Online coupon giant RetailMeNot has just filed for $230 million IPO, according to an S-1 released today.

RetailMeNot, which was acquired in 2010 by the $300 million-funded WhaleShark Media, operates one of the largest digital coupon marketplaces (WhaleShark was subsequently rebranded as RetailMeNot this year). In 2012, the marketplace featured digital coupons from over 60,000 retailers and brands, and the site saw more than 450 million total visits to desktop and mobile websites last year. As of December 31, 2012, the company said it has contracts with more than 10,000 retailers, or paid retailers. RetailMeNot sites account for the majority of the company’s traffic.

In terms of financials, RetailMeNot reports that revenues increased from $16.9 million in 2010 to $144.7 million in 2012. In the same period, net income increased from $2.3 million to $26 million, so the company appears to be profitable, and growing.

The Austin-based company has raised $300 million in funding from Google Ventures, IVP, Austin Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners and Adam Street Partners. Whaleshark had previously acquired a number of other coupon sites, including vouchercodes, deals2buy, coupon7, couponshare, cheapstingybargains.com, and deals.com.

It’s good to see a non-enterprise, consumer-focused company bet on the public markets in this climate. We’ve definitely seen a number of strong enterprise IPOs, so it will be interesting to see how the markets react to the more consumer-facing, and ecommerce-related RetailMeNot.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

If you own a Samsung Galaxy and are a Jay-Z fan, then you will probably be happy to hear that Samsung is giving away one million copies of “Magna Carta Holy Grail” to owners of its flagship smartphone 72 hours before the album’s official debut on July 4.

Jay-Z hinted at the endorsement deal on Sunday when he appeared in a TV commercial during Game 5 of the NBA finals, along with Pharrell Williams and producer Rick Rubin. The tagline was “The Next Big Thing”–a teaser for the early release of “Magna Carta Holy Grail” on Galaxy devices.

Samsung bought 1 million copies of the album, which is scheduled for release on July 4, to give to Samsung Galaxy owners. The Wall Street Journal reports that Samsung paid $5 each for the albums–reaping Jay-Z $5 million for “Magna Carta Holy Grail” before it even goes on sale.

The deal is notable for a couple of reasons. First, it could help Samsung further polish its image in the U.S. as it continues its heated rivalry with Apple. Though Samsung is the top smartphone seller in the world, with a 28.8% percent share of the global market according to IDC, iPhones continue to lead in the U.S. Samsung’s Galaxy series has performed very well in the U.S., but the Korean company still suffers from lingering perceptions that it’s just a copycat thanks to the drawn-out Apple-Samsung legal battles over patents. An endorsement deal with one of the U.S.’s top rap artists may help Samsung gain more cred with consumers, especially younger ones.

The deal may also help Samsung’s Music Hub, a streaming music service available on Galaxy devices, compete with Apple’s iTunes Radio, which will be included with iOS devices and offer preview of tracks before they are available elsewhere.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Apple is building a big, visually stunning store in the Stanford shopping center. A few hundred yards from the construction site sits a small, modest Apple location. Last spring, Microsoft opened a flagship spot right next to the small Apple store with a free Maroon 5 concert.

Whether for pure dollars and cents or for appearances (maybe both), Apple has been very aggressive in Palo Alto in the past couple of years. The company had a very nice store on University Avenue in downtown Palo Alto; in October 2012, they moved down the street to an even bigger, more prominent location. Now, this new store in the Stanford shopping center is supposed to become one of the company’s flagship stores.

We’re told that the company tests its retail products at the Stanford Shopping Center and University Avenue locations; when the company began offering self checkout, the engineers who worked on the project were in those stores testing the new systems. This new flagship location offers enormous space for testing new retail products, and makes the nearby Microsoft store an afterthought at best.

Ifo Apple Store reports that the ”store design was completed in 2011 by Apple’s long-time architectural firm Bohlin Cywinski Jackson. It was approved by Steve Jobs about six months before Tim Cook assumed the position of CEO in August of that year.”

The design for the store features a visually floating roof and gives passerby’s wide angles to see the storefront; a large stone wall will reportedly separate the front of the store from the back (Image via Palo Alto Online).

The Palo Alto Online reports that construction is happening seven days a week, usually beginning at 7 a.m. on the 12,000 square feet store. The Palo Alto Online also reported that while initial estimates had the store opening in November 2012, delays may be due to “the sensitive glass design of the building.”

Employees at the University Avenue Apple store told TechCrunch that they don’t know when the Stanford shopping center store will open; employees said that some of them were only given two weeks notice in October before they moved down the street to the new University Ave. location.

I checked out the construction myself, and the store is impressive. While it looks months away from an opening, it’s a massive space and the glass facade will be a striking architectural accomplishment that makes the store stand out even with impressive neighbors.

Less than two minutes after I started taking pictures of the construction, a security guard told me to stop, as taking pictures of any buildings or logos is ”against their policy.” Never change, Palo Alto.

Check out more photos of the construction below:

While most of the construction is hidden behind a large fence, you can see the massive glass panels and early work on the roof in these photos.

Here you can see the scope of the complex, with the glass section in front.

Images via Mary Orlin.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

This coming Friday night, I’ll be at the API Days conference in San Francisco to talk for a few minutes about my perspectives of the API economy. I am not a developer — just an observer — so my views are not deeply technical. That just means I have to ask more questions and talk to more people about APIs and what they represent.

But then I have to simmer it down, collect my thoughts, and then ask some more questions. Here are two themes I am picking up on from all these conversations.

Speed: APIs are making things faster. They connect apps. Software is eating the world. APIs connect the software so it can eat the world faster. Distribution is a driver of speed. The more distributed the API network, the better it can scale and the faster it can work to connect apps and create a mesh that is increasingly more effective than content-delivery networks.

An API distributed from a central point can slow things down considerably if the load increases on the server. API management companies are pushing APIs to the edge in order to manage the billions of calls that they get daily from service providers that connect the apps into websites, mobile devices, cars — you name it.

Data-intensive APIs are doing something else. They are slowing the network. To alleviate the issue, service providers are looking at the I/O, trying to find ways to make the data connect faster to the APIs that, in turn, connect the apps so someone can post a picture or get a text message about an update from a blog. It’s this need for speed that cloud services are built upon. Scale out the infrastructure and app developers will use it to get better performance and overall quality improvements. What’s still emerging are the advancements of the networks themselves. Again, that’s where software enters the picture and the further need for APIs. The infrastructure needs to be programmed. How that’s done is the big question.

Automation: Once one part of a system gets automated, the rest of it soon follows. APIs are the glue that makes the automation possible. People want to connect their apps. It’s why services like Zapier and IFTTT have gained such popularity.

People want to connect apps to get work done and reshape their reality. Chris Dancy uses IFTTT and Zapier to connect apps that feed into Google Calendar, Evernote and Excel. He uses these services to quantify his life. Through automation, Dancy can program himself and the things around him. He can connect his dog into the network and track its movement in the house.

In this new reality, everything becomes a node. You, me, the lamp post across the street all can have sensors and APIs to connect with other people and things. If this is the case, then the API economy is more about how this new network makes for different forms of commerce that maximize these connected, automated systems. The questions: What are these new forms of commerce? What are the infrastructure and systems needed for this new reality?

These are two themes in particular I look forward to discussing.

There’s a third but it’s an open-ended one that may be better off ruminating about in the hallways or over a beer. And that’s how this new idea about data and APIs is better understood by more than 1 percent of the people out there. It’s not just the geeks who should be able to live in the future but everyone else, too.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The mystery of Path’s mysterious growth deepens.

The app, which has been around for nearly three years, miraculously jumped up the charts from between 500th and 600th place to the teens on the free list about two months ago. That raised questions about how the app was able to do that so spontaneously. Was it that Path finally suddenly acquired the network effects and organic growth that it had worked for years to trigger? Or was it something else?

Valleywag speculated that it was spamming tactics plus spending on advertising, citing a graph from app and mobile ad tracking service Onavo Insights. The chart showed that an uptick in advertising spending that coincided with Path’s gradual rise up the overall charts. In fact, a source familiar with the spending habits of various top-tier mobile developers tells me that Path was the third highest spender on iOS app install ads on Facebook in the month of April behind the usual suspects like the top-grossing gaming companies. It then tapered its marketing spend down in May, and it also suffered slightly on the charts after Facebook shut down the app’s “Find Friends” ability.

Path’s Facebook ad spending was also done in a clever way, with much of that spend being devoted to Spanish-language ads instead of English ones. We have an example unit at the top of the story, which appeared in the Facebook mobile feed and which Path put money behind earlier this spring.

Not only that, if you dive into Onavo’s data, you’ll see that the highest correlating apps for Path usage in the U.S. are Mi Banco Mobile and El Nuevo Dia. Morin has talked about this publicly before, telling The Wall Street Journal that the company saw a spike in adoption in countries like Venezuela, Mexico and Puerto Rico.

Path, for its part, is issuing its clearest statement today on its spending habits. It says it spends nowhere near what Valleywag claimed, which is more than $10 million in marketing over the last two months.

“We would like to set the record straight once and for all — Path’s recent growth has been primarily organic and viral,” said the company’s vice president of marketing Nate Johnson. “While we do run Facebook ads in growing markets around the world, that spend averages in the low 10′s of thousands of dollars a month at best. Recent claims that Path has spent an order of magnitude more than that are laughable.”

There are a couple ways that you can look at this.

If you took a more cynical point of view, you could argue that this is a way for Path to grow without industry observers and potential investors seeing that the company is doing potentially unsustainable user acquisition.

If you took a more benign point of view, you could say that the messaging market already has leading contenders in Europe, North America, China, Japan and South Korea through companies like WhatsApp, KakaoTalk, WeChat, Facebook Messenger and Line. While WhatsApp does have a lead in Latin America and other Spanish-speaking markets, perhaps this could be a savvy way for Path to lock down one of the last regional markets that’s vulnerable to a newcomer.

To be fair, I also think that Valleywag’s headline about Path “cheating” its way to the top of the charts is overblown.

Spending money to advertise your product is not a sin. The majority of companies at the very top of the grossing lists do this every day. It’s a form of arbitrage: spend X amount of money to bring in a user, and earn Y from them over their lifetime of playing a game, buying Groupons or stickers or whatever else. Mobile gaming companies like Supercell and Kabam have dedicated “user acquisition” teams that can spend millions of dollars per month on this type of marketing.

If Path is presumably earning enough revenue from sticker sales to justify this spending, it’s not really a problem.

But spending money on marketing in an ROI negative way is problematic if you intend to build a sustainable business — which could be an issue if the company moves forward with early-stage fundraising talks that could value it in the high hundreds of millions or even a billion dollars.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google today launched a large update to Google Maps that adds more than 1,000 new locations from around the world to the service’s Street View feature. These include numerous locations that can’t be reached by car, including the cathedral of Seville, the canals of Copenhagen and the Singapore Zoo. Overall, it seems, this update focuses on locations from Asia, Europe, Latin America, the U.S. and Canada.

Google, of course, has long been expanding Street View’s reach beyond cities and rural streets, thanks to its backpack-like Trekker, tricycles and, most recently, its underwater Street View scooter. Today’s update, Google says, includes numerous historical landmarks and sports stadiums, but it’s also adding some ski slopes in Chile and other relatively unusual locations to its lineup.

Today’s large rollout hints at the fact that Google is speeding up its Street View imaging efforts. Until now, it would often announce some of these projects individually. Now, however, it’s adding a huge amount of locations from around the world in one launch, even though quite a few of them are probably a first for the Street View team.

All of this imagery, of course, is available on the web, as well as on Google Maps for Android and iPhone.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

After months of speculation, the fate of Waze, the social-mapping-location-data startup, is finally decided: Google is buying the company, giving the search giant a social boost to its already-strong mapping and mobile businesses. Although speculation has had it at $1 billion to $1.3 billion, but so far there is no price on the deal. In any event, it’s a doubly strategic move. Google’s purchase comes in the wake of what appeared to be failed negotiations between the Israel-based startup two big rivals of the search giant: Facebook, which was eyeing up the company but apparently faltered at the due dilligence phase; and Apple (neither company ever publicly confirmed interest in acquiring Waze).

The news comes after a particularly heated few days in which reports of Google’s interest in Waze reached new heights, after first surfacing two weeks ago. In the wildfire that is internet publishing, many even went so far as to report it as a done deal, making things even more confusing.

Waze had raised some $67 million in funding from Blue Run Ventures, Magma, Vertex, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, and Horizon Ventures. And it looks like the majority of the payout in the sale will go to these VCs. Globes, the Israeli business newspaper that first reported the latest interest from Google, estimated that payouts to co-founders — Ehud Shabtai, Amir and Gili Shinar, Uri Levine, Arie Gillon — and its CEO Noam Bardin, will be under $200 million in total.

There are at least a couple of places where you can see Google making use of Waze data.

Social. Under CEO Larry Page, Google has been especially bullish on where it positions itself on social, which it has been hinging on Google+ as a kind of web across all of its other properties to show you, the user, what those you know are doing, and also to let your connections see what you are looking at online. Taking a page from Facebook’s book, the thinking goes that this helps with discovery and engagement.

Waze, as a crowdsourced location platform, would give Google an additional, very mobile-based angle on this concept, letting users not just share places (i.e. sites) visited on the web, but actual places visited physically. As Bardim noted at the AllThingsD conference in April, “What search is for the web, maps are for mobile.” By this, he means that most of the searches you do on mobile have to do with location, and Waze is one of the few companies out there that is bringing that kind of search together with actual map data and a social layer. (The NYT ran an interesting piece yesterday with one mapping company describing how maps on mobile specifically become a “canvas” for all other apps.)

Competition. Waze could be a two-pronged fork for Google: On one hand, it gives the search giant nice, healthy wedge into the mass of consumers who are already using the app on iOS devices. But it also, if reports are to be believed, also gives Google a way of roadblocking how companies like Facebook could use Waze’s assets. As the startup likes to point out, it’s not a mapping company, but a big data player. Facebook, making its own big push on mobile, would have been a natural home for a socially-focused company like Waze, which also happens to be one of the few home-grown mapping databases around. This will mean that Facebook will need to have to continue to use third-party data for its own location-based searches and information, or less look to acquire elsewhere.

(Now could be a good time to wonder whether Nokia might consider offloading Navteq, its loss-making but strategic mapping asset, to shore up its financial position…)

It’s interesting, in any case, that Google and Waze have now kissed and made up. It was only in April that Bardin jabbed at Google when talking about who the big players in mapping were and how Waze stacks up against them: Waze used to benchmark itself with Google, he noted at the AllThingsD conference, but after the search giant cut off access to its API, Waze started to benchmark to Navteq.

When the Facebook acquisition reports surfaced, we’d heard that one of the sticking points was that Waze wanted to keep its R&D in Israel, while Facebook was leaning to a Menlo Park relocation. Since then, others have told us that this was just smoke a mirrors and that there were other reasons the deal fell through (Mountain View’s most famous resident being one possible factor). Google, unlike Facebook, has a decent presence in the country, including a new hub for startups started in December 2012, Campus Tel Aviv.

Google today made it clear that it would keep Waze’s operations going in Israel — for now, at least. “The Waze product development team will remain in Israel and operate separately for now,” Brian McClendon, Google’s VP of Geo, noted in the blog post announcing the deal. “We’re excited about the prospect of enhancing Google Maps with some of the traffic update features provided by Waze and enhancing Waze with Google’s search capabilities.”

In any case, it makes sense that Waze might want to keep its Israel-based operations intact. Just about all of the company’s 110-or-so employees are there, with only around 10 in a very modest office in Palo Alto, just down the street from another big-data startup, Palantir. That small proportion, however, is mighty: regular workers there include CEO Noam Bardin and Di-Ann Eisnor, Waze’s VP of platform and partnerships.

The U.S. is currently Waze’s largest single market — in April, Bardin noted that 12 million of its (at the time) 44 million users are based there — and this is where the company is putting its growth efforts for now, too. In February of this year, Waze expanded its U.S. operations, and its monetization ambitions, by opening an office on Madison Avenue, the heart of the advertising world in New York City, and we’ve seen that members of the team have been visiting New York recently. There is still a lot of development to be done on the advertising front — and given Google’s pole position in online and mobile advertising, that would give Waze another obvious fit with its new owner.

Ironically, the news comes as Google continues to fight other kinds of fires on the mapping front. In the U.S. it is trying to get a ruling overturned that it violated federal wiretap laws with its StreetView services.

In Europe, Google recently offered up a settlement in a search antitrust suit, originally brought by travel and mapping companies, that claimed Google, the biggest search engine in Europe by a longshot, was giving its own mapping and travel results more preference in search results over those of its competitors, making business untenable for smaller players. In that ongoing case, the EU competition regulator Joachin Almunia said at the end of May that Google still needed to make more concessions.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Toyota has demoed its upcoming new social car configurator at Google’s I/O conference.  Check out the video below.

Built in collaboration with Google and Saatchi & Saatchi LA and Joystick Interactive, the new social shopping Toyota app will allow people to configure a car together in a Google Hangout session. Up to five people can actively take part choosing features and colours in real time, whilst a further 5 can look on and comment. Then participants can take a virtual Street View test-drive though a chosen location by plugging in Google Maps coordinates. Finally, a local dealer can drop into the hangout to invite people for a real test drive.

The virtues (or not) of design by committee aside, this is social commerce done right – helping people shop smarter with social technology.  Social as a (omnichannel) service – not social spam.

Article courtesy of Social Commerce Today

Competition is heating up in the on-demand transportation industry, but unlike other segments of the market, there’s no lock-in that keeps customers loyal to one service or another. Users looking for a way to get from one place to another seemingly only care about the cost, convenience and reliability of the service.

With that in mind, services like Uber and Lyft aren’t fighting to be the only app people use necessarily, but they definitely want to be the first app passengers turn to when requesting a ride. With convenience and reliability becoming commoditized, the next battle will be waged based on price.

Making On-Demand A Commodity

Once upon a time, Uber was pretty much the only game in town if you needed a fast, reliable alternative to hailing a cab on the street, or calling one of the local taxi dispatchers. It’s not surprising, then, that it charged a premium for that convenience and reliability. If you needed to be somewhere, it was worth it to pay a little bit more to know that a car was on its way and, well, how far away that car would be.

Over the last few years, however, competitors have popped up with on-demand ride apps of their own. On the one hand there are apps like Hailo, which allow customers users to use their phone to hail a taxi, rather than having to find one on the street, or rely on a local dispatcher. And on the other hand, there were apps like Lyft, which rely on community, non-commercially licensed drivers to get passengers from point A to point B.

In both cases, Uber’s competitors undercut its traditional black car prices by a significant margin. With convenience and reliability becoming commoditized, they’re competing on price instead.

Of course, Uber hasn’t been sitting still since its lower-cost competitors have arrived. It, too, has been working on making lower-priced options available to users. In cities like New York, that means its own e-hail taxi service. And in San Francisco and some other cities, it’s moving forward with its own peer-to-peer ride share offering as part of its UBERx service.

First App Opened

But while UBERx’s prices are lower, they’re still above the typical cost of a Lyft or SideCar ride. That’s led some in the San Francisco Bay Area to switch. Anecdotally, I know a number of people who are active users of both service in San Francisco, but tend to open the Lyft app first when they need a ride.

Price is a big reason for choosing one over the other. But the community aspect is another reason. Say what you will about the big pink mustaches on Lyft rides, or the obligatory fist bump when you enter the car of one of its drivers, but those things lend users to know what kind of experience they can expect when they get into a Lyft. (Then, again, it’s not for everyone — I know plenty of people who would prefer not to get into a conversation with their driver when requesting a ride.)

For a while, even if those users opened the Lyft app first, there was no guarantee that there would be rides available. The startup went through some growing pains in San Francisco at the beginning of the year, as demand outstripped its supply. It seems like Lyft has gotten those problems mostly under control over the last few months, as it more than doubled the number of drivers it has serving the city.

Even still, there are still times when an Uber will be available and a Lyft will not. In those cases, Uber wins the ride, but those cases are becoming rarer as Lyft removes its supply constraints and better positions its drivers.

Price Wars Are Coming

What happens if UBERx becomes cheaper than Lyft, though? That’s a scenario we will see play out soon, as Uber is poised to lower the price of UBERx fares by 25 percent, according to a memo it sent its drivers last week. While lower fares will reduce the amount drivers will make per ride, Uber is betting that the increase in volume will more than make up for it.

That’s a bet Uber likely feels comfortable making, in part because it has years of data to back it up. And it’s a bet that Uber can make in part because it has a diversified set of higher-priced services in UberBLACK and UberSUV that will be able to provide healthier margins even as it reduces fares on UBERx.

Will that make it first app opened? Or maybe only app opened? You can be the guys at Uber sure hope so.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Dollar Shave Club, the subscription razor service incubated by Los Angeles-based Science, Inc. and backed by firms like Venrock, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Andreessen Horowitz, is launching its second line of products today — butt wipes.

The idea may seem like something designed to provoke embarrassed laughter, but CEO Michael Dubin told me, “Nothing we do is an accident. It’s funny to talk about, but it was derived from research. We wanted to understand the products that guys use in the bathroom and where they want to see improvement.”

Dubin went on to suggest that the new product, called One Wipe Charlies, is addressing a similar need to its razor service. It’s “replenishing an often-used, always-overpriced staple,” he said. Indeed, although I recently became a Dollar Shave Club subscriber and do enjoy the convenience of the regular deliveries, the appeal of the razors wasn’t immediately obvious — when the company first launched, I didn’t think buying new razors was that big an inconvenience or expensive. On the other hand, I could immediately remember grumbling trips down the street when I discovered that my apartment was low on toilet paper.

As for why it’s selling wipes instead of toilet paper, Dollar Shave Club says that 51 percent of men have already used wipes, although only 16 percent use them in place of toilet paper. The company will charge $4 for a 40-pack, and it argues that wipes are cleaner, feel better, are faster, and although “we can’t actually prove this one,” may even make your butt smell better.

That last point gets at one of the startup’s main assets — its humor. And not just the “well, that’s cute” humor that you find with many startups, but actual laugh-out-loud wit. The company is probably best-known for the video that Dubin made promoting its razors, “Our Blades Are F***ing Great” (currently at more than 10 million views on YouTube), and Dubin made a sequel (embedded below) promoting One Wipe Charlies. It also brings that approach to its packaging and customer emails.

“We certainly think the Dollar Shave Club experience is more fun than going to the store,” Dubin said.

The broader goal, he added, is “own the bathroom for guys,” so we can probably expect more product launches in this vein. Dollar Shave Club currently has about 200,000 active members, he said.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch