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AOL, in reinvention strategy, buying TechCrunch

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Business models, Economy, Intellectual capital, internet, Investments, Market research, Strategy, Technology, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 29, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Article from SF Gate.

“AOL Inc. bolstered its strategy to reinvent itself as a major source of online content Tuesday by buying San Francisco’s TechCrunch Inc., which operates a popular and influential network of technology news blogs.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Bloomberg News, citing two sources who were familiar with the terms, said AOL agreed to pay $25 million.

TechCrunch founder and co-editor Michael Arrington, a lawyer who has become an influential technology writer, agreed to remain with the company for at least three years as his company joins an AOL stable that includes the popular consumer electronics blog Engadget.

AOL Chief Executive Officer Tim Armstrong joined Arrington onstage during the second day of TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference at the San Francisco Design Center to publicly announce the deal Tuesday.

“I flew out here because the company I’m most interested in is TechCrunch,” Armstrong said in a tongue-in-cheek exchange with Arrington. “I’d love it if you let me partner TechCrunch with AOL to see if we can build a very substantial company together.”

“Yes is the answer,” Arrington replied before he and other TechCrunch executives signed the acquisition papers as the audience watched.

TechCrunch becomes part of AOL’s overall strategy to recover from its failed corporate marriage to Time Warner by reinventing itself as a major source of online news, information and entertainment and to make that content available on all Web-connected devices.

AOL already includes online sites and services such as FanHouse, Joystiq, Switched, MapQuest and Moviefone. The New York firm cut another deal earlier Tuesday to buy video distribution services 5min Media, which has a library of 200,000 fashion, cooking and fitness videos.

Seeking future brands

AOL also is investing in a network of hyperlocal news sites through its Patch Media subsidiary, which already covers about 150 communities. Last week, AOL launched Patch U, a network of partnerships between Patch publications and leading journalism departments at universities including Stanford, UC Berkeley, University of Southern California, Northwestern and Missouri.

“There is one thing that remains constant across all of the major platforms on the Web, and that’s content,” Armstrong said last week at a business conference sponsored by Goldman Sachs & Co. “So our specific strategy for content is to invest in the future brands for the digital space for mobile, for the Internet, for the plasma screen, and you’re going to see us continue to make more moves down that pathway.”

Many consumers may still think of AOL as being America Online, the company that rose to prominence selling dial-up access to the Internet. America Online eventually merged with media conglomerate Time Warner but spun off in December.

“Today’s news has kind of reminded people that AOL is actually not dead and buried,” said Eric Talley, co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law, Business and the Economy.

Database of investors

The acquisition of TechCrunch, which has about 40 employees, contractors and contributors, “is not a gigantic deal,” but it does give AOL a well-known brand within the tech community, Talley said. AOL also gains the potentially valuable CrunchBase online database of company and investor information.

“That data could be the source of all types of future services that AOL is interested in getting into,” Talley said.

TechCrunch becomes part of the AOL Technology Network with Engadget, which according to online measurement service comScore was the top tech blog in August with about 7.3 million unique visitors.”

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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HP tops Dell’s offer in bid to buy 3Par

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Economy, internet, Investments, Market research, Strategy, Technology, Venture Capital, tagged , , , , , , on August 25, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Article from SF Gate.

“Hewlett-Packard, the world’s largest PC-maker, has offered to buy Fremont’s 3Par Inc. for about $1.6 billion, topping Dell‘s bid for the maker of data-center equipment and software.

The bid of $24 a share in cash is 33 percent higher than Dell’s offer, HP said Monday in a statement. Dell offered $18 a share in cash, or about $1.15 billion, for 3Par on Aug. 16.

HP and Dell are using acquisitions to challenge Cisco Systems and IBM in the market for data-center products and services, which generate higher profits than desktop and laptop computers. 3Par sells hardware and software that make it easier and cheaper for companies to store information. Its stock rose past HP’s offer, signaling that some investors expect a bidding contest.

“One of the growth areas in technology is in the enterprise storage space,” said Joel Levington, managing director of corporate credit at Brookfield Investment Management Inc. in New York. “3Par’s products fit well in there. It’s an easy way to gain product breadth.”

HP said on a conference call that it has been working on the proposed acquisition since before the departure of Mark Hurd, who stepped down as HP’s chief executive officer on Aug. 6 after an investigation found he filed inaccurate expense reports to conceal a personal relationship with a marketing contractor.

The offer is HP’s second bid for 3Par, Dave Donatelli, who heads HP’s storage and server division, said Monday. The PC-maker has been in talks with 3Par for “some period of time,” he said, declining to comment further.

David Frink, a Dell spokesman, declined to comment. John D’Avolio, a spokesman for 3Par, didn’t immediately comment.

HP’s offer values the unprofitable 3Par at almost 2 1/2 times its worth before Dell’s bid, and at more than eight times its sales of $194.3 million in the year ended March 31. 3Par’s revenue rose 5.2 percent from 2009, and it has about 670 employees.

“It’s a very exorbitant price,” Levington said. It probably doesn’t make economic sense for Dell to counter, he said.”

Read more here. 

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Facebook’s Places raises more privacy debate

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, FaceBook, Market research, Social Networks, Technology, Web 2.0, tagged , , , , , , , , , on August 23, 2010| Leave a Comment »

From SF Gate.

“Facebook‘s latest move to add “where” to the list of personal information members share with the world gives the social networking firm yet another tool in its march to become the Internet’s most dominant destination.

And yet predictably, the new Facebook Places check-in feature has ignited a new round of debate over whether the Palo Alto firm is doing enough to safeguard its members’ privacy.

Facebook Places began rolling out Wednesday night to the company’s members in the United States with an upgraded application for the iPhone and iPod Touch that includes an icon that resembles a Google Maps location pin.

Launching the app lets members share their current location, which is automatically plotted by their phone’s GPS technology. They can tag Facebook friends who might also be there and use a “Here Now” function to see who else might be in the area. On Facebook.com, the Here Now map is powered by Google-rival Microsoft’s Bing Maps.

Tapping into trend

Places taps into the same social sharing game of “check-in” that has caused technology pundits to declare startups like Foursquare and Gowalla as part of the latest hot tech trend. This year, microblogging service Twitter also launched a location-tagging feature to its tweets and online recommendation service Yelp enabled check-ins on its mobile application.

But Facebook vice president Chris Cox said Places represents more than just a game, because it uses virtual technology to connect people in the real world. Over time, locations can accumulate stories and memories that later generations can access, Cox said.

San Francisco’s Ocean Beach, for example, could be tagged as the place “where your parents had their first kiss,” Cox said. “What starts to happen is the physical reality we’re in comes alive with the human stories that we’ve told there.”

Facebook worked with other location-based services to integrate their apps with Places.

“This basically validates that we’re on to something, that this will be something much, much bigger going forward,” Holger Luedorf, vice president of mobile and partnerships for Foursquare, said during a Facebook news conference.

But analysts say Facebook’s entry into the location-based services could blow the others out of the water because the social network has such a broad reach with mainstream audiences. Worldwide, Facebook has more than 500 million active members who span all age and marketing demographics. Foursquare, by comparison, has at least 3 million members and is growing quickly.

Working with Facebook may give companies like Foursquare “a little advantage, but the advantage is minimal and it’s not going to last very long,” said Susan Etlinger, a consultant with the Altimeter Group of San Mateo. “My Aunt Sue might not be on Yelp, but I know she’s on Facebook.”

Places also completes the public picture of members, who are already encouraged to share who they are, what they are doing and when. Facebook has become one of the Internet’s top destinations for finding news, viewing photos and watching video. And according to Internet researcher eMarketer, Facebook is on track to bring in $1.28 billion in online advertising in 2010, up from $835 million this year. The company is also developing its own virtual payment system, Facebook Credits.

Facebook officials sidestepped questions about how the firm plans to generate revenue from Facebook Places.

But analyst Augie Ray of Forrester Research Inc. said Places enters Facebook into the emerging mobile advertising space.

“There is no question that knowing where people are and what places they visit will be valuable data for Facebook and its advertisers,” Ray said. “It will permit Facebook to better understand individual’s likes and dislikes, not simply based on what buttons they click, but on their actual real-world behavior. And knowing where an individual is at a given moment will permit Facebook to serve better and more relevant ads based on user location.”

ACLU raises questions

But the San Francisco office of the American Civil Liberties Union immediately questioned whether Places has again left Facebook members open to privacy problems.

“Facebook made some changes to its regular privacy practices to protect sensitive location-based information, such as limiting the default visibility of check-ins on your feed to ‘Friends Only,’ ” the ACLU’s Nicole Ozer wrote in a blog post. “But it has failed to build in some other important privacy safeguards.”

In a sharply worded rebuttal, Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt said Places “sets a new standard for user control and privacy protection for location information. We’re disappointed that ACLU’s Northern California office ignores this and seems to generally misunderstand how the service works.””

Read more here. 

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Google Secretly Invested $100+ Million In Zynga, Preparing To Launch Google Games

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Economy, FaceBook, google, internet, Investments, Market research, Social Networks, Strategy, Technology, Venture Capital, Web 2.0, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 13, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Here is some news from Techcrunch.

“Google has quietly (secretly, one might say) invested somewhere between $100 million and $200 million in social gaming behemoth Zynga, we’ve confirmed from multiple sources. The company has raised somewhere around half a billion dollars in venture capital in the last year alone, including $150 million from Softbank Capital last month and $180 million late last year from Digital Sky Technologies, Tiger Global, Institutional Venture Partners and Andreessen Horowitz. The Softbank announcement was never officially confirmed by the company, however, and the Google investment was likely part of that deal as well.

The investment part of the deal closed a month ago or so. A larger strategic partnership is still in process.

The investment was made by Google itself, not Google Ventures, say our sources, and it’s a highly strategic deal. Zynga will be the cornerstone of a new Google Games to launch later this year, say multiple sources. Not only will Zynga’s games give Google Games a solid base of social games to build on, but it will also give Google the beginning of a true social graph as users log into Google to play the games. And I wouldn’t be surprised to see PayPal being replaced with Google Checkout as the primary payment option. Zynga is supposedly PayPal’s biggest single customer, and Google is always looking for ways to make Google Checkout relevant.

And there’s more. These same sources are saying that Zynga’s revenues for the first half of 2010 will be a stunning $350 million, half of which is operating profit. Zynga is projecting at least $1.0 billion in revenue in 2011, say our sources. This blows previous estimates out of the water.

Zynga continues to work on high level strategic business development deals. The reason these deals are so attractive to companies like Yahoo and now Google is this – Zynga allows them to rebuild the massive social graph, currently controlled by Facebook. For whatever reason people love to play these games and get passionately addicted to them, coming back day after day. That’s helped Facebook become what it is today. Google, Yahoo and others want some of that magic to rub off on them, too.”

Read the full post here.

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