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Rip Empson is a writer and rabble-rouser at TechCrunch. He covers startups, music, social, mobile, health, and education. You can reach him at rip[at]techcrunch[dot]com ? Learn More Today at The TC CrunchUp at the Fox Theater in Redwood City, a group of founders and entrepreneurs took the stage to talk about the future of Facebook’s platform, where it’s been and where it’s going as a result. Although the company’s stock has been limping of late, Facebook continues to be impossible to ignore — by the end of June, for example, the platform was seeing 955 million monthly active users, with 81 percent of those coming from outside the U.S., and more than 230 million people playing games on Facebook.com every month. Although it may seem like Facebook has plenty on their plate in terms of stock downturns, ad monetization strategies and more, Facebook Director of Product Management Doug Purdy said that a big challenge facing Facebook today is building a solid and stable platform for third-pa...

Editor’s note: Guest author Keith Teare is General Partner at his incubator Archimedes Labs and CEO of recently funded just.me. He was a co-founder of TechCrunch. It is either a good week to be having a CrunchUp focusing on the faltering Facebook ecosystem or it is a terrible week. Either way it is a compelling and interesting week, and whether it is good or bad depends on who you are and what your role is in the ecosystem. Following the departure of Ethan Beard (director of platform partnerships); Katie Mitic (platform marketing director) and Jonathan Matus (mobile platform marketing manager) this week; and the revelations from an embittered and chastened Dalton Caldwell, it seems to me that the tide is turning against Facebook as a reliable partner for developers to depend upon. In the very same week, Twitter has stirred up its developer ecosystem to fear that its latest moves are both self-serving and destined to punish their loyalty. One consequence of this has been the departur...

Josh Constine is a technology journalist who specializes in deep analysis of social products. He is currently a writer for TechCrunch. Previously, Constine was the Lead Writer of Inside Facebook, where he covered Facebook product changes, privacy, the Ads API, Page management, ecommerce, virtual currency, and music technology. Prior to writing for Inside Facebook, Constine graduated from Stanford University... ? Learn More Facebook keeps its network tight. Today it promoted Justin Osofsky to director of platform partnerships and operations, taking the spot of Ethan Beard who is departing after leading the partnerships team along with Dan Rose since 2008. Director of platform marketing Katie Mitic also announced she was leaving today, and mobile platform marketing manager Jonathan Matus stepped down last week. Along with Sheryl Sandberg’s addition to the board of directors, and long-time Facebook engineers Mike Vernal and Cory Ondrejka taking on former CTO Bret Taylor’s role, the mess...

Currently, an EIR @JavelinVP and an official contributor to @TechCrunch (since January 2011); formerly, handled operations for @Rexly and @Votizen. Please visit www.semilshah.com for more information ? Learn More Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is currently an EIR with Javelin Venture Partners and has been a columnist at TechCrunch since January 2011. He hosts a weekly TCTV show In the Studio and will now begin a weekly Sunday column, Iterations.” Follow him on Twitter @semil. A few weeks ago, Craigslist penned a “Cease and Desist” letter aimed at Padmapper, the popular apartment listings site, to stop its use of Craigslist data for the third-party service. While Craigslist has behaved this way before, the startup community does not particularly like these types of letters. It was not too long ago that the City of San Francisco sent a “Cease and Desist” letter to a company called, at the time, Ubercab, a letter that again brought startups together in a mutual display of support for new bu...

The app store model, pioneered by companies like Handango and popularized by Apple, has become the preferred method for distributing software on everything from desktops to post-PC devices. We’re also seeing this model in the cloud, mostly through software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers, such as the Google Apps Marketplace. But what’s been missing so far is a platform-as-a-service that allows you to add components through an app store interface. In the world of enterprise software, SaaS app markets are subverting the binary distinction between “best of breed” solutions that do one thing and do it well and large suites. It’s hard not to root for best of breed solutions. They are, after all, the best at what they do. But large enterprises have reasons for choosing bundles, ranging from integration to procurement issues. With an app store, you can standardize on a particular suite and then augment or replace specific features. For example, both Jive and Yammer are social collaboration su...

Kim-Mai Cutler is a technology journalist who has worked for Bloomberg, VentureBeat and The Wall Street Journal. Before she joined TechCrunch, she led mobile coverage at Inside Network, a six-person media startup that was acquired by WebMediaBrands in 2011 for $14 million in cash and stock. She specializes in covering gaming, distribution and monetization of mobile applications and venture... ? Learn More No early Google-style growth here. Facebook’s payments revenues barely budged for a third quarter as gaming activity increasingly moved onto mobile devices. The company also hasn’t really started taking revenue share from apps in other verticals like music and media yet either, so that means there aren’t any new engines for platform revenue growth — yet. The company’s $192 million in payments revenue is barely an inch above the $186 million it made last quarter or the $188 million it made in the holiday quarter. On top of slowing advertising revenue growth, this means that the second...

Sarah currently works as a writer for TechCrunch, after having previously spent over three years at ReadWriteWeb. Prior to becoming a professional blogger, Sarah worked in I.T. across a number of industries, including banking, retail and software. ? Learn More Today, a company called payvia is launching a new mobile payments platform for carrier billing. But unlike several in this space, payvia is not a new player in the mobile industry. The company was spun out from m-Qube, which started a transaction and carrier billing network in North America in 2004. Originally focused on supporting carrier billing for entertainment services (think ringtones, wallpaper, etc.), the goal with payvia is to help the company transition into digital goods and services. The company competes with a number of services, including Boku, Zong (now eBay-owned), Bango, Netsize, Fortumo, boxPAY, and others, and it has not been above suing its competitors for infringing on its patents in the past. But now, the ...

GoodData has raised $25 million to continue developing its cloud-based business intelligence technology. The funding brings GoodData’s total funding to $55 million. Founder and CEO Roman Stanek said the investment came from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst Partners and Fidelity Growth Partners. Windcrest Partners is also contributing to the round. GoodData offers a cloud-based data analytics service that competes with solutions from companies such as IBM, SAP and Oracle. Its business model is pretty clever. Its markets to the vast ecosystem of SaaS providers that integrate the technology into their own platforms. Those providers can then offer their own customers access to dashboards, advanced reporting and other features. The difference is in the apps that the SaaS providers offer from GoodData. Stanek cites as an example how budgets are shifting to digital marketing. Marketers, though, still do not have enough analytics. GoodData provides insights into that ...

Google has a new cloud partner program that shows the company’s drive to go after old IT. In a blog post today, Google provided some details about it with a link to a list of the technology and service providers that are part of the program. It’s a short list but here’s what they are offering. Service providers deliver consulting services for the various Google Platform Cloud products. This would include the new Google Compute Engine, Google App Engine, Google Cloud Storage, Google Big Query and its prediction and translation APIs. Technology partners provide integrations with Google Platform Cloud or use one of its services as a foundation for their products. Google is hinting that it will use its partner program to pursue customers who want to migrate off legacy solutions. According to the Google blog post: For example, Orangescape Technologies, one of our partners, integrated Google App Engine as part of their platform to help United Biscuits, a leading manufacturer of biscuits an...