Also: game maker THQ files for bankruptcy; Twitter appoints a new COO and CFO.
Kleiner Partners’ view of the future of tech [THE WALL STREET JOURNAL]
WSJ: Is the sharp rise in the value of private tech companies sustainable for investors?
Mr. Doerr: What we’re experiencing right now is not different from the very early days of the Internet when there were huge winners who more than made up for the losers, and that’s happening right now in mobile.
Mr. Schlein: There’s a lot of talk about how there are too many angel investors [who invest small amounts in very young companies]….But the main event is that we have 1.2 billion people with smartphones, and that’s up 40% year over year and that’s still just 17% of the world’s population.
Game maker THQ files for bankruptcy [THE WALL STREET JOURNAL]
Clearlake has offered a total of around $60 million, including a new $10 million note for the company’s creditors. THQ said it hopes the sale will be completed in about 30 days. … The company, best known for WWE wrestling games and its “Saints Row” franchise, said that its business will remain in operation through the sale, and added that its studios remain open and its development teams continue working. The company, which is also developing a game base on the “South Park” television show, doesn’t plan to cut staff as part of the bankruptcy filing.
Twitter shuffles top brass with new COO and CFO appointments [ALL THINGS D]
In move that shuffles some of the highest ranking members of the microblogging start-up’s executive team, Ali Rowghani has been named chief operating officer of Twitter, according to a change in his Twitter profile, shifting into the role that CEO Dick Costolo once held only a few years ago.
Rowghani, who has been with the company since 2010, came to Twitter to act as chief financial officer after leaving the same role he held at Walt Disney Company’s Pixar animation studios. He was at Pixar for more than nine years, serving as CFO for half that time.
Facebook starts rolling out new privacy settings, making it easier to control which data is public [THE NEXT WEB]
The changes — which were outlined in an ABC report earlier this month — are designed to give users easier access to and awareness of ways that they can control the privacy of their information on the site. A new privacy shortcut menu has been added to the main bar that runs across the site. There’s also a new ‘privacy settings and tools’ page that displays a simplified overview of privacy options and lets users opt out of having content from their Timeline indexed by search engines.
Forrester: 84% of U.S. adults now use the Web daily, 50% own smartphones, tablet ownership doubled to 19% in 2012 [TECHCRUNCH]
One trend that the Forrester report, which includes survey data from nearly 60,000 consumers in the U.S. and Canada, also notes is that 43 percent of consumers now connect to the web with their TVs. Forrester, just like similar surveys, found that most of these users rely on their game consoles to do so (42 percent), while connected TVs (19 percent) and Internet-connected set-top boxes like the Roku or Apple TV are only being used by 14 percent.
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