Facebook Application Development

Earlier this year, young venture capital fund and startup accelerator 500 Startups announced some changes that indicated its intent to move beyond adolescence into adulthood, and expand its scope beyond the U.S. The firm raised a new, bigger fund, added new partners, and increase its focus on identifying and investing in talented international entrepreneurs.

Dave McClure and company have already invested in startup incubators in Mexico City and Beijing, along with taking its “Geeks On A Plane” tour to India last December. This spring, partners McClure and Christine Tsai told us that 500 Startups is redoubling its effort to build ties and make investments in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East in particular. And today, beginning to walk the walk, we’ve learned that the fund has made its first investment in the Middle East — in a startup called Jeeran.

Tourists rave about a city’s well-known restaurants and distort their review averages. So today travel site TripAdvisor starts highlighting beloved eateries from people who live nearby in Local Picks, a Facebook app it’s relaunching. Originally released in 2007 but shut down from 2010 until now, Local Picks pulls in reviews of 850,000 restaurants from TripAdvisor, re-sorts them to more heavily weight the opinions of actual locals, and auto-shares your reviews to your Facebook Timeline.

TripAdvisor hopes to mine the virality bonanza of Facebook Open Graph to beat Yelp, which has yet to implement the auto-sharing feature that’s helped other apps boost growth. In a video interview with the public company’s CEO embedded within, TripAdvisor’s Stephen Kaufer tells me Yelp “doesn’t in my view address the social aspect of where your friends’ favorite restaurants are.”

Peter Fenton joined Benchmark Capital in 2006, after spending seven years as a partner at Accel. Not yet 40, Fenton already sits on the board of directors at companies like New Relic, Polyvore, Twitter, Yelp, and Zendesk. Starting at Accel in his late twenties, the young investor focused his attention on the enterprise — on backing smart software and infrastructure companies. In 2009, for example, the young VC helped lead SpringSource’s $400 million+ sale to VMWare.

Yet, Fenton saw promise in startups like Twitter, investing in the microblogging service back when it employed just 25 people — and got in early on Yelp, too. Becoming actively involved in consumer web companies, Fenton came to recognize a marked difference between how these startups approached their users (and their market) and how enterprise players were doing business. Today, he tells us, a sea change has come to enterprise, which is being driven not only by a fundamental transformation of company culture but by new generation of users — namely those pesky, plucky Millennials.

In its first ever earnings report as a publicly-traded company, Yelp said it earned $27.4 million in revenue, up 66 percent from the $16.5 million it made in the same time a year ago.

However, the company more than tripled its net losses, mostly on rising costs associated with supporting a larger sales staff. It lost $9.8 million, up from the $2.7 million it lost in the same time a year earlier. That loss of 31 cents per share was about double what analysts had estimated. Analysts had predicted a loss of 15 cents per share, according to a Bloomberg survey.

Looking at the sheet, Yelp’s loss expanded mostly on sales, marketing and administrative costs. Sales and marketing costs rose to $18.8 million, up from $11.3 million the year before. On the earnings call, the company said much of this headcount growth came from international expansion, which it has yet to fully monetize. In the first quarter, Yelp launched in 11 new markets, eight of which were international.

This series is supported by Bantam Live, a web-based collaboration workspace with “Social CRM” for small business teams. For more information visit BantamLive.com.

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