Zalora, a Singaporean fashion and beauty e-tailer backed by Rocket Internet, has scooped up €20 million (about $26 million USD) from German retail conglomerate Tengelmann Group, just six months after it landed an undisclosed sum from JP Morgan. In addition, Zalora told us it has also started building a regional software development center in Singapore to develop its Web platform, as well as mobile apps.

Tengelmann has already invested in several other Rocket Internet interests. Last month, Linio, the so-called ‘Amazon of Latin America,’ reportedly raised about €15-20m range from the German company. In January, online marketplace Lazada, another Southeast Asia e-commerce site, announced that it picked up a round of strategic funding from Tengelmann. Sources close to that deal told TechCrunch that it was worth close to $20 million.

Zalora currently operates in Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as across Southeast Asia in Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. Since its launch early last year, the e-commerce site says it has achieved “annualized double-digit million” revenues and now employs more than 1,000 people. As Rocket Internet expands their fashion business to more markets with Zalora and other investments, they can become a stronger buyer, cutting costs and improving margins. Rocket Internet’s relationship with Tengelmann, which has more than 4,000 stores across 15 different countries and annual revenues of over €10 billion, can help it become a more important player in retail.

Zalora not only represents more build-up in developing markets for the Samwer brothers, but with its software innovation center, investing in the Singaporean retailer may also be an attempt by controversial Berlin-based incubator to show that it can innovate in addition to cloning successful business models–though that may be more of a PR move than anything (Linio is an Amazon clone, while Payleven is a duplicate of Square, and Zalora is often referred to as ‘the Zappos of Asia.’

But innovation aside, Rocket is still building out e-commerce companies in emerging markets that are attracting hundreds of millions in investment dollars. The Singaporean site’s other investors include JP Morgan–which, like Tengelmann, is also a repeat investor in Rocket Internet-backed companies. The company did not officially disclose the terms of the funding it received from JP Morgan in September, as is usual for investments in Rocket Internet companies, but Zalora told us that the value was in the “significant double digit millions” of dollars. Last fall’s deal was the seventh investment made in a Rocket Internet company by JP Morgan in the space of just a month.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

At the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference this morning, Microsoft’s CFO Peter Klein was asked about the importance of Bing for the company. According to Klein, Microsoft decided to launch its own search engine because it saw it as a “massive business opportunity,” not only as a stand-alone search engine, but also to help it improve other parts of its business.

Bing, he argues, is a “machine-learning engine that makes all of our services better.” As a search engine, it obviously also collects a huge corpus of data that Microsoft can then use elsewhere, though Klein didn’t go into the details about how exactly the company is currently doing this.

Klein also noted that running Bing has allowed Microsoft to scale in the cloud and to build out its commercial cloud services. Klein didn’t specifically talk about Azure and Microsoft’s other cloud-based tools, but it’s a fair guess that running Bing taught the company quite a bit about running a modern cloud-based operation.

He also believes that handling the large amounts of data Bing deals with has helped the company position itself well with regard to bringing big-data services to market through Bing Data.

In Klein’s view, Bing still represents a “really good business opportunity,” too. Microsoft, he told the investor audience at Morgan Stanley’s conference, has gotten significantly better at managing the cost of running Bing, and its financial performance has increased over the last year.

Over time, Klein thinks Bing will “be more and more of an intrinsic part of all of [Microsoft's] devices and platforms.” There have been occasional rumors about Microsoft wanting to sell Bing or spin it out (and Microsoft may actually have thought about this in the past), but based on Klein’s comments today, that’s not likely to happen anytime soon.

Another service Klein also thinks will get integrated more closely across the Microsoft ecosystem is Skype, which the company acquired in 2011. He seemed especially excited about Skype integration into Xbox.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook shares dropped more than 13 percent to $33.14 — below the company’s final $38 price in the company’s highly anticipated initial public offering last week. Today is an interesting test for Facebook’s worth because the company’s shares will no longer be supported by the IPO’s lead underwriter Morgan Stanley.

Facebook’s performance today may further stoke the debate over whether its IPO was priced well. To save face on Friday, Morgan Stanley had to step in to make sure that Facebook shares didn’t close below their opening price. There were also irregularities in trading on NASDAQ as some buyers had to wait hours to know whether their orders had been filled. The company’s market cap is now around $90.1 billion, down from the $104 billion valuation the company opened with last week.

That said, the real test will be over the long haul. Can Facebook prove its worth over the many years to come with more display ad and payments revenue? At Friday’s closing market cap of $104.8 billion, Facebook is worth more than one hundred times last year’s net income. Plus its revenue dipped quarter-over-quarter for the first time in the beginning of this year.

Over the weekend, there was a raging debate about whether the banks underwriting Facebook’s IPO pushed the offer price too high to $38. The financial press including The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg (and yes, even some earlier reporting from me on TechCrunch) focused on the fact that Morgan Stanley had to support Facebook’s shares above the $38 line.

Fortune’s Dan Primack and others VC’s like Benchmark’s Bill Gurley and the guest post on TechCrunch this morning from Trinity’s Dan Scholnick argue that the IPO went off fantastically well for Facebook. Because shares didn’t pop dramatically higher than the $38 offer price, it’s a sign that the company got the most capital it could out of the IPO and didn’t leave any money on the table. They also savvily negotiated the underwriters’ fees down to about 1 percent.

These are all essentially shades of gray. Facebook’s performance today will be fascinating to watch. But again, it’s just one day in the long life of a company. It’s up to Facebook to show that it is worth a lot more.

That’s a sentiment that was echoed by Union Square Ventures’ managing partner Fred Wilson this morning at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York. He said, “The price of Facebook isn’t that important. Mark built an incredible organization. I don’t care whether it’s trading at $25 or 35.”

Facebook’s performance is probably affecting tech stocks across the board. This morning, Zynga’s shares are off 7 percent to $6.65 and LinkedIn is down 6.4 percent to $92.65.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It was 6:30 on Sunday morning, August 9th, 2007 when Ted Morgan, the Boston based CEO of a little location technology start-up called Skyhook Wireless, got a totally unexpected call from an absolute stranger in California.

Who calls a complete stranger at 6:30 am on a Sunday morning – especially from California, where it was 3:30 am?

Only one man, of course. Steve Jobs. And Jobs was calling Morgan to license Skyhook’s technology for his new iPhone. The rest of the successful relationship between Apple and Skyhook, of course, is history – but it’s been captured for posterity in a Harvard Business School case study used by faculty to teach entrepreneurial students how to manage this kind of out-of-the-blue opportunity. Every entering student at Harvard Business School is taught the Skyhook case. But only one or two may be lucky enough to have a similarly magical experience with their start-up.

Morgan and Skyhook are also in the news for quite different reasons. After originally working with Google to provide Skyhook technology for the Android platform, Morgan claims that Google put pressure on Motorola and Samsung which “forced” them to choose Google’s own in-house location technology over Skyhook’s. So Skyhook is now involved in a lawsuit against Google’s supposedly anti-competitive behavior and Morgan told me his side of the story when he came into our San Francisco studio. Given today’s identification of the Google data engineer behind the company’s controversial Street View project, this interview with Morgan, who is one of Google’s most persistent critics on the data and location fronts, is particularly timely.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Three Zappos alums are trying to replicate the garage sale experience on your smartphone — and their startup Rumgr just raised a $500,000 seed round from a group of investors that includes Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh.

Co-founder Dylan Bathurst says the basic idea came from his own attempts at selling furniture before a move. When users open the app, they’re presented with a list of goods that people nearby are offering for sale. If they see something they like, there’s a public chat associated with each item, where they can ask the owner questions. And if you’re ready to make a purchase, you can negotiate the price, then go to a private chat to work out the hand-off details.

An early version of Rumgr is already live, but the startup is launching an update today that includes a separate screen for making offers, a map of nearby sales, and new tabs for tracking what you want to buy and sell. (It’s currently iPhone-only.)

Now that Bathurst and his team are actually launching a company, they’ve discovered that there are, in fact, other garage sale-type services out there — and of course there’s always Craigslist. The difference, says co-founder Ray Morgan, is that Rumgr wants to fundamentally reinvent the experience for a new device.

“We’re not trying to replicate Craigslist on the phone,” he says.

For one thing, Rumgr is trying to make the listing process as easy as possible. You just upload a photo and that’s it — no description necessary. And the app doesn’t allow users to search for a specific category, like couches or beds. It sounds like the company isn’t completely ruling out a search feature in the future, but Morgan says that’s not the point. Instead, users are supposed to stumble on random, cool stuff, just as they would at a garage sale.

Bathurst and Morgan admit that it may be a challenge to attract enough people in each location for the app to be useful, but they say Rumgr can become a vibrant community with a relatively small core of engaged, connected users — which is what happened in early tests, with only 40 or so of the team’s friends and colleagues.

In addition to Hsieh, Rumgr’s investors include Zappos CTO Arun Rajan, Fred Mossler, and Andrew Donner, CEO and owner of Resort Gaming Group. Following Hsieh’s vision of revitalizing downtown Las Vegas and turning it into a startup hub, Rumgr is based in Las Vegas. (After all, as former Zappos employees, Bathurst, Morgan, and their third co-founder Alex Morgan already live there.) Among the items in their office? A whiteboard purchased off Rumgr.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The drip-drop of financial news about Facebook‘s impending initial public offering is starting to turn into a downpour. The company is planning to file its initial prospectus on Wednesday morning, Reuters is reporting, with the intention of raising a conservative $5 billion.

The report, through Reuters subsidiary International Financing Review, also answers the question of which bank will lead — Morgan Stanley. The others will include Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Barclays Capital, JP Morgan, and Goldman Sachs, which had appeared to be in the lead position last year after it helped Facebook raise a $1.5 billion late-stage round. However, issues around that funding may have contributed to Morgan Stanley getting the top spot.

If everything goes as planned with the SEC’s review, Facebook will likely go public in May.

The general IPO time-frame has already been widely reported. The most interesting part of this latest news, if you’re not a banker, is the relatively low amount that Facebook is seeking. Previous reports had put it seeking up to0 $10 billion. Considering the middling performance of other recent tech IPOs, Facebook appears to be wary of selling too much stock before it knows more about how the market feels. For now, the valuation and share price are still unknown, although shares on private secondary markets are currently selling at prices that would make it worth above $80 billion.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

In a sign that it may be pushing off an IPO after Groupon’s lackluster performance, rival LivingSocial has raised $176 million in a new round of funding, according to a new SEC filing. Reports of the new funding first surfaced in the New York Times a few weeks ago.

While the SEC document does not name the investors, we’ve been able to independently confirm the round was led by JP Morgan, with existing investors Lightspeed Ventures and Amazon also participating. We’ve also heard that no existing shareholders or executives took money off the table (*cough* Groupon *cough*)

According to the SEC filing, Code Advisors and JP Morgan were both advisors and received $5.6 million in “finders fees.” Who needs IPO fees when there is plenty of private capital to go around? (Did JP Morgan just pay themselves? Funny how that works). This funding brings the total capital LivingSocial has raised to $808 million.

Groupon shares are trading at about $21, which is down from their first-day pop of $28, but back up from the lows of last week when they hit $15. The IPO window is still open, but seems like it could crash shut at any moment.

This fundraising will allow LivingSocial to keep expanding organically and through acquisitions without tapping the public markets. And this may be but the first tranche of a larger $400 million funding, which is the total offering amount (meaning LivingSocial can raise up to that amount in future tranches as part of this round).

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Interesting story breaking that Yahoo put an unsolicited bid in to acquire Hulu. For all I know it’s completely true. But I’ve just received an unsolicited message from a source close to Yahoo that says it’s completely untrue (probably because of all my digging the last week on this Yahoo story).

Yahoo hasn’t had any meaningful conversations with Hulu about a buyout, says this source. The source added that Hulu is actively looking for a buyer and has hired Morgan Stanley to represent them.

Like I said, this is all I’ve got right now. The WSJ and the LA Times say they have sources confirming that Yahoo made an offer. With big acquisitions the press is a huge pawn in negotiating strategy. The one thing I’d like to know is who’s the source for the LA Times article. If that source is close to Hulu or Morgan Stanley, I’d be wary. Of course, my source has her own agenda, too.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch