Interrogations

AUSTIN, Texas--It can't be easy for Josh Williams, the CEO of geolocation service Gowalla, to see once-close rival Foursquare plastered all over his hometown this week for the annual South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSW). On the massive outdoor "Pepsi Max Lot" where lucky Foursquare check-ins can earn users "golden tickets" to a Monday night concert by Big Boi, at local vendors participating in a blockbuster partnership between Foursquare and American Express, or just on the smartphones of the tens of thousands of geeks who flood the Texas capital for the conference each year.

"… Read more

Facebook keeps getting bigger. Twitter isn't going away any time soon. Even the companies built to take advantage of these companies' social-media wiring--the Groupons and Zyngas of the world--have gotten huge in their own right. It's ubiquitous, and arguably mature.

So why does Sand Hill Road fixture Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, which has spent nearly four decades investing in companies like Amazon, Google, Intel, and AOL, think it's the right time to start a fund specifically geared toward new investments in social media?

The venture firm, which had a Java-specific fund in the 1990s and launched … Read more

It took 39 questions for the Hunch Twitter Predictor to make a wrong guess about me. The question was, "Have you ever ridden a Segway?" Yes, in fact, I have.

"We call it a 'stunt' internally. It's a fun way to show off the accuracy of our data," Hunch co-founder Chris Dixon told CNET about the Twitter Predictor, a new tool that takes a look at your Twitter network in an attempt to figure out as much as it can about you.

Start-up Hunch launched the prediction tool earlier this month and racked up about … Read more

MIAMI--Walk around the Future of Web Apps event in South Beach this week, and you'll see loads of eager young entrepreneurs and developers proudly displaying the names of their fledgling companies on their conference badges.

Aaron Patzer, who founded personal-finance site Mint.com and sold it to Intuit for $170 million last year, might tell them that the company name might be the first place to make changes.

"Choose something with meaning, even if it's expensive and difficult to acquire, rather based on domain name availability, because otherwise, you're going to kill word-of-mouth," he told … Read more

It's been more than five months since MySpace launched MySpace Music--so how's it doing?

"Our traffic is huge," MySpace Music President Courtney Holt told CNET News in an interview. "Our usage is very high. People are doing a lot of different things with music on our platform." There are currently more than 5 million bands with music on the streaming-and-discovery music service, and more than 100 million playlists have been created, and it was a matter of days before MySpace Music hit its billionth stream.

But the service is still evolving, Holt said, and … Read more

NEW YORK--"They have that saying, 'don't shoot the messenger,' but the reason they say that is because the messenger gets shot," Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman told me over coffee on Tuesday morning. "So I have to take my shots."

He was talking, of course, about the PR fiasco that ensued when the Emeryville, Calif.-based East Bay Express newspaper published a lengthy expose on the business reviews site, alleging that it strong-armed businesses into paying to remove negative reviews. As a fairly regular Yelp user, I was repulsed by the possibility that its corporate … Read more

DANA POINT, Calif.--When political pundit Arianna Huffington, along with a team of digital-media veterans, launched political news aggregator The Huffington Post in 2005, critics were skeptical of the left-leaning site. But it's turned out to be one of political journalism's great recent success stories, even amid controversy over the charismatic and opinionated Huffington and the site's business model, which utilizes thousands of unpaid bloggers in addition to full-time reporters.

Just over a year ago, The Huffington Post hired Betsy Morgan, head of CBSNews.com, to serve as its CEO, taking over from co-founder and former AOL … Read more

LONDON--Perhaps it's fitting that Digg founder Kevin Rose chose the Future of Web Apps conference here as the place to elaborate on his company's international expansion strategy. London, after all, has become the San Francisco-based Digg's biggest hub of user activity. But with headlines dominated by financial disasters, life gets a little more complicated for a company determined to build up and keep hiring.

CNET News caught up with Rose shortly after his presentation on Thursday morning. Here's the first part of our two-part interview.

You're a geek hero. You've got a huge following. … Read more

Facebook's appointment of Ted Ullyot as its first general counsel might spook some in freewheeling Silicon Valley: he served as chief of staff to former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and as an associate counsel to President George W. Bush.

But in an interview Monday with CNET News, Ullyot said that his past resume will make it easier for the fast-growing social network to deal with Washington insiders--because he used to be one himself.

"Having served in the executive branch in Washington and also in the judicial branch, I have a pretty good understanding of those issues,&… Read more