Register for Dogpatch Labs Office Hours: Wednesday March 31st

The next Dogpatch Labs San Francisco office hours will be Wednesday March 31st from 9:00 - 11:00am. Office hours are informal and a good opportunity to meet, tour Dogpatch and interact with other residents / entrepreneurs. If attending, please grab your free ticket on Eventbrite!

Where: Dogpatch Labs at Pier 38 in San Francisco (Townsend and Embarcadero) What: Office Hours When: March 31st at 9-11am Who: Ryan Spoon (Polaris Venture Partners) and various Dogpatch residents + office hours attendees

iPad Demo: Penguin Books

Apple's iPad arrives in ten days. It represents a new form of web consumption and, hopefully, a new form of content, digital media and reading. While the Kindle is able to deliver simple, elegant reading of books, the iPad allows for greater creativity and computing power. The results extend beyond text-based, book-like reading and become something much richer... think applications meet text, rich media, HTML5, and so on.

I initially got very excited about Wired Magazine's demonstration (see here), and after seeing Penguin's demo, have begun to think even bigger about the implications for:

- children's books - textbooks - magazines (editions and brands) Like the iPhone, I think we will see a slower uptake on create content and applications.... but based on consumer demand and developer experience with Apple, my hope is that the iPad app gallery gains depth and strength very quickly. After all, its the apps that ultimately sold the iPhone.

Polaris is Excited to Back Formspring.me

Yesterday, Formspring (http://www.formspring.me) announced a $2.5m Series A investment that was led by Baseline Ventures and FreeStyle Capital. Polaris is excited to also participate alongside a slew of terrific angel investors: Ron Conway’s SV Angels, Maples Investments, Chris Sacca’s Lowercase Capital, Kevin Rose, Travis Kalanick, Dave Morin and Scott Dorsey. Formspring is a social Q&A platform that makes it very simple to ask questions and receive answers from targeted users. Through Facebook Connect and Twitter , answers arrive almost instantly; and thanks to Formspring's large network, users and answers are highly targeted. The combination of:

- a simple user-experience - a clear consumer impulse (questions / answers) - that delivers immediate gratification - in a viral and social way

... has translated into significant growth. Since their November 25th launch, Formspring now reaches over 44m users and had over 300m questions answered. For a taste of their size, search for Formpsring.me on Twitter ... you will notice 100s of posts each minute:

Whether you are looking for creative direction or seeking input on a specific topic, I encourage you to give Formspring a spin.

More reading: VCMike: Why Polaris is Backing Formspring

Whats Hot in iTunes? Location-Based Apps.

SXSW 2010 was all about location. In fact, we could look back on 2010 as the year of location and geo... which would be a natural progression from 2009's mobile growth.

According to iTunes and its "What's Hot" category: the App Store is also all about location. While I do not know exactly how 'hotness' is defined, we know a couple things: - it seems to be a mix of curation + popularity - it is distinctly different from "new" apps and "top downloads" - it usually features a mix of free and paid apps... as it clearly behooves Apple to drive paid downloads - it usually features a mix of app types: games, sports, utilities, etc - for specific themes, Apple creates curated 'storefronts' (like "Baseball App Store Essentials" or "Independent Games Festivals") So it is unique that the six "hottest" apps are: Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Whrrl, MyTown and Citysearch. All are free and location-based, check-in applications. In fact, only one of those applications (Booyah's MyTown) features in-app purchases; but while they are not direct revenue producers for Apple, these are all highly viral and sticky applications.

I would love to see another app category: "most active". Ultimately, I care far more about ongoing usage and adoption than the download. And ultimately, Apple should favor sticky, oft-used apps (like Pandora and Facebook... and these location apps) than those with very high churn. You can extrapolate usage through downloads and ratings... but that is flawed because 1) ratings are predominently negative due to Apple's implementation) and 2) we do not have great visibility into downloads. A barometer of activity - no matter how disguised it would be - would be powerful... and I imagine that, for the time being, these six apps would appear in that list:

I would love to see a

Testing Apture on RyanSpoon.com

My friends at Apture have given me access to the new Apture 2.0 and I am actively testing it on RyanSpoon.com. You will notice that as you scroll down, the Apture toobar appears and allows you to: - share / view shares on Facebook - post / view posts from Twitter - share via email - search and access results directly onsite

Two screenshots are below - followed by a video of how Apture 2.0 works. Would love feedback

Close up:

Facebook: 2.8 Billion Visits, 21.9 Visits / Unique in February

January marked the month where Facebook passed Google in visits and Yahoo in Uniques. Today, Compete released their February 2010 numbers and the trends continued:

1. Google remains the largest by reach (with 141m uniques) and Facebook has gained some distance ahead of Yahoo. All three sites dipped consistently (4.3-4.9%) from January.

Google: 141.3m uniques Facebook 127.9m uniques Yahoo: 125.4m uniques

2. Facebook is the largest in terms of visits - really pulling away from Google (2.8b vs. 2.5b). Again,all three sites declined - but while Facebook's decline was 2.5%, Google and Yahoo dipped 9.2 and 12.7% respectively... which is turn created separation between Facebook and the others.

Facebook: 2.8b visits Google: 2.5b visits yahoo: 2.2b visits

3. Google and Yahoo each see 17.8 visits per unique. Facebook sees 21.9... a substantial difference.

4. It is also interesting that Google's top "referral" and "destination" site was Facebook (Yahoo was #2 and YouTube #3).

Foursquare Traffic Sources: Facebook 33%, Google 22%

As you can tell from recent blog posts, I have been spending time looking at traffic sources for various sites (Facebook, Huffington Post, Perez Hilton, etc). New data from Hitwise reveals that one-third of Foursquare's traffic comes from Facebook:

Top traffic sources for Foursquare 1. 33% Facebook 2. 22% Google 3. 08% Twitter In total, nearly two-thirds of Foursquare's traffic arrives from three sources (one search and two social).

A few things pop out:

- Facebook's referral traffic has steadily grown on a relative basis... and considering that Foursquare's SEO 'juice' has most likely strengthened over time, that means the relative growth has overcome success on Google.

- Twitter as a traffic source is relatively volatile: large peaks around 30% and lows around 7%. It is likely an outcome of power Twitter users and large events (like SXSW - though not reflected here).

- I imagine the visits differ dramatically between Google and Facebook + Twitter. SEO likely sends more branded (foursquare.com) and deep visits (directly to locations - ie a specific venue's name); whereas Facebook and Twitter are more social and circular (driven by the individual rather than the location).

Facebook Represents 7% of all Internet Visits

According to new Hitwise data, 7.07% of all internet visits go to Facebook. Google is the second largest at 7.03%. And Yahoo is a distant third at 3.67%. Equally impressive is how quickly Facebook has gained on Google - since January, they have jumped from ~6.5% to ~7.1%. Much of that acceleration happened in the last thirty days. Just a year ago, Facebook represented ~2.5% of visits.

This data comes a few weeks after Compete released their January report where Facebook surpassed Google in aggregate visits. Furthermore, if Facebook now represents greater internet share by visits, you would imagine that they are therefore significantly ahead by time on site. Google's in-and-out experience combined with Facebook's single-page structure likely result in Google winning the page-view war.

Read more at TechCrunch.