friends-for-sale

Loïc Le Meur, Segway instructor

Jackson West · 09/11/08 02:26AM

Please tell me someone has pictures of Seesmic founder Loïc Le Meur giving small-time technology investor Michael Arrington Segway riding lessons outside 330 Ritch for the TechCrunch50 conference's closing party. For now, I'll have to settle for Siqi Chen, left, and Alex Le, right, the guys behind Facebook widget Friends For Sale, at the Plista party at Fluid. Where's the afterparty? It's not at the W or the Four Seasons. Maybe Mahalo chief Jason Calacanis is drinking responsibly tonight and has turned in early, but I'm pretty sure Arrington is up drinking scotch somewhere.

GOP getting this social network "friend" thing all wrong

Melissa Gira Grant · 07/29/08 01:40PM

BarackBook is the Republican National Committee's new faux-cial network. As a campaign tool, it's supposed to make clear the connections between Obama and his "questionable" friends, like "60's Radicals!" William Ayers of the Weather Underground and Marilyn Katz of the Students for a Democratic Society. They have cute profile photos, sure, but where are the Last Night's Party-style gossip shots of Obama circa 1968 in a Mao baby tee? Users can send a donation to the GOP; they cannot send John McCain a Friends-for-Sale request.

VC invests $4 million to get into $0.92 CPM Facebook-app business

Nicholas Carlson · 04/28/08 10:00AM

Serious Business founders Siqi Chen and Alex Le created the Facebook application Friends For Sale, which has over 550,000 daily active users. On Friday, the pair announced they'd landed $4 million in a first round of funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners. The investment gave the company a "healthy double-digit" valuation, according to Inside Facebook's Justin Smith. (For Chen and Le's sake, we hope there are another six digits after those two.) "We're already profitable, and the investment is going to help us get a head start," Le told Smith. Impressive, if true. Smith recently compiled a list of the CPMs, or cost to display an ad 1,000 times, Facebook developers earn on their applications. The average came in at $0.92. One app earns as much as $4.78 per thousand views and another just $.04.