Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » Kevin Rose

The Washington Post Subsidiary SocialCode Hires 15 Digg Employees

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 10 May 2012 14:53:56 +0000

SocialCode is a social media advertising company and subsidiary of The Washington Post Co. SocialCode has announced that they have hired 15 employees from Digg.com. Digg was one of the most popular Silicon Valley companies where millions of people voted on the top news stories every day. They have declined in the last few years because of poor redesigns and constant unpopular changes. Many of their users flocked to Reddit or Twitter to distribute news to their friends.

Digg downsized their staff from 67 employees to 42 in 2010. In March 2011, Digg founder Kevin Rose left the company and now works for Google. Earlier this month, I wrote a post about how The Washington Post is rumored to be hiring the tech team at Digg and it turns out that was true.

It was rumored that the Digg tech team would be joining The Washington Post Company’s WaPo Labs, known for creating products like Trove and The Washington Post’s Social Reader app for Facebook. Instead the time will join the ad consulting firm, which helps companies find ways to promote their goods and services on Facebook and Twitter.

SocialCode launched in January 2011. They have not acquired the Digg.com domain, service, or technology. Former Digg VP of ad products Alan Lippman will become chief scientist at SocialCode. Former Digg software developer Will Larson will become SocialCode’s director of engineering.

“This agreement marks the first of many planned moves, fueling SocialCode’s commitment to innovation and delivering leading-edge solutions to our clients,” stated SocialCode chief executive Laura O’Shaughnessy.

“At Digg, we have been studying social media since its inception,” wrote Digg CEO Matt Williams. “From Digg Social Reader to Digg Ads, we established a new paradigm for content and advertising on the web.” He added that having engineers move to SocialCode “felt like a natural next step.”

Google Acquired Milk Because They Needed Designers

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 03:30:21 +0000

Google acquired mobile design company Milk Inc. last week. However only half the team was brought in to Google. The other half was the engineering team, which included Amber Reyngoudt and David Peck.

The reason why Google did not hire the engineers is because they have plenty of engineering talent. They wanted to hire design talent. This is why Kevin Rose was brought in. Rose has joined the Android team. Reyngoudt and Peck will be re-launching Skull Ninja, a startup they founded before joining Kevin Rose at Milk.

Kevin Rose Believed To Be Joining Google To Work On Social Efforts

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 18:58:01 +0000

In April 2011, Kevin Rose started working full-time at a mobile development company called Milk. Milk launched a food and restaurant recommendation app called Oink, which was downloaded about 150,000 times in its first month as a free app. Rose is known for launching the social bookmarking website Digg.com and being a host of the popular podcast called Diggnation. Google has hired Kevin Rose through some sort of acqui-hire deal.

Google did not buy Oink or the technology. However it is rumored that Rose will be heavily involved in the social efforts at Google. According to TechCrunch, Milk’s investors put in about $1.7 million and the price of the acqui-hire deal was somewhere in the range of $15-$30 million. Google had to outbid Facebook for the deal too.

Google will be hiring eight of the team members from Milk. Investors in Milk include Dave Morin, Philip Rosedale, Evan Williams, and Shervin Pishevar. Milk shut down the Oink app yesterday.

Gay Social Network Fab.com Raises $8 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 00:56:14 +0000

Fab.com is a social network for gay men that used to be known as Fabulis. Fab.com has raised $8 million in Series A funding.

The Series A funding was from Menlo Ventures, First Round Capital, Baroda Ventures, The Washington Post, Jason Goldberg, SoftTech VC, SV Angel, Ashton Kutcher, Guy Oseary, A-Grade Investments, and Zelkova Ventures. Angel investors in this round included Kevin Rose, Jon Anderson, Don Baer, Josh Kusher, Dave Morgan, Ben Ling, and David Tisch. Fab.com’s seed round of funding was $1 million from Ashton Kutcher, SV Angel, SoftTech VC, First Round Capital, Baroda Ventures, and The Washington Post.

Fab.com has daily design inspirations and flash sales that provides 70% off of the retail cost. Membership to Fab.com is free, but the number of users are capped to maintain the low prices. Fab.com launched on June 9, 2011 and they have 350,000 registered users. Fab.com reported a profit of $1.3 million in the first 30 days of the debut. The company currently has about 45 employees.

[TechCrunch]

Greplin Launches Wikipedia Redesign Contest

Riley Kennysmith — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 16:02:42 +0000

The Wikipedia Search Design Contest, run by search engine Greplin, aims to revamp Wikipedia for easier searching and better results. Daniel Gross, the founder of Greplin, told TechCrunch that there’s nothing particularly wrong with Wikipedia, but “that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be infinitely better. The deadline is August 18th, and the prizes include advertising of the winner’s Twitter handle and a trip to see Edward Tufte speak.

The contest is not affiliated with Wikipedia in any way, so the winning concept will not necessarily be used or acknowledged by Wikipedia. The judges for the competition include Googler Jon Wiley, Milk’s Daniel Burka and Kevin Rose, Dribbble’s Dan Cederholm, Kevin Cheng, Dan Rubin, Johnnie Manzari and Jason Rosoff.

Kevin Rose’s Milk Inc. Raises $1.5 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 06:04:55 +0000

Milk Inc. is a new company that was co-founded by Kevin Rose. Rose is the founder of Digg and co-founder of Revision3. Milk is essentially a company where several developers brainstorm technology and mobile ideas and works away at building them. If there isn’t any sudden traction, then the project gets shut down. Milk has raised $1.5 million in angel funding from well known investors. Investors include Mike Maples, Jr. (Floodgate), David Sze (Greylock Partners), Ron Conway, Dave Morin, Philip Rosedale, Evan Williams, Joshua Schachter, Ashton Kutcher, Michael Arrington, Philip Kaplan, Chris Sacca, Tony Hsieh, Gary Vaynerchuk, and several others. [VentureBeat]

Kevin Rose Launches Mobile App Development Company Milk Inc.

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 02:58:11 +0000

Digg founder Kevin Rose stepped down from working full-time at the company to start a new one. It turns out that Rose has started a mobile development company called Milk. Rose will be working with a team of four or five other coders, designers, etc. to make mobile applications.

In a way, it sounds like Rose wants to use his creative senses once again. Digg is already established and the community will continue to grow, but there is not much you can change there. This environment will allow Rose to quickly come up with ideas, launch them, and kill off the ones that don’t work. One of the co-founders of Milk Inc. is Daniel Burka. Burka worked with Rose in the early days of Digg. Before joining Milk, he was working at a company called Tiny Speck and worked on a game called Glitch.

[TechCrunch]

VP Product Management at Digg Keval Desai Stepping Down

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 06:22:33 +0000

Keval Desai, the VP Product Management at Digg, is stepping down. This is happening shortly after Digg founder Kevin Rose stepped down only to remain on the company’s board of directors. Desai joined Digg in January 2010 after leaving Google. Ben Folk-Williams will be replacing Desai.

Kevin Rose Resigned From Digg, Still Sitting On Board

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 02:42:44 +0000

Digg founder Kevin Rose has stepped down from the company recently. He has started a new company in stealth mode and is close to raising $1 million in funding. Rose launched Digg in December 2004 and it gained popularity very quickly.

In the middle of 2008, Google became very close to buying the service but backed out. Digg would have been acquired for close to $200 million, but the deal fell through. Former Digg CEO Jay Adelson got everybody back on track after the deal did not go through.

After Adelson stepped down, Rose took over as CEO until they hired Matt Williams this past fall. Rose will remain on the board of directors at Digg and it is still very active with Revision3.

[TechCrunch]

Kevin Rose Not Really Active On Digg Anymore

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 17:38:15 +0000

Digg launched a new version of their service in August. Ever since then, traffic has been plummeting. A lot of the Digg community moved on to Reddit. Digg has not been the same since 2008 when President Obama was being elected and traffic was surging. Even Digg founder Kevin Rose is not that active on the website any more.

In a report created by TechCrunch, there was even a point in December when Kevin Rose did not do anything on Digg for 22 days. Not one digg, not one comment, not one submission. And over the last 30 days, Rose had only done seven actions on Digg. That is less than one action every 4 days. He has not submitted a story since February 13.

However Rose still has time to tweet. He sent out about 181 tweets over the last month, which makes him 26 more times active on Twitter than Digg. Yikes. Ironically, Kevin Rose responded to the TechCrunch story in a tweet by saying “@arrington @techcrunch I think you forgot we shoot a weekly podcast about digg stories..”

[TechCrunch]