Yesterday, Facebook released App Center, a home for Facebook-integrated mobile applications. Much like Google Play or Apple’s App Store, Facebook’s App Center will promote various apps to users. Unlike other marketplaces, apps are not ranked – each user will receive personalized recommendations. This is a great move by Facebook to promote apps built using their platform and gives them even more power than they already have on the uptake of certain mobile applications.

Facebook’s App Center enjoys a few distinct advantages over its competitors:

1. Data: Facebook has much more data on users and user behavior than Apple or Google. Facebook’s application recommendation system can employ a user’s likes and interests across Facebook and the web. They don’t need rankings to tell you what you should download and you won’t need to search for it. App discovery is an issue for even the best mobile developers, so if Facebook can target apps to specific users it will be a great tool for distribution.
2. The Ratings Game: Apple hasn’t been able to conquer the ratings spam issue that plagues the App Store. Developers leave 1-star reviews on competitor’s applications. Users leave ratings on apps they have never opened. These problems are exacerbated by the fact that user accounts on the App Store are not necessarily tied to a real person. Because Facebook user accounts are tied to a real human being, it’s much easier to avoid spam (the time it takes to set up a spam Facebook account > the time it takes to set up a spam email account).
3. The Social Graph: Mobile developers have to push users to share apps with their friends. With App Center, an app can be recommended to me because ten of my good friends are using it or give it a high rating. Knowing which mobile apps my friends are using would be much more valuable than knowing which apps everyone is using.

Now what’s in it for Facebook?

1. Platform Distribution: Facebook could control an aspect of the mobile app ecosystem. Mobile is an area of uncertainty for Facebook. They spent a lot of time pushing for HTML5, when they should have been focused on native applications. They need to ensure that their platform continues to grow on mobile as it has on the web. Pushing downloads of apps using the Facebook platform gives them even more data about their users.
2. Controlling the Rise and Fall of Apps: We’ve seen that Facebook’s platform is a very powerful tool for distribution. It can make your app soar to the top of the charts because of heavy newsfeed placement. A small change can also reduce the Facebook traffic heading over to other sites. Facebook can use App Center to demonstrate the power they have over mobile, not just the web.
3. Monetization: Facebook can charge developers for referrals that lead to paid downloads or take a cut for fixed-price paid apps within the App Center.

I’m excited to see where App Center goes – we’ll likely be seeing a lot more of Facebook on mobile apps in the near future.

Farmville, helping you lose Facebook friends since 2009.

Last night I came across the two tweets below from Dan Porter, the CEO of OMGPOP, which makes the hit game Draw Something (recently acquired by Zynga). Porter is now the VP of General Management for Zynga New York. They’re in reference to a former OMGPOP employee, named Shay Pierce who wrote a piece in Gamasutra stating that he wouldn’t be joining Zynga post-acquisition citing that it “views players as weak-minded cash cows”.

Other than the above being tactless and petty, what really bothered me was that this behavior is not at all new for Zynga. They have quite the reputation for scamming their own users, ripping off the games created by other developers, requiring employees to give back their stock, and not telling employees how much their equity is truly worth. I’ve heard similar ramblings from former Zynga employees in person. So, why are we still surprised?

While I’m certainly proud of the OMGPOP team for working through the tough times to a successful exit, it’s hard to feel good for a company that treats people (their users and employees alike) this way time and time again. Hope the money was worth it.

I answered this Quora question today and thought I should post it to my blog since I’ve been asked many times what business development actually means. As I say below, it doesn’t mean the same thing for every startup, but here are my experiences in working at Pulse as we’ve grown from just a few people to a team of over 20.

Q: What is a business development role like at a startup that only creates a consumer mobile/web application?

A: I currently lead business development for Pulse, a consumer application that makes it easy to consume news on mobile phones and tablets. Business development varies quite a bit from startup to startup, but here’s my take:

I started off simply being a “business” person when we were still working out of coffee shops. In a startup with a handful of people, this meant doing everything I could to let our founders focus on building out the product. This included partnerships, data analytics, marketing, community management, hiring, culture etc. In a small startup, a business development role will likely mean wearing all of these different hats. If you hate doing the same thing day after day, it’s a great gig.

As we grew from a handful of people in a coffee shop to 20+ employees busting out of our current office, I began to focus on the areas I enjoyed the most and were most beneficial for the company. There are still a few hats to wear, but not as many as when we began:

• Partnerships: I spend the majority of my time pursuing partnerships that will help our company grow. We’re a news application and it’s my job to partner with publishers like Bloomberg News, USA TODAY, Al Jazeera, etc. so that our users have the content they want. We know what our users are asking for and it’s my job to make that happen – we have over 300 partners to date and that number continues to grow each day. I also help plan our content strategy and develop partnerships to execute on that accordingly. Partnerships are much more than signing the deal – I’m constantly staying in touch with our partners ensuring they’re getting just as much out of our partnership as we are.
• Data Analytics: When I started at Pulse and we needed data to send to our partners, I had to ask our engineers to pull the data for me. It took longer than I wanted and didn’t seem to be the best use of their time, so I learned SQL and started pulling the data myself using Hive. I then started pulling our internal metrics for how Pulse was performing with our users and sharing it with our team and I still do that to this day.
• Marketing/PR: We don’t have anyone at Pulse fully focused on marketing and PR, so if you’re a business person at a small startup, that will likely be in your territory too. When our product team is pushing out the release, it’s my job to write a press release, blog post and email to our userbase, coordinate assets for the press and finalize our “pitch” to journalists.

This varies quite a bit from startup to startup. For startups like Foursquare that are much larger (100+ people), business development is likely fully focused on partnerships. For startups that don’t have many partnerships yet (Path for example, has only partnered with Nike so far), it’s probably more focused on marketing, community and PR.

When Oink shut down yesterday, I used their export tool so that I could do something useful with the information I gave them. In requesting my data, which I did simply by filling out a form with only my username, I received the email below. In looking at the link, it seemed that my publicly available username (cristina) called for the download.

Oink Data Download Email

So, curiously, I tried replacing my username with Kevin Rose’s: http://oink-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/kevinrose-export.zip (go ahead, click it). You’ll get a zip file of every item he has ever added, rated or reviewed. You’ll also get every photo he has ever uploaded to Oink.

All of Kevin Rose’s Oink Data

While you may think “So what?”, one’s personal photos and information are fully available for anyone and everyone to download.

Kevin Rose’s Photos

I began thinking about what access I gave to Oink – did I somehow allow them to make all of my data publicly available without my consent? Well, I tried exploring their privacy page, but it seems to conveniently redirect to their data export page. I hope in the Milk team’s next steps at Google, they place a higher value on user data and privacy.

For more on this, check out The Verge, VentureBeat & PCMag.

Follow @cristinacordova

In July of last year, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures noted the ”law of web/mobile physics” as the ratio of registered users/downloads to monthly actives, daily actives, and max concurrent users. Most of the mobile companies he was seeing hovered around the 30% monthly active user (MAU) rate.

“30% of the registered users or number of downloads (if its a mobile app) will use the service each month

10% of the registered users or number of downloads (if its a mobile app) will use the service each day

the max number of concurrent users of a real-time service will be 10% of the number of daily users”

He noted that the best mobile companies will often use notifications to increase the number of daily and monthly active users, but a 30% MAU rate is actually fairly standard on mobile.

It’s extremely difficult to find companies willing to shed some light on their mobile statistics, but in keeping tabs on the MAUs of a few companies, I’ve noted that:

• Zynga grew from 13M mobile DAUs in December to 15M in February 2012
• Facebook has 425M mobile MAUs as of December 2011, meaning about 50% of its web MAUs are also mobile MAUs
• In September, Bump had 50M installs with 10M MAUs. Yesterday, Bump reported that it now has 77M installs with 12M MAUs.

That last figure really surprised me. In 5 months, Bump has gone from about a 20% MAU/Install rate (already lower than Wilson’s standard rate) to about a 16% MAU/Install rate. I’ve also heard similar stats off the record from other companies about their mobile apps.

About a year ago, Flurry identified the top 100 applications among a set of the largest categories across the App Store and Android Market and exposed their aggregate retention rates (see chart below, more info here).

So, what’s really going on in mobile? Too many apps flooding the market leaving users with short attention spans? As things only seem to be getting worse for retention, how does that affect these companies as they continue to grow? I doubt notifications alone are going to fix this problem, but what can be done to keep these users coming back after the initial install?

Rapportive is one of my favorite tools to use for business development, but can be used for any role where you need to reach out to external contacts. Technically, Rapportive is a tool to manage and connect with your email contacts. It’s a free extension you can add on top of Gmail, which will show you the social networks that a contact is connected to. I happen to use Rapportive in reverse – to find out the email addresses of the people who I want to contact, but can’t through my normal routes like introductions.

Here’s how:

Step 1) I think of every format a potential contact’s email address might be, such as:

• jsmith@companyname.com
• johnsmith@companyname.com
• john.smith@companyname.com
• john_smith@companyname.com
• john@companyname.com
• smith@@companyname.com
• js@@companyname.com

Step 2) I try out each of those email addresses by typing them into the To: field in Gmail and wait for Rapportive to load the information it has on that email address.

3) When a real profile (with either a profile photo, twitter account, facebook account or linkedin account attached to it) shows up, you know you’ve got the right one. Use that email address to contact your person of interest.

It’s very straightforward and I know a few folks who use Rapportive in the same way. While this does get you in the door, there is no guarantee that someone will respond to you. I’ll leave that up to another blog post…

I’ve always hated the idea of New Year’s Resolutions. It makes me think of all those new folks joining the gym who start off the year strong in 2012, but disappear come February. A lot of these resolutions suffer from

1. Impossible Goals – If you make plans to go to the gym EVERY day – once you inevitably miss one day, you’ll miss the next and soon a month goes by and you’re paying a $100 gym tax each month.
2. Goals Without Reasoning – If you make a resolution to eat healthier, but don’t have a reason why (“because I feel like I should”), there isn’t a strong enough incentive to complete it.
3. Goals Involving Things Never Been Done Before – It’s much harder to start doing things you have never done before. You need to learn how to do something and then do it consistently.

So, with that in mind, I thought I would write down a few of my resolutions goals for 2012:

• Write at least once every 2 weeks. I would consider myself a fairly creative person (I paint, sculpt – have done photography etc.), but I haven’t done anything like that in about 3 years. I wish I did it more, but I think writing is a great low-touch way to get that same feeling without stuffing my home full of art supplies.
• Do yoga at least once a week. I run quite a bit, but it has made my muscles tighten up a bit and I’d like to fix that. I also need to put some lulu lemon gear to good use.
• Organize more group-outings. Because hanging out in groups is fun and it’s not that hard to be the one that organizes outings.
• Move to a place that is either a) more fun or b) more convenient. I want to move to either downtown Palo Alto (to be closer to work, the gym and more people) or San Francisco (to be closer to more fun things). My lease is up in June, so I’ve got 6 months to get going.

Do you have goals for 2012? What are they?

What is this? Mad Men?

Penelope Trunk wrote another ridiculously egregious article yesterday on VentureBeat about the “Woman Problem” in tech startups. She’s written similar posts on Techcrunch before:

Women Don’t Want to Run Tech Startups Because They’d Rather Have Children

Why Diversity is Bad for Startups

I’ve always wholeheartedly disagreed with her remarks about women in technology, but she’s continued to push her views as guest posts on several of the blogs I read. I’m actually surprised VentureBeat and Techcrunch have published her posts considering her rampant generalizations of women in tech, but unfortunately I think they find it intriguing because she’s a woman herself. Thankfully, for the women who push themselves each day as founders or early startup employees, she is utterly wrong.

Her first assumption is “If diversity was really a problem, VCs would be solving it”

As Charles Hudson, a venture partner at SoftTechVC said yesterday on BloombergTV, investors feel safer making inherently risky bets on entrepreneurs who remind them of themselves. When the vast majority of venture firms are led by men, that’s where the money is going. Despite this, women are getting funded more often than ever before. They’re founding profitable companies which will have or have had successful exits.

She goes on to state that “Women don’t want to do startups because women want children”. She says startups are risky, require more time and women just don’t care about things like that.

Men want children just as much as women want children. This doesn’t seem to affect their career choices. As women are having children later and later in life, they have the opportunity to spend their twenties founding a startup. Even when they have children, if they have a partner who is willing to parent equally, they have the opportunity to spend their time founding a startup. Startups do require more time and risk, but women are just as free to take these chances. As more women are getting funding, the risk decreases as they can have a normal salary, benefits and many of the securities of working for a larger company.

She states that women in their twenties outearn men, so surely they can do whatever they want in their careers. Startups just aren’t for them.

Women often hit a glass ceiling in their late twenties/early thirties that their male peers don’t seem to hit. This, and not children alone, contributes to women leaving the workforce entirely or only working part time. When women don’t feel they are rewarded for their hard work – they leave. This is a problem that can and should be fixed. It is not a problem that is caused by women not caring about the work they do.

Trunk gives three ideas for what can be done to increase the  number of women who do startups.

1) Give them more money. Women like nice clothes and a house.

Women don’t need any more money than their male peers. They need security, which is a concern for many founders and employees. This isn’t an equation that can be solved by money alone – it’s a feeling that can be fostered by mentorship and a strategic vision.

2) VCs need to accept that women are slower than men.

This is egregious. Men can found companies and be attentive fathers and husbands. This does not change for women. When both women and men should accept that both parents must give equally to their children, you’ll see many more female founders. This has absolutely nothing to do with VCs.

3) VCs should raise funds with the idea that their portfolio companies started by women will be slower.

Good luck with that. How about a VC firm tells their LPs that they’re going to invest in the most talented teams – and we all accept that those are teams started by men and women. Let’s not tell them that the teams are any different – because they’re not.

In writing this, I can only hope that Trunk begins to stop stereotyping women based on her own choices and insecurities. Even though I sincerely doubt that will happen, I hope blogs will stop giving her a platform for her misogynistic views of her own gender.

For more, follow me on Twitter.

There is no doubt that the Airbnb vacation rental horror story has been a PR disaster for the company. As I’m sure this isn’t the first time an AirBnb renter has had property stolen or damaged while renting, I am surprised that this was not handled better. While some may be blaming this on the AirBnb PR team or lack thereof, this is not a “PR” issue. It’s a crisis management issue that is inevitable at many companies. While many were anticipating that this would happen to AirBnb sooner or later, it seems that there was no action plan from the leadership team. A few lessons can be learned from what happened:

1. Respond Immediately
Time is critical in these situations and something must be done immediately. The fact that the situation with EJ has not been fully taken care of for over a month is ridiculous. The second this happened a community manager from the AirBnb team should have alerted the co-founders and they should have addressed it immediately with a plan of action. AirBnb attorneys and public relations staff should have been fully aware of the extent of the situation and the possible effects this may have on their community. San Francisco police and other regulators and associations for the city that might have been able to help should be consulted. They should have been proactive, responding to the victim publicly a month ago when her original blog was posted. They should have given the victim a consistent point of contact, seen her in person, put her up in a hotel, etc.

When the recent earthquake hit Japan, senior managers were told to stock up on food and supplies at their stores immediately. Corporate and retail employees were given immediate assistance and told they could sleep at their stores. The head of Apple International HR and of Japan Retail spent the night with their employees at the retail stores. No one could have predicted that catastrophe, but Apple leadership handled it impeccably.

2. Have a Long Term Response
The problem will not just go away. While AirBnb reported that they doubled their customer service staff, the lack of customer service reps did not cause this problem. Their response was also unclear – they could have had one customer service rep before this incident and upped it to two. This long-term response (a response a month after the incident) is neither clear nor helpful. Trying to improve security and institute some kind of insurance policy protection for renters will help future victims. They had no clear or concise long-term action plan in regards to the problem at hand.

3. How to Handle the Press
A “no comment” can only hurt you. The second a reader sees that a company refused to comment or did not comment in time, they will think that it has something to hide.

Do not lie. You must be absolutely truthful when speaking to the press, your users and investors. Anything but and you will lose their trust. In this case, we have the victim to fact-check AirBnb and it came back to bite them. Their poor management of their relationship with the victim (example: telling her to take down her blog) made her feel like she needed to speak out again.

How companies respond during a crises really makes you think about whether you want to do business with them. Hopefully AirBnb has learned their lesson this time around.

Reading Vivek Wadhwa’s post on how to encourage more minority women to join the tech industry, I immediately began to think of my own experiences as a minority (Hispanic) female in tech. Thankfully, I don’t have anything but good things to say about being a minority female in tech, but there are a few reasons I can think of personally that have pushed me away from it. I don’t think these experiences are unique to me and are more telling of why you don’t see many women like Raissa B. Nebie and Kimberly Dillion starting companies in Silicon Valley. While these are just a few reasons that affected me in my choice for a career, there are many more that affect minority women (and even more that affect disadvantaged minority women). Many of these reasons are cultural, take years to overcome and involve much more than just education.

• Minority women are taught to be risk averse. When I was growing up, I was told I had two options for my future career path: Doctor or Lawyer. My mother gave me these options because they were safe and respectable. Her grandchildren would be well taken care of if her daughter got a second degree and began a career making six figures. One friend told me she had to be a doctor because it was her parent’s dream and a way that she could guarantee providing for them when they got older and could no longer work. Growing up in a family that is financially insecure (as many minority women are), children are pushed to have a lifestyle with a steady income. The first careers that come to mind are not start-ups when financial security is the end goal.
• Failing is not an option for minority women. Many great entrepreneurs fail a few times before they succeed. In the valley, starting a company that fails is a rite of passage. The price of failure for minority women is high and not looked at positively. If the startup I work for failed tomorrow, you can bet my mother would tell me either a. You should have stayed at Google. and/or b. You better start applying for law school. Minority women don’t have the same safety nets that their white male counterparts do.
• Minority women by and large are not exposed to engineering and computer science. Many of my friends and co-workers who are engineers have parents who are engineers or went to high schools with a strong computer science curriculum. They grew up learning to code. My experience was vastly different. My high school “computer science” course was really focused on typing and learning how to operate a computer. I really had no clue what computer science was in high school and engineering always made me think of buildings and architecture. I ended up taking a few computer science courses at Stanford, but only in my junior and senior year when the fear of the unknown subsided. Many of the women I know in tech were only exposed to computer science in college which puts them far behind those who grew up working on projects of their own. Coming from families that are unaware of engineering as a career removes the exposure to tech that is so frequently apparent in engineering grads of today.

For years, the question of why minority women were not represented in an industry (whether law, medicine or business) has been asked. Many of the problems in those industries were institutional, but many of the problems in tech result from cultural opposition to the failure and risk that thrives in the tech industry.