It’s that time of the week for CrunchWeek, the show where a few of us writers chat up the most interesting stories from the past seven days.
Ryan Lawler, Greg Kumparak, and I chatted about Yahoo’s $1.1 billion purchase of Tumblr (and the reports that the company is eyeing a purchase of Hulu); Lyft’s $60 million raise from Andreessen Horowitz and the big reveal of Microsoft’s next generation gaming console, the Xbox 1.
Tune in above for more!
Article courtesy of TechCrunch
Tumblr just can’t catch a break. Yeah, yeah, they’re getting a billion dollars from Yahoo — but it’s been a torrent of criticism ever since. Angry users! Porn! Poooooorn!
Know what probably won’t help? Botching the key detail of an email sent to many of your most tech-savvy users.
Tumblr just sent out a big ol’ mass email to all of the users who host a Tumblr blog through their own, independently owned domain. In other words, to the folks who know enough about these bleepy-bloopy electronic space typewriters we use to be able to get a bit fancy with their Tumblr blogs.
It warned users of an impending change they’d need to make to their settings — a new IP address they needed to point their domain at — unless they wanted their blog to suddenly “no longer work“.
The catch: they, uh, kinda forgot the most important part. They’d put in a placeholder for the IP, and… it never got replaced. “Please point your custom domain to [IP Address],” it directed. Wherps.
For many of these users, this was among the first emails they’d received since the Yahoo acqusition. Within about 30 seconds, the tweets lampooning the email started going up.
Moral of the story: If you work at a lil’ company and manage to botch a mass email, don’t worry too much. You’re in good company. Billion dollar company.
Article courtesy of TechCrunch
Two VMware executives have left to join Redpoint Ventures to help the firm extend its reach into the enterprise and mobile markets. Their leaving marks a string of recent VMware departures, following the Pivotal spinout of several of the two companies’ product groups.
Both executives joining Redpoint had important roles at VMware. Javier Soltero was responsible for driving advanced development and strategy for application level cloud services. Soltero joined VMware after the acquisition of SpringSource in 2009. Three months prior, SpringSource, a Java framework, had acquired Hyperic, a large-scale web infrastructure management software provider. Soltero was co-founder and CEO of the company. Soltero has some Internet chops that date back to the earliest days of the web. Early in his career, Soltero worked at Netscape, where he was responsible for early Internet messaging, application servers and e-commerce technologies.
Kevin Henrikson joined Zimbra in 2005 and worked there until Yahoo! acquired the company in 2007. In 2010, VMware acquired Zimbra, where Henrikson directed Zimbra’s engineering and development roadmap planning and execution, including potential company acquisitions. He holds a published patent and a filed patent in conjunction with his work at Zimbra.
A number of VMware executives have left the company in the past year. Last week, Microsoft hired Patrick Chanezon who recently left VMware to join Microsoft as its director of enterprise evangelism. Dave McCrory also recently left VMware to join Warner Brothers. He served as one of the chief developers of VMware’s Cloud Foundry, the platform as a service.
And in January, CTO Steve Herrod left to join General Catalyst as a managing director investing and supporting early-stage enterprise companies.
Article courtesy of TechCrunch
Another day, another acquisition by Yahoo.
Yahoo said this morning it’s acquired PlayerScale, a California-based startup that makes software infrastructure for cross-platform gaming. Financial details haven’t been disclosed.
PlayerScale, which was self-funded and cash-flow positive as of this past January, was founded in 2011. According to a VentureBeat article also from January, the company had a staff of 14. It’s not clear yet how many staff are involved and will be joining Yahoo — we’ve reached out for details and will update this with any information we receive.
The four-year-old PlayerScale says its platform now has more than 150 million players, which marks significant growth from just this past January when our own Anthony Ha reported the platform had crossed the 100 million user line. For now this does not look like a straight acqui-hire situation, as both Yahoo and PlayScale say the gaming platform will remain active post-acquisition and continue to be developed.
Here is a statement provided by Yahoo PR:
“The team has built an incredible gaming platform that is used by over 150 million players worldwide. We intend to continue to support and grow PlayerScale’s technology, and we look forward to building great new experiences on Yahoo! using the PlayerScale platform.”
And here is PlayerScale CEO Jesper Jensen‘s blog post on the deal:
“Today is a great day — both in our journey with PlayerScale and for users of our Player.IO product. We are happy to announce the next big step toward our goal of building the best possible gaming infrastructure platform: we have been acquired by Yahoo!. And don’t worry, we’re not going anywhere. Our platform will continue to support the same great games that you love playing today … and in fact, it will only get better from here!
Our goal has always been to help developers build the best possible games, without having to worry about building and scaling the infrastructure required to operate today’s biggest successes. In working with the folks at Yahoo!, it has become clear that we share this passion.
We have spent the past four years growing a three-person startup into a product that powers games played by over 150 million people worldwide and we are adding over 400,000 new users every day. In the last four months alone, we have increased our daily user growth rate by almost sixty percent. With Yahoo!’s backing, we can crank out awesome products and improvements to our platform faster than ever before. We will continue to support our existing product and deliver new services to help you grow and manage your success in cross-platform gaming — whether it’s casual, social or mobile.
Today marks a milestone for PlayerScale and I want to sincerely thank the team, our developers and millions of users for the adventure so far and can promise there will be more to come.
- Jesper Jensen”
Article courtesy of TechCrunch
Becoming an investor is easier than it’s ever been, and yet the vast majority of people today aren’t making individual investments. To help get more people investing, Loyal3 has built a platform enabling consumers to invest in companies without paying transaction or management fees. And to meet that goal, the company has raised more money in an effort to democratize stock ownership.
Loyal3 brought on another $18 million in Series C financing, which was led by DNS-L3, an entity controlled by the business interests of Michael Pucker and Gigi Pritzker Pucker. Additional investors include former Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly and Loyal3 Chairman and CEO Barry Schneider, both existing investors in the company. Altogether, it’s now raised $45 million to make investing easy and accessible for regular investors.
Despite falling transaction and management fees, as well as wider availability of online tools for investing in stocks, only about 18 percent of people in the U.S. have made individual investments, according to Schneider. Part of the reason for that is the costs involved with making stock purchases, but part of it is also connected to the ease of use — or lack thereof — on most online trading platforms.
Loyal3 seeks to change that, by enabling its users to easily invest in brands that they know and recognize. It allows investors to purchase as little as $10 in stock for the top 50 brands on Facebook, as well as some other brands that the company works with.
Rather than having its users sort through various tickers or search for public companies themselves, Loyal3 provides visitors to its platform with the logos of brands they can invest in. Once they choose a brand they have an affinity for, it takes about three clicks to actually put money into those companies.
Being the curious dude I am, I tested out the platform for myself, putting $10 into a company I have an affinity for — AB InBev.* Sure enough, the process was drop-dead simple, even for someone like me, who tends to think he’s too dumb and poor to make individual investments.
And that is the point: Loyal3 makes it easy enough and cheap enough for basically anyone to buy stock. With a ridiculously low minimum purchase price and a simple purchasing interface, the company makes stock ownership accessible to pretty much anyone. In addition to individual purchases, individuals can choose to schedule monthly transactions to be automatically deducted from their bank accounts. There’s a minimum of $10 per investment, but a maximum of $2,500 per stock per month.
How can it provide this fee-free service? Loyal3 does it by getting brands to pay whatever transaction fees are associated with the trades. For them, giving common investors ownership is another form of brand marketing, and it creates greater affinity between the purchaser and the company itself. According to Schneider, people spend more, refer their friends more, and shop more often with companies they have direct ownership in.
From a capital markets perspective, the program also brings incremental demand for participating companies’ stock. While it won’t necessarily move markets, in the long term this type of program could help stabilize the price of certain stocks. Loyal3 doesn’t allow stock shorting, and it doesn’t lend shares to speculative investors who wish to short certain stocks. Schneider says it also provides a lower cost way for companies to manage retail shareholders.
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* I would have invested my $10 in a tech company like Yahoo, Facebook, Apple, or Google, but that would have been a HUGE CONFLICT OF INTEREST.
Article courtesy of TechCrunch
Fresh from closing its purchase of newsreading app Pulse, LinkedIn has made another acquisition to dive deeper into the mobile space. TechCrunch has found out, and confirmed, that the social network has aqui-hired Maybe, the social polling startup founded by Omar Hamoui — the man who set up, ran and then sold mobile ad company AdMob to Google for $750 million.
All staff from Maybe, except for Hamoui himself, are now at LinkedIn and working in its mobile division. That includes four engineers and one designer, LinkedIn has told us. Meanwhile, Maybe itself has now shut down. Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed.
Maybe first emerged in June of last year, a startup that was incubated and spun out of Hamoui’s now-defunct startup generator Churn Labs.
Maybe was one of the contenders in the area of polling startups — an area that has seen some other M&A activity, specifically with the acquisition of GoPollGo by Yahoo. Others include Seesaw, Fashism and Thumb.
It’s not clear why Maybe closed up shop so fast. Maybe because the polling space is so crowded? Maybe because Hamoui is working on something else? Maybe because LinkedIn made Maybe an offer it couldn’t refuse? LinkedIn is not commenting further, and we have not yet heard back from Hamoui himself. Maybe we will update when we do.
Update: Hamoui has now responded to confirm the acqui-hire as well, and explain a little more of what went on:
“After a number of different product directions we didn’t feel that what we were building was having the impact we wanted,” he says.
Putting aside competitive pressures in the polling space and startups in general looking for just the right product for the market, there is a connection between LinkedIn and Admob: Kevin Scott, SVP of Engineering at the social network, was previously VP of Engineering at AdMob. TechCrunch understands that after Hamoui and his two co-founders, Haider Sabri and Wayne Pan, met with him, they all decided it would be a natural next step for the mobile-focused team that they had built up.
“Although we had plenty of cash of in the bank, we were really impressed with the team and vision at LinkedIn,” says Hamoui. “Having the excellent mobile focused team we had built join them was clearly a way to have the kind of impact we were hoping for.”
Hamoui says the his own next steps “aren’t locked down yet.” We’ll definitely keep you posted with what we find out.
Article courtesy of TechCrunch
Editor’s note: Kakul Srivastava is CEO and co-founder of Tomfoolery, Inc. She was General Manager for Flickr from 2004 – 2009 and helped the product grow from 37,000 users to over 60 million. Simon Batistoni is VP of Platform and co-founder of Tomfoolery, Inc. He joined Flickr in 2006 as the engineering lead for internationalization.
People can’t help but look at the Tumblr acquisition through a lens colored by the many examples of large, public (and often screwed-up) tech acquisitions by Yahoo and others — Marissa even refers to it in her blog post announcing the deal.
As leaders who helped to guide the Flickr team in its early history at Yahoo!, we had front-row seats as Flickr was (sometimes painfully) integrated with the larger Yahoo! organization. Despite this pain, we believe that Flickr has come a long way as part of Yahoo!, and yesterday’s announcement of a major redesign and refocus is a testament to the continued excellence of the core Flickr team.
Kakul, a product/business professional, joined Flickr just as the ink dried on the acquisition deal. She represented Flickr’s needs through painful acquisition-integration check-ins and figured out how (and if) any of Flickr’s roadmap needed to change based on Yahoo!’s larger corporate needs. Simon, a hacker/engineer, was responsible for creating the translation technology and internationalization infrastructure that allowed Flickr to begin serving customers in Yahoo!’s overseas markets.
Navigating an acquisition can be tough, and though there are a number of differences between Flickr in 2005 and Tumblr in 2013, there are striking similarities:
So as former Flickr employees, here is some practical advice from us to our friends at Tumblr, humbly shared:
Regardless of who’s involved, acquisitions always make communities nervous, if only because they represent significant change. For some people, an acquisition can feel almost like a betrayal, and some Tumblr community members will be looking for any reason to justify their distrust of the situation.
The more honest you can be about the direction you’re taking and the reasons behind it, the better. Give your members a means to easily communicate back to you — the Flickr Forum, while sometimes contentious, has always been a great bellwether of how the community feels, as well as an opportunity for the team to explain and (hopefully) reassure.
Open discussions can be exhausting to manage, but they’re often more rewarding (and instill more confidence in your community) than pronouncements with no outlet for feedback. Avoid reassuring platitudes that gloss over the issues – if putting ads on the Dashboard will allow you to reach a goal of tripling annual revenue, it’s better to say so plainly. Honesty is appreciated by most communities, even if the truth is unpleasant.
Merging your company culture with another is a bit like combining a Trifle and a Tiramisu into a single dessert, layer by layer — hard work, probably messy, and it might taste a bit weird for a while. Losing focus on how you all work together can make the difficult moments seem worse than they really are.
Don’t forget that your culture isn’t just important to you — it’s important to Yahoo! too. Over the years, Flickr had many opportunities to influence the wider culture at Yahoo! including:
Tumblr can set new precedents on how to join and influence Yahoo!’s culture and management. Equally importantly, a truly strong product is usually the result of the strong, connected team behind it. When acquisitions wither on the vine, it’s often a symptom of that team having dispersed over time, taking too much knowledge and culture with them.
However, the magic that really binds a team is larger than any one individual and can persist through multiple “generations” of people, provided everybody feels ownership of it. Ensure that new team members understand the value of the culture you’ve built, and the history that led you from being an experimental blog engine to a 400-million-user powerhouse.
At Flickr, we had several traditions to aid in ensuring that history and culture were passed along. When veteran members left the team, they were asked to provide a “last lecture,” summarizing the most important things they knew, and the lessons they’d learned at Flickr. Equally, new employees spent time with managers from each department during their first week on the job, learning more about how the team operated, the product philosophy, and the engineering infrastructure that made it all work. Every new Flickr team member was also encouraged to spend a day answering member help questions, which allowed everyone to understand how to communicate with the community, and the common problems they had with using the product.
Finally, the importance of goofing around was also underscored by regular bouts of spontaneous dancing, foam-dart wars and liberal posting of lolcats on the walls.
Yahoo is a friendly place — and everyone will want to greet the new neighbors. Everyone will want to figure how they can work better with you. Everyone will have ideas about what Tumblr can do to support their property. By and large, these meetings come from a genuine desire to be a better partner, but they can take time and focus away from your core mission and slow the whole team down. Sometimes too much of this “love” can be overwhelming, and at times it definitely led the Flickr team to handle the overtures less than gracefully. In some cases, this led to relationship management headaches for years.
Allocate a “first point of contact” to triage the ideas and opportunities that come your way. Filtering in this way will allow you to seize the best opportunities and execute well on them, without draining your resources trying to handle too much. And remember that, while the occasional approach will be from someone furthering an agenda of their own, most folks are trying to help both Yahoo! and Tumblr get better. Even if their approach is clumsy, they mean well.
Tumblr has promised to continue executing on its own roadmap, and right now that’s essential. But Yahoo! wants 1+1 to equal 5 (or even 15), not just 2. Back when Flickr was acquired, it seemed everyone was thinking about what the “Flickrization of Yahoo” might mean — except for the team at Flickr. We just wanted to keep Flickr as “Flickrized” as we could. In our case, we missed out on some promising avenues for product improvement and growth.
Don’t forget to leverage what Yahoo! can really add to your business. Whether it’s 24-hour datacenter support, the world’s largest Hadoop cluster, international legal expertise or better Tumblr schwag, you now have access to the resources of a large company that wants you to succeed. Relying on these resources whenever you can will free you up to focus on the things — your core team and your product — that you’re truly the experts on.
For both parties to really benefit from the acquisition, Tumblr will need to embrace certain Yahoo! technologies and infrastructure, but sometimes a successful integration can be much more complex than it initially seems. Will it require that you host Tumblr in Yahoo! datacenters? Perhaps you’ll also need to start using Yahoo! IDs or introduce new features to comply with foreign laws? When large, complex “sub-problems” crop up halfway through a project, the knock-on effects can cost months of time to address.
Make sure you’re always asking questions and scoping out the entire landscape – a large company like Yahoo! has some intrinsic challenges and approaches that will be unfamiliar, and you need to be ready to embrace and work through them. Being a part of Yahoo! will subtly change a few things about how you do business.
Don’t be afraid to reach out to people for a “gut check” even if you feel like you’re asking a silly question. It’s better to spend 20 minutes before you start ensuring that your security measures are adequate, or you’re legally compliant, versus having to significantly rework a project after you thought it was finished.
We are still passionate advocates of Flickr, we use Yahoo! Mail, and run our company blog on Tumblr. We are thrilled about these marriages and can’t wait for you all to show us how well it can be done.
Article courtesy of TechCrunch
HasOffers, a startup that helps mobile app developers see which ad efforts are actually paying off, is announcing that it has raised a $9.4 million round of funding led by Accel Partners.
The company was founded in 2009 — the product that it initially built, and the one that’s still highlighted on the HasOffers website, is a system that helps ad networks and agencies manage their performance-based programs. (Those agencies and ad networks include Bucksense, Tapjoy, and Sponsorpay.)
However, CEO Peter Hamilton said the team realized that mobile advertisers were facing a similar problem, so it built a product called MobileAppTracking, allowing developers to see where app installs, engagement, and purchases actually come from. So as publishers run ad campaigns, they can see which social networks, publishers, and ad networks are giving them the best results, and they can adjust their efforts accordingly.
Rich Wong, the Accel partner who’s joining the HasOffers board, definitely sounded more excited about the mobile side of the business when I spoke to him today. (Wong’s past investments include Google-acquired AdMob and Angry Birds-maker Rovio.) He said “some of the biggest spenders in the Accel portfolio, people who are on the cutting edge of doing customer acquisition,” such as HotelTonight, Spotify, and Trulia, were already using MobileAppTracking. (Other customers include Yahoo, Zynga, Pandora, and Square.)
Wong also argued that the company is part of towards a broader shift in mobile advertising. He said the industry’s first phase, was the early “walled garden” period, followed by a second stage dominated by ad networks like AdMob, Quattro (acquired by Apple), and Millennial (now public). The third, current phase is all about the shift to programmatic buying — in Wong’s words, “the machines are taking over.” In this phase, developers are running campaigns with a wide range of different sources, so they need a better attribution system.
And that system needs to be independent of any of the existing ad networks, so it can measure all sources of traffic effectively. After all, Wong said, many networks have their own attribution systems, and while they might work fine, publishers probably don’t feel entirely confident that AdMob’s can report accurately about one of its competitors, or vice versa. That point about independence came up repeatedly during our conversation, with Wong emphasizing that HasOffers is a software business, not a company that’s selling ads.
“One of the reasons we’re able to do what we do with over 150 ad networks and publishers is that we’re not competitive with them,” Hamilton added.
Until now, Hamitlon said HasOffers has been bootstrapped and profitable, with 79 employees, so it didn’t necessarily need the money. At the same time, he said the mobile ad tracking product has really taken off: “We saw an opportunity to put our stake in the ground as the attribution analytics platform, and we didn’t want it to pass us by.” For now, that means continuing to invest heavily on the technology and product side of the business.
In addition to Accel, RealNetworks founder Rob Glaser and Founder’s Co-op partner Chris Devore also invested. (Glaser and Devore are both based in Seattle, as is HasOffers.) Even though HasOffers is a bit older than your normal Series A company, and even though Accel has a separate fund for investing in bootstrapped, mature companies, this specific investment came from Accel’s early-stage fund: “Even though it has characteristics of a ‘growth-stage business’, we looked at it as an early-stage Series A.”
Article courtesy of TechCrunch
Automated Insights, a startup that translates raw data into plain English, is launching a new product could make analytics data a lot more accessible.
The new product, called Site Ai, pulls data from existing systems (it started with Google Analytics and Clicky, and the company is currently taking votes on which service to integrate next), then it summarizes that data in normal sentences. For example, it can crete a daily or weekly report that will tell you how current traffic compares to past patterns, what referring sites are driving the most searches, what keywords are driving the most searches, and so on. (You can see a sample report near the end of this post.)
Is it really all that difficult to get that information from Google Analytics? I don’t think so, but there’s still value in going that final step and distilling the data into bullet points that everyone can understand. (At TechCrunch, for example, all the writers have access to our analytics, but we still send out a weekly email summarizing the major trends, and I had to create a similar team email when I wrote for VentureBeat.) Automated Insights founder and CEO Robbie Allen wrote a blog post in January criticizing the dashboard-based approach to analyzing data:
The problem with dashboards is that they don’t directly provide insights or deliver knowledge about the data. Even worse, most visualizations require the user go through the mental exercise of interpreting the results. Unless the user knows something about the way a visualization is constructed, (e.g., X-axis, Y-axis, units, scale, etc.), the results can be difficult to understand. For a segment of your audience (arguably a small segment), requiring this level of analysis and interpretation is probably ok. However, this also means many users will be excluded from being able to get anything meaningful from the data (I refer to this group as data novices.)
Put another way: With a Site Ai summary, you shouldn’t have to do too much thinking.
As the company name implies, all of the summaries are automatically generated by Automated Insights’ technology, not people. Allen told me that’s a big challenge: “Turning data into text is difficult because it requires marrying two skills that traditionally don’t play well with each other: programming and writing.” The reason Allen said he can do it is because he has a background in both technology (he worked at Cisco and has degrees from MIT in computer science), but also in writing (he’s the author of a number of books published by O’Reilly).
The company is doing something unusual with the pricing too. It’s offering free sign-up for 60 days, but after that, the price will depend on how many people sign up. If there are more than $10,000 registered users at the end of the trial period, the price will only be $4 per user. So people who like the product have more incentive to tell their friends — Allen called it “viral pricing.”
Beyond its new product, Automated Insights says it will produce 300 million personalized stories in this year for customers like Yahoo, Microsoft, and the Cleveland Indians. The company, formerly known as StatSheet, has raised $5.3 million in funding.
Article courtesy of TechCrunch
The bookend to Yahoo’s Big News Day — a major refresh of its photo sharing site Flickr — will see the company drop its Flickr Pro pricing tiers as part of a bid to compete better with Facebook/Instagram and the rest of the crowded market in the online photo space. But it is not getting rid of paid tiers altogether: it’s keeping an ad-free tier, called Ad Free, as well as a tier for power users, doublr, respectively priced at $49.99 and $499.99 for a year of use.
The Ad Free service, at $49.99, will do away with the advertising the runs along the right side of the current photo feed — and if today’s discussion of what Yahoo intends to do with ads on Tumblr is any indication, ads that may be appearing soon within your photo streams.
The doublr service (again with those dropped vowels… this had to have played some small role in warming the company to buying Tumblr), priced at $499.99, gives users 1 terabyte of extra space, on top of the 1 terabyte that they will already get free as part of a Yahoo account.
The Pro tiers — priced at $6.95 for three months, $24.95 for 12 months and $44.95 for two years — included unlimited uploads and storage, as well as no ads, and a particularly mean-spirited allowance: those who did upload pictures could download more than just a smaller version of them. (Meaning: those who didn’t pay up wouldn’t get the full copies until they did. Their originals have always been stored by Flickr.)
From what we understand from a person close to Flickr, dropping Pro isn’t going to make much difference to the company because Pro never did very well.
“It has always been a relatively small percentage of the overall user base,” our contact says, adding that while now-distant past CEO Terry Semel had made a big push on premium services, after his departure (and actually during his time) there was “virtually no investment made” in trying to develop or push the Pro tier.
Nevertheless, there are now currently Pro users wondering how exactly Yahoo will be compensating them for the rest of their annual subscriptions. Yahoo notes that as part of the changes it will be removing “pro” badges beside people’s names and people can no longer gift pro subscriptions. Strangely, in a bit of an AOL subscription move, Yahoo says it will continue to offer renewable subscriptions to pro to “Recurring Pro users.”
The Pro tier did have another role to play. Today, CEO Marissa Mayer recounted how the small-image download was what prompted her to rethink Flickr altogether. “When we looked across our services we asked, why are we doing that? That started a thought experiment,” she said. The decision was that Flickr no longer wanted to offer “degraded” images. “We keep your images and you have high resolution images everywhere which is a huge differentiator.”
But in the age of Dropbox, BitTorrent, Mega and more, there are so many places to store pictures online today: will anyone really want to pay such a premium price for that place to be Flickr and Yahoo? In any case, as one person has pointed out already, why users wouldn’t just register for two accounts rather than pay for the extra space?
In the meantime, Flickr users are taking a page from the Tumblr book of user reviews, and laying out their vitriol about the changes over here.
Article courtesy of TechCrunch