Square is still working on raising its $50 million-or-so next round of venture capital, and we’ve heard from several sources why it’s taking so long. It seems Square is no longer content to be in the $1 billion valuation club, which is admittedly getting a little crowded. I mean, once they’ve let Spotify in, they’ll let any hot app in, right?
Square is now angling for a whopping $2 billion valuation. That’s caused some well-heeled investors to balk, while others are still listening.
One aspect of the Egyptian uprising (among the others, most ongoing) that was overpowered by the wild acclamation of social media is something that has been quietly but powerfully changing societal norms over the last decade. It is simply the inclusion, on almost every mobile phone sold, of a digital camera. When 90% of the active population can, at any time, record an event they are witness to, and transmit it to the rest of the world instantly, many rules begin to change.
It’s not new, of course: “citizen journalism” has a long history before mobiles were prevalent, and the growing trend of “you report”-style news and things like Twitter streams in live reporting are as plain as the lens on your phone. And while I regularly deride the quality of camera phones, the truth is that improvements have been made that are now promoting phone-cams from joke cameras to true documentary devices.
What happens, exactly, when every individual is not only a node connected to a worldwide network, but is also able to take anything they see and cause it to be made public and (efforts are made in this direction) unable to be taken down? The consequences are complex and far-reaching, and we would do well to start thinking about them now.
Two of many challenges developing countries face are unsafe water and a lack of affordable energy. With the help of a new $1.5 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Ghana may be able to combine these lacks in to an asset in the form of biodiesel.
Last week Twilio, the startup that makes it easy for developers to integrate SMS and telephony features into their own applications, made a significant pricing change: they dropped the price of each outbound SMS message to one cent (it used to be two cents per message). That may not sound like much, but given that some companies being built on the technology handle a huge volume of texts — including some of the group texting apps — it adds up.
I was curious how much of an impact the pricing change could have on the service (after all, there may be some great ideas out there for which Twilio wasn’t previously a viable option), so I got in touch with the company. CEO Jeff Lawson says that Twilio isn’t sharing absolute numbers around the number of text message and voice minutes it’s dealing with, but he did provide the graph above the shows how each of the service’s previous price drops have spurred growth.
I’m a dad and have no problem stating that Father’s Day is farce. It’s a waste of money, mainly. I believe the same goes for Mother’s Day, but I clearly don’t have the same sort of authority to state as much.
That said, I don’t mind receiving a little something for my hard work. Everyone likes gifts, but there’s no reason to spend a good deal of time or money on us dads. Most national brick and mortar retailers sell great items that clearly fit within the Father’s Day gift parameters. Don’t stress over paying huge shipping fees from online retailers because you waited until the last minute. Toys-R-Us, Barnes & Noble and outdoorsy shops all sell gadgets and items your sort of nerdy Dad will love.
There’s currently something going on in the outskirts of the tech world that’s a bit sensitive, so no one really likes to talk about it: we (journalists, bloggers, etc) are at war with the PR industry.
That sentence alone will throw the PR flacks into a tizzy. “Hyperbole!” “Sexy statement, no substance!” “Don’t believe everything you read!” And all the other bullshit they typically spew to blunt interesting concepts into dull, gray PR-friendly dribble. We are at war.
And no, this isn’t about dumbass embargoes (though that remains a huge problem that the PR industry doesn’t seem to have any real interest in solving). This goes deeper.
Anyone who was in the Valley during the late 1990s knows exactly the guy I’m about to describe. He wore blue shirts and khakis. He was a regular at the Bubble Lounge. He always insisted on grabbing the check, throwing down the dot com AmEx for everyone’s drinks, making sure everyone knew he did and later bragging about dropping “several C notes last night.”
He was a business school drop out, who thought that gave him enough cool points to negate the fact that he was lame enough to enroll in business school in the first place.
He hogged the Razor scooter at your cavernous loft-like office, was way too loud when he won at foosball, took up all the restaurant reservations and cabs in the city, drove up the rents to unsustainable levels and generally made everyone else’s life miserable. Worse: He was frequently seen as the most important person in the startup.
Thank God he left in droves once the bubble burst. Even better: He never came back.
But as happens with hot markets, there’s a new douchebag in town.
Chris Dixon resumes his Founder Stories conversation with Eventbrite’s Kevin and Julia Hartz by asking questions about their strategy for attracting customers. Not surprisingly Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn all factor in to the mix.
Julia Hartz says initially Eventbrite positioned itself to be “highly optimized for search engines and discovery.” However, search eventually gave way to sharing in the form of Facebook, and now according to Julia, “Facebook is the number one driver of traffic to our site.” (It has been for a while). She notes “It’s extremely easy to get people to share what events they are going to because events are inherently social” and continues by saying with the “ticket buyer sharing where they’re going” it drives “real traffic back to the site as well as ticket sales.”
We had a blast at Disrupt this year in New York City. Now that we have disrupted the startup scene in New York, we are taking it back to our home turf, San Francisco. We will have new special speakers and guests, amazing new startups, fun after parties, and much more we will start revealing soon. Want to come with us? Here’s your chance.
To enter for a chance to win, just follow the steps below.
Hacker group LulzSec, which only communicates through its own Twitter account, LulzSecurity.com and random messages on Pastebin, has been on a Public Relations tear this morning. For the uninitiated, LulzSec is the loosely conglomerated internet greifer group behind the relentless hacker war on Sony, attacks on PBS, the US Senate, the CIA, and a slew of gaming sites popular with 4Chan users including EVE Online, Minecraft and League of Legends.
But despite the group’s eagerness to get in confrontation for the “lulz” and the numerous mass media headlines to the contrary yesterday and, LulzSec is NOT at war with Anonymous, another hacker group which before the appearance of LulzSec was held to be the preeminent Internet troublemaker. As the @LulzSec Twitter account makes clear this morning …
A New York City startup that helps brands connect with and reward their fans via Facebook, Crowdtap, recently crossed the $1 million revenue mark for 2011, with 115,000 active members and about 50 major brand clients, chief executive officer Brandon Evans reported today.
Crowdtap members earn redeemable points for taking “brand actions” like: completing “quick hit” surveys, voting in a poll, participating in a live-online discussions or sharing brand-related content with a few friends via social media and the Crowdtap platform. The points that Crowdtap gives its members can be redeemed for an array of real world incentives, among them: an Amazon.com gift card, or a cash donation to a charity chosen from the company’s list of approved organizations. These range from environmental non-profits like the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and The Nature Conservancy to The American Red Cross, Autism Speaks and Invisible Children.
Up until now, ecommerce valuations have been relatively reasonable compared to social media valuations. As Aileen Lee of Kleiner Perkins and Kevin Ryan of Gilt Group discussed on stage at Disrupt, there’s resistance for these companies’ prices to get too out of control because frequently the margins are tight and scaling up takes time and investment.
Also, ecommerce companies have a pretty clear business model. That sounds like it should be a good thing for whetting investor attention, but the unfortunate truth is nothing ruins a wildly speculative valuation like real revenue numbers. Real revenue numbers usually get multiples off existing revenues, not multiples off the promise of what they could be.
Someone should tell all that to BeachMint, because its new funding round seems to break all of those preconceived notions.
Recently I sat down with a well-connected Silicon Valley CEO who just raised a ton of money, and who knew of other startups raising even more. There is a new startup club of younger companies raising money right now at $1 billion valuations. I already knew a couple of them, but I started asking a few venture capitalists and now I have a pretty good list of who is in that club and who is trying to get in (see below).
As we all watch the established Web companies go public (LinkedIn, Pandora) or prepare for an IPO (Groupon, Zynga, Facebook), there is this new class of younger, but fast-growing, startups rising up right behind them. A lot of them are out raising money right now at $1 billion valuations. These are $50 to $100 million rounds, and they are generally going to companies showing incredible growth rates in both users and revenues, at least according to investors who have looked at these deals.
So who is in the new billion dollar valuation club?
comScore has just released its monthly data on online video engagement, with 176 million U.S. Internet users watching online video content in May for an average of 15.9 hours per viewer. The total U.S. audience engaged in more than 5.6 billion viewing sessions during the course of the month. And 83.3 percent of the U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
comScore says Google sites (a.k.a. YouTube) was again the top video property in May with 147.2 million unique viewers, 2.17 billion viewing sessions and an average of 311 minutes spent per viewer on the site (that’s an average of 5 hours spent per view in May).
The Internet is abuzz with chatter that this, the tablet in the pic above, is the Xoom 2. It’s featured in a new Verizon ad (embedded after the link) and while it lacks any branding besides the large Verizon logo on the back, it at least looks like a Xoom. It has the same matte black color scheme, contured back and, as Droid-Life points out, the same unique speaker found on the Xoom. But please-oh-please do not let it be the Xoom 2. Or rather, please don’t release the damn thing anytime soon.
The original Xoom started slowly rolling out back in late February. It was supposed to be the ultimate Honeycomb tablet — a sort of Nexus product. But it isn’t and the sales reflected that. It’s stupid expensive, hard to hold, lacks a USB host port and functional microSD card slot. Then there’s Honeycomb, which isn’t exactly fully cooked even now thanks to the lack of apps. It only makes sense that Verizon and Motorola would want to quickly recover from the Xoom disaster, but launching the Xoom 2 anytime soon would do just the opposite.
Forrester Research has just released a new report this morning projecting U.S. mobile commerce to reach $31 billion by 2016, growing at a 39% compound rate. But the report says that mobile commerce is only expected to be 7% of overall eCommerce sales by 2016 and only 1% of general retail sales.
This year alone, mobile commerce sales are expected to reach $6 billion as more consumers look to their smartphones to make purchases. Forrester says that most retailers are continuing to invest in mobile apps and mobile optimized sites. In a recent survey of major retailers, the firm founds that only 9 percent of online retailers didn’t have a mobile presence or strategy.
Question: Who is the mother of MP3?
Answer: Singer songwriter Suzanne Vega, whose iconic 1981 song “Tom’s Diner” was used by MP3 inventor Karl-Heinz Brandenberg to calibrate the standard of the revolutionary codec that would change the music industry forever.
Vega’s attitude to the music industry is pretty matrimonial too. On Wednesday, she keynoted the “CREATE: Protecting Creativity from the Ground Up” conference in Washington DC, put on by the technology and media coalition Arts and Labs (for whom, full disclosure, I consult). Not only did Vega play us an haunting intimate version of “Tom’s Diner”, but she also spoke uncompromising in favor of the artist’s right to be paid for his or her work. Arguing that if she wasn’t paid for her songs she would have to go back to being a receptionist, Vega argued that music, like oranges, shouldn’t be given away for free.
I was trying for a few weeks to write a review of the remake of Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on the 3DS and I couldn’t do it. It was too hard. I was lost to the experience of the thing and knew that I’d simply gush over the new graphics and old storyline and have little to say about the quality of the thing. Then, like a porcine Robert Pirsig, I began to think about the quality of the thing and why Zelda plays such an important part in my life and the lives of an entire generation.
The Legend of Zelda came out at a crucial point in history. Launched in August, 1987, the game appeared on the cusp of the Iran-Contra hearings and its launch coincided with a major LA earthquake. To children of the 1970s who were just coming into their own (I was 12 then), it was a frightening and confusing time. I was too young to understand the world, yet old enough to be afraid of it. I don’t want to conflate world events with the launch of a game, but I think it’s accurate in this case and, at the very least, helps explain some of the world as we (or I) saw it.
Expanding e-commerce operations to international markets is a challenge for online retailers. The logistics of localizing product prices in a country’s currency, and integrating shipping and delivery options can be difficult even for the biggest retailers in the world. Enter FiftyOne, an e-commerce platform that helps power international expansion and operations for online retailers.
FiftyOne streamlines all aspects of the international shopping experience for retailers. FiftyOne will manage all aspects of the international order life cycle, including multi-currency pricing and payment processing, landed cost calculation, customs clearance and brokerage, international fraud management, international logistics orchestration, and more.
You don’t hear news like this too often these days, but according to Japanese business daily The Nikkei, HP is planning to shift part of its notebook production from China to Japan in the next few months. The Californian company plans to eventually manufacture all computers for sale in Japan in factories in Akishima near Tokyo.
For that, HP plans to hire 50% more workers in Akishima, boosting the number of employees there to 450. According to the Nikkei, labor costs in Japan are about four times higher than in China. But with this move, HP apparently wants to increase efficiency, be closer to the market, stand out with a “made-in-Japan” moniker, and push down delivery times especially to Japanese business customers.
