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Posts Tagged ‘Gerbsman Partners’

AT&T deal with T-Mobile – pros and cons

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, boic, Business models, Investments, Market research, Strategy, Technology, Wireless, tagged , , , , on March 22, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from SFGate.

“AT&T Inc.’s $39 billion deal for T-Mobile USA could improve the company’s cell service in San Francisco, but it may also mean the end to low-cost phone and data plans.

Acquiring T-Mobile’s infrastructure will increase the number of AT&T cell towers in San Francisco by 30 percent, according to spokesman John Britton.

That’s a significant increase to a network known for its dropped calls.

“We’ve got the same network, so they’re very compatible,” Britton said. “They can easily come together and be integrated. It’s going to be good news for customers.”

Both companies’ networks use a technology known as GSM. AT&T said customers of T-Mobile, which is owned by Deutsche Telekom, would be able to continue using their existing handsets if the merger is approved.

The company would not say how many cell towers it now has, or how many T-Mobile has in the Bay Area. But it said the acquisition would be crucial in helping it meet the exploding consumer demand for wireless spectrum.

In the past four years, AT&T’s mobile data traffic grew 8,000 percent, the company said. By 2015, it is expected to increase by up to 10 times more.

But AT&T’s expanded network will come at a cost to consumers, advocacy groups warned. T-Mobile’s disappearance from the marketplace would mean that three companies – AT&T, Verizon and Sprint – would own roughly three-quarters of the U.S. mobile market.

And the low-cost plans for which T-Mobile is known will probably disappear if the merger is completed, advocates said.

“This transaction would create a vastly more concentrated market,” said Andrew Jay Schwartzman, policy director at Media Access Project. “What that translates to is higher prices, less consumer choice and less innovation.”

The proposed acquisition, which would bring AT&T’s U.S. subscriber base to 130 million, is likely to take a year to complete. In a conference call with investors Monday, AT&T executives said they expected the deal would win approval from the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice.

U.S. Rep. Anna Eshoo of Palo Alto, the ranking Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee’s Communications and Technology Subcommittee, called for oversight hearings on the proposal.

“Competition is essential to promoting a vibrant wireless market, where consumers have a choice in the innovative services and devices available to them,” Eshoo said in a statement.

Customers will not notice any changes in their service until after the merger is completed, AT&T said.

A combined AT&T and T-Mobile would also make the next-generation communication standard, known as LTE, available to 95 percent of American households, or 46.5 million more than were eligible to receive it otherwise, the company said.”

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The individual entrepreneur – social shopping to take off.

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, boic, Business models, Community, Economy, FaceBook, Gerbsman Partners, internet, Investments, IPO news, Market research, mobile 2.0, Social Networks, Strategy, Technology, Web 2.0, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 19, 2011| Leave a Comment »

As a technology scout, I often look for new behaviors of consumers in order to predict technology evolutions. After some time looking into the GroupOn trend, I have started to form a mental understanding of sorts. The stakes are high and the social shopping trend presents a new prosperous businessmodel and most large online companies are making the move to harness the trend. Let me explain the separate parts that forms my picture and what it all means.

1. eBay – the online fleamarket.

Looking at what today is widely accepted as a stunning success and moneymachine – eBay took the private entrepreneur online. Craigslist and similar services continue to provide broad audiences for the private seller. The shift from paper to online generated a larger audience and more interest for the second-hand market.

2. Facebook – networking our life.

Through the introduction of online social networks like Friendster, MySpace, Bebo, Twitter and Facebook, personal networks got joined together online. The effects of “Faceboking” you social life is a transparency that newer been visible before. New “check in” services from GPS enabled mobile devices further expose our location and automatically connects us with unknown people on the same location.

3. iPhone – making applications smarter.

As mentioned above, “check in” services like “Places” on Facebook, Loopt, Gowalla and Brightkite brought the social context to the mobile device though their “check in” features. Together with Twitter and Facebook mobile, the social and contextual dialogue is more and more becoming a way of using the technology.

The New, New Market!

So, based on these three separate innovations,a new market is emerging – Social Shopping. Sure, not all new in its core – Amazon have for long had recommendation and 3:rd party providers of used products. But, if I look closer on the trend, and take into consideration the companies that have announced that they are testing similar products – it will be a fierce battle ahead.

GroupOn is the one stealing all the headlines right now, IPO rumors are spreading and the race is on for becoming the leader of the pack. Nr. 2 on the market – Living Social are playing catch up. Recently I was invited to sign-up for Facebook Deals, a service originally launched last year and currently going through updates similar to GroupOn and Living Social. Goggle is testing its Google Offers. Microsoft is using it´s Bing to for similar services.

What does it mean?

What does all this mean you might think. I fell it’s a contextual shopping trend that moves the web 2.0 into a truly social value experience. If you are shopping for something and have the mobile device, you will be able to utilize your location and seek out good deals close to where you are, when you want it. The technology evolution exemplified by iPhone and Android phones with location awareness embedded is the technology enabler. Facebook networks are the social context and audience for spreading the word and eBay entrepreneurs can chase deals and post them on the social shopping sites to generate a self-serving ecosystem that becomes a machine in it self.

One might think that this technology trend, contrary to social networks of relationships (which are personal and limited) like Facebook, have enough room for more than one or two major services. As the trend relies on action rather than relation, its a active usage and active user who drives the equation – on Facebook, it’s all a matter of who you know.

Implications

The biggest question for me is if Facebook will succeed in incorporating their Facebook Deals service into the private social networks as a natural extension of smaller, often local groups of a few hundred people, as seem to be the norm of the personal networks on Facebook. If they succeed, they will steal the market from the pioneers like GroupOn and Social Living and further solidify their position as the premier social destination on the net, if not Facebooks value will decline as a result and focus might shift. Google, Amazon and Microsoft will steal their fair share of the market place, as they own large audiences and often “host” a mature audience searching for little less cool and less hip offerings – with high trust and reliability.

The race is on!

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Uncertainty Clouds I.P.O. Market

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, tagged , , , , , , , , , on March 17, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from NY Times.

“After getting off to a strong start in 2011, the market for initial public offerings has started to cool as a result of global uncertainty caused by the disaster in Japan.

In the last week, several companies have either tempered their expectations or delayed their offerings. On Wednesday, Lagardère, the French media conglomerate run by Arnaud Lagardère, said it would put off the initial public offering of its stake in Canal Plus France, the pay-television company.

“Due to the scale of the disaster in Japan, and thereof to the extreme volatility of the markets, the Lagardère Group has decided to postpone” the offering of Canal Plus France, the company said in a statement.

The private equity firm Apollo Global Management, which appeared to be on track to submit plans for its market debut to regulators, is “now waiting for a better time,” Reuters reported on on Tuesday.

There is also speculation that Glencore, the giant commodities trader, may delay filing its paperwork with regulators. The company had been talking with investors for several weeks about a potential offering that could value the company at $60 billion. Glencore, which has never publicly discussed an offering, declined to comment.

Any reticence is understandable, given the volatility in the stock markets. Most of the major United States indexes were down on Wednesday, with the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index dropping 1.95 percent, to 1,256.88. The S&P 500 is essentially flat for the year.

“If the nuclear problems in Japan stabilize immediately, and U.S. markets recover, the I.P.O. market will go back to the schedule it was on a week ago,” said Jay Ritter, a professor of finance at the University of Florida. “If there’s a further sell-off, a lot of deals will be postponed.”

Before the disaster in Japan, the I.P.O. market was on track for a banner year. In the United States, the volume of new offerings topped $12 billion through early March. It was the best start since 2000 and six times stronger than the same period in 2010, according to Thomson Reuters data. Much of that activity came from private-equity-backed companies like HCA, the hospital chain that raised $3.8 billion in its offering.

But new public companies are often considered riskier than well-established blue chips, making them more sensitive to market upheavals.

“I.P.O.’s tend to be perceived as high-risk investments,” Professor Ritter said, “and when there’s a flight to quality, they get hammered most. In 2007, the S.&P. was at an all-time high. At the beginning of 2008, I.P.O.’s started to dry up well before the big collapse in September.”

At least one major deal appears to be on track. The ISS Group — the Danish financial services company that is being listed in a $2.5 billion offering by its private equity owners, Goldman Sachs and EQT of Sweden — is moving forward with its planned offering.

The company is closing its offering on Thursday, said a person with knowledge of the matter who was not authorized to speak publicly, after having received orders for all of the shares. The person acknowledge that the markets were volatile right now, but said that ISS was already far along in the process before the disaster in Japan.

“Obviously, it creates some questions from people,” the person said.”

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Searching for New Tech at South by Southwest

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, tagged , , , , , , on March 16, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from NYTimes.

“We’re here on the ground in Austin South by Southwest Interactive, the annual gathering of tech enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, investors and leaders in the industry.

The weeklong event is crammed with panels, parties, talks, the introduction of new apps and services, demos of said services, networking and the occasional breakfast taco.

Tech companies will be looking for support among tech-savvy festival attendees in the hopes of bubbling up above the noise of the hundreds of companies vying for attention. For a young business, the stakes can be high. South by Southwest, which attracts early technology adopters, has earned a reputation for helping propel companies like Foursquare and Twitter out of relative obscurity. And this year, the numbers of attendees is expected to swell to nearly 20,000. Last year, around 14,000 people attended.

Among the companies looking to create some buzz are Uber, which makes a mobile application that lets people avoid taxi shortages by requesting a car service to give them a ride.; it has seeded this city’s downtown with special pedicabs to lug tired pedestrians around. GroupMe, one of the mobile messaging applications I wrote about on Friday, says it will be handing out grilled cheese sandwiches with the company’s logo toasted into the bread. Breakfast, a digital agency in New York, has rigged several photo booths that will print physical photos snapped with the popular iPhone app Instagram. Eightbit.me, a service that creates cute cartoon avatars for members, has hidden several hard drives shaped like vintage Nintendo game cartridges, around downtown. To win one, users must check into various locations in the city to find and unlock the prize.

Even Apple, which rarely appears at any major technology conferences, is rumored to have a pop-up shop somewhere on the conference grounds, most likely to coincide with the release of the iPad 2, which went on sale Friday.”

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Are You Ready for the New Peer-to-Peer Economy?

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 12, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from GigaOm.

“Unless you really don’t give two hoots about the world of technology, it’s highly unlikely you would have missed the big brouhaha between San Francisco-based startup Square and VeriFone, a payment processing services provider. VeriFone accused Jack Dorsey’s product of not being secure and being easily hackable. Dorsey denied.

This week’s dust-up makes me wonder if VeriFone quite understands its own business. To me, they are a company that provides payment-processing services to big retail outlets, fast food chains and other large transaction volume establishments. That’s what really makes them a good company. Square isn’t going after those customers. It’s going after people who would rather not be VeriFone’s customers. Earlier this year, in a conversation, Square COO Keith Rabois told me that

“Most of our competitors (including the likes of VeriFone and Intuit) focused on 7 million merchants who have the ability to get merchant accounts from say Visa or MasterCard. We are going after 26 million folks who are not merchants in a classic sense.”

When I look at Square, I see a company that’s all about helping payment processing for a different class of customers: you, me and the guy selling apricots at Sunday’s Farmer’s Market. Square is about transactions that are more peer-to-peer in nature. These kinds of transactions are mere crumbs on trail to a much bigger economic trend.

The New Peer-to-Peer Economy

For the lack of a better term, let’s call this trend a peer-to-peer economy. Here, transactions happen between individuals or a group of individuals and not between corporations and individuals.

Just look at AirBnB, a perfect example of a peer-to-peer economy company. It offers a platform for folks to rent rooms (or villas) from other folks. The company takes a piece of the action for making the connection between the buyer and seller — who more often than not, are individuals. Typically, this would be an economic transaction between a traveller and an hotelier. Several other iterations of this basic idea have emerged; for instance, OneFineStay is doing peer-to-peer vacation rentals. RelayRides is another startup that allows you to share cars.

One of the companies I am absolutely fascinated by is New York-based Kickstarter, which I think is less a company and more a socio-economic movement.

KickStarter is a simple site that marries patronage and commerce. Artists come and list their projects and get in touch with friends and supporters, who pledge their money. If the money needed by a project is pledged, the artists get to work. If not, it’s back to the drawing board for them.

In less than two years, Kickstarter has come out of nowhere and is now helping projects raise as much a million dollars a week — from individuals like you and me. It helped raise a lot of money for open-source Facebook rival Diaspora and the iPod watchbands TikTok and LunaTik.

The Network Is the Dollar

This peer-to-peer economy is a throwback to an older way of life, where folks used to barter for goods. It was a different kind of economic transaction, but still it was an economic transaction.

The onset of industrialization brought in mass production and mass consumption into our societies. The Internet and by extension, mobile is going to help change that.

One of the things the Internet enables is our ability to connect with each other very quickly. These connections can go beyond sharing of tweets, photos and links.

The network is a springboard for services and platforms that enable one-on-one (or one-to-many) interactions. The easy to use tools — web and mobile — make it easier for like-minded people to congregate and engage in commerce.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more companies try to tap into the shift to the peer-to-peer economy. The winners will be those with big platforms and the likes of Square who provide enablement services. Perhaps next time, VeriFone needs to remember that.”

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