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Quick Hits: Facebook Opens a New York Engineering Office, Google Can Buy AdMeld, More

Written on
Dec 2, 2011 
Author
Brian LaRue  |
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Quick Hits: Facebook Opens a New York Engineering Office, Google Can Buy AdMeld, More

In a press conference today, featuring big names like Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), Facebook announced it’ll commence engineering operations from its New York office in early 2012. There are currently 100 Facebook employees based in New York City, but they work largely in sales and marketing — what the company announced is Facebook’s first engineering office on the East Coast (in addition to Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., the social network also has engineers working out of Seattle). Facebook is currently accepting applications for the new New York jobs. The company didn’t specify how many jobs will be opening up (“We’ll hire as much talent as we can find,” Sandberg said), but by comparison, the Palo Alto home base employs around 3,000 people throughout all its departments. Engineering manager Serkan Piantino, who led teams that managed the Facebook news feed and timeline, will head up the new office.

After a nearly six-month-long review, the U.S. Justice Department today gave the thumbs-up to Google’s $400 million acquisition of ad optimization platform AdMeld. AdMeld joins DoubleClick, Invite Media, Teracent and others — all Google acquisitions — in Google’s digital advertising “stack,” as the search company calls it. AdMeld will operate independently in the stack for now, but Google has expressed a desire to integrate the various products for publishers offered by these companies it’s acquired. There’s an informative interview with Neal Mohan, “the architect of Google’s ‘stack,” at AdAge.)

Alibaba, the Chinese ecommerce giant that may or may not be interested in bidding on Yahoo, has also announced it’s creating some kind of social networking product, which is currently in beta. It’s called Laiwang, which means “in contact,” and it might be intended for the mobile market, or it might deal in social commerce, or possibly something else. Among people who have viewed Laiwang, which seems to be modeled visually off of Google+, there’s little agreement about what Alibaba’s vision is with this particular network.

Maybe Alibaba can hold off on figuring out its angle for Laiwang. After all, the Pew Research Center (through its Internet and American Life Project) has released a study that reveals 58 percent of all adult internet users in the U.S. go online for no particular reason. We’re not being glib: The big question was, “Do you ever go online for no particular reason, or just to pass the time?” We’ll share the graph with you to ponder over the weekend, which only seems appropriate. (graph via the Pew Center)





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