Posts tagged Buying
Buying Tumblr Will Leave Yahoo With The Same Old Identity Crisis
May 19th
Yahoo is expected to announce the acquisition of blogging site Tumblr for $1.1 billion on Monday, with both companies’ boards having agreed to the deal, according to reports in AllThingsD, which first broke the news of sale talks, as well as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
If it goes through as planned, buying Tumblr would be a signature deal for Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer in her effort to transform the aging Web-media company into a producer of habit-forming online experiences. Tumblr has some 100 million monthly visitors, and its users publish 90 million posts a day. Those are some mighty habits, and they promise to offer considerable room for Yahoo’s advertising sales team.
It can’t have been an easy decision for Tumblr founder David Karp. When we last saw the youthful CEO in early April, he was on the campus of Facebook on the same day that the social network launched its Android Home software. As we left, we saw him locked in an intense conversation with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg, early in Facebook’s life, also wrestled with a billion-dollar buyout offer from Yahoo. We have to wonder what they talked about.
One thing Karp and Mayer will have to figure out is the relationship the combined companies have with their users. Tumblr’s users, a young, cool demographic Yahoo has fairly openly admitted it lacks, identify closely with the service.
Unlike Facebook, Tumblr is a place where they can reveal themselves without revealing themselves. The tolerance for provisional identity (and racy content) is a core part of Tumblr.
Yahoo is a muddle. While it was one of the first sites to let users log in and personalize experiences, it has faded as a source of online identity. The fact that you can use a Facebook or Google account to log in to Yahoo is telling.
The one notable exception is Flickr, the photo-sharing site that has seen a renaissance since Mayer became CEO. Yahoo is expected to announce significant upgrades to the service on Monday as well, and one source who has seen the new version of Flickr told it it was “stunning.”
Will Tumblr become part of Yahoo like Flickr—a distinct service with its own user culture? Or will it become part of the muddle of indistinct Yahoo services like Sports and Weather, more notable for their utility than their expressive nature?
Yahoo nearly crushed Flickr as it first integrated the photo-sharing site and then neglected it. To be useful to Yahoo, Tumblr will have to somehow fit into the rest of the operation. No amount of promises of hands-off treatment will change that reality. (Here’s one way Tumblr could help Yahoo: Junk Yahoo’s overcomplicated in-house publishing systems and move all of the media operations onto Tumblr.)
Even the question of how users log in to Tumblr, post-Yahoo, will be key. Will they retain a provisional identity, unlinked to their real name and the rest of their online activity? Or will it get folded into everything else they do on Yahoo? That question is crucial, and as Yahoo learned with Flickr, it’s easy to screw up.
The difference is that Yahoo spent a few tens of millions of dollars on Flickr. Screwing up Tumblr would be a far more expensive mistake.
View full post on ReadWrite
Intel Is Buying Mashery To Get Deeper Inside The Data Center
Apr 17th
Intel, the chip giant, is buying Mashery, a seven-year-old company in San Francisco that specializes in linking together Web-based software and services, a company spokesperson confirmed to ReadWrite.
Mashery’s 125 employees are learning of the acquisition through a companywide email sent this morning. Intel expects to offer the “majority” of employees jobs when the deal closes, which is expected to happen in the second quarter. The group will remain in its current location and join Intel’s two-year-old Services Division. Terms were not disclosed, but the deal is not material to Intel’s financial results.
Big Implications For Intel’s Core Business
The implications of the deal are huge: it signals Intel’s recognition that the central processing unit is no longer a silicon chip. It is the network.
Mashery, a company ReadWrite has long covered closely, specializes in managing application programming interfaces, or APIs. APIs are the lingua franca of the Internet, the systems through which machines communicate with other machines according to preset rules. For example, Facebook’s platform, which websites and apps rely on to add social features, is a set of APIs. Foursquare uses APIs to let other apps access its location database and other features, allowing Instagram and Evernote users to add a place to a photo or a note.
The same techniques that connect consumer apps, it turns out, also work well within large businesses. Comcast, for example, uses Mashery’s API management service to allow programmers to access internal systems. That’s a far more sensible way to create internal software than the alternative, which involves doing a lot of one-off integrations at considerable time and expense.
Smaller companies often find it difficult to set up systems that grant developers access to these software interfaces. Likewise, enterprises don’t generally want to build their own API-management systems. Recently, that has become a bigger and bigger business for Mashery.
Moving Beyond Chips
Intel is in the midst of a shift away from just selling chips to selling software and services. This change, while little-noticed, has been long in the making. Intel bought McAfee for $7.7 billion in 2010, putting it into the security-software business. In 2005, Intel bought a smaller company, Sarvega, which specialized in XML gateways. (XML, or extensible markup language, is a broad descriptor of a file format commonly used in APIs; an XML gateway transports files to make APIs possible.)
Intel first partnered with Mashery in November of 2012, pairing Mashery’s API-management tools with its own security offerings. By bringing Mashery in-house, Intel has a more complete and credible offering in cloud-computing infrastructure. (Most cloud-software services communicate with other services via APIs.)
Ideally, Intel might sell the chips inside the servers running the software programs that communicate via these APIs, too. But what’s more important is the notion that Intel has a product offering that speaks to innovative startups, not just struggling PC manufacturers.
Mashery has raised a total of $35 million from investors, most recently $10 million last year in a deal that valued the company at $60 million. An experienced startup founder familiar with the terms of the deal says that investors are “happy” with the outcome.
The deal’s not expected to be material to Intel’s results, but industry norms suggest that Intel likely paid two to three times Mashery’s most recent valuation—a range of $120 million to $180 million. (A Mashery spokesperson declined to comment on the company’s fundraising or the deal’s terms.)
View full post on ReadWrite
Google Sells Enhanced Campaign Benefits … But Are SMBs Buying?
Mar 22nd
Against a backdrop of mixed reactions to the new program, Google’s Kesh Patel characterizes the AdWords enhanced campaigns as continued evolution into the multiscreen world that’s a far cry from the one AdWords was first born into.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Buying An iPhone 5? Sell Your Old Phone At uSell.com
Feb 18th
This post is sponsored by uSell, a price-comparison website that helps you find the best price when it’s time to sell your iPhone, Blackberry, smartphones, and other used electronics. Find reputable buyers for your used devices on uSell. #selliPhone
Congrats on your snazzy new iPhone 5. The retina display is brilliant, the camera takes fantastic pictures, and the battery is the envy of all your friends. But now what do you do with your old phone?
Options For Your Existing Devices
The obvious answer is “sell it,” but where? And how much should you charge?
You could sell it to your mobile carrier, but you won’t make market rate, particularly if your phone is more than a few months old. Auctions are a popular option for the adventurous, because they pay better than the carriers do, but they’re a gamble. Buyers change their minds, you might price your phone too high or low. Even if you do find a buyer at an agreeable, you still have to worry about packing, shipping and payment.
If you want to skip the auction circus and get on with enjoying your new iPhone, you could always sell your phone to a reseller. Resellers take the guesswork out of device sales, quoting you a fair, fixed price, and often provide free packaging and shipping. You send the phone, they send a check, and you both part ways happy.
The trick with resellers is finding the best deal. One reseller may be able to move AT&T phones, but have trouble with Verizon devices, for example, so payouts between resellers can vary by more than $100 for the same device.
uSell.com: A Reseller-Comparison Shopping Engine
That’s where uSell.com comes in. uSell partners with dozens of resellers and helps you find the right one for your device. Just answer a few questions about your iPhone’s model, carrier and condition, and uSell returns a list of resellers that are interested. You can sort the list by uSell’s own “best fit,” customer reviews, or price.
Those prices are actually pretty good. We checked eBay for sold iPhone 4S listings over the past month, and uSell’s reseller offers were extremely competitive. A 64GB Verizon 4S tended to sell for $220 to $285 on eBay, before fees and shipping. uSell found a fee-free $235. The same phone on AT&T’s network went for $150 to $320 on eBay, and uSell found us an even $300, with free shipping and no hassle. They even found a buyer for an original 2G iPhone.
Of course, not everyone is trading in an iPhone. if you’re stepping up from a different device, you’re still covered. uSell partners with resellers for all types of cell phones, as well as tablets, game consoles, cameras, and other electronics.
View full post on ReadWrite
5 New Rules: Don’t Get Fooled Again When Buying Enterprise Technology
Jan 23rd
“Change it had to come
We knew it all along
We were liberated from the fall that’s all”
- The Who, “Won’t Get Fooled Again”
With Washington festooned over the weekend with banners and parties alongside the serious national dialogue about the issues of the day, we all understand that the world has changed significantly in the last four years. It has become a more distributed, inter-connected place in every aspect of our society.
The chiaroscuro of the Cold War has completely disappeared – and we’re now seeing a complex and nuanced combination of emerging economic and military powers.
And there are key parallels in information technology with significant implications for IT buyers.
The Cloud Has Already Won
Four years ago, people were still debating the NIST definition of Cloud Computing. Indeed, in 2009, Gartner declared Cloud the most hyped technology in the world.
Today, you’d have to be hiding under a big rock – trying to avoid the HarBowl, perhaps – if you do not realize the IT Stack has irrevocably flipped from client-server/Web to Cloud. Talk to any entrepreneur, and the big argument is not whether to rent the IT infrastructure from an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider (e.g., Amazon or Rackspace), but what possible reason could someone have to burn precsious capital on buying their own servers and routers.
IT is a huge industry. At a projected $3.7 trillion in 2013 (according to Gartner), IT would be one of the five largest economies in the world, behind Japan but ahead of India. As Dan Lyons wrote last year, industry combatants focus on the potential of a $1 trillion transfer of wealth from the large legacy tech vendors to the new upstarts. So the money is there.
The unanswered question, though, is what happens to the hows, whys and whats of IT acquisition? How do you buy enterprise technology in the era of the new stack?
Let me break it down into 5 key elements:
1. The New Boss
Traditionally IT decision making is made in small, vertical slices of the stack. Network buyers procure networking components, storage buyers acquire disks and flash, and functional leadership drives application acquisition with their IT partners, etc.
That is changing rapidly as business decision makers (e.g., line management) set the rate and pace of operations and require IT to respond accordingly. As we learned at Nicira, in the Cloud era, this has led to the emergence of a new category of IT elite called Cloud Architects, who are responsible for making all the components come together.
It has led to an increased focus on both proprietary and open source cloud architectures that enable applications quickly and reduce the intense, overwhelming micro-focus on the cloud’s subcomponents. Rapidly enabling applications that support business processes will eventually drive all IT decision making. My advice: Look out for the cloud guy. He is the new power broker.
2. Bandwidth And Processing For Nothing, And The I/O For Free
In the client-server era systems model, hardware and software were custom-built to work together to enable a specific performance envelope. While specific, targeted use cases will always remain, increasingly Moore’s Law holds sway.
The x86 platform in servers, flash in storage and merchant silicon in networking increasingly dominates the bottom, infrastructure layers of the stack. IT buyers are getting the horsepower at scale by riding this curve and looking to vendors who pull their value through software.
It’s the death of proprietary hardware and the emergence of smart software in IT. Remember this when your tech sales guy comes calling and brags about his chips.
3. Why Buy When You Can Lease?
There has been a ton written about Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) replacing packaged software, so I wont’ bother repeating it. But what happens when Web-scale infrastructure is rentable by the hour (and as Amazon has shown, prices drop along the way)? Without having to deal with real estate, power and cooling, enormous computing power is available by the hour. Determining the differences among the providers – i.e., how well suited are they for your applications – will be your next research activity. Build your IT plan/budget around renting, not buying.
4. There And Back Again, A Content Tale
Cloud-based collaboration environments like Box, DropBox and Google Drive are dramatically revamping how companies store and manage data – as well as how they collaborate both within and across corporate boundaries. The ease-of-use of these platforms compared to traditional software packages like Microsoft SharePoint make them a reality in your business whether you like it or not. Your employees already use them – even if they never bothered to tell you. Developing a content management strategy that accounts for these applications and what should be in the cloud and what should be on premise is critical, right now.
5. Any Way You Want It/That’s The Way You Need It
Finally, all of your applications have to work on any screen, anytime. Remember, it was just four years ago that folks said the iPhone was not ready for business. At the time, people were thinking about smartphones the way radio executives thought about television. In 2013, IT buyers should consider only those applications that work across platform and screen categories.
Today’s businesses need to move faster than they did four years ago: competition and globalization leave them no choice.
This creates friction with existing vendors, who have to deal with the reality of slower development cycles, predictable revenues and profits for shareholders, etc.
As buying behavior changes, though, the fast will eat the slow, including the IT buyers, who will see their influence wane if they cannot keep up with the competition cycle or lose influence as user-driven shadow IT takes over. The smart guys will be listening to The Who:
“I’ll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around me P
ick up my guitar and play Just like yesterday
Then I’ll get on my knees and pray
We don’t get fooled again”
Roger Daltrey image courtesy of s_bukley / Shutterstock.com. Pete Townsend image courtesy of Joe Seer / Shutterstock.com.
View full post on ReadWrite
Do, Know, Go: How to Create Content at Each Stage of the Buying Cycle
Jan 11th
It can be easy to overcomplicate content strategy and keyword research. There’s lots of great ways you to create a content strategy, but to really make it a success you have to get to know your audience and find out what it is they want to see.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Why Buying Backlinks Is Bad for SEO – Terra.com
Dec 29th
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Why Buying Backlinks Is Bad for SEO
Terra.com In this special feature of 'Ask Entrepreneur,' Facebook fan Cake Apps asks: What about buying high PR backlinks, will it hurt the SEO? How will Google know that I am paying? This is an easy question to answer: Don't buy links. That is, don't buy links … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Why Buying Backlinks is Bad for SEO – Entrepreneur (blog)
Dec 26th
 Entrepreneur (blog) |
Why Buying Backlinks is Bad for SEO
Entrepreneur (blog) In this special feature of 'Ask Entrepreneur,' Facebook fan Cake Apps asks: What about buying high PR backlinks, will it hurt the SEO? How will Google know that I am paying? This is an easy question to answer: Don't buy links. That is, don't buy links … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
SEO Buying & Selling: 4 Tricks Creating Unachievable Expectations
Dec 24th
Four SEO selling and buying tricks produce unrealistic expectations and create imbalance in the SEO services market. These tricks will only lead to failure, because the time and effort required to meet SEO expectations and results won’t match.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
SEO Buying & Selling: 4 Tricks Creating Unachievable Expectations – Search Engine Watch
Dec 24th
 Business 2 Community |
SEO Buying & Selling: 4 Tricks Creating Unachievable Expectations
Search Engine Watch For many SEO agencies, the marketing and selling of SEO services is a bigger hurdle than the task of actually obtaining improved organic search results for clients. Competing for marketing dollars while proving value through the sales process needs to … SEO Reputation Management – Proactively Protecting What's Great About Your … Three Ways to Stay on the Good Side of Google |
View full post on SEO – Google News
