Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook on Wednesday updated its S-1 document to the Securities and Exchange commission for its planned initial public offering, and it’s a veritable data dump of new information about the social networking company. The good news is, we’re digging through it so you don’t have to. Here are some of the more interesting tidbits disclosed in this latest regulatory filing:

• The rent is really dang high.You think you spend a lot of money on rent? According to the new filing, Facebook’s new Menlo Park, Calif. campusis costing the company an average of well over $ 1 million per month for the next 14 years (the 15 year lease began in February 2011.) The company’s monthly rent will actually go up as time goes on, from $ 1.175 million/month now to $ 1.9 million/month in 2025, because ostensibly Facebook’s revenue will grow at the same time. The company is, however, getting a million square feet of space for that money, so in context it’s not that ridiculous.
  

  Graph representing Facebook's property rent (click to enlarge)

• Facebook controls even more of its data center strategy than you think. A couple years ago, rumors started buzzing about how a Delaware-based company called Vitesse was behind the planning of Facebook’s Prineville, Oregon data center. In 2011 Facebook eventually came clean with the details of all the ins and outs of the massive data center as part of its Open Compute Project, and now it’s totally clear that from day one it has been completely in charge of the effort: Vitesse is actually a wholly-owned subsidiary of Facebook, according to the newly filed S-1 documents.
• Facebook wears the pants when it comes to Zynga.The updated filings included tons of information about Facebook’s relationship with Zynga, the social gaming giant. Even though Zynga has been asserting its own independence from Facebook, the details of the contract between the two companies shows that Zynga can never quite become a standalone business if it wants to maintain ties with the social media king. These clauses are especially key:
  

  “All Zynga Users must have a valid (e.g. real; not suspended) FB account. Zynga will require all Zynga Users to connect their Zynga account to their FB account. In addition, Zynga will require all Zynga Users to be logged-in to their FB account with an active session to use or access any Covered Zynga Game, Zynga Mobile Game or any Zynga Property” [except in limited situations.]

  and

  “Zynga Users who are not Facebook Users must create a FB account.”

  and

  “Zynga may not prompt any users on the Facebook Site to create, log-in with, register for or otherwise use Zynga Credentials on the Facebook Site.”

• Zuck, Sheryl Sandberg, and the other execs have it pretty good. Of course, you already knew this. But the new S-1 shines a bit more light on the compensation packages of Facebook’s executive team. Mark Zuckerberg’s base salary for 2012 is $ 500,000 (which was shown in the initial S-1) and the new filing shows he is eligible for a semi-annual bonus of 45 percent of that salary based on his performance; COO Sheryl Sandberg’s salary is $ 300,000 and she is also up for the 45 percent twice yearly bonus. They each get 21 days paid vacation annually (this is on par with the rest of Facebook’s employees.)

We’ll continue to pore over the documents and will update this story with any more gems we come across. And keep checking in at GigaOM for our full Facebook IPO coverage.

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Path CEO Dave Morin

Path, the mobile app for cataloging your daily activities and sharing them with a relatively small circle of contacts, came under serious fire on Tuesday when it was discovered that Path’s iPhone app imports all of its users’ address book data onto Path’s own servers without notification or asking permission. Not surprisingly, many people saw this as a major breach of user trust.

Path CEO Dave Morin quickly responded to the fallout, telling app developer Arun Thampi, the blogger who first discovered the address book upload activity, that the data was only used to help users find their friends and “nothing more.” Even so, he also said that the Android app would make the address book upload an opt-in feature, and released a new version of Path for iPhone that does the same. The question still remained, though: What about all the address book data that has is already in Path’s hands?

According to Path, you can now consider it completely gone. In a company blog post Wednesday, Morin explicitly apologized for Path ever having such a feature and said that all the address book data that has already been uploaded will be erased from Path’s servers. The blog post, entitled “We are sorry,” reads in part:

“Through the feedback we’ve received from all of you, we now understand that the way we had designed our ‘Add Friends’ feature was wrong. We are deeply sorry if you were uncomfortable with how our application used your phone contacts.

…We believe you should have control when it comes to sharing your personal information. We also believe that actions speak louder than words. So, as a clear signal of our commitment to your privacy, we’ve deleted the entire collection of user uploaded contact information from our servers. Your trust matters to us and we want you to feel completely in control of your information on Path.”

It’s a very smart move by Morin and the Path team. Privacy breaches can be hugely damaging to web companies, for a company like Path, which bills itself as a more private version of Facebook. Path is already on its second life of sorts (its first iteration as a pure photo sharing app did not take off so well) so its important for the company to value the users it has attracted. Path has not behaved perfectly, but its response to the outcry has been quick, sensitive and strong. The big test now is whether that will be enough from the users’ perspective.

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Path and Pinterest are probably two of the hottest social services right now, racking up millions of users and generating an ocean of favorable coverage. But both have gotten tripped up by the same thing that has made the social web a minefield for both Facebook and Google: namely, decisions that put their interests ahead of their users, and a lack of disclosure about what was going on behind the scenes or under the hood of their services. Will these missteps spell doom for either company? Probably not. But the backlash is a welcome reminder that for social apps, the trust of users is not something to be toyed with.

Path, a mobile photo-sharing app that expanded to become a full-fledged mobile social app when it relaunched a couple of months ago, was co-founded and is run by Dave Morin, an early Facebook staffer. You might think that the privacy blowups the giant social network has experienced over the past couple of years would make Path pretty sensitive to handling user data properly, but that doesn’t seem to be the case: earlier this week, controversy erupted when it was revealed that Path was uploading all of its users’ contacts to the company’s servers, something that many users have taken as a breach of their privacy.

It may not seem like a big deal, but you should still disclose it

In public comments on the blog post that first brought this to light, Morin apologized and said that Path will fix the problem in an upcoming version, by requiring users to explicitly opt-in — and he also tried to defend the company’s behavior by saying that it is the “industry best practice.” As a commenter on the Hacker News thread about the issue put it, however, a better phrase might be “industry lowest common denominator.”

It’s true that other apps and services also do this, including WhatsApp, Beluga, Hipster and others, and the ability to do so has been a part of Apple’s iOS since 2008. Others have also noted in Path’s defence that Apple allows apps to upload contacts without explicitly asking users for permission — something that it doesn’t do for other data such as a user’s location. And it’s also true that importing a user’s address book makes it a lot easier to scan for friends who are already on Path, and that this can be a benefit for users in the long run.

That said, however, the anger and shock that Path’s move seems to have triggered among many users — some of whom say they have deleted the app and will never return — makes it pretty clear that even if this behavior has benefits for users, the lack of disclosure about what Path was planning to do is a deal-breaker for many.

Pinterest, meanwhile, did something completely different to upset some of its users, but the underlying lesson is the same: the company — which says it has built up a massive user base of more than 10 million in just two months — is a content-sharing service where fans of different products and websites can post (or “pin”) their favorites. Since popular posts can drive a lot of traffic to websites that sell these products, Pinterest has been adding affiliate links that generate revenue for the site when users click on them.

Lesson: Never take your users for granted

As many of the company’s defenders have pointed out, this behavior makes a huge amount of sense for Pinterest, since it is providing a free service and needs to generate revenue somehow. But as with Path’s move — which also makes a lot of sense from a purely utilitarian point of view — Pinterest failed to disclose what it was doing to users, or at least failed to make it obvious. Perhaps the company thought (as Path likely did) that users wouldn’t mind. But it turns out that plenty of them do mind.

Path’s decision seems the more surprising of the two, if only because there are so many examples of similar undisclosed or opt-in-by-default moves that have triggered a huge amount of backlash, and not just for Facebook but for Google as well. The search giant’s engineers also clearly thought that merging people’s email contact lists with their new Buzz service was a great idea — after all, it was the most efficient way to populate a user’s follow list. But many users disagreed, and so did the federal government, and the resulting backlash arguably helped kill Google’s first attempt at a real social service.

The lesson here is that for social apps, the trust of users is paramount, and the best way to maintain that trust is to be as open as possible about everything that is occurring, particularly if it involves a user’s personal data. Whatever you’re doing with it may not seem like a big deal to you, but better to be open about it than have it revealed by someone else — at which point you look sneaky. As Craigslist founder Craig Newmark has put it, “trust is the new black,” and it never goes out of style.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Lars Plougmann and Christian Ditatompel

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EMC’s promised Project Lightning server-based PCIe flash storage product is now available — under the VFCache brand. But EMC’s not done — it plans a flash appliance dubbed Project Thunder, for later this year. the thunder-and-lightning duo takes direct aim at Fusion-IO, the hot-selling PCIe flash pioneer which has most definitely caught EMC’s attention.

The promise of flash — or solid-state —  storage is its fast response times. That’s particularly important for performance-sensitive enterprise work loads, like SAP ERP, Oracle database. Putting that fast flash storage on the servers running those applications as opposed to down the wire from them, can be a huge performance boost for those applications.

For Project Thunder “we’re bringing together several VFCaches in a single appliance attached to the server to create even better response times,” said Barry Ader, senior director of product marketing and management for EMC’s Flash business unit. EMC’s not-so-secret sauce is its FAST software which acts as a traffic cop, directing where different data should be stored in a tiered-storage architecture. It puts the most time-sensitive data on server-based flash storage while colder data goes to more distant disks or even tape drives.

Project Thunder, which will be demonstrated at a Monday event headlined by Pat Gelsinger, president of EMC’s Information and Infrastructure Products, (pictured at right) shows just how much EMC is feeling incursions by Fusion-IO and other flash players.

Critics say EMC,  the storage market leader with a huge installed base of non-flash storage to protect and a big, expensive enterprise-focused sales force to pay, is vulnerable to nimble flash-oriented startups.  Ader said VFCache will be very price competitive with Fusion-IO but would not provide pricing.

EMC, never a company to shy away from confrontation,  is taking the fight to its rivals — Ader said it shipped 24 petabytes of flash storage in 2011, more than anyone. He said EMC will bring more of its tools to bear as well … adding more intelligence to its hardware and software including its acquired deduplication technology with Data Domain in 2009.

EMC pitches value of mixed storage vs. all-flash-all-the time

EMC’s view is that while webscale workloads — where Fusion-IO has taken off — are important there’s also a huge market in legacy enterprise applications  that could use server-side flash for the hottest data but route less time-sensitive data to cheaper storage options companies already have deployed.

“The early adopters of PCIe technology were web scale-out early adopters. What we’re doing is bringing it to the mainstream for applications like Oracle, SQL Server and Exchange [server] — business critical applications,” Ader said.

“Many companies talk about flash but most are coming from a single [webscale] use case — that’s not what our customers are asking for. They want coordination across their systems and we’ll put the data in the  most appropriate place for them,” Ader said.

Of course, Fusion-IO CEO David Flynn has a different take:  What EMC is doing here “validates that flash in the server is unstoppable but they represent the height of the mainframe era.”

One big obstacle for EMC  is its cost structure — it traditionally sells into the enterprise with an aggressive, highly paid sales force. As such, EMC cannot really price VFCache as aggressively as it suggests it will, Flynn maintained.  In addition, EMC sales people are used to selling to the storage people in the data center, not the server buyers. Server-side flash requires a different sale.  ”The server admins hate the storage guys,” Flynn said.

It’s clear the flash storage battle has been joined. What remains to be seen is if EMC’s mixed-storage approach will prevail in a world where more workloads are flowing to webscale data centers.

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user Lars Kasper

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Apple has removed a number of apps from its iOS app store that have names that are similar to well known apps such as Tiny Bird, Cut the Birds and Temple Jump. Read more…

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Recently, I was invited by Google to participate in “Mobilizing Mobile” in Mobile, Alabama. As part of Google’s Go Mobile initiative, the event demonstrated what happens when a city’s infrastructure and community goes mobile.

Below you’ll find four key take-aways from teaming up with Google. I believe they can be applied by any startup, in any industry.

Lesson 1: Set the agenda

Consumer adoption of the mobile web is outpacing the rate at which mobile web experiences are being built. In less than three years, more people will access the web via a mobile device than by any other way. Google recognized this trend, and now its showing others where the world is headed.

By painting the bigger picture for everyone else, Google is also framing what the future will look like. Setting the agenda may sound like a lofty goal for a startup, but that’s what you should be focused on.

Startup companies are all about painting the big picture before anyone else can see it. Without a big picture idea, who will join you as a co-founder on your high-risk, potentially hallucinogenic quest? Who will fund you? Who will buy your product, rent you office space, listen to your pitch, or support your ideas? It’s this kind of foresight that creates new opportunities in the marketplace.

Lesson 2: Make your innovation tangible

Now that you’ve created your framework, you need to show it to your audience.

Google goes to great lengths to make its products approachable for users and developers. And they work hard to get users to test out new products as soon as possible.

For the GoMobile initiative, they built the GoMo Meter — a mobile preview tool that “shows you how your current site looks on a smartphone, and provides a report on what’s working and what you can do better.”

The GoMo Meter embodies several aspects of Google’s philosophy when it comes to new products. It has a low barrier to start, requires no commitment to use it, and offers easy access with a simple and obvious interface, all tied to a topic that interests each of us endlessly — ourselves (or, in this case, our websites).

How do you make your startup’s innovation tangible?

Start by figuring out what makes your innovation meaningful to your customers. What do they see and feel in their initial product encounter? When they ask themselves, “What is this?” and “Is it for me?” guide them to the right answer.

Look too for the human behaviors that your product is working on. It’s humans who will make decisions and judgments about your products, and you can tap into some enduring human traits in well-known ways. For example, after successfully raising a VC round, Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman mentioned that well-known VC Roelof Botha only invests in consumer companies that let consumers indulge in one of the seven deadly sins.

Lastly, give users something obvious and easy to do. This could be watching a video or slideshow, clicking a button to initiate an action, entering a few data points, showing some before and after screenshots — anything that leads to a tangible and specific interaction.

As a startup, if you get people interacting with your product, you start to influence their behaviors. Their behaviors then influence their beliefs, which again influence their behaviors in a virtuous cycle.

You could try to influence beliefs. Untold millions are spent everyday attempting to influence beliefs – that’s much of the advertising you see. But it’s very hard both to influence beliefs and to measure changes in beliefs to learn if you’re effective. So focus on behaviors and let them lead to beliefs.

A simple way to prove that you want to influence behaviors over beliefs is to consider fast food. People eat it (a behavior) but they don’t believe it’s good for them. And how many of the seven deadly sins does it appeal to? Sloth, to start, and greed and gluttony for good measure.

Ask the hard question: what are the behaviors you want to have happen because of interaction with you product? Are those behaviors plausible and part of human nature?

Lesson 3: Focus, focus and focus

Focus on the parts of your business that are fundamental to how customers use your core product.

Since a growing number of customers are accessing Google’s core search products through mobile devices, the company has purposefully allocated time, people, and money to development in this sector. It may sound simple for a multi-armed beast like Google to redistribute some of its wealth, but having a lot of resources means the company can easily get derailed and scattered. It’s just as hard for a large company to focus as it is for a startup.

While a startup tends to have a scarcity of resources, it also has the freedom to focus wherever it chooses and to change that focus whenever it wants. The popular term here is “pivoting.” Startups, like all businesses, find success in momentum, and momentum is all about velocity. A startup that changes direction all the time ends up going in circles.

Lesson 4: Track the micro, decide on the macro

Google has built a superb business by understanding the value of data and gathering that information so that others can make meaning from it.

Google tracked the traffic it generated from the Go Mobile event to see if the initiative had been persuasive. Let’s call those micro-metrics.

Micro-metrics — visits, conversions, leads — were used for tracking and tuning, and the macro-metrics — years of mobile adoption, traffic, revenues — drove the strategy and focus.

Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, has a great blog post with much more detail on startup metrics (and tracking the micro while making decisions on the macro) called “Learning is Better than Optimization.

The hard part is balancing the micro and the macro. Every day in a startup involves a ton of detailed work in the micro details of execution, while each decision in the micro details of execution influences the macro strategy.

The answer to balance out the two? Habits and self-reflection.

For Google’s GoMo we connected monthly on a few measurements we’d established to track our success – traffic numbers, leads and conversions.

Internally at my company Mobify, we have a weekly process where each team lead announces their key numbers. Then on a regular basis we review the key numbers. In that review we talk about both the key numbers – their sources, influences and meaning – as well as whether these key numbers are the right numbers to be tracking.

A great framework for figuring out your key performance indicators (KPIs) is to think about your segment ABCs: Acquisitions, Behaviors, Conversions. This ABCs framework is from Avinash Kaushik, Google’s Digital Marketing Evangelist and author of two great books on web analytics. His blog post Web Analytics Segmentation is a terrific guide to getting started and improving your abilities to balance the micro and the macro.

Combine the ABCs framework with good habits and self-reflection and you will find meaning in measurement.

Bringing it together

While it’s hard to imagine that your startup has much in common with a giant like Google, these four strategies should resonate with any sized-business. Think big and paint the picture before anyone else can see it. Have the resolve to focus where attention is needed. And most importantly, never lose sight of what makes you meaningful to your customers. Your company may never reach the size and scale of Google, but your startup can still make a sizable difference.

Igor Faletski is the CEO of Mobify, a web platform that optimizes ecommerce and publishing sites for mobile and powers more than 20,000 sites.

Image courtesy of Flickr user thinkpublic

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Recently, I was invited by Google to participate in “Mobilizing Mobile” in Mobile, Alabama. As part of Google’s Go Mobile initiative, the event demonstrated what happens when a city’s infrastructure and community goes mobile.

Below you’ll find four key take-aways from teaming up with Google. I believe they can be applied by any startup, in any industry.

Lesson 1: Set the agenda

Consumer adoption of the mobile web is outpacing the rate at which mobile web experiences are being built. In less than three years, more people will access the web via a mobile device than by any other way. Google recognized this trend, and now its showing others where the world is headed.

By painting the bigger picture for everyone else, Google is also framing what the future will look like. Setting the agenda may sound like a lofty goal for a startup, but that’s what you should be focused on.

Startup companies are all about painting the big picture before anyone else can see it. Without a big picture idea, who will join you as a co-founder on your high-risk, potentially hallucinogenic quest? Who will fund you? Who will buy your product, rent you office space, listen to your pitch, or support your ideas? It’s this kind of foresight that creates new opportunities in the marketplace.

Lesson 2: Make your innovation tangible

Now that you’ve created your framework, you need to show it to your audience.

Google goes to great lengths to make its products approachable for users and developers. And they work hard to get users to test out new products as soon as possible.

For the GoMobile initiative, they built the GoMo Meter — a mobile preview tool that “shows you how your current site looks on a smartphone, and provides a report on what’s working and what you can do better.”

The GoMo Meter embodies several aspects of Google’s philosophy when it comes to new products. It has a low barrier to start, requires no commitment to use it, and offers easy access with a simple and obvious interface, all tied to a topic that interests each of us endlessly — ourselves (or, in this case, our websites).

How do you make your startup’s innovation tangible?

Start by figuring out what makes your innovation meaningful to your customers. What do they see and feel in their initial product encounter? When they ask themselves, “What is this?” and “Is it for me?” guide them to the right answer.

Look too for the human behaviors that your product is working on. It’s humans who will make decisions and judgments about your products, and you can tap into some enduring human traits in well-known ways. For example, after successfully raising a VC round, Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman mentioned that well-known VC Roelof Botha only invests in consumer companies that let consumers indulge in one of the seven deadly sins.

Lastly, give users something obvious and easy to do. This could be watching a video or slideshow, clicking a button to initiate an action, entering a few data points, showing some before and after screenshots — anything that leads to a tangible and specific interaction.

As a startup, if you get people interacting with your product, you start to influence their behaviors. Their behaviors then influence their beliefs, which again influence their behaviors in a virtuous cycle.

You could try to influence beliefs. Untold millions are spent everyday attempting to influence beliefs – that’s much of the advertising you see. But it’s very hard both to influence beliefs and to measure changes in beliefs to learn if you’re effective. So focus on behaviors and let them lead to beliefs.

A simple way to prove that you want to influence behaviors over beliefs is to consider fast food. People eat it (a behavior) but they don’t believe it’s good for them. And how many of the seven deadly sins does it appeal to? Sloth, to start, and greed and gluttony for good measure.

Ask the hard question: what are the behaviors you want to have happen because of interaction with you product? Are those behaviors plausible and part of human nature?

Lesson 3: Focus, focus and focus

Focus on the parts of your business that are fundamental to how customers use your core product.

Since a growing number of customers are accessing Google’s core search products through mobile devices, the company has purposefully allocated time, people, and money to development in this sector. It may sound simple for a multi-armed beast like Google to redistribute some of its wealth, but having a lot of resources means the company can easily get derailed and scattered. It’s just as hard for a large company to focus as it is for a startup.

While a startup tends to have a scarcity of resources, it also has the freedom to focus wherever it chooses and to change that focus whenever it wants. The popular term here is “pivoting.” Startups, like all businesses, find success in momentum, and momentum is all about velocity. A startup that changes direction all the time ends up going in circles.

Lesson 4: Track the micro, decide on the macro

Google has built a superb business by understanding the value of data and gathering that information so that others can make meaning from it.

Google tracked the traffic it generated from the Go Mobile event to see if the initiative had been persuasive. Let’s call those micro-metrics.

Micro-metrics — visits, conversions, leads — were used for tracking and tuning, and the macro-metrics — years of mobile adoption, traffic, revenues — drove the strategy and focus.

Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, has a great blog post with much more detail on startup metrics (and tracking the micro while making decisions on the macro) called “Learning is Better than Optimization.

The hard part is balancing the micro and the macro. Every day in a startup involves a ton of detailed work in the micro details of execution, while each decision in the micro details of execution influences the macro strategy.

The answer to balance out the two? Habits and self-reflection.

For Google’s GoMo we connected monthly on a few measurements we’d established to track our success – traffic numbers, leads and conversions.

Internally at my company Mobify, we have a weekly process where each team lead announces their key numbers. Then on a regular basis we review the key numbers. In that review we talk about both the key numbers – their sources, influences and meaning – as well as whether these key numbers are the right numbers to be tracking.

A great framework for figuring out your key performance indicators (KPIs) is to think about your segment ABCs: Acquisitions, Behaviors, Conversions. This ABCs framework is from Avinash Kaushik, Google’s Digital Marketing Evangelist and author of two great books on web analytics. His blog post Web Analytics Segmentation is a terrific guide to getting started and improving your abilities to balance the micro and the macro.

Combine the ABCs framework with good habits and self-reflection and you will find meaning in measurement.

Bringing it together

While it’s hard to imagine that your startup has much in common with a giant like Google, these four strategies should resonate with any sized-business. Think big and paint the picture before anyone else can see it. Have the resolve to focus where attention is needed. And most importantly, never lose sight of what makes you meaningful to your customers. Your company may never reach the size and scale of Google, but your startup can still make a sizable difference.

Igor Faletski is the CEO of Mobify, a web platform that optimizes ecommerce and publishing sites for mobile and powers more than 20,000 sites.

Image courtesy of Flickr user thinkpublic

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• NewNet 2012: companies and technologies set to disrupt
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Apple removed, and then put back, some of its iPhone and iPads from its online store front in Germany, due to an ongoing patent dispute involving rival Motorola. Read more…

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Google has revealed details of a security system on its Android Market, with which it aims to tackle the scourge of malware, disguised as legitimate software, that has infected countless devices. Read more…

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Megaupload’s attorney claims that data from the now shut down file sharing web site will remain intact at the site’s hosted servers for at least two more weeks thanks to a deal with the server hosts. Read more…

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