly grid based Facebook games that took our Mothers and Girlfriends by storm the past few years. You want to see what the future holds for them? Just go ask the next 5 girls you see on the street if they are still playing said games: Farmville, CityVille, WhateverVille, etc. I think you will pleasantly surprised to find out that none of them are playing anymore. It’s important to note that this means Zynga is not building  timeless franchise games like EA which make hundreds of millions of dollars each year by tweaking a few features on fan favorites. Once you’ve left Farmville, you’re done for good. There is no Farmville 2 with upgraded corn to pull you back in. The news about 4 more acqui deals shows Zynga is continuing to realize this and wants to have more a presence on the mobile with a wider variety of games. I’m not impressed and neither is the market. The stock fell 6 percent on Wednesday to close at $8.65 per share. #hype #adiosPincus

• TechCrunch Reports: “OS fragmentation, though, is an utter disaster. Ice Cream Sandwich is by all accounts very nice; but what good does that do app developers, when according to Google’s own stats, 30% of all Android devices are still running an OS that is 20 months old? I sure would have liked to stop caring about Android 2.2 bugs fixed in 2.3. It would have been awfully nice to be able to use the animation libraries from Android 3.0, described in this almost-a-year-old blog post, to say nothing of Ice Cream Sandwich’s features; but at this rate, Android developers aiming for a mass audience will have to wait another year, if not longer, before they can actually build apps that take advantage of all the shiny new featuers.”
• What a developer nightmare for Android. This puts iOS in a prime position to continue growth from superior applications on its platform. Why? More than two-thirds of iOS users had already upgraded to iOS 5 within 3 months of the release. With one release, Apple can cleanly improve performance of their platform and native phone features in one fell swoop. Android not so much as there are literally hundreds (soon to be thousands) of different devices running the OS at this point, including different screen sizes, touch/keyboard interfaces, native hardware features, etc. Another ball in Apple’s corner to continue to push the envelops on mobile innovation.

• “According to a new report from research firm NPD, iOS’s U.S. market share (by sales) jumped from 26% in the third quarter of 2011 to 43% by October and November. Android, however, came out on top, with 47% market share during those two months, down from 60% in Q3. Says NPD, over the course of 2011, the smartphone battle saw iOS and Android distancing themselves from the competition, turning it into “a two-horse race.” (TechCrunch)
• Apple owns the top 3 spots at this point, which only means one thing to me: Owning the entire space. Why? Compare the customer loyalty of an Apple user to any other phone manufacturer and it’s light years of difference. There is absolutely no guarantee that the Samsung Galaxy S or HTC Inspire user is going to re-up with that brand. At the end of the day, they are all running Android and it’s a feature race to the bottom for all of the OEM Android runners. Buy APPL.

• Travelzoo has crawled all the way back to its original market cap (430M) after a year of little guidance and extreme growth (Went from 20 to 105 in less than a year). This is a great business with 20M+ subscribers and is a service I love. In today’s secondary markets, Travelzoo would be valued at twice its current share price. As Groupon’s cap comes back to reality and settles, there will finally be a fair comparison of the two companies, sending Traveloo back to where it belongs: $60-70 a share. I got back in at $24

• “As Facebook touches on a reported 800m users, one might think that the “social web” is maturing. In fact, I predict it is only at the beginning. I believe the current and future crop of talented young entrepreneurs will build applications enabling deeper connections between users and the world around them—and the evidence will be seen in 2012 in the start-ups that attract our seed-stage investments, with mobile prominent in our sights. I see numerous emerging trends related to the explosive growth of smartphones. One of these is “context”. Many people will have seen how location-enabled applications have been able to generate highly relevant and timely content. Suppose I permit Google Maps to know my location. Then when I enter coffee into the search bar, it should “push” me the most relevant coffee shop: in this case, the closest. As social networks such as Google+, Facebook and Twitter integrate further with other services, your friends and followers, the people you align yourself with, can provide content with improved depth. This context shows not just the closest coffee shop, but the one which my friends enjoy visiting the most” -Ron Conway in the Economist
• I completely agree with Ron that the social market has not been matured by the fact Facebook has 800M users. Facebook as a platform (FB Connect) will continue to stay relevant for many years to come, but as a service it is ripe for disruption. If anything, Facebook has done a great job of making sure that everyone on the planet has a basic online profile in the same place (picture, interests,  connections, etc). This has made it possible for the next wave of social applications.
• I’m not sure about your friends, but about 90% of my 800 friends are no longer engaging with Facebook as a service. Status updates are from the same old people, events are mostly spam, pictures are vain and the birthday wishes are half-hearted at best. It’s stale. Facebook is only useful for me as a way to engage with my new favorite applications (Instagram, AirBnB, Hipster, Pinterest etc) so I know immediately who I can interact with and/or trust who is using the service I’ve adopted. With these new applications, I can get back to my roots of interacting with the people I care about. I have about 16 friends on Instagram (plenty for me), even fewer on Pinterest. You can keep the other 786 friends on your service Facebook, they were getting annoying anyways.

• Dow Jones VentureSource says there were 522 exits of venture-backed companies in the US throughout 2011, which represents a significant 4 percent drop in deal activity compared to 2010.In 2011, 45 companies raised $5.4 billion by going public, significantly more than the $3.3 billion raised by 46 IPOs in 2010. A lot of that comes from the IPOs of tech giants Groupon and Zynga, which combined raised $1.7 billion by hitting the public markets.

Other notable tech IPOs included LinkedIn, Pandora, Yandex, Tudou and Renren.

• 2012 should be the biggest tech IPO market since 2000 with the IPO of Facebook, Yelp and many of the video ad / display ad companies like Tremor, Specific, Glam and others who have hinted that they will file or have raised money from “last money in” type venture firms.

• Was curious to run a campaign with MyLikes.com for WhiteyBoard over the past week after seeing their recent publicity on TechCrunch. For those that don’t know, MyLikes is an ad platform where brands can pay to have social media influencers Tweet or Facebook Share about their product. WhiteyBoard has had pretty solid success with social media in the past. We’ve had tens of thousands of Tweet about our brand and even once were tweeted about by a reality TV Star, which made us over $1,500 in a matter of hours (they had about 500,000 followers at the time). Nonetheless, we were curious to see how paying for social media traffic would result.
• MyLikes requires a minimum bid of $.10 to get started, so we started with that. That didn’t get any traction, so we increased our bid to $.25 and saw a big jump in traffic over the last 7 days. Look like pretty nice stats, right? (see on the right). Think again. Although $150 is not a large amount of money to do a test, we received quite a lot of traffic. We received about 400 more visitors than usual on Saturday and 200 more visitors than usual yesterday. The result: A $0 increase in sales.

• Last week, I was inspired to test out the Reddit Self-Serve Ad (RSSA) platform for Whiteyboard that I had been hearing some chatter about. Mostly, this blog post by Gabriel on his 13 day trial with RSSA for his Duck Duck Go Engine. I will compare our two experiences, although our goals were quite different (he was trying to promote a search engine over a two week period, and I was trying to sell as much Whiteyboards as possible in a 48 hour window, offering free shipping on Reddit.Whiteyboard.com

Budget to Time:

• Gabriel: $650 for 13 days
• Whiteyboard: $700 for 2 days

Gabriel says: Redditors actually try out your site. 3c per unique visitor is pretty good in and of itself, but it’s all worthless unless they actually try out your site. For example, you can get 5c unique visitors from StumbleUpon (presumably in a similar demographic), but StumbleUpon visitors never would try out my sites. Reddit visitors did try out Duck Duck Go.

Jason Wilk says: True, Redditors do actually visit your site and browse around. For seemingly cheap traffic, Reddit drives highly interested customers, however when selling a product, getting that audience to instantly open their wallets is as tough as using any ad platform.  TO be positive, the bounce rate was very low, and average page views was 2.5+, but conversion rates on our site were even lower than usual. One interesting note, is that our Facebook Like button (which we A/B tested quite a bit on the location saw it’s conversion rates drop to nearly zero). Don’t expect Redditors to share your site.

Gabriel says: My ad ran for 13 days, from 3/7 to 3/20. It cost $650, and I spent $50 per day. In total it had 1,288,378 impressions (282,732 uniques) and yielded 20,700 clicks (18,420 uniques).

Jason says: My ad ran for two days from 7/15 thru 7/16. It costs $700 ($350 per day). In total it has 299,784 impressions (63,000 unique) and yielded 4,226 clicks (4,197 uniques).

Jason says: To be honest, this was the not nearly the best traffic experiment we have come across. In the last few months, Whiteyboard has seen far better conversion results when getting any sort of coverage on blogs. With TechCrunch, LifeHacker, New York Times, etc (and any other blog), we usual generate about $1 per unique visitor (TechCrunch and LifeHacker both generated about 9,000 unique visitors. New York Times online sent us 2,500 visitors). Reddit was a fraction of that, but the ad was still profitable at the end of the day when factoring in the $700 price point. A positive ROI in my book, especially on a site with what seem to be topic starters, is positive from a branding prospective. I truly thought however, that based off of Gabriell’s blog post, that we were going to be looking at a $15,000-$20,000 48 hours with Reddit. We even had Alexis Ohanian (Reddit’s co-founder) design a  custom landing page for the readers and offered free shipping.

If any of you Hacker News readers want the same deal that I gave to Reddit readers, I’m keeping the free shipping link live for another day here.