Monday, April 4, 2011

Y! Alert: TechCrunch

Yahoo! Alerts
My Alerts

The latest from TechCrunch

A Royal Waste Of Resources? Yahoo Launches British Royal Wedding Site Top
I’m not sure about you, but I’m already tired of the Royal Wedding coverage , and the wedding is nearly a month away. Media companies are clamoring to publicize their coverage of the marriage between England’s Prince William and Kate Middleton and Yahoo is the latest to throw its hat in the ring . Yahoo, who says that searches worldwide on is search portal for the royal wedding have increased 8 million percent since the announcement of the royal engagement and 1,523 percent just in the last month, is launching a dedicated portal for all things related to the wedding. At Royalwedding.yahoo.com, visitors can now access articles, photo galleries, videos, and more coverage related to the wedding. Yahoo’s portal, which is an extension of its womens-focused news site Shine, also features a digital guestbook, a livestream of the wedding on April 29, original video content from a joint ABC News/Yahoo News Web show called "Wedding Royale," a mobile site and more. Yahoo is also launching an Official British Monarchy Flickr stream here. Of course, in all fairness, it’s not just Yahoo who is hoping to cash in on the royal wedding media circus. A host of media and news companies are ramping up coverage as the wedding date draws near. CrunchBase Information Yahoo! Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Google Makes $900 Million Stalking-Horse Bid For Nortel Patents As It Looks To Fend Off Trolls Top
The patent system is busted. Tech rivals are throwing lawsuits at each other to shoot down competitors instead of trying to win with innovative products . And Google’s had enough of being pushed around. Today in a blog post , Google has announced that it’s going to help fend off attacks on both itself and ecosystems of projects like Android and Chrome by bidding on the Nortel patent portfolio — a trove of 6,000 valuable patents that relate to a variety of technologies including wireless, 4G, data networking, and more. Which, should Google win them, would be a strong deterrent for any other companies thinking of suing Google or one of its partners. Google hasn’t won anything yet — there’s still going to be an auction planned for June when other companies will be able to bid above the $900 million stalking-horse bid. Nortel is selling the patents as part of a bankruptcy auction and says that the Google bid “follows a confidential, multi-round bidding process involving several interest companies” — which reportedly included Apple, who could presumably follow up with their own bid in the main auction. In its blog post, Google explains that it’s a relatively young company, and that it simply hasn’t been around long enough to build out a patent portfolio as broad as some of its competitors. It says that while it’s still fighting for major patent reform , for now, building out a portfolio is the best defense against such litigation. Google has not used any of its patents offensively before. Google has been involved in quite a bit of patent litigation lately, and Android has been a big target in particular. In March 2010 Apple sued HTC , alleging over 20 patent infringements. Microsoft has gone after Motorola (a big manufacturer of Android phones) and even Barnes & Noble for its Android-based Nook eReader. And there’s also the huge Oracle suit , which alleges that Google is infringing on seven Java patents with Android. From the post: Today, Nortel selected our bid as the "stalking-horse bid,” which is the starting point against which others will bid prior to the auction. If successful, we hope this portfolio will not only create a disincentive for others to sue Google, but also help us, our partners and the open source community—which is integrally involved in projects like Android and Chrome—continue to innovate. In the absence of meaningful reform, we believe it’s the best long-term solution for Google, our users and our partners. CrunchBase Information Google Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Former ValueClick Exec Who Joined Gigya As CEO Jumps To … ValueClick Top
Eyal Magen , founder of social sharing software maker Gigya , a couple of weeks ago announced that Dave Yovanno, who joined the company as chief executive officer in October 2008 after serving as COO of ValueClick for almost a decade, was stepping down . Turns out Yovanno will be returning to ValueClick as the new general manager of Mediaplex , the company’s technology division. Yovanno will report to ValueClick CEO Jim Zarley and will assist with the company's corporate development program in addition to running Mediaplex. Before joining Gigya as CEO, Yovanno was a key member of the ValueClick management team from 2000 to 2008, serving as chief operating officer of U.S. media and the general manager of ValueClick Media. He has also served on the board of directors of the Interactive Advertising Bureau and holds both bachelors and masters degrees from The George Washington University, Washington, DC. CrunchBase Information David Yovanno ValueClick Gigya Information provided by CrunchBase
 
AOL Has Already Replaced The Engadget Exodus (To Tech Gadget Nation) Top
Ever since AOL bought the Huffington Post , one group of high-profile bloggers at our sister site Engadget (AOL also owns TechCrunch) decided they did not like the direction the company was going and left quite vocally. It seemed that every week one of them quit in a huff. Now we know where they went. Eight of those bloggers, led by former editor in chief Joshua Topolsky, are preparing to launch a competing tech blog at SB Nation , which is currently a sports blog network whose CEO, Jim Bankoff, is a former AOL executive. As David Carr at the New York Times writes : At first blush, SB Nation would seem to be an odd home for a gadget blog — the Venn diagram intersection between geeks and jocks usually is defined by the Madden NFL games. The new site doesn’t have a name yet—call it Tech Gadget Nation for now—and won’t launch until the fall. Besides Topolsky, the other bloggers Bankoff poached from AOL are Nilay Patel, Paul Miller, Joanna Stern, Ross Miller, Chris Ziegler, Justin Glow and Dan Chilton. Bankoff picked them off one by one as they departed, he says. Where does that leave AOL and Engadget? It survived the departure of its first two rockstar editors, Peter Rojas and Ryan Block, who went on to start GDGT , and it will survive this talent turnover as well. In fact, editorial director Joshua Fruhlinger, who has been at Engadget since 2004 and was Topolsky’s boss, tells me that he’s hired seven new editorial staffers in the past month alone (Richard Lai, Myriam Joire, Christopher Trout, Dana Wollman, Brian Heater, Brett Terpstra, and Paul Heuts), and is about to announce two more additions, including new editor in chief Tim Stevens (formerly the automotive editor). “Engadget is nonstop,” he says. More than 20 people are currently writing and editing the gadget site full time, and they are not taking a break until next fall. CrunchBase Information Engadget SB Nation AOL Information provided by CrunchBase
 
HomeAway Broadens Presence In Australia With Acquisition Of Vacation Rental Site RealHolidays Top
As it prepares for a public offering , vacation rental giant HomeAway is continuing its aggressive acquisition strategy with the purchase of realholidays.com.au , the Australian vacation rental brand of REA Group Limited. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The acquisition broadens HomeAway’s presence in the Australian market, and into the Asia-Pacific region.Currently HomeAway has presences in North America, Europe and South America. Realholidays.com.au, which currently features which features 21,000 listings, will be integrated with HomeAway.com.au and will be managed by James Cassidy, formerly of realholidays.com.au and vacation rental site, stayz.com.au. HomeAway.com.au already features 105,900 vacation rental listings in 99 countries. International expansion is a key growth strategy for the vacation rentals giant and I think we can expect HomeAway to continue to make similar acquisitions in the coming year. In 2010, 37.9% of the company’s revenue of $167.9 million came from outside the United States, including 36.6% from Europe and 1.3% from Latin America. A few weeks ago, HomeAway filed for an IPO valued at $230 million (though this could be a placeholder amount). HomeAway has raised close to a half a billion dollars in venture funding, and in its most recent investment round was valued at $1.4 billion. CrunchBase Information HomeAway Information provided by CrunchBase
 
SmartBear Buys Website Performance Monitoring Company AlertSite Top
SmartBear Software this morning announced its acquisition of web and mobile performance management software maker AlertSite . Through the acquisition of AlertSite , SmartBear says it aims to expand its cloud and mobile offering. Founded in 2003, Austin, Texas-based SmartBear offers code review, testing, and development management tools to a community of over 100,000 users. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, although SmartBear Software CEO Joe Krivickas in a statement said “all AlertSite customers and employees” will make the switch to SmartBear. Founded in 1998, AlertSite serves more than 2,300 customers worldwide. CrunchBase Information AlertSite Smart Bear Software Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Livebookings Processes 1 Million Reservations In A Month, Raises $10 Million Top
London-based online restaurant reservations and marketing services company Livebookings says it has processed 1 million bookings for restaurants in a single month, marking the largest ever for the OpenTable rival. In the same month the record was achieved (that would be March, 2011), Livebookings secured £6 million - or nearly $10 million - in a round of funding from existing shareholders, including VC firms Balderton Capital and Wellington Partners .
 
EMC Buys Network Security Monitoring And Analysis Company NetWitness Top
Following its $2.25 billion acquisition of Isilon, infrastructure giant EMC is making another purchase today— network security software company NetWitness. EMC's acquisition of NetWitness closed on April 1, 2011 (clearly neither company wanted to make the announcement on April Fool's Day) and NetWitness will operate as a part of RSA, the security division of EMC. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. NetWitness provides network security monitoring and analysis software products for commercial and government organizations internationally. The company's software offers network content analysis methods, risk verification and determination methods, incident response, data leakage and content monitoring, and compliance services.
 
How We All Missed Web 2.0′s "Netscape Moment" Top
(Editor’s note: This is the third installment in a series about the late stage, secondary investing craze sweeping the venture capital business. For the first two installments go here and here .) On May 26, 2009 Mike sat down with Yuri Milner, Mark Zuckerberg and a Flipcam to talk about the then-scandalous $200 million investment DST made in Facebook, at a price that valued the company at about $10 billion. The camera-work is Blair-Witch-Project-like at best. You can barely hear the audio,  and Zuckerberg can’t for the life of him figure out whether to look at the camera or Mike. It doesn’t really matter because, just after he asks, Mike proceeds to cut off half his face anyway. But shoddy production aside, this may have been one of the most pivotal moments TechCrunch has ever captured on camera. We didn’t know it at the time, but this was something more than an unexpected investment by an unheard of investor in a seemingly overhyped social network. It was a moment we’d been waiting for for more than a decade. Something we’d been obsessing about. It was the moment when a Web startup fundamentally broke all the normal rules of gravity that govern all Web startups. It was the moment that would eventually spawn a new, unchartered frenzy of late stage dealmaking. In my opinion, it was nothing short of the Web 2.0 generation’s answer to “the Netscape moment.” THE. NETSCAPE. MOMENT. Anyone who was in the Valley in the 1990s likely hears dramatic music when they read those words. It refers to Netscape’s 1995 IPO , when an 18-month-old company that wasn’t yet profitable electrified the public markets generating one of the biggest first day stock pops in history. It wasn’t just the dream team of the Svengali-like Jim Clark, king of the geeks Marc Andreessen and the operationally rigorous Jim Barksdale. It wasn’t just that Netscape stood at the forefront of a multi-billion wave of Internet creativity that would transform nearly every industry and the lives of the billion people online today. And it wasn’t just that Netscape was a better business then than people like to remember, doubling revenues quarter-over-quarter. It was also Netscape’s timing: The IPO coincided with a greater democratization of stock market investing. It wasn’t the banks– it was the everyday retail investors flooding brokerages to buy a piece of a product they loved that caused the stock to pop so dramatically. And Andreessen was a symbol to every hacker or geek that you could move to Silicon Valley and build something huge (and get rich) in a matter of months– something that had never been possible in business before. Put the two together and there was an irresistible new reality where a smart idea posting dramatic growth that a huge number of consumers loved could now operate by new company formation and liquidity rules. Was it any wonder a flood of new companies followed? Of course, everyone knows the inevitable happened next: Greed and latecomers pushed things too far, and we ended up with a dramatic crash that psychologically much of the Valley is still reeling from. (Don’t believe me? How many times this week have you read an alarmist report about whether or not the Dot Com Bubble is back?) It didn’t take long for nostalgia over Netscape’s IPO to set in. One of the biggest stories when I first moved to the Valley was the hotly anticipated IPO of Loudcloud, Andreessen’s second company. It was the fall of 2000 and the IPO market had ground to a halt. But there were still plenty of people who believed it was only the frothiest companies that would die and that, after a pause, the new economy would keep surging. Quarterly venture capital investments were still increasing, launch parties were still held, and the Red Herring was still as thick as a phone book. As times got worse, everyone needed something concrete to pin their hopes on, and for many that became the Loudcloud IPO. Afterall, Andreessen had changed the markets once, why couldn’t he do it again? The story that rang across CNBC, the Wall Street Journal and countless other media organizations: Could the Loudcloud IPO be the new Netscape moment? It wasn’t . And yet, the press still yearns. Since then there have been no fewer than 10 million Google mentions of the phrase, as the press and analysts have predicted that each impending liquidity event by an outperforming company lead by a charismatic CEO would be the thing to get the broader public markets moving again. Would Salesforce.com be the Netscape Moment? Would Google be the Netscape Moment? Would Tesla be CleanTech’s Netscape Moment? Each IPO above has been newsworthy and an industry milestone in its own right, but each has fallen short of the Netscape yardstick. Here’s a spoiler alert: When LinkedIn becomes the first social network to file later this year, no doubt the same story will be written, and LinkedIn won’t produce a Netscape moment either. As each IPO fails to be the next Netscape, more expectations pile onto the IPO everyone really wants to see: Facebook. Since 2007, stock “experts” have been reading tea leaves to predict its imminent arrival, and even today every move the company makes is pinned to speculation that the IPO is coming soon, nevermind executives take every opportunity to say there are no immediate plans for one. Facebook has a young wonder-geek CEO. Facebook is growing a fast rate. Facebook has 650 million users, who no doubt will produce a strong retail pop. Couldn’t Facebook be it? The obsession is palpable. Of course none of these things will be the next Netscape moment, because Netscape has already happened. Crash-aside, the new rules created by the Netscape IPO are still pretty much the rules high-growth startups play by today. It’s no longer shocking that a 20-something kid could move to the Valley and build a billion-dollar world changing company. We’ve seen it dozens of times– in good economic times and bad. And it’s no longer shocking that an Internet company can grow very fast because of quick product cycles and a huge market of 1 billion people these companies can reach. These trends have developed and intensified, but today they are the norm. In our obsessive zeal to witness the next Netscape Moment, I submit we missed it. As a business reporter, the Netscape moment wasn’t so pivotal because it was an initial public offering; it was pivotal because of what it represented. It was pivotal because of the impact that it had on entrepreneurs– allowing them to build companies based on a set of new rules, not the old rules that had been defined for them. It was about a company not only disrupting an industry, but disrupting the laws of gravity associated with being a startup itself. Just as Netscape proved you didn’t have to be profitable or fully-baked to go public, Facebook has proved the inverse: That you don’t have to go public to get liquidity for investors, a huge marketing event, and cash to acquire competitors and keep growing. That you don’t have to go public just because the playbook says so. One was about pushing a wave of companies to surge towards an IPO faster; the other has been about giving permission to a wave of companies to put off the IPO as long as possible– but the two have been equally dramatic changes that have impacted the broader economy. Netscape gave Wall Street and investors a new high growth industry to pour money into; Facebook– starting with that first DST deal– has deprived the market of it. But because we were so conditioned to view the next pivotal moment in startup economics as an IPO, we continually saw these secondary deals as something leading up to that pivotal moment– not as the pivotal moment that changed everything itself. Facebook and DST won’t comment on the record about things like this– particularly since it involves IPO specualtion– so the natural people to talk to are the two guys who have been in the middle of it all: Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. Andreessen was the co-founder of Netscape and the Mark Zuckerberg before Mark Zuckerberg. He was the reason Loudcloud had so much hype. And he’s not only on Facebook’s board, his and Horowitz’s firm has been one of the most aggressive investors in the Web 2.0 late-stage frenzy DST sparked. Horowitz gets fewer headlines, but he was a manager at Netscape, the co-founder and CEO of Loudcloud and the co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz too. When I mentioned this story to Andreessen at a dinner party a few weeks ago, I could see the involuntary facial tick as his smile faded. He was polite, but his face said: “You’re not actually asking me about the Netscape moment? You must know me well enough to know how much I’ll hate that.” Indeed. I do. There’s a reason I quickly added: “HEAR ME OUT!” I sat down with Horowitz this week for his take and I saw the same look momentarily cross his face– the fleeting desire to throw me out of his offices for bringing up such a silly, overused press gimmick that they’ve been asked about thousands of times. It’s the only thing worse than asking if the current wave of frothy valuations are “ANOTHER TECH BUBBLE.” It’s the same look I give when someone asks me if China is the next Silicon Valley. Um… for starters, one of those is a huge country with a billion people surging out of poverty, and one is a 50-mile stretch in California full of millionaires… Both Andreessen and Horowitz granted the dramatic change prompted by both the DST and Netscape deals – but to them, DST’s investment in Facebook was still just a precursor to a potential IPO. They argue what was so revolutionary from within Netscape was the retail pop– the sense of every rabid user owning a piece of the company and that reinforcing the marketing of the company itself. “It was one big feedback loop,” Horowitz says. Granted, just like a comparison of 2011 to 1999 is inane, so too are there huge flaws with my comparison. As Andreessen likes to say, “There are no ‘nexts’.” To call Facebook the next Google misunderstands what each company has built. Predicting the next industry changing moment is like predicting the next industry changing technology– by definition it’s something we can’t envision before it happens. And that’s why we didn’t realize at the time just how transformative that DST-Facebook deal would be. In the Milner-Zuckerberg video above, Mike asks a few times why the company would raise this much money when it didn’t need the cash and why Milner would invest so much without a board seat. Zuckerberg says, “We have no plans to use this money immediately and we may never use it. We may use it to make an acquisition or to open up data centers, if some strategic option makes itself available, and now we might be able to do it whereas otherwise we wouldn't have been able to, that's the option value that we gain through this investment.” Was he being cryptic? Maybe. More likely, even he didn’t realize the flood of follow-on secondary opportunities the deal with unleash allowing Facebook to put off an IPO for years without hurting the company’s growth. Some more parallels jumped out at me, the more I thought about the two moments: Both had key enablers from outside the establishment. In the late 1990s four San Francisco-based boutique investment banks were the first to spot the potential of small tech IPOs that could get huge. The incumbent Wall Street vets missed it completely, obsessed with playing the old-economy game. This time around it was DST that was the outsider to the establishment who spotted an opportunity that all the billions of dollars in Silicon Valley was ignoring: Facebook couldn’t go public, and it needed money and liquidity. The deal was reviled at the time and DST was deemed to be paying an outrageous price for such a speculative company– the same thing that’s been said at every Facebook valuation, by the way. But pretty soon everyone around the company warmed to the idea: With Facebook’s earliest investors using these secondary deals to lock in returns, Facebook’s earliest employees using them as a pseudo-IPO, major firms like Kleiner Perkins, Elevation Partners and Andreessen Horowitz using them to manage to get a pre-IPO chunk of the company, and of course, Facebook using them to put off going public, but still get the benefits. Just as the boutique investment banks spotted an inflection point in the market to break the traditional rules that the establishment initially mocked and then jumped all over, so too did DST spot an inflection point in the market, broke traditional rules, was mocked and then billions of dollars and many of the biggest names changed their strategies to follow . The Macro-Economic and Cultural Backdrop . The impact of each of these moments was about so much more than the companies themselves, and that’s what makes them different from, say, Google’s IPO which was a huge moment in tech, but didn’t have much of a macro-economic impact beyond Google, Google investors and Google millionaires. Netscape’s IPO came at a point in time that it represented a catalyzing of the birth of the modern startup, the birth of the Internet and the impact of a truly democratized stock market. The latter was continually goosed by CNBC and only become more pronounced with the birth of subsequent companies like eTrade and Ameritrade. The role so many individuals played in the bubble was what made the crash so devastating. Likewise, Facebook’s reluctance to go public is wrapped up in a lot of bigger macro trends that have been more than a decade in the making. It’s not so much the psychological impact of the Dot Com Bubble, Mark Zuckerberg has always been one of the few people in the Web 2.0 world immune to that. As he once told me, “I was in middle-school then.” It’s the transformation of what it means to be a public company. To many CEOs, the benefits– liquidity, marketing and a stock currency to purchase other companies– have been outstripped by mounting costs. There are hard costs like Sarbanes Oxley compliance, but more problematic are things like Regulation Fair Disclosure , or ‘Reg FD’. It was created to make sure all shareholders got the same information at the same time, but in practice means a company can’t defend itself against rumors started by hedge funds without the dangerous precedent of issuing a press release to rebut
 

CREATE MORE ALERTS:

Auctions - Find out when new auctions are posted

Horoscopes - Receive your daily horoscope

Music - Get the newest Album Releases, Playlists and more

News - Only the news you want, delivered!

Stocks - Stay connected to the market with price quotes and more

Weather - Get today's weather conditions




You received this email because you subscribed to Yahoo! Alerts. Use this link to unsubscribe from this alert. To change your communications preferences for other Yahoo! business lines, please visit your Marketing Preferences. To learn more about Yahoo!'s use of personal information, including the use of web beacons in HTML-based email, please read our Privacy Policy. Yahoo! is located at 701 First Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA 94089.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)