The latest from TechCrunch
- Sales Have Slowed To A Trickle On Google's Chrome Web Store
- Twitter Math: If Accounts Were Ranked By Followers, This Would Be The Equation
- Chegg Hires Former Netflix COO To Manage Massive Textbook Warehouse
- Not Just IPOs: The Surprising Increase of Big Liquidity through Buyouts (TCTV)
- TV Content Check-In App Miso Lands $1.5M From Google Ventures And Hearst
| Sales Have Slowed To A Trickle On Google's Chrome Web Store | Top |
| In December, after months of anticipation and working with third-party developers, Google finally unveiled the Chrome Web Store — an online portal that lets users purchase and ‘install’ web applications like TweetDeck, MOG, and hundreds of others. It’s one of the first platforms that helps developers monetize web applications using a unified payment system (in this case, Google Checkout), and it’s going to be deeply integrated into Google’s Chrome browser. Unfortunately, as far as we can tell, nobody is really buying anything on it. The UI for the Chrome Web Store looks very similar to iTunes, and, just like iTunes, one of the most prominent sections is a list of ‘Top Paid’ applications. Sitting at the top of the list is Toddler Jukebox , a colorful little app selling for $1.99 that lets you play twelve children’s songs, like ‘Wheels on the Bus’. And, according to the Web Store stats, it’s been installed six times this week. Ouch. To be fair, Google isn’t sorting its ‘Top Paid’ list in order of purchases (though I’m not sure why) — a few of the other applications in the list are doing better, but even those are still showing lackluster sales. The paid application with the most recent activity is MathBoard , which has 65 weekly installs and sells for $2.99 (less Google’s fees , so it gets around $2.56 a pop). In other words, it’s earning around $165 a week. That’s not nothing, but given that every other app on the store is probably making less than that, it’s not good. Now, it’s possible that sales slowed a bit over the holidays, but the impact couldn’t have been that huge. There is, however, one more significant explanation for this: Google hasn’t done much to expose the Web Store to users. In fact, the current stable release of Chrome still doesn’t actually feature the Chrome Web Store anywhere — it only shows up if you go to the Web Store directly and install an application. That said, Google has placed banner ads for the Store on some sites (including TechCrunch), and the store got loads of publicity at launch, so it’s not like it’s a secret. There are some free applications that are getting far more attention, like Quick Note , which has 8,000 installs this week. Obviously it’s common for free applications to get more installations than premium apps, but the discrepancy — 65 paid installs versus 8,000 free — seems pretty steep. One thing is clear: Google has a long way to go with the Web Store. It’s still impossible to distinguish applications that are basically just bookmarks from those that are full-fledged web apps. And while the purchase flow itself is pretty simple (you can buy something in a couple clicks, assuming you already have a Google Checkout account), I think Google will have to put some work into educating people on what exactly they’re paying for. Thanks to Brian Kennish for the heads up. Kennish is the man behind Disconnect , a browser extension that lets you block services like Facebook Connect CrunchBase Information Google Chrome Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Twitter Math: If Accounts Were Ranked By Followers, This Would Be The Equation | Top |
| exp(21 – 1.1*log(#followers)) If you ever wanted to know where you rank among Twitter users in terms of the followers you have, that’s the equation. Well, for most of you anyway. Twitter tech lead Pankaj Gupta tweeted that equation out earlier today. A Twitter Equation: If accounts were ranked by #followers, approx. rank=exp(21 – 1.1*log(#followers)). e.g., 331 with 1M followers! Sure enough, exp(21 – 1.1*log(1,000,000)) = 331.272, if my math is correct. And by “my” math, I of course mean WolframAlpha’s math. The caveat is that this equation only holds if you have between 100 and a million Twitter followers, Gupta tweets . “ It’s amazing how seemingly complex systems are internally just equations ,” he notes. But since that range covers the vast majority of Twitter users, this should be useful to see where you stand. Plugging my own numbers (31,074 followers) into the equation puts me at a rank of around 15,085 in this system. Mike , with 58,722 followers, would be ranked around 7,490. Scoble , with 156,709 followers, would be about 2,544. All of this is particularly interesting since we know that Twitter has a secret “reputation ranking” score for every user. This is something Twitter might even make public in the future. But this equation has nothing to do with that, apparently. “I should add that this is not how we rank twitter users for anything interesting we do internally ,” Gupta tells us. I still prefer to use my Twitter Golden Ratio . Also, if my math is correct here (and by “math” I mean deduction skills). That means that Twitter has roughly 331 users with more than a million followers. CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Chegg Hires Former Netflix COO To Manage Massive Textbook Warehouse | Top |
| Right about now, as college students across the country start to go back to school for the Spring semester, things are starting to pick up at Chegg’s 600,000 square foot warehouse in Shepherdsville, Kentucky. The warehouse sits right next to the main UPS shipping hub and across from a Zappos warehouse. The textbook rental company sees its busiest times peak twice a year at the beginning of each college semester. Books from last semester come in around Christmas and new ones start going out by New Year’s. “To me,” says CEO Dan Rosensweig, “watching the ball drop is just inverting the rental tracker.” The books that come in need to be inspected, sometimes repaired, and shipped out again for the next batch of student textbook renters. The warehouse has the capability to ship nearly 17,000 books an hour. “On our biggest day hundreds of thousands of books are processed,” says Rosensweig. To manage the operations, Chegg board member Tom Dillon has officially joined the company as senior vice president of distribution. Dillon was the first chief operating officer of Netflix, and set up its hub-and-spoke DVD distribution centers. (Former Netflix CFO Barry McCarthy is also a board member). Since demand for Chegg’s textbooks is highly seasonal and concentrated in those two times a year, Chegg must staff up both its warehouse and customer service with temporary employees. Chegg employs a couple hundred people full-time, but it quadruples its staff during peak times, with more than 500 workers in the warehouse alone. But Chegg is fanatical about customer service, and bulks up on customer service reps to answer students questions during rental season. Despite competitors like BookRenter and eCampus nipping at its heels , Chegg remains the undisputed leader in the growing textbook rental market. The company plants a tree for each book it rents, and over the past three years it has planted over 4 million trees. “From peak to peak we are seeing excellent growth,” reports Rosensweig, “we don't feel we have hit penetration or are even close yet.” And while it is still early, so far numbers are up this year again. Rosensweig wouldn’t go into specific financials, but he did confirm that the company did better than it had been projecting for the year. Onstage at Disrupt last September, when I threw out our 2010 revenue estimate of $130 million , at the time he said it wasn’t far off the mark. Round that up to $150 million and that is probably pretty close is my best guess. Chegg already rents to students in about 7,000 of the 8,000 college campuses nationwide, and its focus is to spread across campuses to more students and to rent more books to existing customers. It also acquired CourseRank and Cramster , which help students pick courses and study for them. The company has raised $219 million to date, most recently a $75 million round last Fall. Shipping books is a capital-intensive business, and eventually it could be threatened by the rise of digital textbooks. In fact, Chegg co-founder Osman Rashid is bringing to market the Kno Tablet to offer digital textbooks to students. Rosensweig thinks that in a few years digital textbooks could be a factor, and he’d like to offer them to students if there is demand for them. Already Chegg offers digital textbook supplements online. But for right now, he says electronic textbooks are “insignificant.” He points out some of the challenges. “Battery life is not better than a book;” publisher availability is not complete (all a student’s textbooks need to be available on one or what’s the point); and, “Right now, it is less expensive to rent a physical textbook than to get one digitally.” He expects all of these things to change, but not overnight. Until then, he’s got a huge warehouse to keep humming at full capacity. CrunchBase Information Chegg BookRenter.com Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Not Just IPOs: The Surprising Increase of Big Liquidity through Buyouts (TCTV) | Top |
| Around 2006 there was a sudden increase in so-called “partial liquidations,” where entrepreneurs could take some money off the table during a mid-stage funding round. Considered unheard of at the time, now they’re the norm for companies doing well. Then in 2009, we saw the rise of secondary markets, which allowed early stage investors and employees to take some money off the table at more frequent intervals. That’s still controversial in some quarters, but becoming the norm for hot companies– and at huge sums. And now, Dow Jones VentureSource has been tracking a new trend in the same vein: An increase in private equity money not just cashing out some founder or early investor shares, but buying the whole company as a way for everyone to exit and still keep the company private. In 2010, there were 23 buyouts of venture-backed companies by private equity firms totaling $1.9 billion. That’s a small percentage of the overall liquidity last year, but more than half of the $3.4 billion brought in by IPOs. And like IPOs, these buyouts usually represent larger exits than corporate acquisitions. These three trends–partial liquidations, secondary trades and private buyouts– are all intermingled and all symptoms of the same problem: Most startups hate the idea of being a public company. In most cases, this urge to find liquidity elsewhere has nothing to do with Wall Street demand for growing companies; it has to do with companies and founders not wanting to file. That’s a massive cultural shift from the ecosystem on which the Valley and the Internet was built. It also is emblematic of the strong divergence between short-term flips for the singles, increasingly long-term investment horizons for the homeruns and the relative lack of doubles and triples in the middle that we wrote about yesterday . Interestingly, this buyout trend isn’t just because IPOs have been out of favor for the last few years. In a poll, more than 50% of VCs told Dow Jones VentureSource that they expected private buyouts to increase as a viable exit strategy in 2011 even as the number of big IPOs increase. In many cases, the buyout is a just step to an eventual IPO, in others it may be the final destination. This is strange, because buyout firms and venture capital shops used to be the polar opposites of the private equity world. One was known for taking has-been public companies and helping streamline and relaunch them anew inspiring books like Barbarians at the Gate , and the other was known for creating huge, new companies from nothing but an idea inspiring books like The New, New Thing . Few people saw a trend of one cashing the other out coming. Jessica Canning, research director for Dow Jones VentureSource, joined us via Skype to talk about the trend, whether it’s a good or bad thing for venture returns over time, and who is most likely to write the biggest checks as the trend continues. | |
| TV Content Check-In App Miso Lands $1.5M From Google Ventures And Hearst | Top |
| The check-in app for TV content Miso has just announced $1.5 million in new funding led by Google Ventures with Hearst Interactive Media also participating in the round. The startup had previously raised seed funding last May from angel investors and from Google Ventures. Similar to GetGlue, Tunerfish and others, Miso applies Foursquare’s check-in model to television content. The idea behind Miso is that as you watch TV shows and movies, users can check-in to this content, follow specific shows and earn points and badges for interacting with this content. Miso offers iPhone, iPad and Android apps for users on the go as well as a web app. The startup now has 100K registered users (which actually seems small compared to GetGlue’s active users ), and is rolling out an API to partners. And Miso, which is developed by Bazaar Labs , landed a pretty high-profile new media partner—Oprah’s recently launched OWN Network. Specifically, if users check-in to Oprah's Search for the Next TV Star show on Miso, users will earn exclusive OWN badges. Miso’s founder Somrat Niyogi writes that 2011 will bring a new strategy of expanding interaction beyond just the check-in, and it should be interesting to see how the startup plans to do this. Niyogi, who thinks there isn’t really a long term value for badges as rewards, says the “second-screen” market is still relatively young relative to TV content, and there is a lot of potential for advertising on this new experience. And having Hearst, with its media empire of television stations, and Google as media partners isn’t a bad way to start the New Year. CrunchBase Information Miso Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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