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Archive for the ‘Strategy’ Category

Apple flirts with ranking of biggest company

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Business models, Economy, Investments, Market research, Strategy, Technology, tagged , , , , , , , on August 10, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from SFGate.

“Apple sliced through the competition to briefly become the most valuable company in the world Tuesday, as its market capitalization surged past No. 1 Exxon before settling slightly lower.

The Cupertino company closed the day with its stock up 5.9 percent to $374.01 per share, valuing it at $346.7 billion. Exxon, the Texas oil giant, ended the day with a value of $348.3 billion.

It capped an astonishing turnaround for a company that founder Steve Jobs has said was weeks from bankruptcy when he returned as CEO in 1997 and focused the company on a handful of key products.

Apple’s stock price has gone up nearly 35 percent in the past year, reflecting heightened confidence among investors in its line of computers and mobile devices. In its most recent quarter, the company posted a record $28.57 billion in revenue as sales of the iPhone, iPad and notebook computers soared.

The company’s growth is particularly strong in the Chinese market, Apple Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook told analysts last month. International sales accounted for 62 percent of Apple’s revenue in the last quarter.

The company is expected to continue growing in the near term, analysts predict. A new iPhone is expected in the fall, and analysts say Apple might also introduce a lower-cost model that would help the company reach a lucrative new market.

Sales of the iPad continue to soar. Apple sold 9.25 million of the tablet computers in the last quarter, a 183 percent increase over the same period in 2010.

“On the iPad side, they’re so far ahead of the market that none of the Android or other tablet competitors have really made much of a dent in their market share,” said Charles Golvin, an analyst with Forrester Research. “‘Tablet is still essentially synonymous with ‘iPad.’ ”

It was less than two years ago that Apple joined the list of the 10 most-valuable U.S. companies. Since then, it has made a rapid ascent, surpassing Microsoft last year to become the world’s most valuable technology company.

Less than a month ago, Exxon was worth more than $50 billion more than Apple. Exxon’s market value declined as investors became pessimistic about prospects for economic growth, which drives demand for oil.”

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“What About Me” by Don Middleberg, Middlerberg Communicaitons and a member of Gerbsman Partenrs Board of Intellectual Capital

Posted in Business models, google, Inetellectual Property, internet, Social Networks, Strategy, Technology, tagged on August 4, 2011| Leave a Comment »

What About Me?

As I patiently wait for my invitation to join Spotify, I can’t help but think about the way social media and all of the newest online, must-join sites have used exclusivity to create buzz. I couldn’t help but feel “accepted” when I finally received the invite to join Google+. I relate it to getting a bid from a popular fraternity or even getting invited to a great party. Like the kids that stuffed themselves with chocolate with the hopes of visiting Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, there are millions of people staring at their inboxes waiting for their golden ticket to explore parts of the web that are new and uncharted.

Whether it be a new website or gadget, brands have us all waiting patiently to visit or play with them. I gave TechCrunch’s live blog feed during the unveiling of the iPad2 the same attention I gave the final episode of the Sopranos (but at least Apple gave me something to look forward to). Is it because Twitter and Facebook have become boring? Not really. It seems like Facebook comes out with a new feature monthly. I think it’s because we are all trying to stay ahead of the curve. In my case, I want to be able to share something new with a client, especially the “next big thing.” But a lot of these new offerings make life easier. Apple’s iCloud will be available in Fall. I have hundreds of apps and documents in addition to thousands of songs and pictures spread across five different devices in my home, office, and pocket. To me, iCloud equals organization and efficiency, something I am sure we could all use more of in our lives.

So be patient all, and if you’re looking for an invite to Google+, reach out to us on Facebook and we’ll hook you up. Also, check out some of the links below for a couple of shortcuts to getting an invite to Spotify.

http://www.spotify.com/us/coca-cola/

http://venturebeat.com/2011/07/14/spotify-invites-from-klout/

Don Middleberg
Middleberg Communications, LLC
317 Madison Avenue, 15th Fl.
(entrance on 42nd st)
New York, NY 10017
P:  212-812-5664
M: 914.629.3999
twitter.com/donmiddleberg

don@middlebergcommunications.com

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New Google+ social network starts off strong

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, FaceBook, google, Market research, Social Networks, Strategy, Technology, tagged , , , , , , on July 25, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from SFGate.

“Just three weeks after its launch, Google+ is off to a strong start.

Google Inc.’s latest attempt to break into social networking circles attracted more than 20 million visitors in its first 21 days, according to the Internet measurement service comScore Inc. And there is a report that Google+ now has 25 million members.

To be sure, those numbers still don’t place Google+ in the same league as the more established social media stars, especially the current king, Facebook Inc., which has 750 million active users.

But Facebook has made enough mistakes in the past to leave the window wide open for Google+, which is still in its experimental stages, to barge through and become a serious contender for the crown, said Sam Hamadeh, CEO and founder of a Privco, a New York firm that monitors private companies like Facebook.

Facebook may have a big lead now, but the two has-been kings of social networking – Friendster and Myspace – are reminders that there’s no such thing as invincibility in the world of technology.

“People used to be on Myspace chatting all day, updating their pages,” said Hamadeh. “And before that, people were on Friendster nonstop. Before you knew it, the winds had shifted and once the winds shift, they shift very quickly.”

Officially, Mountain View’s Google hasn’t issued any updated Google+ numbers beyond those that CEO Larry Page revealed during a July 14 earnings call – 10 million members, more than 1 billion items shared and received in one day and 2.3 billion clicks of the “+1 button,” Google’s answer to Facebook’s “Like” button.

‘Just the beginning’

“We’ve learned a tremendous amount having just gone to field trial three weeks ago,” Vic Gundotra, Google’s senior vice president for social, said in a statement. “The team has been listening to users and moving really quickly to launch dozens of new features and updates to the product. We realize this is just the beginning. And while we’re thrilled with the reaction so far, we have a long, exciting road ahead of us.”

Hamadeh, citing sources inside Google, said the fledgling social network hit the milestone 25 million user mark Thursday night.

And Andrew Lipsman, a comScore vice president, said the 20 million visitors to Google+ in the first 21 days was “an extraordinary number.”

Of that total, 5.3 million were in the United States and 2.8 million in India. And people from the Bay Area and Austin, Texas, two of the most tech-savvy markets, were three times as likely to be on Google+, Lipsman said.

Right now, the main users are the tech-savvy crowd that is always at the forefront of new and emerging technology.

Of the total Google+ audience, 63 percent were men and 58 percent were between the ages of 18 and 34, comScore said.

“It has clearly captured the attention of the technorati and as usage incubates among this crowd it will likely continue to proliferate to a more general audience,” Lipsman wrote in a blog post.

High marks

That technorati has generally given Google+ high marks for its design and privacy protections, especially compared to Facebook. Analysts say Google+ can be compelling.

“My usage has subtly changed as more and more of my personal network joins, and I’m commenting as much privately as publicly,” said Charlene Li, founder of the Altimeter Group, a San Mateo technology research and consulting firm.

One major feature in Google+ is the ability to create specific, private groups, called “circles,” of friends or people being followed.

“Google+ has the advantage of not requiring that people be a member of the network in order to share with them. They just get updates via e-mail,” Li said in an e-mail. But whether Google+ becomes a hit with more mainstream audiences is still a question.”

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EBay’s Zong deal heats up mobile-payment battle

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Business models, Economy, Investments, Market research, mobile 2.0, Mobile Phone Usage, Strategy, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 14, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from SFGate.

“EBay Inc.’s purchase of mobile-payment startup Zong Inc. for $240 million is stepping up pressure on companies such as Google Inc. and American Express Co. to make their own acquisitions in the market.

Google has held exploratory discussions with mobile-payment startups, according to two people with knowledge of the meetings. Credit card companies, including American Express and Visa Inc., also are meeting with takeover candidates, though deals may not be imminent, people familiar with the talks said.

More consumers are looking to pay for things like movie tickets, apps and other items with their phones – rather than cards or cash. That’s pitting financial-service providers, which benefit from transactions, against technology companies like Google. Both sides aim to use mergers and acquisitions to shore up their positions, said Richard Crone, who runs Crone Consulting LLC, a firm focused on mobile banking and payments.

“There’re much more M&A and roll-ups to come in this space,” Crone said. “You will see the activity happening before the end of the year.”

The total value of mobile payments will reach $670 billion by 2015, up from $240 billion in 2011, according to Juniper Research. That includes transactions for digital and physical goods, money transfers and payments using near field communication – a wireless technology that lets users tap their phones against a reader to make a purchase.

Mainstream acceptance

Many companies are shopping for startups that help users charge purchases to their phone bills. Within a year, 40 percent of all U.S. mobile subscribers will put items other than ring tones on wireless bills, according to Chetan Sharma, an industry analyst in Issaquah, Wash. That’s up from 30 percent now.

Potential acquisition targets include Boku Inc.; Payfone Inc.; BilltoMobile, which is majority-owned by Danal Co.; and Amdocs Ltd.’s OpenMarket Inc., Sharma said.

Syniverse Technologies Inc., MindMatics AG’s Mopay unit, Bango and Vindicia Inc. could be candidates as well, according to Crone. Acquisition targets will sell for 10 to 20 times their trailing 12-month sales, he said. It’s unclear how that measures up against the Zong deal because eBay didn’t disclose the startup’s revenue when it announced the purchase last week.

Still, some startups may struggle to attract a deep-pocketed suitor or land that kind of premium. And large technology and finance companies may choose to develop the capabilities themselves.

‘Pressure to act’

Representatives from Google, American Express and Visa declined to comment on any potential deals, as did Bango, Boku, Payfone, Syniverse and Vindicia. OpenMarket didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Ingo Lippert, CEO of Palo Alto’s Mopay, said the Zong deal will likely give rise to more acquisitions, though his company is “solely focused” on operations.

“We’ve been forecasting consolidation within the mobile-payments space for some time,” Lippert said in an e-mail. “With Zong’s acquisition, companies testing out solutions within the mobile-payments market will now feel increased pressure to act.”

Investments in payment startups began picking up several months ago. In February, Visa agreed to spend about $190 million, plus performance incentives, to purchase PlaySpan Inc. The company handles purchases of virtual goods in online games and social networks. In April, American Express led a $19 million funding round in Payfone, a developer of a mobile-payment service.

EBay’s buying spree

Last year, eBay acquired Red Laser and Milo, two comparison-shopping applications that allow users to scan product barcodes and read reviews. With Zong, the company will get a bigger foothold for its PayPal payment service on phones, especially in developing countries.

Zong lets people pay for things by putting them on their mobile-phone bills. That’s attractive in emerging markets, where credit card adoption is low.

“The phone is ubiquitous, and credit cards are not,” Rodger Desai, CEO of Payfone, said.

U.S. carriers lets third-party services such as BilltoMobile operate on their networks. Verizon Wireless, for instance, allows charges of as much as $25 a month. BilltoMobile also declined to comment on whether it was a takeover target.

Carrier bills contained $3 billion worth of charges for virtual goods last year, and these charges are rising at 38 percent annually, Crone estimates. Those purchases can include ring tones, dating-site subscriptions and weapons for mobile video games.

Purchases of apps charged to wireless bills reached $5 billion last year and are growing at 68 percent a year, Crone said. Consumers in countries such as South Korea are increasingly charging physical goods to carrier bills as well.

“We are seeing very rapid growth,” said Jim Greenwell, CEO of BilltoMobile.”

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Facebook partners with Skype to provide video chat

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, boic, Business models, Community, FaceBook, internet, Market research, Microsoft, Social Networks, Strategy, tagged , , , , , on July 7, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from SF Gate.

“Facebook began bringing video calling to the masses Wednesday, partnering with Skype to provide the free chat service to its 750 million members.

Video calling comes to the world’s largest social network as part of a larger overhaul of Facebook’s chat features. The updated service will allow users to create group text chats by adding multiple friends into the same window. The chat window also becomes more prominent, taking up the right side of the screen by default.

Speaking at the company’s Palo Alto headquarters, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the updates marked a shift for the company away from simply adding users at an ever-faster clip.

“The driving narrative for the next five years or so is not going to be about wiring up the world, because a lot of the interesting stuff has actually been done,” he said. “It’s about what kind of cool stuff you’re going to be able to build, and what kind of new social apps you’re going to be able to build, now that you have this wiring in place.”

Zuckerberg said the shift was prompted in part by a surging demand for sharing information. Facebook users share twice as much today as they did a year ago, as measured by photos posted, comments written and other items.

Facebook’s announcements come on the heels of Google rolling out a new social offering, Google+, that duplicates many of the sharing functions found in Facebook. Google+ also includes a feature called Hangouts that enables group video chatting.

For starters, the Facebook-Skype partnership will only allow one-on-one chatting. Group video chat could be forthcoming, executives said, although on Skype’s stand-alone product, that feature costs money to use.

Zuckerberg said Google’s new product validated Facebook’s own works, and that in the future social features would become an expected part of every application.

The question is which Internet company will prove better at retaining users. Google has more unique users, but they spend less time on the site than Facebook users do. The more time users spend on a site, the more valuable it is to advertisers.

Susan Etlinger, an analyst at Altimeter Group, said Facebook’s large user base would make its video-calling feature instantly competitive with Google’s and other video chat services.

She said the company’s plans to build new services on top of their platform signaled a newfound maturity for the 7-year-old company.

“What I heard Mark say today is that Facebook is starting to focus more on the social aspect of social networking, whereas in the past they focused more on the networking and engineering,” she said. “It’s a really healthy shift.”

Executives at Skype, which was acquired by Microsoft in May for $8.5 billion, said the acquisition would introduce them to an enormous new audience and sell add-on services to them.

“We think this makes a lot of business sense as well,” Skype CEO Tony Bates said. “We get huge reach. In the future we’re talking about potentially also having Skype paid products available within the Web format that we saw here today, so we’re very excited about it.”

Every month, Skype’s users spend 300 million minutes making video calls, Bates said. At peak times, video represents more than half the company’s traffic. (Skype has 170 million regular users.)

Video chat should be available to everyone within a week, Skype product manager Mike Barnes said. Making calls requires users to download a small Java application through the browser.

At first, users will not be able to link their Facebook and Skype accounts. But that integration is in the works, Barnes said. Users who have microphones but not webcams will be able to make voice-only calls on Facebook, he said.”

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