As you may know, we’re co-curating the London Web Summit on March 19, in The Brewery Venue, in London’s East End, already the single biggest cluster of tech startups in London. I’ll be working with Paddy Cosgrave and chairing the start up competition, which you can apply to enter here.
Niklas Zennstrom, one of Europe’s top tech entrepreneurs and investor, has now confirmed he will be speaking and joins Google’s Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora as one of a number of keynotes, including Shervin Pishevar, Lars Hinrichs, Jason Goldberg, Morten Lund, Ben Parr and Reshma Sohoni, among others.
LWS will demo 20 startups at the event with the winning startup sharing a prize package worth over £35,000 thanks to Orrick (£15k Legal Services), KPMG (£15k Advisory Services), HP (£4k hardware) and there is more to come.
There are now also four ways for early stage startups get over 60% off the ticket price. We’ll also have an exhibition area. We’re looking at over 500 attendees already signed up and over 100 investors.
But if you want to come free, here’s a way to do it:
We have 12 pairs (that’s 24 tickets total) for London Web Summit to give away.
The giveaway starts now and will end this Thursday 6pM CET. To enter, all you have to do is follow the steps below.
1) Become a fan of The London Web Summit on Facebook
2) Then do JUST ONE of the following:
- Retweet this post on Twitter (including the conference hashtag: #LWS )
- Or leave us a comment below telling us why you want to come, (and tick the box to post it to your Facebook stream).
The contest starts now and ends this Thursday, 6pm CET.
Make sure you only Tweet the message once, or you will be disqualified. We’ll choose the winner at random and contact them by this weekend. Anyone in the world is eligible. Please note this giveaway only includes two tickets to the ceremony and after party, and does not include airfare or hotel.
TVGuide.com has acquired social TV startup Fav.Tv in what executive vice president and general manager Christy Tanner says is a straightforward talent acquisition.
Plenty of startups are trying to reinvent the tv guide — including Fav.Tv, which was described, when it launched last fall, as not “your grandmother’s TV Guide.” But TVGuide.com (which operates the TV Guide digital properties while licensing the name to the print magazine publisher) has been trying to evolve too. It unveiled a new feature in August called Watchlist, which incorporates social elements, as well as on-demand/digital listings. Tanner credits Watchlist as one of the driving forces in the website’s growth from 4 million to 24 million unique monthly visitors.
TVGuide.com has also sold 80 sponsorships around its social features, making it “one of the very very very few actually making money from social TV,” she says.
The company has already launched iPhone, Android, and iPad apps, but Tanner says they haven’t incorporated the Watchlist yet because the company is focused on “getting it right.” Fav.tv’s two engineers will be working on the mobile apps. As for the Fav.tv apps and site, well, they’re following the predictable path of talent acquisitions — they’ll be shut down soon, and the startup is already pointing its users to set up Watchlist accounts.
The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Tanner says, “It’s not a big deal. It’s a very small deal.”
On the eve of what may well be the launch of a brand new iPad from Apple comes some new analysis from Forrester Research on the current competitive landscape in tablets — or lack thereof, as the case seems to be.
In short: despite the rush of tablets that have come out in the past year, many built on Google’s Android OS, Apple has managed to continue to run away with the competition, and how has 73 percent of the tablet market. No Android tablet maker, it notes, has more than a five percent share against it.
There is a caveat to Forrester’s research, however.
Forrester carried out its market research last September, before Amazon had started to sell its Kindle Fire tablet, and before Barnes & Noble had released its own tablet to compete against that. These devices have proven to be forces in the market, and are already having an impact on sales of another device in the food chain, e-readers. (More on that below.)
Both Amazon and Barnes & Noble also use Android — albeit versions that have been customized and are no longer on Google’s upgrade track (and service track) as a result.
In Forrester’s analysis, Samsung has a five percent share; Motorola four percent and Acer a three percent share. HP’s TouchPad, now discontinued, had a six percent share, but that was during that series of crazy fire sales when everyone suddenly rushed to buy one.
So how would those numbers look with the $ 199 Kindle Fire in the mix? Unfortunately we still don’t know exactly: the last numbers that the company released were during its last quarterly results at the end of January, but even these were not concrete. Amazon said that sales of its Kindle products, including the e-readers, had grown 177 percent over the last year and that the Kindle Fire was the bestselling among them.
But others have parsed those numbers and have come up with their own sales estimates.
Mobile analyst Chetan Sharma tells me that he believes that Amazon sold around four million Kindle Fire tablets in 2011. That would put it behind his estimates for Samsung, at six million, for the full year.
But in the holiday quarter alone (the only quarter when the Kindle Fire was actually shipping to customers), Sharma believes Amazon would have come in second place to Apple, which reported that it sold 15.43 million iPad tablets. Others have guessed that Amazon sold more like six million Kindle Fire tablets.
If you trust Forrester’s guess on these things, the role that companies like Amazon will play in the tablet market will continue to grow because of two reasons: price and content.
Although many Android tablets, such as Samsung’s Galaxy line or Motorola’s Xoom, have been launched with media services in an attempt to punch at the same weight as Apple, it seems that the offerings are not good enough to justify the prices, which have been on par with Apple’s iPad.
Amazon has made content a focus of its tablet, too, but at a much lower price point. That’s made the whole product significantly more attractive. Quoted in Bloomberg, Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps notes: “Tablets are about services. That is where Amazon has succeeded where others have failed.”
E-reader effect. Amazon’s Kindle Fire might not yet be denting Apple’s share by too much, but one area where it seems to be having more of an impact is on e-readers. Some research from DigiTimes estimates that shipments of pure-play e-reading devices will be down to only two million units this quarter, compared with nine million in the same quarter a year ago. It says this is down to the “substitution” effect of people opting for products like the Kindle Fire instead.
That kind of cannibalization, to be honest, seems only to spell good news for Apple, as it means that more people are looking for devices that are bigger than smartphones, yet still portable, but are loaded up with more features than an e-reader: that’s a market where Apple has consistently set the bar.
It’s still a market that is wide open for change: Forrester believes that by 2016, only about one-third of U.S. adults will own an iPad, and that’s before even considering what might happen in other markets.
Getaround, a car rental community that only launched in May 2011 and subsequently won TC Disrupt NY, is ready to get you where you need to be in time for SXSW.
The app that lets you rent a car by the hour, day or week, and comes fully loaded with insurance, 24-hour roadside assistance, and a Getaround car-kit has broken ground in some new territories, including (yep, you guessed it) Austin, Texas.
The app received a $ 3.4 million seed round in September, with participation from Netflix founder Marc Randolph, Powerset founder Barney Pell, WordPress’ Matt Mullenweg, Redpoint Ventures, General Catalyst, Michael Arrington‘s Crunchfund and others. At that point Getaround was only available in the Bay Area, but has since gone on to disrupt the Portland area and San Diego.
You see, Getaround isn’t rushing the service into any market without being sure that there’s enough demand, variety and inventory. Luckily for all of you venturing out to SXSW this week, Getaround will be ready for you.
The company says that market-by-market expansion is imminent in the next couple of months.
Disruptive mobile and online payments startup Jumio has raised $ 25.5 million in Series B funding led by Andreessen Horowitz. The firm’s General Partner Scott Weiss has joined Jumio’s board of directors. Jumio’s earlier investors include Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin Peng T. Ong, partner at GSR Ventures and founder of Match.com and Vivek Ranadivé, founder of TIBCO. Founded by Daniel Mattes in 2010, Jumio has raised $ 32 million to date. We previously reported the most recent raise, which was disclosed in an SEC filing, but the new investors were unknown.
Mattes, who sold his latest company, Jajah, to Telefonica for $ 207 million, founded Jumio because he felt that existing online payments solutions both presented a security risk and caused churn, as most people didn’t want to input their credit card and payments details by hand for each transaction made on a phone or online.
Jumio’s first product Netswipe, debuted last year in Europe as a technology that allows e-commerce site owners and Internet retailers to process online and mobile payments by having customers ‘swipe’ their credit cards using virtually any webcam. Basically, the webcam uses Jumio’s patent-pending technology to scan and read the card so that the payments can be made.
To complete a transaction, consumers briefly hold their credit card in front of their webcam. Through secure videostreaming, the credit card details are recognized and verified: no snapshot image is taken, no data is stored on the computer used for the payment, making the technology extremely secure, explains Mattes. Credit card info is streamed to Jumio’s servers.
The benefit to Netswipe is that it minimizes the time between a customer’s decision to purchase something online and making a transaction, cuts down on the friction of entering credit card information and reducing fraud. The technology also comes with a complimentary mobile solution, which works similarly to the web platform. You simply use the phone’s camera to take a short video of the credit card, and the payments data is captured. As Mattes tells us, the main IP for Jumio is centered around computer vision technology that makes the process fast and secure.
It’s important to note that Jumio isn’t the only company trying to disrupt credit card scanning technologies. Card.io, a startup that develops mobile applications also capable of scanning credit cards using smartphone cameras. But Jumio aims to tackle both web and mobile payments.
In terms of how Jumio makes money, the startup takes a percentage of transaction, which depends on size of merchants. This falls anywhere between 0.8 and 3.5 per transactions, and there is no per transaction fee. For distribution, Jumio will partner directly with large-scale retailers to implement the technology in the payments and checkout process as well as with payments service providers and processors to reach small and medium-sized online businesses.
The company is also debuting Netverify, the company’s newest product for online merchants. Built with the same patent-pending technology as Netswipe, Netverify turns any webcam into a virtualID reader. Netverify allows merchants to confirm a customer’s identity in real-time and continue an in-process transaction without interruption. Netverify eliminates the need for consumers to scan and fax copies of their ID. Instead, they simply hold their ID up to a webcam, Netverify scans it and the merchant gets an instant verification. Mattes says that Netverify can be used as a complement to Netswipe or as a single solution. We’re told already a number of banks are excited about using the technology, both the online, and on mobile.
As Weiss explains to us, Andreessen Horowitz made this bet on Jumio partly because Mattes is a successful serial entrepreneur but also because the startup’s technology solves a real problem with online merchants accepting credit cards, making the user experience much easier and solving fraud problem. “This is already a tempest in a tea pot and starting to explode,” Weiss says of Jumio’s technology.
The company started off with European focus last year on gaming, retail and travel and now is on track for a $ 100 million revenue run rate in 2012. The new cash infusion will go to hiring as well as expanding merchant and network partnerships through the US and Asia in retail, travel, gaming and digital goods.
Weiss seems optimistic that Jumio can enter these markets and change consumer behavior, saying “I don’t stay up at night worrying about how Jumio is going to do…there’s so much to like about the business and it has the potential to be the primary way people take credit cards online.”
Mattes and Jumio are essentially trying to replicate the ease and security of swiping a credit card through a payment terminal online through this video streaming technology. It’s an ambitious goal, especially considering that you have to change the behavior of consumers from inputting credit card info via typing into fields into using their webcams. But clearly the young company is seeing traction in Europe and is making an impressive amount of money along the way.
Connotate, which aims to help companies collect data and content from the Web and transform this unstructured data into actionable enterprise intelligence, has acquired fellow competitor Fetch Technologies. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Fetch Technologies helps companies access massive amounts of real-time Internet data, especially in the areas of retail and background checks. The company pulls in everything from pricing data for retailers and shopping engines to criminal background history or news stories. Customers include Shopzilla.
Based on technology developed at Rutgers University, Connotate provides customized real-time Web information extraction capabilities that help organizations transform data into actionable intelligence, in order to create new revenue streams, increase productivity and track Web sites with automated processes.
Connotate, which has raised $ 5.25 million in funding, helps organizations detect changes, collect and organize data from more than 3 million Web pages per day. This data can then be transformed into what the company refers to as “high-value information assets”, to feed content products, grow market and business intelligence, enable mass data aggregation, migration and integration. Customers include Reuters, Dow Jones & Company, Associated Press and McGraw-Hill.
The merger, says Connotate, will expand the company’s offerings into new verticals.
Kontagent, a startup offering analytics for Facebook, mobile, and Web apps, says that its annual revenue grew 500 percent in 2011, to “just under $ 10 million.”
The company’s kSuite tools allow developers to track virality, engagement, retention, and revenue. The company signed up 100 new enterprise customers last year, including its first mobile clients. The current customer base includes Peak Games, Gaia Online, and Popcap. (In addition to game companies, Kontagent says it has large clients in e-commerce, but it isn’t naming them.)
Asked what’s coming next, CMO Dan Kimball says the company wants to build a “deeper” product this year, one that offers “the benefits that are typically associated with expensive, home-built [business intelligence] tools” in an inexpensive way.
Kontagent was founded in 2007. Last year, it raised $ 12 million from Battery Ventures, Maverick Capital, and Altos Ventures.
After Apple pushed its 25 billionth app this weekend there was nothing especially surprising about the list of all-time paid apps for the iPhone: games and novelty apps dominated it. But the list of all-time paid apps for the iPad was somewhat revealing. Pages, Apple’s word processing app, was up there at number one. Numbers and Keynote were on the list as well, as well as Penultimate, QuickOffice Pro HD, Notability and Splashtop Remote Desktop. Almost 25% of the list was comprised of productivity apps.
It’s not surprising that the business casuals have embraced the iPad — that’s been clear for a while now if at any time in the past 18 months you’ve stepped into the local branch of a coffee shop chain where the Banana Republic set feels most comfortable. But what is interesting is just how strongly and quickly they appear to have embraced it. QuickOffice Pro HD is especially telling: it’s a replacement set for the three of the most popular applications in Microsoft Office, with a 4.5 rating for the current version on the App Store.
At this point, if you still believe that the iPad is primarily a consumption device you’ve probably got a netbook to sell me. And while PC sales aren’t quite fucked yet, clothes are definitely being shed. This is all, pretty clearly, a problem for Microsoft. Office was roughly 30% of Microsoft’s revenue last quarter — and almost all of that was from traditional computing devices. And while releasing Office for the iPad is the right move for Microsoft, it raises serious questions about Microsoft’s future Office revenues.
Microsoft’s Business Division, which is where Office is siloed, reported revenues of over $ 6 billion last quarter. Over 90% of that was from sales of Office products. Microsoft didn’t break out the difference between enterprise and consumer sales in their 10-Q, but looking at their data it appears that roughly 75% of Business Division’s revenue comes from the enterprise and 25% from consumers. To think about it another way, that’s 23% and 7% of all of Microsoft’s revenue for their last quarter.
This is where the iPad comes in, scissors in hand, and prepares to give the Business Division a haircut. It’s not clear if it’s going to be a Sweeney Todd situation or more like Supercuts, but a lot of it is going to be due to pricing.
Right now, consumers can pick up Office for PCs for around $ 125. Per-seat pricing for the enterprise is a little trickier, but it’s estimated to be around $ 50 and predicted to drop further.1 Office prices have always seemed relatively fair, because the core products — especially Word and Excel — are bundled. Customers think that they’re getting a lot for their money — and if they didn’t, well, everyone needs Office, right?
But pricing on the iPad is a totally different situation. The Office competitors and complements on the all-time list are all priced under $ 20. Pages, Numbers and Keynote are under $ 10. Even if Office for the iPad is released as a bundled app — which seems like a UX boondoggle — what can they possibly price it at to stay competitive? QuickOfficePro can view and edit Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents and you get the whole shebang for $ 19.99. If they release standalone apps — which seems the most likely, but who knows — will customers be willing to pay more than $ 30 for Word on the iPad? Will they be willing to pay more than $ 20?
Unbundling Office for the iPad creates an additional problem for Microsoft revenues, especially on the consumer side. I can’t find a breakdown of how Office products are used, but it’s a safe bet to assume that many people who bought Office have never even opened PowerPoint. If Microsoft unbundles Office, there’s a good possibility many people aren’t going to be buying Microsoft Office. They’re going to be buying Microsoft Word.2
None of this is considering versioning and paid upgrades — which Microsoft loves — and are still relatively untested in the iOS market.
I could be totally wrong about the price people are willing to pay for Office on the iPad. Maybe it is that important and people are willing to pay $ 125 for a suite of Microsoft products on a device that costs $ 500. But the adoption of the iPad has not just shown that consumers use the iPad to get work done but that those same consumers have learned that they can get work done without using Office.
This was made especially clear to me by a series of retweets by John Gruber over the weekend showing just how quickly people are adapting to the iPad. George Howard:
@gruber i've seen a dramatic and steady increase in the number of college students using their iPad (sans ext keyboard) to take notes.
— George Howard (@gah650) March 05, 2012
Maxim Harper:
@gruber As one of those teens who are iPad heavy I get 110wpm out of mine. The lack of travel really helps with speed.
— Maxim Harper (@MaximHarper) March 04, 2012
Anecdotal evidence, sure, but illustrative of the systemic changes the iPad is bringing unto computing. Not only does Microsoft have to compete in a crowded market where the brand value of Office is significantly diminished, they have to compete against products priced at $ 9.99. That’s not a price point Redmond has much familiarity with.
1 This is why Microsoft has to bet big on Office 365. It’s not just an answer to Google Docs, but they’re also trying to increase per-seat pricing by moving towards a software as a service model.
2 Though with Microsoft’s deft marketing hand, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it called Microsoft Office Word for Tablets Home Edition 2012.
Seth Besmertnik, co-founder and CEO of startup Conductor, admits that Web search isn’t that “sexy” anymore — hell, by slapping a +1 button on everything, Google itself seems more excited about social than search. But Besmertnik says he’s still building a big business focused on search engine optimization (SEO).
Specifically, Conductor is announcing that there are 1,000 global brands (including Ticketmaster and Gilt Groupe) who use Conductor’s Searchlight product to monitor and improve their ranking on Google, or whatever the dominant search engine is in a given country. That number is up 300 percent from the year before. Besmertnik also says that Searchlight booked $ 1 million worth of new customers in the fourth quarter of 2011, and it now has an annual run rate of $ 10 million in revenue. In fact, he says he’s hopeful about eventually taking Conductor public.
When pitching Searchlight’s potential, Besmertnik favorite statistic isn’t actually about customer count or revenue numbers. Instead, he points out that “natural” search (the results that advertisers don’t pay for) accounts for 92 percent of clicks, but only 11 percent of search spending. Naturally, Besmertnik wants to shift that ratio.
Searchlight collects data from more than 100 public sources to help companies understand where they sit in search results, where their competitors sit, and how they can move up. (Yes, Google+ is part of that data — Besmertnik says that as more social signals are incorporated into search, “they’re just more signals” for Searchlight to weigh.) Some companies that depend on SEO for all their traffic might spend their entire working day in the service, while others see it more of an alert system, so they know when their rank is falling. Besmertnik says the average customer pays Conductor $ 60,000 or $ 70,000 per year.
As for where the industry goes from here, Besmertnik predicts that it will continue in the direction of “universal search,” incorporating images, video, and other media. As that happens, it’s probably safe to assume that Searchlight will be expanding its support for those features. In addition, Besmertnik says his team will be revamping the product so that it “tells you a lot more about what you have to do, versus having to figure it out yourself.”
TestFlight could have been a safe little business, but co-founder Ben Satterfield is a true entrepreneur, and his dreams are not so small. Before today, only the most successful mobile app developers could afford sophisticated real-time usage and revenue data tracking. Costs prevented indie developers from getting the data they needed to build great apps and games. By being acquired by in-app ad management platform Burstly (scooped by MG Siegler for PandoDaily), Satterfield’s team gained the resources necessary to launch TestFlight Live, democratize this data, and get better apps built for everyone.
Satterfield tells me “This is us believing in the bigger vision. [The original TestFlight] is a great product on its own, and we could have charged and gone scrappy with it month to month, but we want to wake up every day and go after something big.”
That’s why TestFlight didn’t slap a subscription fee on its free iOS app testing platform, or port the same features to Android. It saw a big gap in measurement tools for mobile devs, realized the platform owners Apple and Google couldn’t or wouldn’t solve the problem, and it seized the opportunity. Developers can now leave the pre-launch TestFlight code in their apps to gain access to TestFlight Live’s engagement and monetization data from real users.
In social games on the web, Zynga used its funding and early success to build powerful data analysis and game optimization tools that helped it crush smaller competitors going on hunches. This arguably reduced innovation across the space. TestFlight could protect the burgeoning mobile app industry from the same fate.
With TestFlight Live’s dashboard, even tiny studios can watch install rates, and what levels users are getting stuck on, but also revenue rates and which ads are driving clicks — all from a single screen. Ties to Burstly’s multi-network ad management platform will make it so developers aren’t at the mercy of a single ad network. Burstly’s CEO Evan Rifkin tells me, “Once they understand lifetime value and average revenue per user, they’ll know what they want to build, how much to spend on marketing, how many developers to hire, and it will allow the app economy to flourish.”
When asked if the TestFlight team was worried that Apple could steamroll them with its own app testing and measurement platform, Satterfield explained, “We all love Apple obviously, but what they do is they champion the consumer.” Rifkin chimed in, “It’s in our minds but not something we’re really worried about. Developers are important to them, but consumers are #1. We built this because we wanted it, and it’s our only focus.”
Rifkin also noted that Apple would never build something that also supported Android. Now,TestFlight doesn’t support Android yet either, but Satterfield says “it’s something we’re consistently thinking about. There’s specific pain points in developing for that platform, and we’d want to make [an Android version] specific to those needs.”
A higher priority, though, was getting TestFlight Live out the door and improving the original TestFlight’s UI. Developers can actually get a sneak preview of the next iteration of TestFlight right now by going into their account and enabling ‘v2′ in the “Area 51″ section. Satterfield calls it a “beta beta”, and asks devs to turn v2 off once they’ve had a look, as all the kinks aren’t out yet.
If you could hear how passionate Satterfield and Rifkin are about empowering developers, you’d stop asking “Why not go it alone?” Rifkin rallies, “It’s such a bold, difficult mission, even as a combined company. I don’t think there’s a chance in hell Burstly or TestFlight could have done it by themselves. The path we were on was cool, but that’s not why we’re working our asses off and getting very little sleep.”
There’s something grander at stake than mobile ads or beta testing. It’s about helping creators create. “We can get the data to every developer, and raise up the entire app ecosystem. That’s the religion that brings two companies together when they’re doing well on their own.”
