Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘Business models’ Category

The Advantages of a “Date-Certain” Mergers and Acquisition Process Over a “Standard Mergers and Acquisitions Process”

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Business models, Distressed Intellectual Property, Distressed IP, Gerbsman Partners, Inetellectual Property, Intellectual capital, National Venture Capital Association, NVCA, Venture Capital on February 14, 2012| Leave a Comment »

The Advantages of a “Date-Certain” Mergers and Acquisition Process Over a “Standard Mergers and Acquisitions Process”
Every venture capital investor hopes that all of his investments will succeed. The reality is that a large percentage of all venture investments must be shut down. In extreme cases, such a shut down will take the form of a formal bankruptcy or an assignment for the benefit of creditors. In most cases, however, the investment falls into the category of “living dead”, i.e. companies that are not complete failures but that are not self-sustaining and whose prospects do not justify continued investment. Almost never do investors shut down such a “living dead” company quickly.

Most hope against hope that things will change. Once reality sets in, most investors hire an investment banker to sell such a company through a standard mergers and acquisition process – seldom with good results. Often, such a process requires some four to six months, burns up all the remaining cash in the company and leads to a formal bankruptcy or assignment for the benefit of creditors. In many instances, there are a complete lack of bidders, despite the existence of real value in the company being sold.

The first reason for this sad result is a fundamental misunderstanding of buyer psychology. In general, buyers act quickly and pay the highest price only when forced to by competitive pressure. The highest probability buyers are those who are already familiar with the company being sold, i.e. competitors, existing investors, customers and vendors. Such buyers either already know of the company’s weakness or quickly understand it as soon as they see the seller¥s financials. Once the sales process starts, the seller is very much a wasting asset both financially and organizationally. Potential buyers quickly divide the company’s burn rate into its existing cash balance to see how much time it has left. Employees, customers and vendors grow nervous and begin to disengage. Unless compelled to act, potential buyers simply draw out the process and either submit a low-ball offer when the company is out of cash or try to pick up key employees and customers at no cost when the company shuts down.

The second reason for this sad result is a misunderstanding of the psychology and methods of investment bankers. Most investment bankers do best at selling “hot” companies, i.e. where the company’s value is perceived by buyers to be increasing quickly over time and where there are multiple bidders. They tend to be most motivated and work hardest in such situations because the transaction sizes (i.e. commissions) tend to be large, because the publicity brings in more assignments and because such situations are more simply more fun. They also tend to be most effective in maximizing value in such situations, as they are good at using time to their advantage, pitting multiple buyers against each other and setting very high expectations. In a situation where “time is not your friend”, the actions of a standard investment banker frequently make a bad situation far worse. First, since transaction sizes tend to be much smaller, an investment banker will assign his “B” team to the deal and will only have such team spend enough time on the deal to see if it can be closed easily. Second, playing out the process works against the seller. Third, trying to pit multiple buyers against each other and setting unrealistically high valuation expectations tends to drive away potential buyers, who often know far more about the real situation of the seller than does the investment banker.

“Date Certain” M&A Process

The solution in a situation where “time is not your friend” is a “date-certain” mergers and acquisitions process. With a date-certain M&A process, the company’s board of directors hires a crisis management/ private investment banking firm (“advisor”) to wind down business operations in an orderly fashion and maximize value of the IP and tangible assets. The advisor works with the board and corporate management to:

1. Focus on the control, preservation and forecasting of CASH;
2. Develop a strategy/action plan and presentation to maximize value of the assets. Including drafting sales materials, preparing information due diligence war-room, assembling a list of all possible interested buyers for the IP and assets of the company and identifying and retaining key employees on a go-forward basis;
3. Stabilize and provide leadership, motivation and morale to all employees;
4. Communicate with the Board of Directors, senior management, senior lender, creditors, vendors and all stakeholders in interest.

 
The company’s attorney prepares very simple “as is, where is” asset-sale documents. (“as is, where is- no reps or warranties” agreements is very important as the board of directors, officers and investors typically do not want any additional exposure on the deal). The advisor then contacts and follows-up systematically with all potentially interested parties (to include customers, competitors, strategic partners, vendors and a proprietary distribution list of equity investors) and coordinates their interactions with company personnel, including arranging on-site visits. Typical terms for a date certain M&A asset sale include no representations and warranties, a sales date typically two to four weeks from the point that sale materials are ready for distribution (based on available CASH), a significant cash deposit in the $100,000 range to bid and a strong preference for cash consideration and the ability to close the deal in 7 business days.

Date certain M&A terms can be varied to suit needs unique to a given situation or corporation. For example, the board of directors may choose not to accept any bid or to allow parties to re-bid if there are multiple competitive bids and/or to accept an early bid. The typical workflow timeline, from hiring an advisor to transaction close and receipt of consideration is four to six weeks, although such timing may be extended if circumstances warrant. Once the consideration is received, the restructuring/insolvency attorney then distributes the consideration to creditors and shareholders (if there is sufficient consideration to satisfy creditors) and takes all necessary steps to wind down the remaining corporate shell, typically with the CFO, including issuing W-2 and 1099 forms, filing final tax returns, shutting down a 401K program and dissolving the corporation etc.

The advantages of this approach include the following:

Speed – The entire process for a date certain M&A process can be concluded in 3 to 6 weeks. Creditors and investors receive their money quickly. The negative public relations impact on investors and board members of a drawn-out process is eliminated. If circumstances require, this timeline can be reduced to as little as two weeks, although a highly abbreviated response time will often impact the final value received during the asset auction.

Reduced Cash Requirements – Given the date certain M&A process compressed turnaround time, there is a significantly reduced requirement for investors to provide cash to support the company during such a process.

Value Maximized – A company in wind-down mode is a rapidly depreciating asset, with management, technical team, customer and creditor relations increasingly strained by fear, uncertainty and doubt. A quick process minimizes this strain and preserves enterprise value. In addition, the fact that an auction will occur on a specified date usually brings all truly interested and qualified parties to the table and quickly flushes out the tire-kickers. In our experience, this process tends to maximize the final value received.

Cost – Advisor fees consist of a retainer plus 10% or an agreed percentage of the sale proceeds. Legal fees are also minimized by the extremely simple deal terms. Fees, therefore, do not consume the entire value received for corporate assets.

Control – At all times, the board of directors retains complete control over the process. For example, the board of directors can modify the auction terms or even discontinue the auction at any point, thus preserving all options for as long as possible.

Public Relations – As the sale process is private, there is no public disclosure. Once closed, the transaction can be portrayed as a sale of the company with all sales terms kept confidential. Thus, for investors, the company can be listed in their portfolio as sold, not as having gone out of business.

Clean Exit – Once the auction is closed and the consideration is received and distributed, the advisor takes all remaining steps to effect an orderly shut-down of the remaining corporate entity. To this end the insolvency counsel then takes the lead on all orderly shutdown items.

About Gerbsman Partners

Gerbsman Partners focuses on maximizing enterprise value for stakeholders and shareholders in under-performing, under-capitalized and under-valued companies and their Intellectual Property. Since 2001, Gerbsman Partners has been involved in maximizing value for 69 Technology, Life Science and Medical Device companies and their Intellectual Property, through its proprietary “Date Certain M&A Process” and has restructured/terminated over $800 million of real estate executory contracts and equipment lease/sub-debt obligations. Since inception, Gerbsman Partners has been involved in over $2.3 billion of financings, restructurings and M&A transactions.

Gerbsman Partners has offices and strategic alliances in Boston, New York, Washington, DC, Alexandria, VA, San Francisco, Orange County, Europe and Israel. For additional information please visit http://www.gerbsmanpartners.com or Gerbsman Partners blog.

GERBSMAN PARTNERS
Email: steve@gerbsmanpartners.com
Web: http://www.gerbsmanpartners.com
BLOG of Intellectual Capital: blog.gerbsmanpartners.com
Skype: thegerbs

Read Full Post »

Investors Get the Chance to Assess Facebook’s Potential

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Business models, Economy, FaceBook, internet, Investments, IPO news, Market research, Social Networks, Strategy, Venture Capital, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 2, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Article from NYTimes.

“With a huge initial public offering on the runway, Facebook has shown that it pays to have friends. New investors will now have to decide what they are willing to pay to be friends.

The giant social network said in a filing on Wednesday that it was seeking to raise up to $5 billion through its I.P.O. Many close to the company say that Facebook is aiming for a debut that would value it between $75 billion and $100 billion.

At the top end of the range, Facebook would be far bigger than many established American companies, including Amazon, Caterpillar, Kraft Foods, Goldman Sachs and Ford Motor. Only 26 companies in the Standard & Poor’s index of 500 stocks have a market value north of $100 billion.

Already, Facebook is a formidable moneymaker. The company, which mainly sells advertising and virtual goods, recorded revenue of $3.71 billion in 2011, an 88 percent increase from the previous year. According to its filing, Facebook posted a profit of $1 billion last year.

“Facebook will have more traffic than anyone else, and they’ll have more data than anyone else,” said Kevin Landis, the portfolio manager of Firsthand Technology Value Fund, which owns shares in the privately held company. “So, unless they are impervious to learning how to monetize that data, they should be the most valuable property on the Internet, eventually.”

A lofty valuation for Facebook would evoke the grandiose ambitions of the previous Internet boom in the late 1990s. Back then, dozens of unproven companies went public at sky-high valuations but later imploded.

Investors are eyeing the current generation of Internet companies with a healthy dose of skepticism. Zynga, the online gaming company, and Groupon, the daily deals site, have both struggled to stay above their I.P.O. prices since going public late last year.

“We’ve seen thousands of investors get burned before,” said Andrew Stoltmann, a securities lawyer in Chicago. “It’s a high risk game.”

The potential payoff is also huge.

Consider Google. After its first day of trading in 2004, the search engine giant had at a market value of $27.6 billion. Since then, the stock has jumped by about 580 percent, making Google worth nearly $190 billion today.

Facebook is still a small fraction of the size of rival Google. But many analysts believe Facebook’s fortunes will rapidly multiply as advertisers direct increasingly more capital to the Web’s social hive.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and chief executive of Facebook.

Mark Zuckerberg, a founder of Facebook and its chief executive, even sounded like his Google counterparts in the beginning. In the filing, Mr. Zuckerberg trumpeted the company’s mission to “give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future” — not unlike Google’s plan: “don’t be evil.”

Investors are often willing to pay up for faster growth. At a market value of $100 billion, Facebook would trade at 100 times last year’s earnings. That would make the stock significantly more expensive than Google, which is currently selling at 19.6 times profits.

Newly public companies with strong growth prospects often garner high multiples. At the end of 2004, the year of its I.P.O., Google was trading at 132 times its earnings.

But investors have less expensive options for fast-growing technology companies. Apple made nearly $1 billion a week in its latest quarter, roughly the same amount Facebook earned in all of 2011. At a recent price of $456, Apple is trading for roughly 16.5 times last year’s profits.

Investors now have to try to ignore the I.P.O. hype and soberly sift through the first batch of Facebook’s financial statements to gauge the company’s potential.

Online advertising is a prime indicator. At Facebook, display ads and the like accounted for $3.15 billion of revenue in 2011, roughly 85 percent of the total. With 845 million monthly active users, advertisers now feel that Facebook has to be part of any campaign they do.

“When you have an audience that large, it’s hard not to make a lot of money from it,” said Andrew Frank, an analyst at Gartner, an industry research firm.

For all the promise of Facebook, the company is still trying to figure out how to properly extract and leverage data, while keeping its system intact and not interfering with users’ experiences. On a per-user basis, Facebook makes a small sum, roughly $1 in profit.

The relationship with Zynga will be especially important. The online game company represented 12 percent of Facebook revenue last year, according to the filing. However, estimated daily active users of Zynga games on Facebook fell in the fourth quarter, from the third quarter, the brokerage firm Sterne Agee said in a recent research note — a trend that could weigh on the social networking company.

Facebook also faces intense competition for advertising dollars, something it acknowledges in the “risk factors” section of its I.P.O. filing. While advertisers will likely choose to be on both Facebook and Google, they will inevitably compare results they get from both. Some analysts think Google may have the edge in such a competition.

Google users tend to be looking for something specific. This makes it easier for advertisers to direct their ads at potential customers, analysts say. “Visually, Facebook ads are eye-catching, but in terms of accuracy of targeting, they are not even close to Google’s ads,” said Nate Elliott, an analyst at Forrester Research. “A lot of the companies we talk to are finding it very hard to succeed on Facebook.”

However, the high level of interaction on Facebook could prove valuable to advertisers. “At Facebook, you are looking at people’s interests, and what they are sharing,” said Gerry Graf, chief creative officer at Barton F. Graf 9000, an advertising agency in New York that has used Facebook for clients. If Facebook becomes a place where people recommend, share and buy a large share of their music and movies, such a business could generate large amounts of advertising revenue, as well as any user fees.

“Facebook has become the biggest distribution platform on the Web,” said Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify, a service that accepts only Facebook users.”

Read original article here.

Read Full Post »

Companies that would do best without venture capital

Posted in Business models, Economy, Intellectual capital, Investments, Market research, Strategy, tagged , , , on January 25, 2012| Leave a Comment »

By Dan Shapiro.

“I just got the following email.

Subject: Small taxi company looking to expand

Hello,

I run a small taxi company outside of Boston Massachusetts. My community has been targeted for casino development and I am looking to expand my business. Could you possibly provide some advice on how to find venture capital?

For someone who lives in the startup world, this looks pretty silly.  But I’m sure I’d say a lot of silly things if I were getting in to the taxi business, too.  So I figured I’d point him to a simple explanation of why taxi companies (actually, services companies in general) aren’t appropriate for VC.  I did the Google thing for a bit to find a good article.  And no luck.

Well, you know what they say: when the internet fails you, make more internet.  Here, then, are a very good set of reasons not to take venture capital (or – why venture capital won’t take you).

1.  You want to build a profitable company

First day of Founder’s Institute I ask how many people want to raise venture capital.  Most of the hands go up.  I then ask who wants to build a profitable company.  Again, most hands go up.

The funny thing about this is – VCs don’t actually like their companies to be profitable.  Someday, sure, but not on their watch.  You see, profitability means that the company wont grow any faster.

This seems odd, but think about this for a minute. At the early stages, a company may be making money, but it’s almost certainly investing every penny it makes back in to the business.  If it has access to outside capital (e.g. a VCs), it’s investing more than it makes.  And that’s exactly what VCs like: companies that can grow at amazing speed, and never slow down their burn rate to amass cash.

They like this for two reasons.  First, VCs want to invest in companies that can grow explosively.  That means huge markets, executives who can scale up a business fast, and a willingness on the part of management to double down on a winning bet – over, and over, and over again.  Second, because it means the company keeps coming back to the VC for more money on positive terms.  That means the VC keeps getting to buy more and more of the growing concern.

Of course, this is something of an over-broad generalization.  I’m required to include one per post or I lose my startup blogging license.  In fact many venture backed companies are profitable, it’s very impressive to bootstrap your company to profitability in a few months before raising outside investment, etc.   But if you are excited about a profitable business that can cut you giant dividend checks (not that most VCs can even accept divided checks  – long story), realize that VCs will not be pleased with that approach to running the business.  They will want you to plow those earnings back in to the business.  And when the day comes that a VC-backed business generates cash faster than it can effectively spend it?  They sell the company, or IPO (which is technically also selling the company), or replace the CEO with someone who can spend faster.

A taxi business should be run for profits.  That’s not VC style.

2. Your business has reasonable margins

As a general rule, VCs don’t like reasonable margins.  They are exclusively interested in outrageous margins.  Ludicrous margins.  We’re talking about sneering at 50%, and hoping for 80%, 90%, crazy astronomy stuff.  Venture capital is all about investing a little bit of money to create a business with massive scale and huge multiples – investing tens of millions to build software that then can be duplicated or served up for virtually nothing extra per-person with a total market size of billions.

In particular, VCs don’t like businesses that are people-powered.  Software businesses are awesome, but their evil twin – software consultancies – are near-pariah to VCs.  If adding revenue means adding bodies, they don’t like it.  In fact, enterprise software companies, which can tread a fine line between software consulting & software development, sometimes get really creative to come down on the right side of the line.

So the rule of thumb is that VCs like product companies: software, drugs, cleantech, and so on.  And they don’t like the manufacturing, service industry, and consulting businesses that often are just a tiny shift of business model away.

Every new taxi requires a… well, a new taxi.  And a new taxi driver.  Not the right business for VC.

3. You are going to double your investors’ money

I’ve covered this before, but VCs really don’t want to double their money.  Strange though it sounds, their economics make that look like a failure.  They need to target a 10x return on their investment, and that means – depending on stage and fund size – that you company has to grow to somewhere in the hundreds-of-millions to billions range to be interesting.

That means taking your taxi business from $20MM in annual revenue to $40MM just doesn’t do it for them.  Particularly because the valuation multiples on the aforementioned lower-margin businesses are smaller.

4. VCs probably don’t want to invest in you

Here are the people VCs really love to invest in:

  • Entrepreneurs who’ve already made them lots of money
  • Their closest buddies
Here are the people who VCs can be convinced to invest in:
  • People who have been wildly successful at high-profile past jobs that are related to their new business  (e.g. a former executive VP at a Fortune 500 company, inventor of thingamajig that everyone knows)
  • New graduates from top-of-the-top tier schools who have built something amazingly cool already
  • Extremely charismatic type-A personalities
Anyone else is possible, but our taxi driver is going to have a devil of a time.

5. You have better things to do with 9 months, and you will probably fail

That’s how long it took me to do my Series A for Ontela.  9 months before the first check came in.  Average is 6-12.  That’s because a busy VC will look at a few companies a day, and will make a few investments a year.  The math says the hit rate is well under 1%.  That matches my experience – I pitched over 100 times during our Series A investment.  Not only that, but most of the companies pitching the same events and people that I saw worked just as hard as I did, and did not get funded.  And fundraising is a near-full time job; you won’t have much time for actually driving your taxi.

6. You will have a new boss

You know the great thing about working for yourself?  Well, if you raise VC, you probably don’t have that thing any more.  Raising VC usually means forming a board that includes your investors, and that board is charged with, among other things, potentially firing and replacing you.  I’ve worked with a number of boards and have been lucky in that they were all awesome and I would recommend those folks to anybody.  But if you like your freedom, then bringing on VC may feel somewhat familiar – in an “I have a boss again” way you probably won’t enjoy.

What are my alternatives?

VC is really only appropriate for a tiny fraction of a fraction of the companies in the US.  But there are numerous alternatives.
  • Angel investors are individual investors who can invest larger amounts, on more flexible terms, and with less onerous restrictions.  Many companies that take VC money actually start with angel investments – but lots of companies never do VC, and just grow off of angel investment.
  • Traditional bank loans are always an option if you have a sufficiently traditional company – while they may not be right for many purposes, they’re definitely the best terms you will find for bringing in capital.
  • A Revenue Loan from a company like Lighter Capital is a way for companies with revenue to bring in capital with a debt structure – without giving up control to outside investors.
  • And, of course, Bootstrapping is arguably the best way of all – re-investing your company’s profits in your own growth, and building a strong company based on the revenues from your business.

…So does this mean I shouldn’t raise VC?

Look.  I’ve raised over $30mm from 7 different firms in the course of my two startups.  I will tell you: if you are the right kind of company, and find the right kind of investor, then VC is awesome.  It’s an instant infusion of cash, connections, experience, credibility, and confidence at the stroke of a pen.  It accelerates everything.  It focuses the mind.  I can’t recommend it highly enough.
But most companies are not the right kind of companies.  And the only thing more frustrating and time consuming than raising a VC round is failing to raise a VC round.
So think hard.  Make sure it’s for you.  And if not – keep on driving!”
Read the original post here.

Read Full Post »

How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Business models, Economy, FaceBook, Gerbsman Partners, google, internet, Investments, Market research, Strategy, tagged , , , , , , , , on January 24, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Article from NYTimes.

When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for dinner in Californialast February, each guest was asked to come with a question for the president.

  But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?

Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.

Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.

Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.

The president’s question touched upon a central conviction at Apple. It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.

Apple has become one of the best-known, most admired and most imitated companies on earth, in part through an unrelenting mastery of global operations. Last year, it earned over $400,000 in profit per employee, more than Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobil or Google.

However, what has vexed Mr. Obama as well as economists and policy makers is that Apple — and many of its high-technology peers — are not nearly as avid in creating American jobs as other famous companies were in their heydays.

Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas, a small fraction of the over 400,000 American workers at General Motors in the 1950s, or the hundreds of thousands at General Electric in the 1980s. Many more people work for Apple’s contractors: an additional 700,000 people engineer, build and assemble iPads, iPhones and Apple’s other products. But almost none of them work in the United States. Instead, they work for foreign companies in Asia, Europe and elsewhere, at factories that almost all electronics designers rely upon to build their wares.

“Apple’s an example of why it’s so hard to create middle-class jobs in the U.S. now,” said Jared Bernstein, who until last year was an economic adviser to the White House.

“If it’s the pinnacle of capitalism, we should be worried.”

Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

Similar stories could be told about almost any electronics company — and outsourcing has also become common in hundreds of industries, including accounting, legal services, banking, auto manufacturing and pharmaceuticals.

But while Apple is far from alone, it offers a window into why the success of some prominent companies has not translated into large numbers of domestic jobs. What’s more, the company’s decisions pose broader questions about what corporate America owes Americans as the global and national economies are increasingly intertwined.

“Companies once felt an obligation to support American workers, even when it wasn’t the best financial choice,” said Betsey Stevenson, the chief economist at the Labor Department until last September. “That’s disappeared. Profits and efficiency have trumped generosity.”

Companies and other economists say that notion is naïve. Though Americans are among the most educated workers in the world, the nation has stopped training enough people in the mid-level skills that factories need, executives say.

To thrive, companies argue they need to move work where it can generate enough profits to keep paying for innovation. Doing otherwise risks losing even more American jobs over time, as evidenced by the legions of once-proud domestic manufacturers — including G.M. and others — that have shrunk as nimble competitors have emerged.

Apple was provided with extensive summaries of The New York Times’s reporting for this article, but the company, which has a reputation for secrecy, declined to comment.

This article is based on interviews with more than three dozen current and former Apple employees and contractors — many of whom requested anonymity to protect their jobs — as well as economists, manufacturing experts, international trade specialists, technology analysts, academic researchers, employees at Apple’s suppliers, competitors and corporate partners, and government officials.

Privately, Apple executives say the world is now such a changed place that it is a mistake to measure a company’s contribution simply by tallying its employees — though they note that Apple employs more workers in the United States than ever before.

They say Apple’s success has benefited the economy by empowering entrepreneurs and creating jobs at companies like cellular providers and businesses shipping Apple products. And, ultimately, they say curing unemployment is not their job.

“We sell iPhones in over a hundred countries,” a current Apple executive said. “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.”

‘I Want a Glass Screen’

In 2007, a little over a month before the iPhone was scheduled to appear in stores, Mr. Jobs beckoned a handful of lieutenants into an office. For weeks, he had been carrying a prototype of the device in his pocket.

Mr. Jobs angrily held up his iPhone, angling it so everyone could see the dozens of tiny scratches marring its plastic screen, according to someone who attended the meeting. He then pulled his keys from his jeans.

People will carry this phone in their pocket, he said. People also carry their keys in their pocket. “I won’t sell a product that gets scratched,” he said tensely. The only solution was using unscratchable glass instead. “I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.”

After one executive left that meeting, he booked a flight to Shenzhen, China. If Mr. Jobs wanted perfect, there was nowhere else to go.

For over two years, the company had been working on a project — code-named Purple 2 — that presented the same questions at every turn: how do you completely reimagine the cellphone? And how do you design it at the highest quality — with an unscratchable screen, for instance — while also ensuring that millions can be manufactured quickly and inexpensively enough to earn a significant profit?

The answers, almost every time, were found outside the United States. Though components differ between versions, all iPhones contain hundreds of parts, an estimated 90 percent of which are manufactured abroad. Advanced semiconductors have come from Germany and Taiwan, memory from Korea and Japan, display panels and circuitry from Korea and Taiwan, chipsets from Europe and rare metals from Africa and Asia. And all of it is put together in China.

In its early days, Apple usually didn’t look beyond its own backyard for manufacturing solutions. A few years after Apple began building the Macintosh in 1983, for instance, Mr. Jobs bragged that it was “a machine that is made in America.” In 1990, while Mr. Jobs was running NeXT, which was eventually bought by Apple, the executive told a reporter that “I’m as proud of the factory as I am of the computer.” As late as 2002, top Apple executives occasionally drove two hours northeast of their headquarters to visit the company’s iMac plant in Elk Grove, Calif.

But by 2004, Apple had largely turned to foreign manufacturing. Guiding that decision was Apple’s operations expert, Timothy D. Cook, who replaced Mr. Jobs as chief executive last August, six weeks before Mr. Jobs’s death. Most other American electronics companies had already gone abroad, and Apple, which at the time was struggling, felt it had to grasp every advantage.

In part, Asia was attractive because the semiskilled workers there were cheaper. But that wasn’t driving Apple. For technology companies, the cost of labor is minimal compared with the expense of buying parts and managing supply chains that bring together components and services from hundreds of companies.

For Mr. Cook, the focus on Asia “came down to two things,” said one former high-ranking Apple executive. Factories in Asia “can scale up and down faster” and “Asian supply chains have surpassed what’s in the U.S.” The result is that “we can’t compete at this point,” the executive said.

The impact of such advantages became obvious as soon as Mr. Jobs demanded glass screens in 2007.

For years, cellphone makers had avoided using glass because it required precision in cutting and grinding that was extremely difficult to achieve. Apple had already selected an American company, Corning Inc., to manufacture large panes of strengthened glass. But figuring out how to cut those panes into millions of iPhone screens required finding an empty cutting plant, hundreds of pieces of glass to use in experiments and an army of midlevel engineers. It would cost a fortune simply to prepare.”

Read the rest of this excellent article here.

Read Full Post »

Apigee buys Usergrid, shifts focus to mobile

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Business models, Economy, Investments, Java, Market research, Strategy, Technology, Web 2.0, Wireless 2.0, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 18, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Article from GigaOm.

Apigee, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based API management platform and services company is buying San Francisco-based Usergrid, as part of its increasing focus on the mobile app business.  Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Companies such as Netflix and AT&T have been using Apigee to offer their application programming interfaces to developers. While most of Apigee’s initial efforts were focused on web and enterprise applications, the company (which was started under the name Sonoa Systems) has seen most of the developer focus shift to mobile.

When I asked Chet Kapoor, Apigee CEO if this acquisition was a change in direction for the company, he said that Apigee had been dealing with the shift to mobile for nearly a month. He said developers (including those in enterprises) are thinking about mobile apps before web apps.

Apigee, Kapoor says will offer the Usergrid and its own API management platform as a cloud-based service. With this acquisition, Kapoor says, Apigee will now be able to give enterprises and developers a simple, easy and scalable way to access the full range of APIs — enterprise APIs, public APIs, and, now with Usergrid, the core APIs that all mobile applications need.

Usergrid was started by serial entrepreneur Ed Anuff who most recently worked for Six Apart. Previously, he was co-founder of Widgetbox, a popular marketplace for widgets, and he was also co-founder of enterprise software company Epicentric, an enterprise portal software company. He left Six Apart to start Usergrid, a mobile app cloud platform with focus on user management. As part of the deal, Anuff will join the new company as a vice president.

Anuff started Usergrid to collapse the complex mobile-app development stack and allow developers to focus all their energies on client side presentation and application logic – aka what sits on the phone. He wanted to hide all the complexity – hosting, databases, storage, server-side application logic, API services and user provisioning – and offer it as a cloud service. The cloud-based mobile app development platforms are a hotly contested category and recent entrants like Parse have drawn a lot of attention.

Read more here.

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »