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Archive for the ‘Board Of Intellectual Capital’ Category

Cloud Startup Values Are Getting Insane

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Economy, Investments, Market research, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 26, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Article from GigaOm.

“Forget the AngelGate controversy and shift your attention to the big-money world of cloud computing and infrastructure startups. While the clashing egos clang in the Silicon Valley echo chamber, massive amounts of money have started to flow into cloud companies at nosebleed valuations, and things are only just getting started.

Here are some of the recent deals and some exclusive details on forthcoming rounds and valuations of some of the better-known cloud and big data focused companies:

  • StorSimple, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based storage company making hybrid storage systems, recently raised $13 million in Series B funding. The company, which has yet to bring in a dollar in sales, is being valued at $50 million.
  • RightScale recently raised $25 million in Series C funding from Tenya Capital, DAG Ventures, Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures and Presidio Ventures at a reported valuation of $100-$125 million. Another source suggests that RightScale’s valuation is even higher.
  • Eucalyptus, a company headed by ex-MySQL CEO Marten Mickos, is said to be valued in excess of $100 million, and raised $20 million in new funding from New Enterprise Associates, Benchmark Capital and BV Capital.

On the big data front:

  • Aster Data recently snagged $30 million in new funding from the likes of Sequoia Capital and a new undisclosed investor. Rumored valuation: somewhere between $85 and $120 million.
  • I’ve heard rumors that Cloudera, the Hadoop-based big data company and one of the all-stars of big data movement, is looking to raise a fresh round of funding and is being valued in excess of $100 million.

My sources tell me a handful of cloud companies are likely to raise a ton of money in the coming weeks. So now you must be wondering what’s going on. There are two forces at work:

From a macro standpoint, the investment industry’s thinking about cloud-based investments has evolved. At our Structure 2010 conference, folks like VMware CEO Paul Maritz talked about the 10-year shift in the IT infrastructure. Early cloud doubters such as Oracle’s Larry Ellison are coming around and rethinking the opportunities being offered by the cloud. The venture capital community is sensing an opportunity and pumping dollars into the sector. But when you zero in, you can see that late-stage investors are willingly investing in companies that already have backing from the cream of the crop venture capital firms, such as Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital and Index Ventures.”

Read the full article here.

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Zynga Moves 1 Petabyte Of Data Daily; Adds 1,000 Servers A Week

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Economy, FaceBook, Gerbsman Partners, internet, Market research, Social Networks, Strategy, Venture Capital, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on September 22, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Article from TechCrunch.

“We all know that social gaming giant Zynga is one of the fastest growing tech companies of all time and has turned games like FarmVille into a mainstream phenomenon. And via international expansion and deals with Facebook and Google, Zynga has continued its path to domination of the social gaming market. We have an idea of the company’s revenue and other gaming statistics, but there is some data involving the backend of the platform that has not been revealed. Today, Zynga’s CTO Cadir Lee is speaking at Oracle’s OpenWorld conference about the gaming giant’s infrastructure, business and challenges.

Lee offers the following statistics:

  • 10 percent of the world’s internet population (approximately 215 million monthly users) has played a Zynga game.
  • The company adds as many as 1,000 servers every week to accommodate growing traffic.
  • Zynga’s properties move a whopping 1 petabyte of data daily, and the company operates its own data centers; using a hybrid private/public cloud infrastructure.
  • Zynga’s technology supports 3 billion neighbor connections on games like Frontierville and Farmville.

The company itself has been steadily adding employees, through both acquisitions and new hires, and now counts more than 1,200 full time employees and includes 13 game studios.”

Read more here.

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Android phones look to expand app offerings

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, mobile 2.0, Strategy, Technology, Web 2.0, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 2, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Article from SF Gate.

“Pinger Inc., a San Jose developer of mobile applications, can get twice as much in sales from programs for Apple devices than for phones powered by Android software. That’s not stopping it from creating its first Android app.

“Even if the revenue generation might be less, we think it’s still going to be significant,” said Joe Sipher, chief product and marketing officer at Pinger, which makes text-messaging and other programs. “Our users are saying, ‘Gosh, I switched to an Android phone. Can you put your Textfree app on Android?’ ”

Pinger and other programmers don’t want to miss out on the $40 billion that Booz & Co. estimates will come from sales of apps by 2014, much of it from Google Inc.‘s Android platform. Android unseated Research In Motion Ltd.‘s mobile operating system as the top U.S. smart phone software last quarter, making developers more willing to put up with its drawbacks, including higher app-creation costs and an online marketplace some users consider harder to navigate than Apple’s App Store.

PopCap Games Inc., maker of the Bejeweled and Plants vs. Zombies games, doesn’t have any titles in the Android Market. But by mid-2011, the Seattle company expects to release games simultaneously for iPhone and Android handsets.

“Even though we are not making any money on Android right now, we have pretty high hopes for it,” said Andrew Stein, PopCap’s director of mobile business development. “There’s really no reason why users shouldn’t consume and buy content to the same extent on an Android phone as they are on an iPhone.”

Android phones like Motorola Inc.’s Droid X and HTC Corp.’s Droid Incredible are gaining devotees. Stein expects the revenue generated from Android games to approach that of PopCap’s iPhone versions by the end of 2011.

Apple way ahead

A wide variety of apps – as well as the availability of the most popular ones for games, location, texting and content – is critical to luring phone buyers. Android lags behind Apple by that measure. Apple has more than 250,000 apps available, compared with about 70,000 for Android.

Like Apple, Google takes a 30 percent cut of revenue from apps sold in its marketplace.

“We want to reduce friction and remove the barriers that make it difficult for developers to make great apps available to users – across as many devices, geographies and carriers as possible,” said Randall Sarafa, a Google spokesman.

Google may be taking steps to remedy some of the problems that make Android apps less lucrative to developers.

Apple iTunes users can do one-click shopping because iTunes saves their information. While Android buyers can do the same if they sign up for Google Checkout, that service doesn’t have as many users.

Android Market also lacks features for in-app purchases, which some developers of Apple apps use to sell new game levels or virtual products, said Tim Chang, a venture capitalist at Norwest Venture Partners, whose investments includes Ngmoco of San Francisco, which makes games for the iPhone.

Google is in talks with eBay’s PayPal to add its payment service, three people familiar with the matter said last month. That may ease the process. Google may also offer tools that let developers sell subscriptions and virtual goods from within apps, Andy Rubin, Google’s vice president of engineering, said in June.

For now, producing programs for Android isn’t as lucrative. Loopt Inc., the maker of an app for locating your friends on a map, and Zecter Inc., which offers the ZumoDrive file storage service, said they make less from the sales of their Android apps than they do from their iPhone versions. Neither of the Mountain View companies would specify the difference.

Developers hesitant

“There’s no question Android has a lot more phones out than six months ago, but that’s very different from saying Android is a more appealing platform for developers,” said Sam Altman, chief executive officer at Loopt.

ZumoDrive makes money by getting people to download the free program and then upgrade to a paid version. Thirty percent more iPhone customers do that, said CEO David Zhao.

Besides generating fewer downloads of paid apps, fewer people click on ads in Android programs, according to data from Smaato Inc., a Redwood City mobile-ad firm. In July, the iPhone had a click-through score of 140 in the United States, compared with 103 for Android, Smaato said.

Plus, the market share Gartner Inc. measures for Android – 34 percent in the United States last quarter – doesn’t mean there are that many customers for apps, said Pinger’s Sipher. Some Android phones don’t have the ability to access Google’s app store and the proliferation of models means some programs won’t work on some phones.

App creators have to contend with various versions of Android and differences in screen resolution and keyboards. That makes it more expensive to test programs and can force developers to design for the lowest common denominator, said Bill Predmore, president of POP, which builds mobile applications and ads for such clients as Google, Microsoft Corp. and Target Corp.”

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/09/01/BU381F6GOA.DTL&type=tech#ixzz0yLeTxmEa

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Tony Fish member of Gerbsman Partners Board of Intellectual Capital and founder at AMF ventures to speak at Mobile 2.0 conference in San Francisco

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, tagged , , , , , on August 31, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Please reserve the date as registration for Mobile 2 (Silicon Valley) in now is open.

Event : Mobile 2 Event

Style : Business/ strategy day & developer day

Date :  Monday 20th and Tuesday 21st September 2010

Venue :  San   Francisco

Timing :  Full day events

Registration :  Click here.

Discount :  Enter “Friends” code for 20% discount.

In its 5th year, MOBILE 2.0 Silicon Valley brings together experts and thought leaders from all aspects of the mobile ecosystem, including startups, investors, mobile carriers, device manufacturers, and mobile application developers and web technologists. The event is focused on new Mobile Applications and Services, Mobile Ecosystems, and Disruptive Mobile Innovation.

I will in SFO from Wednesday 15th to Wednesday 22nd and would be good to meet up.  I will be hosting again the fireside chat, this year with Russ McGuire, David Katz, James Parton and Fabio Sisini.

As usual Mobile 2.0 Silicon Valley is all about giving our audience the opportunity to learn, network and voice views. The Event does not talk at you — you are the Mobile Community and we strive to create an atmosphere that challenges your business assumptions and provides you with hands on understanding of mobile platforms.

Looking forward to seeing you at the event!

/ Tony Fish

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A Recapitalization’s Risk And Reward

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 26, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Article from WSJ´s Venture Capital Dispatch.

“A last-minute recapitalization to save a 10-year-old optical networking company demonstrates the extreme risk and possible rewards that come with these types of investments.

Around the turn of the century, telecommunications carriers, hungry for more bandwidth in anticipation of the coming Internet boom, were already looking past the then-evolving 10-gigabit standard to a 40-gigabit standard, leading companies like Mintera Corp. to begin developing products for that market. After the dot-com bust, that market didn’t take off the way Mintera’s investors and other venture capitalists that put money into the sector originally anticipated.

Many companies closed, but a few 40-gigabit companies had decent outcomes, such as CoreOptics Inc., which was sold to Cisco Systems Inc. for $99 million in May, and StrataLight Communications Inc., sold two years ago to Opnext Inc. for $169 million.

Mintera, which burned through about $73 million in venture capital since it was founded in 2000, was able to build a decent business, generating $20 million in revenue over the last year and capturing around one-sixth of its total market. But that wasn’t enough to generate a home run for its investors any time soon.

By this year, it was clear that some of Mintera’s weren’t willing to commit more capital to the company, so it searched for a buyer. Normally, the investors would have stuck by the company, putting in more capital for growth, but the “real reason it had to be sold was that it had been funded by venture capital firms that had mature funds that had come to the end of their lifecycle,” said Jim Murray, a managing general partner of Court Square Ventures, an early investor in Mintera.

The company needed enough capital to keep the lights on while it searched for a buyer. At the end of May, Court Square decided to double down in exchange for a near-majority stake in the business.

As happens in a recap, the equity structure of Mintera was reset. Two shareholders, RRE Ventures and STAR Ventures, held onto stakes, but three others – Polaris Venture Partners, Portview Communications Partners and Glynn Capital Management – were washed out completely.

At the same time, talks were under way with a buyer, Oclaro Inc., but a deal was less than certain. Oclaro looked like it would walk away, Murray said. “We knew it was a good company, if Oclaro didn’t want to buy it someone would,” he said, declining to say how much capital Court Square put into Mintera.

Six weeks after Court Square invested, Oclaro agreed to buy the company in July for $12 million in cash with the potential to earn as much as $20 million if Mintera reaches certain milestones.”

Read the full article here.

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