Reports say Apple Inc. may be thinking about buying the video web service Hulu. Bloomberg says the talks are early, citing anonymous sources. The price could top $2 billion, which would be an unusually large acquisition for Apple, which previously paid $400 million for its largest one, NeXT Software Inc. in 1996.
Apple, however, is focused on including more video in its ecosystem, according to an analyst Bloomberg quotes.
Google and Facebook notch company records for lobbying
Google and Facebook set company records for spending on lobbyists, according to documents the firms filed this week.
Google booste its lobbyist spend from $1.48 million in the first quarter to $2.06 million in the second, exceeding the amount Microsoft put into its lobbying budget. Take a look at Google’s lobbying report for the quarter for details such as issues of concern, agencies lobbied, and more.
Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and number two on our recent list of the top 20 venture capitalists in the United States, recently gave the Entrepreneur Thought Leader lecture at Stanford University outlining the rules he has used wehn creating a venture. They include aiming high, looking for disruptive change, and networking, planning for bad luck and persistence.
Go Daddy Group Inc., parent of domain registrar GoDaddy.com, has sold to private equity firms for $2.25 billion, the company said. The company sold to KKR, Silver Lake and Technology Crossover Ventures.
GoDaddy is looking to exceed $1.1 billion in revenue this year. The company is known for its excellent company service. If you ever bought a domain name from GoDaddy, you likely got a call not long after from one of its service people. The company, based in Scottsdale, AZ, was founded by CEO Bob Parsons in 1997.
Some folks in the tech community have expressed concerns that the private equity buyers of the company will milk it for all its worth without regard to its tradition of selling domain names inexpensively with great service. We’ll see.
Zynga, Farmville-maker files for $1 billion IPO
San Francisco-based Zynga, the game maker that created Farmville and Mafia Wars, two of the most popular Facebook games, has filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering of stock to raise at least $1 billion.
For a detailed infographic on Zynga’s path from founding to IPO see: Zynga infographic at Namesake.com.
Zynga, founded four years ago, has users in 166 countries. About 230 million people play its games every month. The company has revenue of $597 million in 2010, up from $121 million in 2009. The profitable company earned $90.6 million in 2010.
It is the latest of the much ballyhooed Internet companies to seek public status following LinkedIn (Linkd) Corp. Analysts expect even greater interest in Zynga’s IPO and the amount of money it decides to raise may change as the level of that interest is better evaluated.
The company was founded by CEO Mark Pincus and has about 2,300 employees. The company’s shares recently sold for $15 each on secondary markets, which would value the firm at $12.6 billion.
The filing with the SEC reveals the company is investing in its own data centers to supplement its use of the Amazon cloud service, which allowed the company to grow fast without building infrastructure. Most Facebook game companies rely on Amazon’s cloud. VentureBeat says Zynga’s ability to design apps that take advantage of Amazon’s cloud is one reason for its success.
Despite the inevitable suggestions that the moonbeam valuations of Internet companies may signal another Internet bubble, many analysts point out that the difference is in the fact the today the Internet is more fully integrated into our public, personal and professional lives. These companies have substantial revenues, enormous numbers of users, and some, such as Zynga are even profitable.
Some analysts note, though, that their market values may still be quite overvalued.
BLiNQ names John Tawadros president, COO
BLiNQ Media, a global technology innovator in Facebook advertising and the only pure-play media and technology company worldwide with official access to the Facebook Ads API, has hired former COO for top search-marketing firm iProspect John Tawadros as president and COO.
Prior to joining BLiNQ Media, Tawadros was the COO of iProspect. Over the course of ten years he helped build the company from a basement startup to the #1 search marketing firm in the world, acquired for $50MM in 2004.
While at iProspect, he built and ran a world-class client services team with a 90%+ client retention rate, a companywide training program and scalable business processes to drive efficiencies, communications, ROI and overall performance.
The client-facing, algorithmic and paid search, technology, training and innovation teams all reported to Tawadros. He also played a significant role in the integration of iProspect with Aegis and in the acquisition and integration of a Texas-based retail industry search firm.
“Social media is the new search,” said Tawadros. “Facebook, the biggest player in digital media, is now the home of innovation, and BLiNQ Media helps advertisers make the most of it. It’s an honor to join this creative, intelligent and hard-working team.”
News Corp. has sold the once dominating social network MySpace for $35 million, most of it in stock, the Associated Press reports. The price is a fraction of the $580 million the company paid for it in 2005.
Reports say the sale is to Specific Media, an online advertising network, and that News Corp. will retain a 5 percent stake.
Founded in 2003 by Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, MySpace was particularly attractive to musicians marketing their wares and a place where people acquired friends, but Facebook, founded in 2004 quickly eroded its popularity, aided by popular apps and games such as Farmville and Mafia Wars.
We never did much with MySpace, which seemed largely geared to the younger generation, ourselves, but Facebook caught us in a matter of months after it went national, just as it did many other people. MySpace later copied the Facebook news feed idea and News Corp. attempted to reposition it as a music venue, but the social network continued to lose relevance.
Along with once high flying AOL, the MySpace story is a lesson in the volatile nature of the Internet. Adaptability is essential to any continuing success.
Twitter has confirmed buying third-party tool TweetDeck in a blog post. TweetDeck was created by London programmer Iain Dodsworth as a way to organize Twitter and Facebook feeds.
In the blog post, Twitter said, “TweetDeck is a great example of a third-party developer that designed tools for the incredibly important audience of Twitter power-users and, in turn, created value for the network as a whole.”
For TweetDeck’s take on the acquisition, see its blog. CNN has reported the deal was worth $40 million.
Zynga IPO next? Either way, its hiring
Rumors are flying that Facebook game-maker Zynga will be the next social digital media company to launch an initial public offering of stock following LinkedIn’s incredible performance Thursday. Bloomberg reports the company may file for an IPO by the end of June. Online music site Pandora has already filed for an IPO and both Facebook and Twitter are expected to do the same in the not too distant future.
Whether Zynga files for an IPO or not, it is hiring in Austin, Baltimore, Cambridge, Carlsbad, Dallas, L.A., New York, San Diego and San Francisco. Jobs range from software engineers to game designer to accountants. You can see all the available jobs on the Foundry’s Portfolio Company jobs page. Other Foundry companies hiring inlcude Admeld in New York, Cheezburger Inc, in LA, New York and Seattle, Memeo in Santa Clara, and Gnip in Boulder, among numerous others.
Putting jobs from portfolio companies online is a trend we’ve noticed more venture firms doing. A look at any of them demonstrates the truth that startups create the jobs in the U.S. economy.
YouTube passes 3 billion daily page views
YouTube, which launched in May 2005, said it passed 3 billion daily views over the weekend (May 21-22). That’s up 50 percent from last year. Users now upload more than 48 hours of video to YouTube every minute, double last year’s figure. It’s up 37 percent in just the last six months.
This news follows the report that Netflix streaming movies now accounts for a quarter of the bandwidth used in the United States.
While we’re avid users of Netflix and view all sorts of YouTube videos, ourselves, we wonder how long this can continue before Internet service providers started charging for usage and just how that will affect video viewing online?
One video startup entrepreneur we know says that he’s confident that technology will help solve that problem if it arises via compression techniques and other means. We’ll see. – Allan Maurer
On the heels of disclosing that it has 25 percent of the ereader market, Barnes & Noble is introducing a new touchscreen E-ink device that sells for $139, the same price as Amazon’s Kindle 3 Wi-fi unit.
Called the Simple Touch Reader, the new B&N device boasts a two month battery life, the longest of any ereader, and a six-inch screen, same as the Kindle’s, even though it is smaller than the Kindle at 7.5×4.8 inches and about a third of an inch thick.
It weighs 8.5 ounces and has built in Wi-fi. It’s available at nook.com. I’m all for extended battery life, smaller form factor without sacrificing screen size, and even the touchscreen. In particular I like e-ink, which is as legible as real ink and lacks the eyestrain regular LED screens can cause if you stare at them as many hours as we do.
We’re still pleased with the Kindle 3 Wi-fi we bought before Christmas. It also plays mp3 files and we recently uploaded several podcast science fiction stories to listen to while driving on a trip, a feature which worked just fine. The Kindle’s own voice, which will read your books to you as male or female, is still too sing-song computer for me, though.
We have noticed that with the Kindle and with a Squeezebox standalone Internet radio we bought, we have to reset our modem (just unplug it for 30 seconds and plug it back in) from time to time, although that only happened once with my Kindle, it’s a recurring problem with the radio, which we’ll write about more fully another time.
Amazon itself is working on a color tablet that is expected to debut later this year, while the e-reader wars are in full swing.
Dropbox saving 300 million files a day, but privacy concerns arise
The popular file-sharing service Dropbox says it is now saving 300 million files a day with 25 million people in 175 countries using the product. It saves more files daily than there are tweets on Twitter.
We started using it ourselves recently and it is a really simple way to share and collaborate on files or access them on different machines.
However, a security researcher has filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission saying Dropbox mislead consumers by saying its encryption protected stored files even from Dropbox employees, when that is not the case. The complaint came from Ph.D. student Christopher Soghoian, who says Dropbox “has and continues to make deceptive statements to consumers regarding the extent to which it protects and encrypts therir data.”
Dropbox has grown from 20 employees and 5 million users last year to 60 employees today. We hope the company is pro-active about taking care of this file privacy issue. It could lead to trouble for users down the road if the security researcher is correct
Rumors say Twitter has bought TweetDeck
CNN has reported that Twitter has purchased the much-used third-party Twitter client TweetDeck for $40 million. About three weeks ago, TechCrunch reported a deal was likely to close in a week (they missed on that one).
The rumor began in mid-April with a Wall Street Journal story saying the sale was in the $50 million range.
Twitter has rumbled that it isn’t so crazy about third-party clients using its API for purely Twitter related apps.
We use both TweetDeck and Seesmic, each optimized for different purposes, but both easier to organize than Twitter itself, in our opinion (and that of many others, since about 40 percent of tweets come from third-party apps.
Since the birth of Twitter five years ago, the social networking/microblogging site has experienced staggering growth. To celebrate this milestone, the company released a new set of numbers about its growth and usage.
Twitter has reached approximately 200 million registered accounts, with an average 460,000 new accounts being created daily. Over the past year, the average number of Tweets sent per day has increased from 50 million in March 2010, to 110 million in January 2011, to 140 million this month. In any given week, 1 billion messages are shared.
The site’s burgeoning use and popularity hasn’t come without growing pains, however. For many users across the globe, Twitter has become THE preferred news source, 911 system, and communication outlet. As such, at some points during major worldwide events—for example, the 2010 World Cup, which yielded 2,940 Tweets per second; the 2010 Haitian earthquake; and even Michael Jackson’s 2009 memorial service—activity has spiked so high that site slowdowns, availability issues, or full-blown outages have ensued.
Despite these occasional blips, the performance of Twitter’s homepage over the years has remained steady and in line with industry averages.
At the start of 2010, Twitter.com delivered response times averaging 2.09 seconds. Delays spiked in the second quarter at 4.54 seconds, but declined steadily throughout the remainder of the year.
Despite a few widely-publicized performance issues, availability of Twitter’s homepage remained consistently above 99 percent throughout the year.
The site is off to a good start in 2011 as well. As of March 15, Twitter has delivered average response times of 2.67 seconds and 99.63 percent availability. A pretty remarkable feat given the 140 million tweets the site serves up per day.
Millions of users worldwide now rely on Twitter as a real-time source for information and updates on everything from natural disasters to pop culture. Recognizing this role, Twitter appears to have made great improvements and investments in the scalability of its site, even as it adds new features and users by the millions.
Gary Beerman is Vice President of Product Management for AlertSite, a Florida-based provider of Web performance management solutions acquired by Beverly, MA-based SmartBear Software Tuesday (April 5). SmartBear delivers quality and performance tools throughout the quality lifecycle, anywhere – on the desktop, mobile and the cloud.
AlertSite uses it’s DéjàClick to monitor Twitter’s homepage every five minutes from 12 geographic locations across the United States.Response times refer to how quickly visitors are presented with the complete home page, including objects, JavaScript, Flash and any third-party page components. Availability is measured by the percentage of time the website is accessible. This includes the ability to reach the website from multiple locations and complete page rendering in a browser within a given time period (maximum of 90 seconds) without error.
TechJournal South is a TechMedia company. TechMedia presents the annual conferences:
MELBOURNE, FL – EMX International, which sells security and intelligence solutions to the U.S. Militarty, Homeland Security, and infrastructure protection clients, has raised $750,000 of a round targeted at $4 million, according to a regulatory filing. The funds are being held in esrow until they reach $2 million.
Part of the raise will be used to acquire two businesses, including EMX Inc.
EMX Inc. sells cutting-edge thermal imaging surveillance cameras, thermal weapon sights, field services and integrated solutions to defense, government agency and commercial clients. Focused on integrated security solutions technologies, EMX develops and manufactures a broad range of products that uniquely positions the company to support the world community’s commitment and emphasis on security and safety.
The company disclosed the financing in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
TechJournal South is a TechMedia company. TechMedia presents the annual conferences:
NEW YORK – AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) is buying T-Mobile USA from Deutsche Telkom AG in a cash-stock deal worth $39 billion. The deal, which is likely to face regulatory scrutiny, would make AT&T the largest US cellphone company.
AT&T, now the second largest wireless carrier in the US, and T-Mobile, the fourth, would have a combined 129 million subscribers, surpassing previously number one Verizon Wireless, which has 102 million subscribers.
Due to the regulatory process, AT&T does not expect the deal to close for a year.
“This transaction represents a major commitment to strengthen and expand critical infrastructure for our nation’s future,” said Randall Stephenson, AT&T Chairman and CEO.
“It will improve network quality, and it will bring advanced LTE capabilities to more than 294 million people. Mobile broadband networks drive economic opportunity everywhere, and they enable the expanding high-tech ecosystem that includes device makers, cloud and content providers, app developers, customers, and more. During the past few years, America’s high-tech industry has delivered innovation at unprecedented speed, and this combination will accelerate its continued growth.”
As part of the transaction, Deutsche Telekom will receive an equity stake in AT&T that, based on the terms of the agreement, would give Deutsche Telekom an ownership interest in AT&T of approximately 8 percent.
Improves service quality for U.S. wireless customers
The company says AT&T and T-Mobile USA customers will see service improvements – including improved voice quality – as a result of additional spectrum, increased cell tower density and broader network infrastructure. At closing, AT&T will immediately gain cell sites equivalent to what would have taken on average five years to build without the transaction, and double that in some markets.
We would hope it improves service for both firms. AT&T’s has some noticeable gaps now.
SPRINGFIELD, VA – USA Mobility, Inc. (Nasdaq: USMO), a leading provider of wireless messaging and communications services, has acquired Amcom Software Inc. for $163.3 million in cash.
The acquisition was funded by $110.8 million of cash on hand and $52.5 million through a credit facility provided by Wells Fargo Capital Finance.
Vincent D. Kelly, USA Mobility president and CEO, said, “This acquisition is about combining two leaders in mission critical communications. USA Mobility’s three primary core market segments of healthcare, government and large enterprise are exactly aligned with Amcom’s customer segment focus.”
“USA Mobility is the undisputed leader in paging and wireless messaging — the foundation of mission critical communications today. Increasingly, however, mission critical communication is evolving. Pagers were once the lone device for urgent communications in healthcare, government, and public safety.
“But today’s leading organizations communicate with an ever-increasing diverse array of methods and devices. Amcom Software is a recognized leader in delivering software solutions, which enable seamless, critical communications. Amcom’s unified communications suite connects people across a universe of devices that is constantly expanding.”
JACKSONVILLE, FL – Fortegra Financial Corporation (NYSE: FRF) has agreed to acquire eReinsure.com, Inc., an industry leader in web-based technologies for reinsurance process control, information management and compliance functions, for a cash purchase price of $37 million.
The acquisition of Salt Lake City, Utah-based eReinsure will enable Fortegra to offer eReinsure’s unique reinsurance negotiation platform to insurers, reinsurers and brokers. eReinsure was founded 11 years ago and developed a web based platform to support placing reinsurance risks.
Since then, eReinsure has grown to serve many of the largest reinsurance buyers, sellers and brokers worldwide. eReinsure has demonstrated the value of a web-based system for enhancing transaction control and efficient distribution in the reinsurance market. As a result of the growth of eReinsure, electronic placing of reinsurance has become well established with over 15,000 registered users in 80 countries.
Fortegra Financial Corporation is an insurance services company that provides distribution and administration services and insurance-related products to insurance companies, insurance brokers and agents and other financial services companies in the United States. It sells services and products directly to businesses rather than directly to consumers. Fortegra’s brands include Life of the South, Consecta and Bliss & Glennon.
Go Daddy Group Inc., parent of domain registrar GoDaddy.com, has sold to private equity firms for $2.25 billion, the company said. The company sold to KKR, Silver Lake and Technology Crossover Ventures.
News Corp. has sold the once dominating social network MySpace for $35 million, most of it in stock, the Associated Press reports. The price is a fraction of the $580 million the company paid for it in 2005.
Twitter has confirmed buying third-party tool TweetDeck in a
On the heels of disclosing that it has 25 percent of the ereader market, Barnes & Noble is introducing a new touchscreen E-ink device that sells for $139, the same price as Amazon’s Kindle 3 Wi-fi unit.
By Gary Beerman
NEW YORK – AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) is buying T-Mobile USA from Deutsche Telkom AG in a cash-stock deal worth $39 billion. The deal, which is likely to face regulatory scrutiny, would make AT&T the largest US cellphone company.
SPRINGFIELD, VA – USA Mobility, Inc. (Nasdaq: USMO), a leading provider of wireless messaging and communications services, has acquired Amcom Software Inc. for $163.3 million in cash.
JACKSONVILLE, FL – Fortegra Financial Corporation (NYSE: FRF) has agreed to acquire eReinsure.com, Inc., an industry leader in web-based technologies for reinsurance process control, information management and compliance functions, for a cash purchase price of $37 million.
