Press DistributionLatest News Headlines
The Ten Most Likely M&A Deals In Online Video
Editor’s note : Guest author Ashkan Karbasfrooshan is the founder and CEO of video site WatchMojo . Below are his picks for the ten most likely M&A deals in online video. Previously, he wrote a series if posts about the state of online video (Part I , II , III , and IV ). Which online video companies will get bought in 2010? Venture capitalists are desperately looking for exits while the usual suspects are sitting on more than $80 billion in cash: Microsoft ($20B), Apple ($40B), Google ($15B), Amazon ($3B), and Yahoo! ($3B) just to name the cash positions of a few potential acquirers. Theoretically, it should be a match made in heaven, but the sheer number of venture-backed video startups is staggering so when the music stops, not everyone will find a dancing partner. Once you assess what drives companies to merge or acquire one another, however, it seems like we’re about to enter a period of mergers between video competitors and see a series of acquisitions by larger companies looking to accelerate their video strategies, with a common theme being increasing both monetization and margins. Right now, as the chart above shows (click to enlarge), there are two types of online video companies: those with sky-high ad rates but fairly limited inventory (company A) and those with huge inventory but woeful monetization (company B). Companies can extend profitability through technology, ad solutions or content. With that in mind, let’s look at those 10 potential deals. 1. Demand Media will acquire Tremor Media Demand Media has raised $355 million but to this day still generates the bulk of its revenue from its domain registrar unit, eNom. However, it is trying to move into the content business, with its “Content Farm” strategy getting a lot of attention . Demand Media’s existing content lends itself better to an arbitrage strategy built around Google marketing and monetization, but over time it will want to do a better job entering both display and video advertising and it will do that by buying one of the many, many video ad networks out there. Brightroll, which is focused on brands, is one option. Tremor is another, focusing on reach. That strategy should fit well with Demand Media’s modus operandi. Tremor Media’s ads reach 177.6 million uniques, or 85% of internet users. 2. Lagardere Groupe will acquire Dailymotion At first glance, French media conglomerate Lagardere seemingly sees no value in communities as a marketing platform: “There is no clear business model because you have a huge, massive audience, but it is not a marketing community,” says to Lagardere’s Chief Financial Officer Dominique D’Hinnin. Monsieur D’Hinnin might be right, but never underestimate France’s sense of nationalism. Dailymotion is France’s answer to YouTube and it has taken steps to reduce its share of user-generated and pirated content in favor of professional videos. (Disclosure: Dailymotion is also one of WatchMojo’s distribution partners). With $68.5M in funding—including a tidy sum from Le Fonds Strategique d’investissement, which is an investing arm of the French State—you can imagine that one of the pillars of the French media landscape, Lagardere Groupe could eventually step in and acquire Dailymotion despite its admitted monetization problems: “At the moment, we are poor at monetising our audience,” admits Dailymotion CEO Cedric Tournay. Lagardere could help with that provided Dailymotion can continue to de-emphasize its less advertiser-friendly content. Additionally, Lagardere will be able to leverage Dailymotion’s audience to promote its own content: the company owns Hachette along with numerous other media entities. 3. Scripps will acquire 5Min When 5Min (another one of our distribution partners) launched, it focused on user-generated how-to content. Thankfully for them, they have since moved away from that and currently mesh a) aggregated premium and super premium content with b) their monetization engine, a strategy which has propelled 5Min to become a Top 10 comScore video company. Scripps is a producer of super premium content, and like Discovery Holdings, it might prefer to distribute its programming through TV and cable. But, with consumers viewing more and more videos on the Web, it will need more content for its sites and will look for more inventory online. The two companies already have a strategic deal in place, so they have some familiarity with each other. 4. Google will acquire Ooyala Last year it was rumored that Google was going to acquire Brightcove for $500-700M. That was always unlikely because many of Brightcove’s financial backers are the very same media companies that view Google as the bane of their existence. Moreover, Google makes a lot of acquisitions but rarely are they large (YouTube, DoubleClick and AdMob being the exceptions). A more logical fit to expand its video foothold would be Ooyala , which competes with Brightcove and includes Glam Media and others as clients… and was founded by a former Google executive. Google has the consumer video market cornered with YouTube. Iit could leverage Ooyala to go after the corporate market by undercutting Brightcove. 5. Microsoft will acquire Brightcove The consolidation in ad services peaked with Google’s $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick and Microsoft’s $6B acquisition of aQuantive. After selling ad agency unit Razorfish, today aQuantive is Microsoft Advertising , and as advertising continues to move into video, MSFT will probably want to offer a video content management to go along with the Atlas ad serving platform. That is where Brightcove fits in. If you think about it, Google owns video search by way of its YouTube acquisition. Microsoft wants to push into cloud computing and at least conceptually, owning Brightcove would give it a legitimate cloud computing foothold in professional video content with no real threat to any of its core businesses. It could also better integrate Brightcove (which increasingly powers media companies’ videos) into Bing’s video search, helping it kill many birds with one (albeit expensive) stone. 6. Yahoo! will acquire Freewheel After acquiring Blue Lithium and Right Media, Yahoo! got a shot in the arm and grew its advertising reach across the Web, outside of the Yahoo.com property. Freewheel is founded by former DoubleClick employees but Google (which bought DoubleClick) might have less interest than one would think in augmenting its video advertising reach across the Web considering it owns YouTube which accounts for 40% of online video consumption. YouTube only monetizes a small share of the billions of videos on the site. Freewheel, which allows marketers and publishers to manage campaigns across a variety of distribution sites, would be a nice fit with Yahoo!, which might want to extend its Audience Network in video offerings. 7. Gannett will acquire Livestream Gannett already invested $10 million in Livestream (then known as Mogulus). The fit is a natural: print media will want to bolster its video offerings (be it content or technology). The main challenge here is that media companies have grown wary of buying technology firms, but news organizations will have a natural predisposition for all things live and the investment sets the stage up for an all-out acquisition. 8. Nielsen will acquire TubeMogul TubeMogul provides analytics to countless marketers and publishers (we use them at WatchMojo). Nielsen and comScore are both looking at adding video capabilities and TubeMogul has done a good job of getting wide adoption, providing Nielsen with a quick entry into the burgeoning video space. Also, David Toth, former president, CEO, and co-founder of the NetRatings service joined TubeMogul’s board. 9. AOL acquires Howcast AOL’s recent acquisition of StudioNow is a sign of things to come: When AOL was spun off from Time Warner, it was shackled with restrictions on its use of cash and thus the size of the deals it could complete. But AOL wants to create content, lots of it. AOL’s Tim Armstrong is an investor in Howcast ; he was also an investor in Patch, a local startup Armstrong acquired after joining AOL (to his credit, he simply recouped his initial investment and did not participate in the capital gain). Howcast creates videos themselves, lets users create and upload videos and aggregates other professional content (Howcast is one of our distribution partners as well). While Howcast might have proven redundant with the StudioNow acquisition, AOL has a history of doubling up when it focuses on a space (think ad services: Tacoda, Advertising.com, and Third Screen Media) and Howcast is more focussed on how-to videos. 10. News Corp. acquires Break Media from Lionsgate, spins off NewCo News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch is in the process of divesting from the Web: first selling Photobucket , then chucking Rotten Tomatoes to Flixster while retaining a stake in the new venture. I see something similar happening with Acquisition #10. Break Media is one of the so-called YouTube clones who has managed to differentiate itself by focusing on the men’s 18-34 market and creating content, be it videos and now video games. Back in 2007, Lionsgate invested $21 million in stock for a 42% stake in Break.com. At the time, it also got a call option (basically, the right to buy) which is “exercisable at any time from June 29, 2007 until the earlier of 30 months after June 29, 2007 or a year after a change of control, to purchase all of the remaining 58% equity interests (excluding any subsequent dilutive events), including in-the-money stock options, warrants and other rights, of Break.com for $58 million in cash or common stock, at the company’s option.” The 30 month window expired on December 29, 2009, and despite Break’s momentum, I don’t see any major incentive for Lionsgate to exercise its call option. I do, however, see the following happening (well, maybe…). Lionsgate might be more willing to trade its 42% stake in Break Media for a smaller share in a NewCo. that houses both Break Media and News Corp.’s IGN Entertainment, another leader in the men’s 18-34 space. (again, bothh Break and IGN are distribution partners). This NewCo. would then be a more likely candidate for an IPO and would allow both Lionsgate and News Corp. to focus on their core businesses and cash out their investment over time. Needless to say, all of the above deals are idle, if informed, speculation on my part. What do you think are the most likely video exits this year? CrunchBase Information Ashkan Karbasfrooshan Information provided by CrunchBase
Mobile Fundraising Campaigns Begin For Chile
Following the earthquake in Haiti, mobile fundraising via texting exploded; with over $40 million raised via text messaging alone. With the massive success of the Haiti campaign, mobile donations are now being used to raise funds for the victims of the 8.8 magnitude earthquake that shook Chile over the past weekend. Mobile giving is fairly simple; you text a keyword to a code on your phone and a micro-donation is made to a given charity. The donation is billed via your carrier. Similar to the Haiti campaign, AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint and T-Mobile are waiving text-messaging fees for the donations. According to the Mobile Giving Foundation, Habitat for Humanity, The Salvation Army, The American Red Cross and World Vision are all accepting SMS donations for the Chile earthquake. Mobile Accord, which ran Haiti mobile fundraising efforts for the Red Cross, is also coordinating SMS fundraising on behalf of several philanthropic foundations raising money for Chile. Via the company’s mGive program, you can make $10 donations to Friends of the World Food Program, Operation USA, and Convoy of Hope. It’s unclear whether the fundraising campaign for the Chile earthquake will see the impressive results of the Haiti initiative, but the model did prove to be successful. Photo Credit/Flickr/ curiouslee CrunchBase Information Mobile Accord Information provided by CrunchBase
Jimdo Makes Running Your Own Online Store A Breeze, Loses Investor
People who use Jimdo to create and publish their own basic website know how versatile yet easy-to-use the tool really is – I know because I used the service myself to set up and manage a site for my wedding last year. And if these users now want to start selling something online through their websites, it wouldn’t involve as much hassle as it would have a week ago. This is because the German startup behind Jimdo has added a ‘Store’ feature to their website building service, enabling users to add a full-fledged ecommerce element to their sites. Jimdo users who want to set up an online business can use Store to start organizing and publishing a catalog of products, which can be presented in various ways: multiple pictures with detailed-view zoom functionality, videos, text, PDFs and more. Products can have multiple variations (e.g. shirt colors, sizes, etc.) and can be featured as ‘bestsellers’ or within a given specific product category. A shopping cart feature is built right into the new product extension, complete with PayPal integration and the ability to include a custom check-out process (i.e. by invoice). The startup has also considered the challenges of conducting online business on a global level, making it possible for sellers to switch between U.S. Sales Tax and VAT (Europe) and customize shipping costs accordingly. Here’s a reference site , fully powered by Jimdo (more can be found here ). For pricing and current promotions, check this page . In other, rather unexpected news, Jimdo investor United Internet has withdrawn from the company’s board. In May 2009, the international ISP had acquired 30% of the startup and also inked a license deal with the young company that allowed it to have its hosting provider subsidiary 1&1 enable their customers to build Jimdo sites as a white-labeled service. Jimdo co-founder Matthias Henze had this to say about the whole ordeal: “United Internet has left the board of shareholders. As you know, they mainly invested because of the partnership we had with 1&1. Since 1&1 had different views concerning the roadmap we changed the agreement with 1&1 which now has a license to develop the white-labeled version on its own. I’m really sorry, but due to signed NDAs I can’t share any more details on the deal.” It’s a bit of a strange development, but Jimdo doesn’t seem to be all too worried about the ties getting cut – the company also tells me they’ve reached profitability with team of 30 full-time employees. We’ll see how they fare now that they’re on their own again. CrunchBase Information Jimdo Information provided by CrunchBase
Wendy Toye obituary
Dancer who became a choreographer, actor and director for stage and screen As a dancer, Wendy Toye, who has died aged 92, was a child prodigy. Born in Hackney, east London, the daughter of a bristle merchant, she had made her first public appearance at the Royal Albert Hall by the age of four. Aged nine, she choreographed a ballet at the London Palladium and also won the women’s prize, dancing the Charleston, at a ball organised by the theatrical manager CB Cochran and judged by Fred Astaire and Florenz Ziegfeld among others. The men’s prize was won by Lew Grade. She was always grateful for the advice she received from her tutors, including Ruby Ginner, Ninette de Valois and Anton Dolin, and regretted that when she reached the next stage of her career – choreography and direction – there were no teachers. She had to learn as she went along. During the 1930s, she mixed dancing and acting. She appeared in the film Dance Pretty Lady, directed by Anthony Asquith; danced in The Miracle at the Lyceum (directed by Max Reinhardt, with choreography by Léonide Massine) in 1932; and joined De Valois’s Vic-Wells Ballet company. Having met Dolin in Ballerina at the Gaiety theatre, she went on tour with him and Alicia Markova, for whom she choreographed the ballet Aucassin and Nicolette. Toye’s theatrical performances included Love and How to Cure It at the Globe in 1937. An enforced rest of several months after an operation for appendicitis ended her career as a ballet dancer, though not in other forms of dancing – such as tap and jazz – in which she had been trained. As a choreographer, she remained loyal to ballet and when she arranged the dances for These Foolish Things at the Palladium in 1938, she persuaded George Black to employ ballet dancers in the chorus line. Throughout the war, she continued to work on Black’s shows, dancing in some of them herself. When she helped with a show for American troops called Soldiers in Skirts, the officer in charge was known as Captain George Brest; in civilian life he was George K Arthur, but she did not know that until later. Through Arthur, she went on to make her first film. Cochran was responsible for her transition from choreographer to stage director. He had watched her progress ever since, with ticket number 66, she had won the prize at the ball in her youth. (He always called her Sixty-Six.) Cochran sent Toye the script of Big Ben, an operetta with book by AP Herbert and score by Vivian Ellis. She read it and replied that she could see no reason for dancing in it. Cochran agreed: he wanted her to direct it. Opening at the Adelphi in July 1946, it was the first of three Herbert-Ellis musicals put on by Cochran and directed by Toye. The second and most successful, Bless the Bride, opened at the Adelphi on 26 April 1947. The French star Georges Guétary came over to play the lead. Four days later at Drury Lane, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! burst upon the British public. There were bound to be comparisons. Oklahoma! was a smash hit, but Bless the Bride also did well and ran for three years. Soon after Bless the Bride opened, Toye joined the cast of Annie Get Your Gun and had a complicated dance as Winnie Tate. After the third Herbert-Ellis musical (Tough at the Top) failed, she formed the company Ballet-Hoo de Wendy Toye and went abroad. By 1950 she was in New York, co-directing Jean Arthur and Boris Karloff in Peter Pan. She met George Arthur in the US and, when he came to England, she helped him with casting a film he wanted to make: The Stranger Left No Card. Toye suggested various well-known directors and Alan Badel in the lead. He followed her advice except that he wanted her to direct. She agreed and the thriller won the best short film award at Cannes in 1953. The result was an Alexander Korda contract, but he died soon after and her contract was turned over to Rank, for whom she made some films that were less interesting. Toye was one of only two prominent female film directors in the 50s – Muriel Box was the other – and as such inspired many women to enter the business. She continued to be sought after in the theatre, and, in 1955, she directed a small-scale English musical, Wild Thyme, with decor by Ronald Searle. He and Toye worked well together and they became lifelong friends. Their first film collaboration, the Oscar-nominated On the Twelfth Day (1955), was based on the “12 days of Christmas” and alarmingly the studio was filled with animal and bird life. Their later collaboration, The King’s Breakfast, made at Shepperton, competed at Cannes in 1963. That year, she served on the jury at the Berlin film festival. Toye was awarded the Silver Jubilee Medal in 1977. Her stage productions in that decade ranged from Showboat at the Adelphi to Stand and Deliver at the Roundhouse and Oh, Mr Porter at the Mermaid. Toye had an all-embracing career taking in every kind of entertainment, including opera (Orpheus in the Underworld) and Shakespeare. In 1981, with some reluctance, she remade The Stranger Left No Card for television, with Derek Jacobi. Among her more bizarre later engagements was to direct Kiss Me Kate in Danish in 1986. An adviser for the Arts Council’s training scheme since 1978, Toye was always pleased to be asked to direct students and had an unerring eye for promising performers. Her production of Rodgers and Hart’s Babes in Arms at Lamda was highly praised. She was appointed CBE in 1992 and introduced a programme of her films at the National Film Theatre in London in 1995. A few years ago, she moved to Denville Hall, a care home for actors in north London. Toye married Selwyn Sharp in 1940 and they divorced in 1950. She is survived by a nephew, Peter. • Beryl May Jessie Toye, dancer, choreographer and director, born 1 May 1917; died 27 February 2010 Wendy Trewin died in 1999 Dance Ballet Theatre Opera guardian.co.uk
Robert Hoy obituary
Daring American stuntman who often doubled for Tony Curtis and starred in the TV series The High Chaparral Among the many unsung heroes of film history are those individuals who make actors seem more athletic and daring than they could possibly be. Although the raison d’etre of his profession is invisibility, the stuntman and stunts co-ordinator Robert Hoy, who has died of cancer aged 82, was one of the few whose name and face have emerged from anonymity. As well as enjoying a long career as a stuntman – he continued into his 60s – Hoy, an expert horseman, appeared in more than 150 films and television series in small parts. One of his largest roles was the ranch-hand Joe Butler in 62 episodes of The High Chaparral from 1967 to 1971. With his thick black moustache, dark hair and sideboards, and invariably wearing a blue shirt, Hoy made Butler into a hard-riding, hard-fighting, hard-drinking masculine figure, willing to risk his life again and again to defend the Chaparral ranch from enemies. Risking one’s life goes with the job of performing stunts, although extreme precautions are always taken to ensure safety. However, this has not entirely prevented accidents. On the set of Spartacus (1960), Kirk Douglas accidentally cracked one of Hoy’s ribs when he rammed a fake sword into the stuntman’s side. While hanging upside down for the 1980s TV series Magnum PI, Hoy broke his leg and ankle. “I recovered and got back to work,” he recalled. “I didn’t think twice about it. That’s just part of the business.” Hoy, a veteran of the second world war, had been rejected from active service in the Korean war because of a bad injury to his right leg: “That hurt more than the actual injury.” Hoy considered that one of the most dangerous stunts he ever did was for the Stanley Kramer film The Defiant Ones (1958), in which he doubled for Tony Curtis, while Ivan Dixon did the same for Sidney Poitier. On the run as escaped convicts, and chained together, they find themselves in the rapids of California’s Kern river. “The current was moving along at about six knots,” Hoy remembered. “There were many outcroppings and rocks, some of them below the water. There also were old fence posts, downed trees and whirlpools. There was no element of control. All we could do was try to stay alive, but it all looked great on film.” Hoy specialised in horse work and explained that “all stunts have an element of danger, but horses have minds of their own, and in the two or three seconds of doing a stunt, things can go wrong”. Although he was born in New York City, he got to know horses as a child when he worked part-time on a dude ranch in the Catskill mountains. He continued to handle horses there until he joined the marines near the end of the second world war. (Hoy always wore two pins: one honouring the marines, the other the fraternity of stuntmen.) On leaving the service, he took a job as a cowboy on a Nevada ranch, before going to Hollywood in 1950. His first film was Ambush, where he doubled for Robert Taylor on a horse, jumping fences and falling off. Hoy was lucky to have the stuntman Dave Sharpe as his mentor, who taught him how not to get killed. Hoy continued to do stunts and act. Besides being a favourite of Curtis, he was stunt double for Clint Eastwood in four movies: The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), The Enforcer (1976), The Gauntlet (1977) and Bronco Billy (1980). Hoy doubled for Audie Murphy in To Hell and Back (1955), in which Murphy, the most decorated combat soldier of the second world war, played himself. He also did some of the more tricky bits of action for Murphy in Destry (1954) and Walk the Proud Land (1956). Hoy was a lifetime member of the Stuntmen’s Association of Motion Pictures, which he co-founded in 1961. A few days before he died, he received the Golden Boot, an award given by the Motion Picture & Television Fund to those who have made significant contributions to the western genre. He is survived by Kiva, his wife of 22 years, and a son, Christopher. • Robert Francis Hoy, stuntman and actor; born 3 April 1927; died 8 February 2010 Kirk Douglas Tony Curtis Clint Eastwood Second world war Ronald Bergan guardian.co.uk
Letter: Jean Simmons obituary
Maurice Rubens writes: Jean Simmons ( obituary, 25 January ) made her stage debut in 1949 in an ill-fated production of Tolstoy’s The Power of Darkness, with Stewart Granger. I remember little of the production, but have a vivid memory of Simmons and Granger happily signing autographs and throwing snowballs outside Manchester opera house. Jean Simmons United States guardian.co.uk
Don’t “Pull A Patzer” And Other Lessons Learned On Our Trip Down Sand Hill Road
Editor’s note : Earlier this month, BrightRoll raised a $10 million Series B for its video ad network. In this guest post, CEO Tod Sacerdoti shares some of the lessons he learned trying to raise that money in the current environment. As Peter Drucker once wrote , “The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it and exploits it as an opportunity.” Put more simply, change is good . . . of course, that’s unless you’re trying to raise capital in these trying times. After my company BrightRoll recently closed its Series B round of financing, we took a step back to digest the lessons we learned from pitching and negotiating with a handful of VCs over our 6-week fundraising effort. To say raising money in the current economic environment has been different than it was two years ago is a massive understatement. Saying it’s night and day would be more accurate. As a year that was touched off by Sequoia’s now famous “RIP Good Times” presentation , 2009 was highlighted by massive layoffs, significant cost cutting and many well publicized company failures . As a result, many VC firms, and their portfolios, are now fraught with uncertainty—walking a fine line between licking their wounds thanks to poor fund returns and looking for new opportunities to improve their fortunes as the market recovers. Perhaps the most important lesson gleaned from our financing is that over the last two years, the fundraising environment has become more complex. A still dormant IPO and comparatively sluggish M&A markets offer little hope for the future in terms of exits, while a handful of well-publicized scandals have led to more bureaucratic layers in the due diligence process and a new series of metrics are being used to gauge long-term prospects. It’s a market in flux, with a whole new set of best—or worst—practices, depending on how you look at them. What follow are some highlights from BrightRoll’s most recent trip down Sand Hill Road. 1. The Mint.com Acquisition Left Anything But a Minty Aftertaste in the Mouths of Many on Sandhill Road If you read TechCrunch, you undoubtedly know the story of Mint.com . The winner of the inaugural TechCrunch40, Mint.com’s personal finance application lets users track and monitor their financials. The company grew by leaps and bounds following its debut and just three years after its founding was acquired by Intuit for $170M . By most accounts Mint.com’s rapid rise to prominence and ultimate acquisition is the quintessential Silicon Valley success story. Yet, the Mint.com acquisition brought to light an interesting phenomenon, one I’ve coined the “Patzer Problem.” Prior to submitting offers to invest, three separate VCs wanted to confirm that we had no intention of “Pulling a Patzer,” modern-day Sandhill Road parlance for selling too early. Here’s why: with large funds being raised on Sand Hill Road and returns from previous funds underperforming , investors are becoming increasingly desperate for that single homerun investment that returns $1B or greater. Even though Mint.com was a huge success for the founder and team, generating $60 million in equity value per year, many VCs believe they sold too early and left too much potential value on the table. 2. Fraud and Its Impact on the Due Diligence Process In addition to the challenge of getting a term sheet signed, new barriers have emerged that make closing transactions harder than ever. Chief among them is completing due diligence, which has gone from a relatively efficient and painless series of “check-the-box” financial and legal processes, to a full-blown corporate and financial audit. These changes can be primarily attributed to the alleged fraud and ultimate failure of Canopy Financial , a company that raised more than $85 million from FTP and Spectrum. Canopy is alleged to have falsified financial reports and auditing statements and its investors were left holding the bag, which means that other entrepreneurs seeking funding are now paying the price. To prepare for these changes, companies should make sure to negotiate a cap on legal expenses ($25,000 max) in all term sheets because there is no end to what can be attributed to due diligence under this new model. 3. Perception is Reality, So Prepare Your Third-Party Data As Mark Twain once said, “Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.” While both companies and venture capitalists often argue that internal logs are both factual and the most accurate source of online traffic data, this data carries little weight when there are millions of dollars at stake. At BrightRoll, we were amazed how many investor decisions relied on metrics provided by comScore and Quantcast, even when the same investors would simultaneously mock the validity of those reports. The lesson here? VCs act like public market investors and perceived leadership may be as valuable as actual leadership—don’t forget to put apples-to-apples measurement in place before making your pitch and understand how to explain any discrepancies that may exist between your logs and those of third-party providers. 4. New Metric: Revenue vs. Money Raised (RoR) We all know that Rome wasn’t built in a day and that venture investing is by nature one of the most risky investment classes. History has shown that companies pursuing billion dollar exits that VCs covet are often required to spend significant amounts of time and capital in their formative years to build out their product and gain market share. Yet, in what may be a harbinger of things to come, in multiple meetings I was asked to compare BrightRoll’s annual revenue to the amount of money it had raised in previous years. This is what I now call the Revenue on Raised (RoR) Ratio. If your RoR is greater than one, meaning you generate more revenue every year than your total capital raised, then you are in good health and outperforming most later-stage startups. Just a few years ago, the “Patzer Problem” and the “RoR” ratio would have seemed paradoxical. After all, how can a company be expected to pursue a multi-billion dollar opportunity, bring a product to market and generate revenues in excess of the funds they’ve raised fast enough? As difficult as it is, that is what companies must do. Savvy investors now realize that fast time-to-market, and massive market opportunities and significant revenue generation are all possible in today’s online environment. 5. Revenue Growth or Profitability, Pick One There is a perception that in 2009 companies were either reducing head count to get profitable or gaining market share to grow revenue. Yet, in most of our conversations the concept of doing both—doubling revenue and getting profitable in a down year—was regarded as the gold standard. Is this thinking the fatal flaw in the venture model? Looking back to early 2009, it would have been a smart move to invest in companies at low valuations to enable them to deliver either revenue growth or profitability, not both. These results would have been achievable through a disciplined approach, focused on several factors, including: Resisting raising too much money before the business was scaling so that achieving a desirable RoR was possible in the short term Only hiring where desperately needed, to preserve capital to hire through the recession; Together, these small steps can pay dividends when it comes to raising follow-on rounds, particularly during tough economic times. I hope the above lessons help other companies looking to dive into today’s VC environment, as a little knowledge from the companies that have come before you can go a long way. Photo credit: Flickr/ Steven Damron CrunchBase Information Tod M. Sacerdoti BrightRoll Information provided by CrunchBase
How We Hate NBC’s Olympics Coverage: A Statistical Breakdown
The coverage of the Winter Olympics on NBC has been painful to watch. In addition to the tape delays which ruined the outcomes for anyone paying attention to any other news, sports or social media outlet other than NBC, there are a lot of other complaints. In between the hard-hitting reports of polar bears in the Canadian North and life among the lumberjacks, NBC did manage to squeeze in some actual Winter games, which were matched in quantity by the constant loop of the same handful of commercials on heavy rotation for McDonald’s, Visa, AT&T, Diet Coke, and NBC’s upcoming shows Parenthood and the Marriage Ref . (Thank goodness for DVRs). We already know that NBC’s handling of its Olympics coverage sucks , if only because everyone on Twitter says so. Right now, Twitter Sentiment shows that 73 percent of Tweets about “NBC Olympics” are negative. But what are they complaining about exactly, and is it just Twitter? Some new data from Crimson Hexagon , another sentiment analysis service for brands, shows the breakdown of hate: Tape Delay Horrible: 19% NBC Is Awful In General: 13% Commentators Are Lacking: 9% Not Enough Sports: 20% Mobile/Web Lousy: 12% Other Complaints: 12% Happily Watching: 15% These numbers come from an analysis of nearly 20,000 Tweets and 5,700 blog posts and forum comments. On Twitter alone, the biggest complaint by far (25 percent) is the tape delay. But that’s what you’d expect from a bunch of realtime addicts. Overall when you count blogs and forums that complaint ranked second, barely nudged out by the lack of enough actual sports coverage. Notably, only 15 of people on the Web were happy with NBC’s coverage. Perhaps people just go to the Web to complain, and happy viewers had no reason to log on because they were enthralled by those polar bears. But something tells me the Web’s view reflects the general one. How do you rate NBC’s coverage? CrunchBase Information Crimson Hexagon NBC Universal Information provided by CrunchBase
19 Startups Showing Their Wares At TechCrunch Japan’s TokyoCamp Demo Event
A total of 19 Japanese startups were given the chance to show their services at TokyoCamp, a demo event held by TechCrunch Japan (one of the country’s biggest blogs) this Friday. The event, which was co-organized by hosting company KDDI Web Communications , was a blast and attracted over 200 people this time. This was the third TokyoCamp (see here and here for my previous reports), and here are short profiles of all the startups that presented there. (Please note not all of the services offer English homepages.) Demo 1: AQUSH by Exchange Corporation Launched by Tokyo-based Exchange Corporation in December last year, AQUSH is a peer-to-peer lending service that is similar to ZOPA in the UK. AQUSH aims to unlock some of the more than US$7 trillion of retail cash and bank deposits (that are earning nearly 0% interest) by offering individual investors access to the US$300 billion Japanese consumer loan market. Lenders set their desired investment amount and interest rates from 4% to 15% for 5 classes of borrower credit risk, as denoted by AQUSH itself. AQUSH loan applicants are screened based on their credit histories, financial situation and FICO scores. The service has been in operation for 2 months and so far the average annualized ROI for investors is 10.58% after fees. AQUSH says for borrowers, interest rates range between 25% to 50% cheaper than available from specialized consumer lending companies. If you can read Japanese, there’s an in-depth (and fairly recent) article on AQUSH on TechCrunch Japan. Demo 2: Maysee by Mogura Japan is business card country , which means that your average salary man collects hundreds of these cards in any given year. Maysee is a service that scans business cards for clients, corrects OCR errors manually and makes the data accessible via PCs or mobile phones through a web app (for $20 per month per user/$0.35 per business card). The company is currently looking for business partners overseas. Demo 3: Sketch Piston by Team Lab Sketch Piston is the name of a “new game genre” created by Tokyo-based Team Lab. There are two “Sketch Action” games available at the moment, Sketch Piston 3 and 4 (both of which were made for Team Lab clients). Players can interact with characters in the Flash games by “sketching” various objects with a virtual pen, stamp and eraser. The games have no goal per se, but users can make and share creative gameplay videos on a dedicated platform . Demo 4: Cacoo by Nulab Cacoo is a what appears to be a powerful online drawing tool that allows multiple users to create designs collaboratively and in real-time. The designs can be shared with certain users or published on the web, for example on blogs or wiki sites. If you make changes to the designs in Cacoo, the blog or wiki the designs were pasted into gets updated automatically and in real-time, meaning there is no need for another upload. Mainly made for technical illustrations (wireframes, software design diagrams, network diagrams, UMLs etc.), Cacoo is completely browser-based, free and available in English. Demo 5: Link Knowledge by SAN SAN Link Knowledge is an SaaS solution with a focus on CRM and SFA (sales force automation). Much like Maysee (profiled above), Link Knowledge digitizes information found on printed business cards, puts the data into context and stores it in the cloud for customers who can then access their data from anywhere they want. Demo 6: Wishcovery Wishcovery aims at matching people who have the right skills with those who have uploaded requests or project proposals on the site. The service is scheduled to launch in alpha in April. TechCrunch Japan covered Wishcovery just last month after it won the “TechCrunch Japan Award” at the first Startup Weekend Tokyo event. Demo 7: Conyac by anydooR Dubbed “social translation service”, Conyac is actally based on a virtual currency called “Conyac Points”. The way it works is that “requesters” need to pay a certain fee upfront, upload a text and indicate which languages the text should be translated into. Registered translators (who don’t need to get screened or examined) translate texts they think they can handle to earn Conyac points. Those points can then be converted into real money via Paypal, with the service itself getting a 20% cut. Demo 8: LIFEmee TechCrunch50 demopit company LIFEmee presented a revamped version of their eponymous life management service that will go live early next month. Expect less clutter, a simplified UI, fresh features (i.e. a scheduler) and a new mobile version (scheduled for release next month). Demo 9: Mangaroo by Mobakids Mangaroo is a free, social manga service that allows comic artists (amateurs and professionals alike) to upload and share self-created works with other users. Readers can just read the comics, leave comments, bookmark their favorite manga or rate them. Here’s how a typical “e-comic”, submitted by a Mangaroo member, looks like (click to enlarge): Each manga is based on Flash and can be embedded in other websites. Demo 10: meme memo by meme design meme memo is a free, Flash-based “pin board” that can be covered with “virtual Post-its”. Each user can set up to ten pin boards (folders) and embed up to 1,000 Post-its (“cards”) to scrape, organize and share various information. Some cards require work by the users themselves (i.e. the ToDo card or the address book), but others get updated automatically once you add them to your folder (i.e. the Twitter card or the RSS card). Apart from pure text, it’s also possible to add videos (YouTube card), images or audio files to the pin board. Demo 11: TwitCasting Live by sidefeed As one of the few iPhone apps that were shown at TokyoCamp, Twitcasting Live ( iTunes link ) is a free Twitter client that lets you broadcast (video and audio) live through your Twitter account. The app splits the iPhone screen in half: You can see what you currently broadcast on the top and access your Twitter timeline on the bottom. When you start the recording, Twitcasting tweets a link to your followers who can watch the live broadcast on their PCs or iPhones. The app works with both 3G and Wi-Fi and supports the 3G as well as the 3GS (click here for a demo video). Demo 12: Bang Me! by DigitalNomad Let me explain the name first: Bang Me! is a wordplay of sorts on the Japanese word for “program” or “show”, which is pronounced “ban-gu-mi” (seriously). Provider DigitalNomad is marketing the downloadable software as a dead-simple video editing tool for beginners or online businesses that don’t have the budget to produce flashy promo videos. Bang Me! was featured on TechCrunch Japan last month and appeared to be much better than the name suggests (I was told they will change it when the software goes on sale internationally). Demo 13: Hanashirabe by Knowledge System In case you ever stumbled upon a flower whose name you either forgot or were interested to know, Hanashirabe is the solution for you. Just upload a picture of the flower in question, crop it, specify when you took it and the “flower recognition engine” will reveal the name of the flower in a heartbeat ( demo video ). Demo 14: Talknote Pitched as “Yammer for private use”, Talknote is a micro social communication service that has yet to launch. The main selling point of the service is that it enables multiple users to text-chat across a number of different devices – virtually in real-time. Talknote will be the first service that allows iPhone users to communicate with owners of regular Japanese handsets this way (PCs, Symbian, Blackberry, Android etc. will eventually be supported as well). The conversations are stored as “talknotes” and can be accessed again anytime later. I was able to play around with the iPhone version, which looked pretty nifty already. Demo 15: Qlippy by SpinningWorks Presented for the first time at TokyoCamp, Qlippy is an iPad application that extends to the web in the form of a social network for book lovers. The app will let users download EPUB -based ebooks off the web to read on the iPad. Provider SpinningWorks says readers will also be able to clip pictures or texts on the iPad to create their own scrapbooks. The clipped elements and scrapbooks can be shared with other people on the Qlippy website ( demo video ). Here is an early screenshot (click to enlarge): Demo 16: waarp by Waaotn Korean transplant Dong Yol Lee has presented a very early version of waarp, his 3D audio augmented, “eyes-free” social network system that eliminates the need for a visual UI. Demo 17: Video Analytics by sus4 Video Analytics is a freemium-based “Google Analytics for video” that’s especially geared towards e-commerce and education sites. The tool helps to analyze how visitors view videos by breaking down which keywords from search engines are the most effective, how many times a certain video was accessed, how many users watched it from beginning to end, at which points users pushed the stop button etc. All data is visualized online through a Google Analytics-like dashboard. Demo 18: mindia mindia wants to be the online “encyclopedia of your mind”. The main idea behind the service is to provide a platform for people to share their viewpoints on any given keyword with the world (in Japanese, at least). Unlike Wikipedia, mindia encourages users to post what they personally think and makes all discussions public, with every member having a specific profile page ( example ). In other words, mindia is like Wikipedia with a social network built on top of it. The platform is free to use, but there’s also a solution for enterprises . Demo 19: Fastweet / Fastweet Live by Glucose Tokyo-based startup Glucose presented three Twitter apps for the iPhone. Fastweet is one of the many, many Twitter clients out there and is available in the App Store as a free version (which stores just the latest 200 tweets) or as Fastweet 2K ( for $1.99 ), which keeps the latest 2,000 tweets. Fastweet Live ( iTunes link ) is a good solution if you search for specific keywords or hashtags. The app then displays just the relevant tweets dynamically, which makes sense during an event or if you want to stay informed continuously on a current hot topic or a specific news item ( demo video ). The next TokyoCamp will probably take place in April. Thanks to all attendees, startups and co-organizer KDDI Web Communications , and a sorry to the many people who couldn’t make it on the guest list this time! Go to TechCrunch Japan’s Flickr account to see more pictures of the event . CrunchBase Information KDDI Web Communications Aqush LIFEmee Information provided by CrunchBase
NSFW: Cherchez la fame – or why the media’s obsession with Twitter campaigns will make customer service smell French
Time was, companies knew how to keep track of their important customers. First, they set up loyalty programs: computerised systems that tracked the monetary value of everyone who shopped in their stores or flew on their planes or ate at their restaurant. When a high spender made a booking, the company was alerted to their status and they were treated accordingly. Frequent fliers got upgrades and champagne, frequent diners got a visit from the chef at their table – that kind of thing. Anything to ensure that the money kept flowing. And then there was the other way of measuring worth: celebrity. It was understood that if you were (in order of importance) in movies, or on television or a journalist with a significant audience then you would get special treatment too, often for free. Brad Pit doesn’t have to mingle with the plebs in the American Airlines lounge, Courtney Cox doesn’t wait in line at the bank, and the New York Times restaurant critic never has to wait a month for a table at Le Bernardin. If you’re a business, all of this makes perfect sense: high paying customers are the ones who keep you in business, and celebrities are the ones who guarantee positive mentions in the press. No one messes with Oprah. And for decades the system worked. Sure, the rest of us often found ourselves treated like crap but what were we going to do about it? Write a letter to the company’s complaints department? Write a furious blog post? Post a negative review on Yelp? Ooooh – scary! The fact is that, even with Google making it easier than ever to find negative reviews, most large companies couldn’t care less about individual complaints. The average customer simply didn’t have the value, the cachet or the audience to cause more than the tiniest PR blip. A $10 gift certificate and a form letter from the head of customer services was enough to make everything better. Frankly, I had absolutely no problem with this system. In fact it suited me just fine. For a start, I’m a journalist, so people are generally nice to me. But more importantly I’m a Brit and, as such, any reminder of our old class system – hereditary peers making the rules and peasants knowing their place – makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. None of your Thomas Jefferson ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident’ colonial bullshit. So can imagine how horrified I was when I picked up a newspaper and realised that something was starting to go very wrong with the established order of things. Two weeks ago, Kevin Smith – the film maker who brought the world Clerks, Chasing Amy and the character of Silent Bob – was flying from Oakland to Burbank on Southwest Airlines. Smith, as fans will know, is a big guy to the point where he frequently books two seats when he flies. On this occasion though, there was only one seat available on his flight, so he booked that. Which is where the problems started. Despite having checked Smith in and allowed him to board, the Southwest flight crew suddenly decided – just before takeoff – that he was (in his words) ‘too fat to fly’. In front of hundreds of passengers they escorted him off the flight. None of the crew realised he was a celebrity – he’s really only famous to stoners and people who have watched Die Hard 4 – so to them he was just a fat dude who needed to be dealt with. In response to his treatment, Smith did what you’d do, and what I’d do: he Tweeted about it. Not once, but a billion times. Dear @SouthwestAir – I know I’m fat, but was Captain Leysath really justified in throwing me off a flight for which I was already seated? Wanna tell me I’m too wide for the sky? Totally cool. But fair warning, folks: IF YOU LOOK LIKE ME, YOU MAY BE EJECTED FROM @SOUTHWESTAIR. So, @SouthwestAir, go fuck yourself. I broke no regulation, offered no “safety risk” (what, was I gonna roll on a fellow passenger?). I was..wrongly ejected from the flight Thank God I don’t..embarrass easily (bless you, JERSEY GIRL training). But I don’t sulk off either: so everyday, some new fuck-you Tweets for @SouthwestAir. …and on and on, to his 1.6m + Twitter followers , many of whom of course retweeted each and every message. But it didn’t stop there: before long, a host of major news sources had picked up the story – including many who would never normally write about a cult film maker getting bumped from a flight. The LA Times headline summed up the angle most of them took: Kevin Smith’s Southwest Airlines incident sets Web all a-Twitter . And that’s when I realised something interesting, and terrifying: Smith’s involvement wasn’t the reason the story was deemed newsworthy; Twitter’s was. Don’t believe me? The following week, across the pond and at the other end of the follower spectrum, my friend Robert Loch, founder of the Yes And Club , started his own Twitter fight. His target: One Alfred Place – a members’ club in London that offers work space for entrepreneurs. The club has recently brought in a new CEO to revitalise its fortunes and her first act was to start axing members who were using facilities too frequently. One of those members happened to mention to her friend Robert that she’d been booted, prompting him to go into battle on her behalf – writing a scathing blog post about the club and tweeting the URL… My thoughts on One Alfred Place’s appalling treatment of its members. http://tinyurl.com/yds97lm Robert only has a little over 1300 followers , but – as with Kevin Smith’s Southwest embarrassment – the story struck a nerve with enough of them (me included) that we began to retweet it. As did people who saw our retweets, and people who saw those, and so on. By the end of the day, Robert’s tweet had spread far enough that he was contacted by reporters from most of London’s major business publications, all wanting details on the “Twitter revolt” that he;d sparked. Again, it didn’t matter that Robert wasn’t himself particularly newsworthy: Twitter was the angle that interested them. You don’t have to look far for dozens more examples of this journalistic trend. Just type “twitter sparks…” (no quotes) into Google News and you’ll find dozens of headlines where Twitter’s involvement in an otherwise mundane corporate failing has propelled it to the pages of the mainstream media. A random, recent example from those results: “ Artist sparks Twitter campaign against Paperchase over disputed design ” – another UK-based story, this time concerning ‘Hidden Eloise’ an artist who noticed that the upscale stationery company ‘Paperchase’ had apparently ripped off one of her designs. She took her fight to her 1,000+ followers and before long the story had been retweeted enough times to become a trending topic. The Guardian quickly picked up the story and forced Paperchase into issuing an embarrassed apology to the artist, and taking steps to make things better. Two years ago, none of this would have been news. A cult film maker was kicked off a flight? So? What was he going to do? Make a film called ‘Jay and Silent Bob hate Southwest airlines’? (Admittedly that would still have been better than Jersey Girl). An entrepreneur’s got quietly kicked out of a members’ club to make way for more profitable clients? Tough shit: that one’s not even newsworthy enough for the most desperate trade magazine. A little known designer gets ripped off by a gigantic retail chain? Boo hoo. Tell it to someone who cares. Without a major celebrity angle, there was little to no chance of the media picking up a run-of-the-mill intellectual property complaint and forcing the company into action. But today it doesn’t matter who you are or how many fans you have. You can have 1.6m like Kevin Smith or you can have 1000 like Hidden Eloise . All that matters is that a) you have a story that tweaks people’s ‘David vs Goliath’ nerve and that b) you get enough people retweeting it that the mainstream press can paint it as a ‘ Twitter campaign ‘. In the past few months Twitter has been promoted daily on network news shows, it’s been name-checked by Hollywood A-Listers – hell, it was even mentioned in Dan Brown’s latest book; wedged in right at the end to keep da kids interested. The result: Twitter itself has become an A-list celebrity. And like with any A-list celebrity, any story that even tangentially involves it is automatically newsworthy. This presents an enormous problem for companies. If Twitter campaigns are inherently newsworthy then anyone with a Twitter account and a gripe against you has the potential to become your biggest global PR nightmare. Pissing off Joe Twitter User is just as dumb, from a PR point of view, as upsetting Will Smith or Donald Trump. Sure, I can hear the response from CEOs and heads of PR. “Oh, it’s ok, we’re on Twitter already – if anyone complains we reply to them straight away. We have an intern dedicated to it.” Yeah. No. Southwest Airlines is on Twitter , One Alfred Place is on Twitter – even Paperchase finally dragged itself on to the bandwagon a couple of weeks ago. The problem is, official responses, even if accompanied by some kind of grand gesture of apology, do little to quell a Twitter storm once it has started. The phenomenon of mass retweeting means that – to paraphrase Churchill – a complaint makes it half way around the world before the official company response has time to put its pants on. Or as the CEO of Paperchase put it to the Telegraph : “I am sure it can be beneficial but if you get an untruth (on it) it can be very dangerous.” Really there’s only one answer – and it’s one that strikes at the very heart of the established hierarchy of customer importance. Companies are going to have to start treating every single customer like a VIP. Actually, no, it’s worse than that – consider the Hidden Eloise example; she wasn’t a customer, but just a humble designer. Companies are going to have to start treating every single person in the world like a VIP. In all areas of their business they’re going to have to make sure they’re purer than pure; they’re going to have to examine every one of their processes to ensure that no one is getting screwed over. Moreover, they’re going to have to treat every complaint like it’s the most important complaint they’ve ever received, lest the complainer take their fight to Twitter. In other words, if you’re going to kick someone off a plane, you had better be sure you’re kicking them straight into the VIP lounge with a huge gift certificate and possibly even a hot stone massage. Because all of those things are cheaper than cleaning up the mess afterwards. Of course, as a Brit, this horrifies me. I mean, the idea that everyone, regardless of their wealth or fame, should be treated equally by companies just smells a bit… well, French. Quelle horreur! But as a customer, I have to admit that it’s about bloody time.
