A cluster of start-ups in east London is thriving. All they need now is a big success

A cluster of start-ups in east London is thriving. All they need now is a big success

Oct 5th 2013 |From the print edition

TO SPAWN the next Facebook or Twitter, first launch a start-up contest. Promise the winner a sizeable equity investment, say £1m ($1.6m), and let firms from all over the world compete. Among the entries there will surely be a hit. This is the idea behind the Million Pound Start-Up competition put together by Digital Shoreditch, an event organiser. More than 1,000 hopefuls from 77 countries have signed up. Read more of this post

What newspapers can learn from television

What newspapers can learn from television

Oct 5th 2013 |From the print edition

LAST November Mike Darcey, then a top executive at BSkyB, a British satellite-television company, received a phone call from Rupert Murdoch, the boss of News Corporation. Mr Murdoch wanted him to run News UK (formerly News International), his scandal-plagued British newspaper unit, even though Mr Darcey had never worked in publishing. “Don’t worry about it,” Mr Murdoch said. “It’s exactly the same” as television. Read more of this post

Era of mobile settlement already approaches in Korea

Era of mobile settlement already approaches

Lee Deok-ju, Won Yo-han

2013.10.04 17:29:55

A Korean office worker in his 30s only named as his initial ‘K’ always touches his smartphone on the ticket turnstile instead of inserting a subway ticket into the device. His smartphone has a mobile T-money payment system of transport fares. The near field communication (NFC)-enabled smartphone works the same as the plastic payment card.
In his way to start the company, he decided to read a comic using his smartphone. When he chose his favorite comic book from an electronic shelf of Yes 24 and settled his deal on a simple payment method provided by KG Inisys. This is part of mobile settlement that is being shaped to cover all types of commerce with separate payment for each deal possible. According to the nation’s five major credit card companies on Friday, a total of 3.3 million mobile cards have so far been issued. Nearly 90 billion won ($84.1 million) worth of transactions were settled through these mobile cards in September alone. It represents just 0.21% of 43.4 trillion won settled monthly through all credit and check cards in Korea last year, but it’s a significant rise compared to 2010 when 55,000 mobile cards were issued with 1 billion won of transactions were settled. Attention is being paid to growth potential of mobile cards, as they have become part of our everyday life. “Telecom service providers, portals and even social network service firms have tapped into local payment gateway markets and the future business outlook is bright because mobile commerce users are increasing sharply,” said Kim Min-seok, head of SK C&C Mobile Business.

Why Qunar will travel with Baidu

Why Qunar will travel with Baidu

By Dan Primack June 24, 2011: 10:06 AM ET

Chinese search giant Baidu (BIDU) is making a major push into the travel market, today agreeing to acquire a majority stake in privately-held Qunar for $306 million. So I spent some time on the phone this morning with venture capitalist Richard Lim, a Qunar board member and managing director of GSR Ventures. What follows is an edited transcript:

Fortune: What is your firm’s history with Qunar?

Lim: We were the first investor, leading the Series A round in 2006. Then we helped put together the Series B round a year or two later, and worked with them on the Series C round that closed in December 2009. Read more of this post

The new Facebook lives in China: Tencent’s WeChat

The new Facebook lives in China

BY HAMISH MCKENZIE 
ON OCTOBER 4, 2013

We’ve said it before, but because we’re just wrapping up a special report about mobile chat, it’s worth saying again. WeChat is, like, the biggest thing ever. China’s leading mobile chat app, a product of Tencent, the country’s largest Internet company and one of the top five in the world by market cap, has achieved virtual ubiquity in the Middle Kingdom, taking up residence on the handsets of the young and old. It enjoys the sort of dominance in China that Facebook enjoys in the US. And it’s only going to get bigger. Read more of this post

State of Flux for Solid-State Drives

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2013

State of Flux for Solid-State Drives

MKM says smartphone and tablet sales are shifting from high-end to low-end.

MKM Partners

Following significant price increases in memory in late 2012 and the first half of 2013, DRAM appeared to be set for a return to a more normalized downward trajectory in the third quarter before a fire at Hynix’s Wuxi, China semiconductor fabrication plant (responsible for 12% of global DRAM output) in early September sent spot pricing dramatically higher. NAND prices, which had appeared to have stabilized, moved slightly higher in sympathy with DRAM on the possibility that some manufacturers, such as Samsung [of South Korea] and Micron Technology (ticker: MU) (rated at Neutral, $16 fair value) could switch capacity from NAND to DRAM to make up for the Hynix shortfall. Read more of this post

Twitter Advertisers Say Service Needs More Users; Buyers Say Service Should Be More Mainstream Before It Gets More From Mass-Market Clients

October 4, 2013, 7:03 p.m. ET

Twitter Advertisers Say Service Needs More Users

Buyers Say Service Should Be More Mainstream Before It Gets More From Mass-Market Clients

YOREE KOH And SUZANNE VRANICA

SAN FRANCISCO—For some advertisers, 218 million people isn’t a big enough audience. That’s their message to Twitter Inc., which Thursday detailed plans for an initial public offering. Ad buyers say that the short-message service will need significantly more users, and a bigger sales force, to win more spending from their mass-market clients. “Scale still matters,” says Adam Shlachter, senior vice president of media at DigitasLBi, a digital-ad firm owned by Publicis Groupe PUB.FR +0.38% SA. “How consumers embrace [Twitter] and tap into it or tune in or out is going to be critical.” Read more of this post

U.S. TV networks tout video on-demand for catch-up viewing

U.S. TV networks tout video on-demand for catch-up viewing

5:03pm EDT

By Lisa Richwine

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The morning after a new episode of the drama “Sleepy Hollow” airs on the Fox broadcast network, a message on the show’s Facebook page encourages viewers to catch up with the show by clicking on their cable operator’s video on demand service. Fox and other networks are firing up marketing efforts to steer audiences who miss live episodes to free on-demand viewing. As the new television season gets underway, they are putting promotional spots for video on demand, or VOD, in prime time, on their web pages, and on social media. Read more of this post

Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian Explains How He Built A Web Empire

Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian Explains How He Built A Web Empire

GREGORY FERENSTEIN

posted yesterday

You don’t need to be a cut-throat jerk to be successful in the business of capitalism. Alexis Ohanian doesn’t stand out in a room; other than being tall enough to play NBA defense, he’s usually the unassuming guy in a corner making new friends with a big smile and a buddy-buddy attitude. Ohanian also happens to have founded one of the most influential websites in existence:Reddit.com, a popular news aggregator, snags over 1 billion page views a month and has the power to turn a news story into a viral sensation. Ohanian’s new book, Without Their Permission, reveals the origin story of Reddit as the earnest project of a do-good entrepreneur. Most importantly, it proves that there are many paths to unlocking the Internet treasure chest and at least one doesn’t involve selling your soul. Read more of this post

A Chinese Mobile Startup With Global Reach: Android-Based Go Launcher Touches 80M Monthly Actives

A Chinese Mobile Startup With Global Reach: Android-Based Go Launcher Touches 80M Monthly Actives

KIM-MAI CUTLER

posted yesterday

As I’ve written about before, while the Chinese startup scene is sometimes criticized for producing copycats of Western businesses,there are emerging entrepreneurs building software products with global appeal. One of the startups with the largest reach is Go Launcher, a Beijing-based company making an Android homescreen that boasts 80 million monthly actives and three Android products with more than 50 million installs each. Read more of this post

Twitter Lost $69 Million On $254 Million In Revenue During The First Half Of This Year; Twitter Admits 5% Of Its ‘Users’ Are Fake

Twitter Lost $69 Million On $254 Million In Revenue During The First Half Of This Year

JAY YAROW OCT. 3, 2013, 6:24 PM 1,299

Compared to other major tech companies, Twitter is pretty small. The company’s IPO filing reveals that it lost $69 million on $254 million in revenue through the first six months of the year. Facebook earned $1 billion on $3.3 billion in revenue for the same period. Twitter is growing faster, though. Its revenue was up 107% on a year-over-year basis, compared to Facebook which grew 46%.  In this chart, you can see how Twitter’s revenue, and losses have been growing through the years on a quarterly basis. As you can see, Twitter just started getting aggressive on revenue two years ago. The majority of Twitter’s revenue — 87% — comes from advertising. The rest is from data licensing. The chart comes from BI Intelligence.  Read more of this post

Roku’s Survival Will Take More Than Beating Apple TV

Roku’s Survival Will Take More Than Beating Apple TV

By Joshua Brustein October 03, 2013

Heavy users of streaming video love Roku, which makes puck-size boxes used to view Internet-streamed video on television sets. Since it began piping Netflix (NFLX) from broadband connections into viewers’ living rooms in 2008, Roku has become the favorite device among 37 percent of U.S. households with streaming players, compared with 24 percent for Apple TV, according to researcher Park Associates. On Sept. 25, Roku released new versions of its devices, making minor improvements to its cheaper models and adding content from M-Go, a video rental and purchase service owned by MediaNaviCo. Read more of this post

One Big Doubt Hanging Over Twitter’s IPO: Fake Accounts; With Robot Accounts Spitting Tweets, Marketers May Want More Certainty They’re Reaching Humans

Updated October 3, 2013, 7:40 p.m. ET

One Big Doubt Hanging Over Twitter’s IPO: Fake Accounts

With Robot Accounts Spitting Tweets, Marketers May Want More Certainty They’re Reaching Humans

TOM GARA

At 4:45 p.m. on Thursday, the Twitter account for Mashable—one of the earliest movers into the now endless world of social media news sites—sent out its 60th tweet for the day. The tweet itself wasn’t particularly interesting, But what happened next was a small window into one of the biggest challenges Twitter will face as it seeks to convince investors that its more than 215 million users are one of the web’s most lucrative—and undeveloped—advertising audiences. Read more of this post

For Twitter, Success Came After Founders’ Exit; Ailing Startup Finds Its Legs After Pushing Aside Those That Brought It to Life

October 3, 2013, 8:08 p.m. ET

For Twitter, Success Came After Founders’ Exit

Ailing Startup Finds Its Legs After Pushing Aside Those That Brought It to Life

SHIRA OVIDE and YOREE KOH

Twitter Inc., which Thursday detailed one of Silicon Valley’s most hotly anticipated IPOs, nearly died without a chirp. The company was a side project of an ailing startup and riven with internal power struggles before morphing into a communications tool that has helped foment revolutions, end political careers and change the meaning of the word “tweet.” It reached that point without any of its four co-founders, none of whom now work at the company. A promising idea only turned into a steady company when Twitter outgrew its founders, and the people in charge pushed aside those who brought the company to life. Read more of this post

France delivers postal blow to Amazon; Law to aid bookshops stops internet booksellers offering free delivery

October 3, 2013 5:15 pm

France targets Amazon to protect bookshops

By Hugh Carnegy in Paris

France’s parliament has passed a law preventing internet booksellers from offering free delivery to customers, in an attempt to protect the country’s struggling bookshops from the growing dominance of US online retailer Amazon. On Thursday, Aurélie Filippetti, the culture minister who originally proposed the move, denounced Amazon for its alleged “strategy of dumping”, claiming that the company used offers of free delivery to get around French laws controlling the price of books. Read more of this post

Amazon plans TV streaming box in time for holidays

Amazon plans TV streaming box in time for holidays: WSJ

3:12pm EDT

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Amazon.com Inc, which entered the gadget-making business with the Kindle e-reader, intends to sell a set-top box that can stream Internet content to televisions in time for the holidays, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. The Internet retailer has approached media software developers as well as cable television providers in recent weeks, hoping to secure content partners for the device by mid-October, the newspaper reported, citing people briefed on the company’s plans. Read more of this post

Twitter ad strategy aims to be on target as it looks beyond US

October 2, 2013 3:11 pm

Twitter ad strategy aims to be on target as it looks beyond US

By Rob Budden in London and April Dembosky in San Francisco

Twitter was relatively late to the advertising game, but as its market debut looms, it is making up for lost time, and a big part of the catching up is happening outside of its core US market. In the past few months, the site has opened a number of offices outside the US as it begins to sell advertising internationally. In addition to the US, Twitter now has sales teams in eight other countries including Brazil, France, Japan and the UK. It is also working with resellers in theMiddle East and Africa, in southeast Asia, and in Spanish-speaking Latin America. The US still accounts for the lion’s share of revenues – about 83 per cent of estimated global ad revenues of $580m for Twitter, according to eMarketer. But revenues in the rest of the world are growing fast. By 2015, non-US countries are expected to make up almost a quarter of Twitter’s total revenues, the research company predicts, helping propel a doubling of ad revenues next year to $950m. Read more of this post

Techs eye Japan’s ‘keiretsu’ as VC model

Last updated: October 2, 2013 8:47 pm

Techs eye Japan’s ‘keiretsu’ as VC model

By Richard Waters

Groups seeking venture capital success must mimic Japan’s example

When big corporations jump on the venture capital bandwagon, it is often an indication that a start-up investment cycle has peaked. Incumbents usually wake up to the idea of backing a new band of disruptive companies – some of which are out to eat their lunch – only when it is already too late. If so, then the extra $650m that SAP has just ploughed into venture capital – boosting the firepower of its venture investment arm to about $1bn – looks like a clear “sell” signal. As Nino Marakovic, head of SAP Ventures, ruefully puts it: “Corporations normally get in at the top and out at the bottom, which is exactly the wrong way to do it.” Read more of this post

The Death Of Social ROI — Companies Are Starting To Drop The The Idea That They Can Track Social Media’s Dollar Value

The Death Of Social ROI — Companies Are Starting To Drop The The Idea That They Can Track Social Media’s Dollar Value

JOHN HEGGESTUEN OCT. 2, 2013, 4:00 PM 2,066 2

Many brands are moving away from metrics that purport to measure ROI on social media. They’ve realized that social media isn’t a transactional engine or sales machine, so they’re dropping half-baked indicators that gauge secondary effects, such as financial return. Instead, the new metrics evaluate social media strategies in terms of audience-building, brand awareness, and customer relations. In a new report from BI Intelligence, we look at the no-frills but powerful metrics that social media managers and analytics companies are focusing on, we explain how the end of the vogue for ROI has not meant a pullback on social media budgets (in fact, social media budgets are ballooning). And we dig into some of the misconceptions and misuses surrounding the more common reach and engagement metrics popularized by Facebook Insights, the built-in analytics dashboard for Facebook pages. Here’s how social media strategies are evolving:  Read more of this post

Social Networks in a Battle for the Second Screen

October 2, 2013

Social Networks in a Battle for the Second Screen

By VINDU GOEL and BRIAN STELTER

After “Breaking Bad” drew 10.3 million viewers to one of the most crowd-satisfying finales in television history on Sunday, Twitter and Facebook raced to tell the news media about the throngs who shared their instant reactions to the show on the social networks. The companies were seeking more than just bragging rights. Facebook and Twitter both see the social conversation around television as a way to increase use of their sites and win a bigger piece of advertisers’ spending, which eMarketer estimates will be $171 billion across all types of media this year in the United States. In recent months, they have engaged in an escalating battle — publicly and behind the scenes — to claim the title of the nation’s digital water cooler as they woo networks and advertisers. Read more of this post

A Watch That Sinks Under Its Features; Samsung’s Galaxy Gear watch is ambitious and even amazing. But it has too many components for one gadget.

October 2, 2013

A Watch That Sinks Under Its Features

By DAVID POGUE

In the beginning, computers were the size of buildings. To use one, you walked into it. Over the decades, they grew small enough to sit on a desk, then to carry in a briefcase, then to keep in your pocket. And now we’re entering the age of computers so small we wear them like jewelry. Just what kind of jewelry, however, has yet to be decided. Will we wear our computers on our foreheads, as with Google Glass? Or will we wear them on our wrists, as with the new Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch ($300)? Read more of this post

In Taiwan you can buy an Android tablet from 7-11 for $200

In Taiwan you can buy an Android tablet from 7-11 for $200

October 2, 2013

by Josh Horwitz

As mobile technology becomes cheaper to manufacture, an increasing number of low-end brands have emerged, selling simple devices at affordable prices. In Taiwan, one of these brands happens to be 7-11, the world-famous convenience store chain. The Taiwanese 7-11 (owned by domestic conglomerate Uni-President, and unaffiliated with the pit stop C-store most Americans are familiar with) announced yesterday it would release a private label tablet called “OPEN.” Manufactured by Taiwan electronics giant Foxconn, the device runs on Android 4.2 Jelly Bean and packs a quad-core 1.2 GHz Marvell processor, 16GB of storage, and 1GB of RAM.  Read more of this post

Merck believes ‘printable’ big OLEDs not far off

Merck believes ‘printable’ big OLEDs not far off

Oct 03,2013

Merck, a German-based chemical and pharmaceutical company, believes printable organic light-emitting diode (OLED) displays could be manufactured commercially within three years, allowing mass production of large displays. “You have to ask Samsung or LG for the exact date, but what I can tell you is that we have material available that serves that purpose,” said Walter Galinat, president of performance materials for Merck, who visited Korea for the “Displaying Futures” symposium yesterday in Seoul. ”We have manufactured displays in printing, and they worked very well.”  Read more of this post

Shares in accounting software start-up Xero have surged back towards all-time highs after it boasted it now has more clients in Australia than in its home turf, New Zealand, as it ramps up its global push

Sales soar as Xero ramps up global push

October 3, 2013 – 10:49AM

Brian Robins

Shares in accounting software start-up Xero have surged back towards all-time highs after it boasted it now has more clients in Australia than in its home turf, New Zealand, as it ramps up its global push. In the September half, revenues surged to $NZ30 million ($27 million) from $NZ16.9 million a year earlier, whikle at the end of the half, revenue was running at an annualised $NZ70 million. Read more of this post