Tuesday, 1 May 2012
Friday, 27 April 2012
SketchUp Is Google’s First Divestment Ever, And It Made A Profit
Google’s sale of a previously purchased arm of the company this morning, 3D modeling software SketchUp to Trimble, isn’t just something it does “every now and again”. It’s actually Google’s first divestment ever, according to two sources, and we’re hearing the search giant made a profit, as it sold SketchUp for more than it bought it for back in 2006.
This could signal a sea change in how Larry Page executes his vision for a leaner, more focused Google. The company frequently shuts down extraneous products, but that requires redistribution of their team members internally. If it’s now willing to sell them instead, Google could streamline around the theme of making user’ lives more convenient, while making some money at the same time.
It wasn’t that SketchUp wasn’t working. It had 30 million activations since joining Google as part of @Last Software in March 2006. But it just didn’t fit with the direction Google is heading in. It’s a relatively niche product for architects and the construction industry, game developers, and film makers. It doesn’t fit with last years theme of inherently social product that could be tied to Google+, or this years plan to simplify everyone’s lives.
So rather than sink it in the deadpool, Google sold it to someone that can actually use — Trimble, a mapping, surveying, and navigation equipment company. Analysts speculated that Google paid $45 million for SketchUp in 2006. As Trimble called the acquisition of the product “immaterial”, and therefore less than 5% of its annual revenue, it couldn’t have paid more that $90 million for it. That would mean Google could have made up to $45 million in profit on the sale, though its likely closer to a few million.
Early this year Google shut down its photo editor Picnik and open sourced its Android stargazing app Google Sky Map. If the company had to do it again, maybe it’d sell them off instead.
This strategy of divesting successful but outlying products meshes with why we’ve heard Google didn’t buy Instagram. While initially vaguely interested in buying the photo sharing service, we hear Google walked away before talks went past the coffee table stage. That’s because buying Instagram for a high price just to fracture focus by running it independently didn’t align with Page’s game plan.
I often hear that headcount bloat and disorganization in the ballooning Google disgruntles employees and makes them flee for startups. The inefficient bureaucracy, lost transition time , and expensive counter-offers it has to make to get talent to stay are running up costs for Google while slowing it down. While no one wants to see their co-workers shipped out of the Googleplex, it may be wise for Google to sell the meat instead of just trimming the fat.
Update: Okay so it turns out Google’s done this spin off thing once before, with Wideorbit. But for what it’s worth that sale was “assets” and not a single product. So yeah*
[*Additional reporting by Alexia Tsosis and Rip Empson]
Warid Introduces New 100 MB Monthly Internet Bundle
After introducing new internet bundles last month, Warid has partially revised the offer with an addition of offering new 100 MB monthly mobile internet bundle for Rs. 99 per month.
Revision in previous bundles include 15 MB cap for daily mobile internet bundle that comes at Rs. 10 per day, which was earlier offered with 50 MB daily limit for download upload.
Following is the complete details of mobile internet bundles offered by Warid:
100 MB Mobile Internet Bucket
- Monthly Limit: 100 MB
- Price: Rs 99.99/month
- To activate, SMS 100MB to 7777
Tuesday, 21 February 2012
Australian Ride-Sharing Marketplace Jayride.com Grabs $400K In Angel Funding
Australian-based travel marketplace Jayride.com has lined up $400,000 AUD in seed funding for its ride-sharing service, which also aggregates transportation data. The angel funding was led by Andrey Shirben, one of the first investors in Kenshoo, a digital marketing software company. In addition to helping in the financing, Shirben will also bring his digital marketing expertise to assist the company, as well as connect Jayride with other players in the global travel sector.
Compared with other current ride-sharing and carpooling startups, Jayride’s unique angle is to provide a single interface for finding all your transportation options, including commercial transport, and combining that data with the available ride-sharing options. This way, travelers will never be in a situation where they research a route and end up without options. Instead, when there are no ride-shares found on your planned route, Jayride will show you bus schedules, shuttles, relocation cars and other transportation options.
Shirben tells us that the angel round was supposed to be for $350,000 AUD, but after he put his money in, it became overbooked by 30-40%. Within a year, Jayride plans to raise another round led by a U.S. VC firm, as it prepares to expand its geographical transport data coverage.
“Jayride is the only land-transport marketplace attacking ride-sharing this way,” says Shirben of the startup’s transport data aggregation play. “There are many ride-sharing startups around the world, but almost every one fails this simple UX test: if you search from point A to point B outside a main thoroughfare, you find no search results. This is the main limitation of ride-sharing today.”
Shirben says that after meeting the Jayride founding team, and following up over the course of a few months, the decision to invest was an easy one. “Great team, disruptive idea, lots of business potential in a huge market,” he remarks.
Founded in 2008 by Rod Bishop and Ross Lin as a carpooling site, Jayride made the move to aggregate all travel data last fall. The service currently supports Australia, New Zealand, and is coming soon to the U.K. and Ireland.
Denise Richards Turns 41: Why She's a Great Single Mom
Denise Richards may be most recognized by her stunning baby blues, but one thing this former supermodel prides herself on is her life as a mother!
As mom to three daughters, Sam, 7, and Lola, 6 (with ex-husband Charlie Sheen) and Eloise Joni (who she adopted in July), 7 months, the star, who turns 41 Friday, knows that she has a long and obstacle-ridden road ahead of her as they grow up.
So when Sam and Lola”s dad made headlines about his series of public outbursts last year, Richards decided to educate their daughters about addiction rather than continue to hide it from them.
“I got a book to read to them,” Richards explained in a July interview on the Today Show. “I was just lying to them about so much, and covering up things and totally lying. It was just getting too confusing that I had to sit down with them. It”s too early [for them to understand], but I told them enough for them to make sense of things that were going on.”
Ad Startup Rocket Fuel Just Had Its First Profitable Quarter
Startup Rocket Fuel claims to use “rocket science” to ad campaigns, and it sounds like that science is turning into real revenue. The company says it made $44.5 million in revenue last year, compared to $16.6 million in 2010 and $2.4 million in 2009.
In fact, CEO George John tells me that in the fourth quarter of 2011, the company was profitable for the first time. Not that he plans to stay profitable — he says it would be “weird” for Rocket Fuel to be profitable all the time, since it’s trying to grow. Instead, he plans to be “slightly unprofitable” until Q4 2012, when it will probably be profitable again, thanks in part to seasonal cycles.
The company, John says, consists of “nerds trying to help the cool people in marketing do a good job.” Specifically, it works with ad agencies to ensure they’re reaching the audience they want — not just the audience that they think is desirable, but one that will actually click on an ad and buy a product (or convert in some other way). As a result, Rocket Fuel-optimized campaigns can perform twice as well as they did before, which could mean doubling the response rate or halving the cost per lead. John also claims that the software is genuinely fun to use, comparing the company to Mint in its efforts to create an engaging user interface.
Oh, and the “rocket science” thing isn’t a joke. John himself has worked as NASA, and (playing on the fact that he knows I’m a big science fiction fan), he says that he’s currently looking to hire “a couple of robot psychologists that can monitor the autonomous behavior of our adserver and bid-server and explain the macro and micro decisions being made and how this complex behavior emerges from simpler rules and goals that various AI agents have.”
As for his plans for 2012, John says the company plans to release a self-serve product in the second quarter, one that will focus on “self-service analytics, with direct visibility and transparency.” Over time, that self-serve product will include more controls to let the customer direct the ad placement process.
Rocket Fuel last raised a $6.6 million Series C from Northgate Capital and others.
[Via - TechCrunch]
Yandex, Google’s Russian Rival, Is Twitter’s New Real-Time Search Partner
A significant step for Twitter in its international growth: Yandex, Russia’s search giant, today announced that it will carry Twitter data in all of its search results.
The news also underscores one possible route to revenue generation for Twitter: Yandex describes this as a licensing deal. The terms of it were not disclosed but Microsoft reportedly paid Twitter $30 million for a similar search agreement.
The agreement with Yandex will see Twitter’s data firehose appear both in Yandex’s blog search, as well as through a dedicated URL, twitter.yandex.ru.
The Yandex agreement is similar to the real-time Twitter search that used to be offered by Google — a partnership that ended last year around the time that Google was launching its own Google+ service.
Yandex says it has licensed the “full feed of all public tweets,” covering all languages — but seems to highlight specifically those tweets that are in Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian or Kazakh, covering tweets from more than two million users. People will be able to search by usernames and hashtags, too. In total, Twitter has around 100 million active users, covering some 250 million tweets per day.
This looks like Twitter’s first big deal with a Russian portal, and could point to more local partnerships of its kind — useful for Twitter extending its coverage and usefulness beyond its home market and English.
For Yandex, the Twitter deal gives the search giant — which currently has around 60 percent of the market in Russia — a leg up in its own strategy to do more in social networking: Yandex already offers people Google-like features to share news and other content and this will enhance that.
[Via - TechCrunch]
Monday, 20 February 2012
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
