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Facebook buys Gowalla

money.cnn.com

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Re: Facebook buys Gowalla

#91

Post by caseysoftware »

moses1400 wrote: post #86
a5seo wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll second that. Gowalla was in Austin in name only. Zero presence at any events, no penetration of the startup networks. They moved to Austin from Dallas, I hear, at the behest of investors.

It's interesting how many startups are based here yet Gowalla got the huge press whenever Austin was mentioned. I wonder why this is - is it because of the Foursquare competition initially? Because they launched at SXSW and were a local company?

No clue why they got all the attention.. but @mattt has gotten involved in the community here and there. I've run into him a few times at @damon's Friday Night Hacks.

In terms of other startups, we have Other Inbox, Infochimps, WPEngine, and a number of other things that are relatively quiet. In terms of "big" players, we have Facebook, Evernote, Zynga, some of Sony's game dev (DC Universe Online started here), and Ebay/Paypal is moving in. OpsCode and Mozilla both have lead evangelists here too.

And there are probably dozens of things I'm missing..

Disclosure: I'm a Developer Evangelist for Twilio and based in Austin.

Re: Facebook buys Gowalla

#92

Post by adrianparsons »

oldstrangers wrote: post #16
kainosnoema wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is definitely a big loss for Austin. There are still a few interesting startups in the area, but Gowalla was the one that made it a serious contender.

Evernote just moved in. We also have Facebook and Google offices.

Infochimps, Indeed, HomeAway, Demand Media, and OtherInbox top my list of nationally-known startups in Austin. Am I missing any?

Outside of the startup world: Apple, IBM, Dell and AMD have major campuses in Austin.

I grew up in Austin and live in NYC. I love seeing Austin companies make waves, but I feel like the startup scene there is still in its early stages.

Re: Facebook buys Gowalla

#93

Post by untog »

fufulabs wrote: post #61
oldstrangers wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook does have a solid design team, but I wonder where all that talent is being directed? Visually, their hires in the past year or so haven't made an impact with facebook.com. At least with Google's new design team, you can see what they're doing. So, one has to ask, what are these people working on? A facebook phone? Facebook X.0?

My bet is Facebook OS on top of Android ala Kindle Fire. the UX will be its only differentiator so much care is needed there.

I really, really hope Facebook doesn't do that. It makes absolutely no sense for anyone to buy a Facebook tablet, unless they intentionally cripple the capabilities of their apps on other tablet platforms.

Re: Facebook buys Gowalla

#94

Post by nhangen »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #67
harryh wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I think that the team at gowalla is great, and I have mad respect for them. But in terms of facebook's overall hiring this is a relatively small deal. Don't really know how many folks FB hires a year but I'm guessing hundreds? Sorry if I was curt. Just trying to be clear and concise.

Fwiw, you were perfectly clear. Anytime someone says "Facebook/Google/Awesome-Tech-Company-of-the-decade bought them as a talent acquisition" , the obvious implication (and compliment) is that the talent is really talent . Don't know where this confusion is coming from.

Probably because of this line: 'Once you're beating someone by a factor of over 100:1 you move on to other things.'

which I thought was abrasive.

Re: Facebook buys Gowalla

#95

Post by CoachRufus87 »

tbrooks wrote: post #77
kainosnoema wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is definitely a big loss for Austin. There are still a few interesting startups in the area, but Gowalla was the one that made it a serious contender.

How is this a big loss for Austin? Gowalla isn't involved in the community.

they are/were involved in the rails community

Re: Facebook buys Gowalla

#96

Post by buster »

tzury wrote: post #66

Off topic to the acquisition, however, not being a Gowalla user, I went to gowalla.com and looked what they have to offer. Naturally, I look at my town, Tel Aviv[1], and was shocked. Tel Aviv has much more to offer than what it is listed in that guide, and in my opinion, it is far more attractive city than it appear at gowalla (for instance, some photos are rotated upside down, others by 90 degrees). Perhaps it takes…

Wow.. just browsed my hometown, Berlin, and it's really not a good picture. Most of the photos are horribly underexposed and show some boring places..

Re: Facebook buys Gowalla

#97

Post by Tichy »

buster wrote: post #96
tzury wrote: post #66

Off topic to the acquisition, however, not being a Gowalla user, I went to gowalla.com and looked what they have to offer. Naturally, I look at my town, Tel Aviv[1], and was shocked. Tel Aviv has much more to offer than what it is listed in that guide, and in my opinion, it is far more attractive city than it appear at gowalla (for instance, some photos are rotated upside down, others by 90 degrees). Perhaps it takes…

Wow.. just browsed my hometown, Berlin, and it's really not a good picture. Most of the photos are horribly underexposed and show some boring places..

Then again they seem to cover a lot of popular tourist destinations. http://gowalla.com/guides/berlin

I am only in Berlin for 3 years and I would not necessarily be able to come up with better recommendations for tourists.

Re: Facebook buys Gowalla

#98

Post by utan »

adrianparsons wrote: post #92
oldstrangers wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evernote just moved in. We also have Facebook and Google offices.

Infochimps, Indeed, HomeAway, Demand Media, and OtherInbox top my list of nationally-known startups in Austin. Am I missing any? Outside of the startup world: Apple, IBM, Dell and AMD have major campuses in Austin. I grew up in Austin and live in NYC. I love seeing Austin companies make waves, but I feel like the startup scene there is still in its early stages.

BazaarVoice and WhaleShark Media are another two that come to mind.

Re: Facebook buys Gowalla

#99

Post by Nate75Sanders »

brk wrote: post #43
harryh wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A) They haven't really been a competitor for a long time. Once you're beating someone by a factor of over 100:1 you move on to other things. B) Facebook isn't buying the product (they don't care about the product). They're just hiring a couple of engineers/designers/product folks.

It's understandable that you don't consider them a competitor, but who is? Most people tend to agree that it is not good to have NO competitors. Go walls was in some ways a kind of straw an against Foursquare. You had someone to be "100:1" against. Now who is your competitor? I would not call this inconsequential because it can also be interpreted as the non-viability of check-in sites as a distinct business. I appre…

Most people tend to agree that it is not good to have NO competitors.

I believe this is primarily when you're starting out. You're trying to decide if there's a market at all and having competitors lends some credence to that.

Once you already have the traffic that FourSquare does, I don't think it matters anymore. One case where it might be different is if there were some paradigm shift where there were a whole bunch of similar companies for a long time and all of them had dropped out of a dying game while a single company was holding on -- but that's not going on here.

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