David J Rodriguez

So excited to announce that @Livefyre has been acquired by @Adobe! It has been an honor to work with such an amazing team and investor group for the last 4+ years. I look forward to continuing to work with the team to build out our vision as leading social marketing platform, now with the resources and support of Adobe and the Adobe Experience Manager team. Big things to come!

Some initial press on the acquisition:

Fortune, Heather Clancy: What Adobe’s Latest Acquisition Says About the Future of Marketing

Inc Magazine, Christine Lagorio-Chafkin: Software Giant Adobe Gobbles Up a Content Startup

VentureBeat, Ken Yeung: Adobe acquires social engagement platform Livefyre

TechCrunch, Frederic Lardinois: Adobe acquires Livefyre

This post was originally published on Livefyre’s corporate blog here: http://blog.livefyre.com/livefyre-brings-user-generated-content-to-salesforce/

This has been an incredible week for all of us at Livefyre. Just two days after announcing our partnership with Adobe, we have hit yet another milestone. Today, we announced a strategic partnership with Salesforce, the world’s largest provider of CRM and marketing software. Specifically, we’re bringing real-time user generated content from social networks into Salesforce Community Cloud™ experiences through Livefyre’s content curation tools and suite of social applications.

As one of the first Lightning Components on the Salesforce Community Cloud platform, Livefyre makes it simple for Salesforce Community Cloud customers to find, manage and publish content from external social networks in order to educate community participants, increase engagement and influence participant behavior.

Consumers are already talking about brands and topics relevant to brands online, creating authentic content in real-time. This content comprises the new building blocks of a strong community strategy. Smart brands leverage user generated content and invite all consumers to be part of their story. Livefyre is enabling this by providing brands with tools to create stronger, more authentic and compelling online experiences.

This new integration enables customers to:

Quickly drag and drop Livefyre social applications like Galleries, Maps, Media Walls, and Polls from the Salesforce Community Builder onto webpages and mobile apps

Easily collect, manage and publish real-time social content from Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook into community experiences

Collaborate with teammates on social content discovery, curation, and moderation within a single platform; saving marketers both time and money

Activate a captive audience, raise brand awareness and build customer loyalty by providing targeted, personalized content within interactive digital experiences

“At Community Cloud, we are always looking for new ways to help our customers stay ahead of the curve by integrating the latest technologies and capabilities,“ said Mike Micucci, Senior Vice President of Product Management for Salesforce Community Cloud. “By offering new integrations of Livefyre with Community Cloud, our customers now have even more ways to deliver personalized content to each user.”

This partnership further strengthens our relationship with Salesforce, which we welcomed as an investor in our $47 million Series D funding round earlier this year.

Livefyre’s new integration with Salesforce will be featured during the Community Cloud Keynote and a number of sessions at Dreamforce! If you would like to learn more or schedule a live demo at our Dreamforce booth, visit dreamfyre.com for more information.

I’m extremely excited to announce that I am joining the Livefyre team.

Livefyre is a conversation platform that powers conversation and social engagement on the websites of some of the largest publishers and brands in the world. That’s exciting in itself, but I’m also joining because of what's next- the opportunities that exist at the intersection of big data, consumer, social, and the real-time web. What the Livefyre team has in the pipeline is absolutely amazing.

I met Jordan Kretchmer, CEO of Livefyre, exactly a year ago at SXSW in Austin. After getting to know him over the course of that weekend, I was blown away by Jordan, his vision, and the Livefyre platform. Over the next several months, I had the pleasure of working with my colleagues at Greycroft to lead Livefyre’s Series B financing. Since then, I’ve been a board observer at Livefyre and have had a tremendous experience working with Jordan as he has built the company from around 10 people a year ago to an amazing team of over 30 people today. The next chapter of my involvement with Livefyre will be as Senior Vice President where I will lead operations, finance, and strategy.

Fortunately, I won't be moving on from Greycroft entirely. I'll continue to work with several companies in the Greycroft portfolio as a Venture Associate. My experience at Greycroft has been one of the richest of my career so far from both a professional development and personal enjoyment perspective. I’ve learned an unbelievable amount under the mentorship of Alan Patricof, Ian Sigalow, and Dana Settle, and it’s been a blast working with everyone on the team. I feel extremely fortunate to have the opportunity to continue working with such a great team.

If you are at SXSW over the next few days, please drop me a note so we can catch up. One place you’ll be able to find me is at Livefyre’s Fyrebash on Sunday night. RSVP to the invite here and come by.

Have you heard of Taobao? If you live in China or are keeping tabs on the global ecommerce market, you probably have. Taobao.com, the "eBay of China", accounted for nearly 80 percent of e-commerce volume in China as of 2010. It is interesting to note that Taobao is driving C2C ecommerce, which is the vast majority (~90% according to iResearch) of the ecommerce market in China, (unlike the US which is dominated by B2C ecommerce). It's as if the large bazaars that are pervasive in developing countries are just moving online, and the larger companies are slow to follow. The B2B side of the market is picking up and Taobao is participating; it's actually more like the "ebay & Amazon of China" vs. the "ebay of China."

The numbers in China are staggering. China’s e-commerce market is expected to be worth more than RMB 2 trillion ($315 billion USD) by 2015. That's impressive when you compare that to the US market which is about a $200 billion market today. Further, that's only a small sliver of the market in China - ecommerce in China will go from representing 3.3 percent of the country’s total retail value today to 7.4 percent in 2015. (source)

Fred Wilson recently wrote a post about Yochai Benkler's New York Times op-ed on the the new national broadband strategy and America's lack of competition in broadband.

Yochai argues that the government's 100 Squared Initiative - which aims to get 100 megabits-per-second service to 100 million households, at affordable rates - is hardly sufficient as it doesn't drive competition: 

"Affordability is the hard part — because there is no competition pushing down prices. The plan acknowledges that only 15 percent of homes will have a choice in providers, and then only between Verizon’s FiOS fiber-optic network and the local cable company. (AT&T’s “fiber” offering is merely souped-up DSL transmitted partly over its old copper wires, which can’t compete at these higher speeds.) The remaining 85 percent will have no choice at all."

Yes, sounds like a oligopoly and the government playing it's part in perpetuating it. This allows providers to set pricing, and is stifling innovation in internet access. As a result, America will suffer, and pricier and slower access than the rest of the world will have cascading effects on the consumers and businesses who rely on high-speed internet.

I'm glad that Google's interests are aligned with America's on this one, and Google is being proactive about promoting high speed internet with their project to bring one ultra high-speed broadband network in at least one US community- and they've received quite the response - more than 1,100 community responses and more than 194,000 responses from individuals

And I like Google's analogy comparing this to the space race in that it will require an "all hands on deck" approach for a nationalistic effort to drive innovation.

"As with the space race in the 1960s, America needs a national effort by our scientists, engineers, companies, educational institutions and government agencies. Just like that great national adventure, we need near-term and long-term goals."

But the analogy doesn't go far enough as the internet is much more fundamental to every American's life than going to space.

During 2008 I did some dumb things in investments. I made at least one major mistake of commission and several lesser ones that also hurt. I will tell you more about these later. Furthermore, I made some errors of omission, sucking my thumb when new facts came in that should have caused me to re-examine my thinking and promptly take action."