

Google Acquires Katango, A Social Contact Sorter Designed For Facebook - knaox
http://marketaire.com/2011/11/15/google-acquires-katango-a-social-contact-sorter-originally-designed-for-facebook/

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friggeri
Related to this, I'm a PhD student from INRIA[1] and as part of my research on
social communities I launched at the beginning of the year an experiment
called Fellows[2] on Facebook doing more or less the same thing as Katango.
Except that Fellows was not an iphone app but a web experiment which aim was
validate a new quantification of social cohesion I have introduced (the
results were presented in a peer reviewed conference, the final manuscript is
on arxiv [3]).

I have been wondering about the difference of media treatment Katango and
Fellows received. I tried everything imaginable at the time (pitching large
blogs, sending emails, asking friends if they knew someone I could talk to,
etc.) and wasn't able to get that much press, whereas when Katango launched
they were much more covered.

I'm not complaining, we managed to have ~2500 participants which was enough to
validate our model, but I'm still wondering why in one case the story got
picked up and in the second case not. Is it because they're a startup and I'm
a student ? Is it a question of USA vs. France ? Could it be because I lack
the good connections to get introductions to media ?

Sorry for hijacking this thread, but I'd really appreciate insight on what
they did right/I did wrong.

Thanks !

1: <http://www.inria.fr/en/>

2: <http://fellows-exp.com/>

3: <http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.3231>

~~~
asanwal
Probably many reasons, but Katango was backed by Kleiner Perkins - one of the
more prestigious and well-known VC firms out there, and it was the first
investment out of their sFund which targeted social services and apps.

The blogosphere and others in the startup community will almost always be
interested in what Kleiner, Sequoia, Accel, Greylock, Union Square Ventures
and a few others etc are funding as they are well-known and regarded as
thought leaders in the venture community. So by default, what they fund
becomes more newsworthy almost implicitly. I'm not saying this is right or
wrong - it just is.

~~~
ma2rten
I think this actually really bad, because it is a vicous circle.

You get founded by kpcb -> you get good press -> you get successful -> you get
acquired by google -> this reflects positively on kpcb -> the press will write
about the next startup founded by kpcb

At some point Kleiner won't have to anything.

But there are only so many startups that can be founded by the Kleiners and
Sequoias of this world, erm.. valley. Is everybody else bound to fail?

~~~
mc32
Couldn't you say one is a known entity and one is an unknown. So Bill Nguyen
vs. Make up a Name.

All things being equal, who do you favor, someone for whom you know some
history or someone for whom you have no history?

Kpcb has historic cachet. If a venture succeeds, it's a story, if it fails
it's also a story. If an unknown succeeds it's a small story‡ --if it fails
it's an even smaller story (for a blog to write about).

‡Smaller b/c there's less confidence in an unknown, I think. Like an
entrenched sports team with a winning history vs an upstart. Who has the
fanbase (audience)?

