Posts tagged Investment
Big Data Gets Big Investment: $20M for Social Sharing Service AddThis
May 10th
Clearspring Technologies, the maker of the AddThis widget that facilitates content sharing on the Internet, announced today that it has closed a $20 million round of funding from Institutional Venture Partners (IVP).
Clearspring is all about data. Big data. Lots of data. Data coming out of our ears data. Clearspring processes 10 terabytes of data per day. The AddThis button is on over nine million websites and has a billion unique users worldwide. Data is generated by users of the platform sharing content across social and news networks as well as when people visit sits that AddThis is embedded on. Clearspring will use this round of funding to accelerate its next-generation publishing products and continue growth of its advertising offerings.
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“You look at the audience business that we have, helping advertisers reach audiences at the right time through the ad exchanges and platforms … that market size is doubling every year and we are already a leader. So, if we just continue to build our position and we have a growing business. But, that is just one thing. You can build end products that generate revenue off of this. So, they look at it and are like ‘OK, they already have a business that is tripling in revenue this year in a market that is doubling every single year. What else could they do?” Said Radfar.
“People are pretty excited. It makes you dizzy,” Hooman Radfar, CEO and co-founder of Clearspring, said to us. “You think, I have the entire Internet measured and I can have it in real-time. You look at comScore, for instance, every month they give you a flash report. I can give it to you on the minute of who is on your site. Right now, across every site. What could you do with that?”
This is Internet data done right. AddThis gets data from everywhere, all the time. Clearspring can make this data available to publishers with high-end analytics to be able to take action on what users are reading and sharing on their sites and optimize the Web experience to the user.
“We can now bring the power of that reach back to the individual publisher via our next generation tools and services, which will focus on providing publishers actionable data, not just from the social web, but the entire web,” said Radfar. “Imagine the challenges we can help a publisher solve- -it’s a staggering opportunity.”
What To Do With All That Data?
Clearspring has a few primary focuses. Foremost is the publisher platform that shares content around the web as well as producing data for Clearspring content creators. Second is the data analytics. Essentially, Clearspring creates and entire Library of Congress worth of data every week (around 70 terabytes). They are building data centers in Ashburn, Va. and Los Angeles. Third is the social media optimization and advertisers network. The biggest part for Clearspring is that all of the data analysis in done in real-time. They showed me a screen board in their offices in McLean, Va. with screen tracking the Internet that was counting how many shares and views and the like were coming across on a huge portion of the Internet. It is truly mind blowing how much data Clearspring can process.
“That is what everyone is excited about, that next generation of tools,” Radfar said. “It is cool that we have always had that vision around data and analytics and being this big data company and now it is like everyone gets big data and it is all about big data because the timing was really good.”
The hope for the publishing industry is that firms like Clearspring and other will be able to provide enough rich data that advertisers will up the ante on rates for digital content as opposed to print content. The amount of data that Clearspring brings to the table should go a long way in helping bridge that divide.
“Just imagine, you take the power of that entire network, a billion uniques and nine million sites and run it through that processing,” Radfar said. “What are all the products that we can offer a publisher and bring that back to an individual.”
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Charge It: Square Gets a Visa Investment
Apr 27th
Visa may have just launched In2Pay, a mobile payments solution of its own, last December but why should that stop it from funding rival mobile payment systems? The answer is that it shouldn’t and it hasn’t.
This morning, Square, the mobile payment solution founded by former Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, announced that it had received "an undisclosed “strategic investment” amount from Visa, the No. 1 credit card company," according to The Wall Street Journal.
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Square gives merchants the ability to process credit card payments by way of a namesake dongle that plugs into the headphone jack of an iPhone, iPad or Android phone. With a complimentary app, customers then swipe their card in the dongle and the payment takes place over the phone’s Internet connection.
Visa has been testing it’s own mobile payment solutions, primarily involving Near Field Communications (NFC) chips, for some time. It might seem like a contradiction, then, to invest in another mobile payment company, right? As Square COO Keith Rabois explained to The New York Times, however, the move makes perfect sense for Visa, "because Square could convert the 27 million businesses that don’t accept credit cards into Visa customers."
“We’re empowering people to accept credit cards that historically have not,” Rabois told the Times.
According to TechCrunch, Square did $66 million in payment volume in the first quarter of 2011 – $26 million more than expected – and plans on tripling that in the second quarter. Rabois told TechCrunch that Visa accounts for roughly two-thirds of all Square transactions.
If merchants were previously reluctant to sign up for Square, a vote of confidence by Visa might just change their minds. What do you think – are you more willing to slide your card through the little white square than you were before?
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ReadWriteWeb Announces Major Investment
Apr 1st
ReadWriteWeb‘s founder, Richard “Chuy” MacManus, announced this morning that the publication has accepted its first major investment. The infusion of cash, to the tune of $14 million, came from OZJ Investments, a subsidiary of Ozark Jimmy’s Global Enterprises Holding Company. OZJ CTO and Spokesman, Carlos Canulas, explained some of the changes ahead for the publications.
“The Internet is a fad. We’re one of the few companies who have realized that hard truth. Plus, 99.2% of the content is pictures of ladies in tube tops but you can’t read it on the can! Look, we’re marshaling the shift of RWW from a doomed online fad-publication to a perfect-bound, four-color slick. What’s it gonna be? Sick!”
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ReadWriteWeb was founded in 1972 in a New Zealand sheep camp by MacManus, an Nell-like savant who lived in a pile of oily rags and made a bare living from recycling old bed frames.
As it grew, ReadWriteWeb became well-known among trade-paper sub-editors, interior decorators, wolves, millionaire patrons of art, sadists, nymphomaniacs, bridge sharks, anarchists, women living on alimony, tire formers, educational cranks, economists, hopheads, dipsomaniac playwrights, nudists, restaurant keepers, stockbrokers and dentists as “the smart alternative to Cheri.”
OZJ made its bones by pioneering the development and sales of mesquite-flavored Japanese-style toilet bacon In 25-, 50- and 150-foot family spools. After expanding its comestibles line, it moved into toys, personal defense technology, comfort tools, hardware, folk medicines and teachin’s. Them teachin’s will definitely guide the expansion of OZJ into publishing.
How will the focus of RWW change under the influence of the new investors? We asked MacManus.
“I’m buying a freaking cigarette boat with an airbrush painting of Janet Frame on the side and an Ed Brown Classic Custom Centennial with hand-relief engraving on the slide flats, grip screws, thumb safety flats, laser engraving on the the slide, ‘Tru-Ivory’ grips and a jeweled barrel hood!”
Ozark Jimmy’s Global Enterprises Holding Company is a privately held firm, whose backers include Taq Hamas Revolutionary Venture Funding Cell, Cahuenga Brothers, Ltd. and the Virtual Hillbilly Investment Capital Fund. Billy-Joe Al ‘Abdurrahman, general partner of Taq Hammas and Nimrod Cajones, general partner of Cahuenga Brothers, Ltd., joined Ozark Jimmy’s Global Enterprises Holding Company’s Board of Directors in 2001. Abdurrahman is currently director of numerous companies, none of which can be mentioned by name on pain of death. Cajones was a co-founder of Poncho.com, and is a director of several high-growth Internet companies, including Llamaspace, Cahuengista.com and Martha Stewart Living.
Cigarette boat photograph by Brent Ozar
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Major Publisher Investment Advances Inkling as the Future of Digital Textbooks
Mar 23rd
Digital textbooks are at a tipping point, a recent study suggested, on a trajectory to overtake print textbooks in the coming decade. Even though they are a small part of the market now – just 3% – digital textbooks are on track to surpass 25% by 2015.
No matter where you set the target date for that tipping point, digital textbooks certainly just received a strong shove in that direction with a major investment announcement from the iPad textbook maker Inkling. The startup has raised an undisclosed round of funding, with participation from some of its initial investors including Sequoia Capital.
More significantly, this financing involves significant minority investments from the two biggest educational content companies in the world, McGraw-Hill and Pearson.
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More Books, Cheaper and Digital
These publishers investments also include a substantial content commitment, significantly boosting the textbooks available on Inkling’s platform. Students will now have access to the top 100 undergraduate titles from McGraw-Hill, a full MBA curriculum from Pearson, a full medical education curriculum, and more.
Having a more robust catalog helps Inkling meet the needs of more student book-buyers, and makes the company another viable alternative to the expensive and cumbersome print books found at the local campus bookstore. Of course, students have a number of alternatives for books already – print or digital – including a variety of used book and book rental websites. The latter all offer cheaper alternatives to new print textbooks. So does Inkling, and goes one step further by giving students the option to buy books by the chapter, not just in their entirety.
Textbook as App: Beyond Simply Digitizing the Text
But Inkling founder and CEO Matt MacInnis says that price isn’t the only factor that will win over student consumers. Instead, he believes that Inkling can offer a superior learning experience over other textbook formats. And no doubt, Inkling has re-imagined how a textbook should work and done so with the iPad (ok, tablet… but really, iPad) experience in mind.
Textbooks on Inkling’s platform aren’t simply the print versions converted to the tablet screen. “We have gently disassembled the textbook,” says MacInnis. Content isn’t bound by pages or sections or chapters in the same linear fashion. Rather, it’s hierarchical, richly illustrated and augmented. It’s interactive. It’s social.
“We have gently disassembled the textbook” – Matt MacInnis, Inkling founder and CEO.
“The iPad is not a book,” says MacInnis. “Too many publishers pretend it’s a book.” And while, yes, Inkling does offer well-known college textbook titles – reassembled, if you will, from the print versions – it’s pretty clear that a textbook on the Inkling platform isn’t really “a book,” or not at least not with the constraints of the physical printed form.
Now, I love books in their physical printed form, don’t get me wrong. And geek that I am, the thought of books becoming apps makes me shudder. But when it comes to textbooks, quite frankly, I can’t really muster much of a defense for their print-bound integrity.
The Future of (E)Books – An Engineering, Not a Publishing Problem?
Interestingly, Inkling hasn’t approached the textbook with any sort of reverence or commitment to that print-bound form. Bringing textbooks to the Inkling platform is an “engineering problem,” according to MacInnis, not a publishing problem. And that’s likely why the platform takes a very different approach to the textbook that simply uploading an electronic version of the text.
It may be an engineering problem that MacInnis says his company is working on here, but the investment today from Pearson and McGraw-Hill sure makes it look like those educational content providers think Inkling’s on to something that will address the publishing problem too.
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New “Halo Report” Aims to Track Angel Investment Trends
Feb 22nd
Quarterly reports about venture capital investment are fairly commonplace. But information about early stage investment can be more difficult to come by.
To help investigate some of the investment trends, the Angel Capital Education Foundation (ACEF), Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and CB Insights are announcing a partnership that will produce a quarterly research report. The aptly-titled Halo Report will track angel investment activity in the U.S. and Canada, providing data that entrepreneurs and early-stage investors have long sought after.
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CB Insights CEO and co-founder Anand Sanwal notes that “Unlike data on VC investments, comprehensive, rigorously collected data on angel-backed companies and angel investors does not currently exist in any centralized fashion.” The Halo Report aims to give more visibility to this segment of early-stage investment, which in turn will help build data-driven tools to help both investors and entrepreneurs.
CB Insights has an extensive database of private company financing, and we often cite its findings here at ReadWriteWeb. The Halo Report will draw on that data, in conjunction with SVB and ACEF’s expertise in angel investment, to include information about overall investment activity, as well as details about round sizes, location, and industry preferences.
The first Halo Report is expected to be available in the second half of 2011.
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Forrester: Is IT Investment Hurting US Job Growth?
Feb 18th
Forrester released today a report called Caution: IT Investment May Be Hurting US Job Growth. The report’s author – Andrew Bartels, Christopher Mines and Sarah Musto – note that despite record corporate profits, unemployment remains unchanged. Forrester notes that poor job growth both causes and is caused by poor economic growth. It’s a vicious cycle.
The report suggests that corporations are investing in IT instead of hiring workers. The analysts looked at research from 62 industries to find out what’s going on. The report says that the industries with the highest IT investment are also the ones with the biggest decline in jobs. The analysts conclude that there is a causal connection between IT investment growth and the lack of employment growth.
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Forrester is not the first to suggest this. Gartner VP and fellow Tom Austin’s blog post on the same subject lead us to ask last year “What Can IT Do To Stimulate the Job Market?” And AMI Partners claimed last year that cloud computing would result in 200,000 – 250,000 job losses over the next decade.
Here’s some of what Forrester found:
- In 2/3 of industries raised IT investment while cutting jobs.,.
- In 1/5 of industries cut deep into employment while investing heavily in IT.
- In 1/4 of industries, IT investment was up and job losses were small.
- In 1/3 of industries both IT investment and employment were down.
- In five industries, IT investment was reduced and employment was increased.
- In 1/10 of industries, federal stimulus increased both IT investment and employment.
“Looking across these 62 private sector industries, we found a modest but statistically significant inverse or negative correlation between IT investment and employment,” the report says. The effect was most pronounced in manufacturing.
The industries that cut IT spending and boosted employment were: social assistance, computer systems design and related services, transit systems, performing arts and spectator sports and waste management.
Industries that were able to raise both IT spending and employment were: ambulatory healthcare, education, nursing and residential care, hospitals, oil and gas extraction, mining support activities, petroleum, pipeline and utilities.
What can be done? Forrester’s report is aimed at vendors who need to avoid the stigma of being bad for jobs. Forrester also warns that the perception that IT could be bad for jobs could cause political problems as well. “While the republican takeover of the US House of representatives does reduce the risk of congressional hearings, resolution, and legislation on technology as a killer of jobs, republicans will be none too happy if the tax incentives for new business investment that they support end up in companies buying more technology instead of hiring more workers.” Therefore, Forrester’s advice for vendors is to done down rhetoric about cost savings and emphasize technology’s ability to grow top-line revenues.
But changing rhetoric won’t necessarily solve the actual problem. Forrester suggests that technology will lead to new jobs. That’s very likely – but will it lead to enough jobs to make up for the ones we lose? As Austin wrote, it’s 50 years since the IT revolution began. “Where all the new jobs for the ones displaced?”
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This Week in Internet of Things: Intel’s $25M IoT Investment, French Intelligent Cities & More
Jan 27th
Every Thursday evening PT we review Internet of Things developments from the past week. Internet of Things is a term for when everyday objects are connected to the Internet. It’s becoming an increasingly relevant trend for the Web and media, so we want to keep you updated with the latest news. Tune in every Thursday evening for our updates.
This week’s stories include a big IoT investment by chip maker Intel, two French cities building smart cities, RunKeeper’s platform for exercise and health data, and more. Also we continue the countdown to the Internet address apocalypse!
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5 More Days Until the Internet Runs Out of IPv4 Addresses
As we noted last week, it’s getting down to the wire for IPv4 Internet addresses. It’s now down to 5 days, according to the Twitter account @ipv4countdown (data sourced from Hurricane Electric). This time next week, it’ll be Armageddon! Well… not really, the Internet will continue to run and most of us won’t notice any difference. For the technically inclined though, the age of IPv6 will have officially arrived.
The adoption of IPv6 is a key technology in the Internet of Things, because every object connected to the Internet requires at least one IP address. There will be huge demand for Internet addresses and IPv6 is more than capable of handling that.
Intel invests $25 Million in Internet of Things Research
Intel announced this week that it will invest NT$750 million (US$25.8 million) in joint research with Taiwan’s top-ranked university, National Taiwan University. The research project, named Intel-NTU Connected Context Computing Center, will focus on Internet of Things. Specifically it will look at smart sensing, “green sensing” and context analysis.
Vida Ilderem Burger, vice president and director of Intel’s integrated platforms research, said that
it’s Intel’s first such center and will probably eventually expand to China. This is significant, because as we noted last week China is well ahead of the U.S. on IoT implementation.
The Quantified Self: RunKeeper Emphasizes IoT Platform
Fitness-tracker RunKeeper announced this week that its iPhone app will remain free, after formally being a paid app. Instead of making money from its apps directly, RunKeeper is going to focus on building a platform for exercise and health data. Other companies have already built RunKeeper integration into sensors, ranging from heart rate monitors to sleep monitors and bathroom scales. RunKeeper says it will launch a public API (Application Programming Interface) this year.
Running coaches are already selling training programs on the RunKeeper site and power-users can pay for the RunKeeper Elite level of service. For more explanation and context, read Marshall Kirkpatrick’s analysis of RunKeeper.
French Intelligent Cities
Bruce Sterling, who runs the excellent Spime Watch on his Wired blog, pointed us to a report on "smart city" development in France. The telecoms company France Telecom Orange has been running two smart city pilot projects at Cagne-sur-mer, a city with 40,000 residents located near Nice, and in the Grenoble city center. Reports Louise Joselyn from new Electronics:
"At Cagne, the pilot project has involved the deployment of sensors to monitor, measure and even control certain aspects of the city environment, including water metering in public buildings, street lighting control and the environment.
[...]
So far, the Cagne project has worked well, handling 100 or so sensors. The challenge is to support multiservices simultaneously and to scale to tens of thousands of sensors."
QR Codes Track Ancient Artifacts
As we reported earlier this week, the Center for the Studies of Archaeological and Prehistoric Heritage (CEPAP) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona is now using QR codes to ID and track ancient artifacts. The CEPAP team has been testing this process for two years, affixing QR tags on everything from sword blades to bone remains. CEPAP has managed to reduce artifact coding errors to 1% with this process.
Sao Paulo Cancer Hospital Uses RFID to Respond to Heart Attacks
A report in the RFID Journal this week explained how a Brazilian hospital is making use of RFID in medical emergencies. The system "not only alerts responders in the event of a cardiac arrest, but also tracks response times, thereby providing the clinic with information that it can utilize to improve its response processes."
The RFID implementation has been a success so far and the hospital is planning to extend it to "tracking and managing clinical assets, as well as for environmental monitoring of temperature and humidity in patient care areas, and in hospital refrigerators and freezers used to store tissue samples and medications."
That’s a summary of some Internet of Things highlights from the past week. Feel free to share in the comments other interesting Internet of Things developments that you spotted this week.
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