The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- DoubleClick Rolls Out New Interface, Branding, And APIs
- Last Quarter Ended With 192 Million Total New Registered Domains, Up 11 Million
- Open Text Buys Up Content Analysis Startup Nstein Technologies For $34 Million
- Reply.com Files For $60 Million IPO
- Iron Mountain Buys Up Email Archiving Company Mimosa Systems For $112 Million
- Motorola Exec Dan Moloney Bails To Become CEO Elsewhere
- Yellow Pages Group Strengthens Foothold In Canada Through Acquisitions
- The Next TechCrunch Europe Events: Paris, London, Edinburgh, Copenhagen
- Al Gore Joins Richard Branson in Backing GreenRoad
- The Future Of Energy? Bloom Energy Boxes Already Power Google, eBay, Others
- MySpace’s Hail Mary Strategy: “Discovery”
- MySpace Launches An Activity And Content Stream
- RightSide Capital Announces New Seed Fund; Will Make 100-200 Investments Per Year
- Why You Should Confess Everything Before You Get Caught
- Small Business Spotlight: Drink Some Wine At Local Wine Events
- Mike Maples Talks Venture Capital And Thunder Lizards
| DoubleClick Rolls Out New Interface, Branding, And APIs Posted: 22 Feb 2010 08:53 AM PST
If you run a Website that uses DoubleClick’s DART ad server or Google Ad Manager, those products just got a major upgrade and rebranding. The DART brand is being retired and it will now be called DoubleClick For Publishers. Meanwhile, Google Ad Manager (which targets smaller Websites) will now be called DFP Small Business. With the rebranding, DoubleClick is rolling out a new dashboard to manage the ads served on a publisher’s Website, improved ad-serving algorithms, and anew set of APIs. Google details some of the new changes on its main blog:
There is more detailed info on the DoubleClick blog.      
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| Last Quarter Ended With 192 Million Total New Registered Domains, Up 11 Million Posted: 22 Feb 2010 08:26 AM PST Approximately 11 million new domain names were registered in the fourth quarter of 2009, an eight percent increase in new registrations from the third quarter of 2009. The increase has brought the total of registrations across all of the Top Level Domain Names to 192 million, an increase of nearly 15 million domain name registrations since the close of 2008. That means we’ll likely cross the 200 million milestone this or next quarter, provided growth continues. The numbers come from VeriSign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief (PDF). In Q4 2009, the base of domain name registrations grew by two percent over the third quarter of 2009 and eight percent over the fourth quarter of 2008. According to the Industry Brief, the base of Country Code Top Level Domain Names (ccTLDs) rose to 78.6 million domain names, a three percent increase quarter over quarter and a 10 percent increase year over year. In terms of total registrations, .com unsurprisingly continues to have the highest base followed by .cn (China), .de (Germany) and .net. VeriSign’s average daily DNS query load during the fourth quarter of 2009 was 52 billion per day with peaks as high as 61 billion per day, jumping 48 percent for the daily average and 31 percent increase for peak daily queries as compared to fourth quarter 2008.
(Via press release)      
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| Open Text Buys Up Content Analysis Startup Nstein Technologies For $34 Million Posted: 22 Feb 2010 06:57 AM PST
For example, Nstein powers the backend of The Financial Times’ semantic search engine, called Newssift, that indexes about 4,000 business news sources, from online newspapers and blogs to news portals and research sites. Open Text’s digital media solution help its customers manage rich-media content, so Nstein’s technology should boost Open Text’s existing offerings. Last year, Open Text, which is a publicly traded company bought up 3-D interface innovator Vizible.      
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| Reply.com Files For $60 Million IPO Posted: 22 Feb 2010 06:31 AM PST
Local cost-per-click marketplace Reply.com wants to raise $60 million in an initial public offering. The company filed its offering statement with the SEC this morning. Reply.com is a cost-per-click ad network which targets ads for local businesses. Its strategy is to gather more information from consumers who click on their ads by inserting a “middle page” between that pops to ask them where they live or what brands they like to improve targeting before showing them an ad. Revenues rose 75 percent in 2009 to $32.6 million. The company operates with a 50 percent gross margin, and turned its first net profit in 2009 of $2.5 million. The business produced $4.7 million in cash flow in 2009, but it ended the year with only $1.3 million in cash. Reply.com acquires click traffic from search engines, display ad networks, and other sources. These traffic acquisition costs account for nearly all of its cost of revenue. In the fourth quarter alone, the generated 4.9 million “enhanced clicks” and 700,000 leads for 5,000 advertisers. The company employs 127 people—103 of them in sales and marketing. Since 2005, the company has raised $27.5 million from Scale Venture Partners, Outlook Ventures, ATEL Ventures, and Debi Coleman, a former CFO of Apple. CEO Payam Zamani is the largest stockholder. He owns 43 percent of shares outstanding (before the offering). Scale is the second largest shareholder, with 21.5 percent. Zamani was previously the co-founder of Autoweb, and he’s been bankrolling the Reply.com. Over the past two years, the company has been dipping into his personal lines of credit to improve its liquidity. According to the filing, the “aggregate principal amount that we repaid under these credit lines to Mr. Zamani through December 31, 2009 was $5.9 million.” All of this personal debt to the CEO was repaid as of December 31, 2009, but it does suggest one reason why the company may need more working capital. It also plans to use the proceeds to expand into new advertising categories and geographies (and, presumably, to hire more sales people—local ad plays are very sales intensive). Click on the tables below to see its consolidated income statement.
     
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| Iron Mountain Buys Up Email Archiving Company Mimosa Systems For $112 Million Posted: 22 Feb 2010 05:59 AM PST
Information management company Iron Mountain has acquired Mimosa Systems for a cool $112 million in cash. Mimosa Systems provides an enterprise-friendly archiving system for email, SharePoint data and files. Iron Mountain provides data management solutions including protection, recovery, archiving, eDiscovery and intellectual property offerings. Mimosa Systems will provide on-premises archiving solution to compliment Iron Mountain’s cloud-based information management systems. With the acquisition of Mimosa, Iron Mountain gains 1000 more customers. Mimosa will be folded into Iron Mountain's Total Email Management Suite. The president and CEO of Mimosa Systems, T. M. Ravi, will become chief marketing officer for Iron Mountain Digital. Since its launch in 2003, Mimosa has raised close to $50 million in venture funding.      
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| Motorola Exec Dan Moloney Bails To Become CEO Elsewhere Posted: 22 Feb 2010 05:53 AM PST
Update: looks like he’ll be joining Technitrol as head honcho at the end of March 2010. Moloney will not be replaced, as Motorola co-CEO Sanjay Jha will continue to lead the previously announced combined Mobile Devices and Home businesses, as well as take the leadership role for the Home business, effective immediately. Moloney served nearly 10 years in senior-level capacities at Motorola and, previously, 16 years in managerial positions at General Instrument Corporation before its acquisition by Motorola early in 2000. Since 2007 up until the recently announced reorganization, Dan Moloney ran Motorola’s Home & Networks Mobility group. In that role, he reported to Greg Brown, Motorola’s other CEO, but with the reorganization Moloney effectively rolled into a position where he had to report to co-chief executive officer Sanjay Jha instead. When it became known that he’d be staying on as head of the Home business after the split-up, this was something of a surprise to some industry watchers. Premature, as it turns out, since it only took about 2 weeks after those reports for Moloney to hand in his resignation after all.      
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| Yellow Pages Group Strengthens Foothold In Canada Through Acquisitions Posted: 22 Feb 2010 04:49 AM PST
Simultaneously, the company announced that it has acquired Clear Sky Media, owner of a number of digital coupons and price comparison websites, for an undisclosed sum. The former agreement will enable YPG to build traffic for its own properties, Canada411.ca and YellowPages.ca, essentially leveraging the brand and growing reach of online directory 411.ca. Under the agreement, 411 Local Search will retain an exclusive license to use the 411.ca trademark until YPG purchases the balance of outstanding shares in the company within approx. three to five years. In a joint press release, 411.ca is said to have grown to attract close to 10% of online users, generating 13 million queries for local Canadian businesses each month. The addition of the 411.ca site will add approximately one million unduplicated unique visitors to YPG’s network reach, the companies added. The second acquisition that was announced by YPG this morning is that of Clear Sky Media, a holding company that operates RedFlagDeals and Scarlett Lounge, both community sites centered around discounts and coupons on the web and mobile, as well as price comparison engine PriceCanada.com. RedFlagDeals alone attracts 2.2 million unique visitors per month, according to comScore Media Metrix. Detailed terms and deal size were not disclosed for either agreement.      
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| The Next TechCrunch Europe Events: Paris, London, Edinburgh, Copenhagen Posted: 22 Feb 2010 04:03 AM PST
But we’re going to need your help. We’re looking for speakers and startups to appear at our events, and we’re especially interested in new startups planning to launch (read on about why). Meanwhile we’ve set up ticketing sites for you now so you can actually go and get early bird ticket prices right now. See below for details. So far this year we’ve partnered with or created events in Istanbul and Barcelona for tech startups. The next series of events require YOU to get as involved as you can. These take us to the Summer, after which we’ll be hitting other cities. In all cases, here’s what we want:      
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| Al Gore Joins Richard Branson in Backing GreenRoad Posted: 22 Feb 2010 12:01 AM PST
The name of that proof is GreenRoad. While so many entrepreneurs bang their heads against a Web and social media advertising brick wall, GreenRoad has applied common technology to an industry technology has largely passed by and—voila—they've got a business that's growing and saving lives, money and the environment. Driving is the third most deadly profession after deep sea fishing and working in a coal mine. Not only does driving more safely save lives but research shows it can also save 10% on annual fuel costs, and alleviate a good chunk of the $230 billion professional fleets spend on crashes each year. Enter GreenRoad: a system that helps professional drivers drive more safely and as a result save their company a lot of money. The GreenRoad system looks simple from the outside: There's a two-inch device on the dashboard that starts the day with a green light. If a driver brakes hard, swerves or turns recklessly, the light turns yellow. If the driver continues to drive erratically the light stays yellow. If it gets worse the light turns red. That's it. But like a lot of apparently simple ideas, there’s a lot more going on under the hood. GreenRoad was the brain-child of an Israeli entrepreneur who was run off the road one night by some wild kids. "If only their parents knew how they were driving…" he muttered to himself and the work on the company began. It morphed over the years from a consumer product to one aimed at commercial fleets. While the device is made up from mostly off-the-shelf products like a GPS chip, accelerometer, a CPU, mashed up with Google maps and a dashboard-like management portal, it took a good three years of hardcore R&D to build. While you want the system to work well enough that aggressive driving tactics are caught, avoiding false positives are a must if drivers are to trust GreenRoad and accept its results. The algorithms can crunch more than 120 different driving maneuvers and the map on the dashboard helps provide context, both for the driver, and for a supervisor looking at the results later. For instance, a lot of harsh right turns could be the result of a hairpin turn in the road, not carelessness on the part of the driver. There's also a good deal of psychology worked into the device. Drivers don't want to feel spied on, so video and audio surveillance products haven't been popular. It's also not a good idea to have something distracting, which is why early models that had icons to describe the offending aggressive move were nixed for the three simple lights. The dashboard, too, helps pull natural competitive levers by showing your performance, relative to your peers. And don't underestimate things as simple as starting each day with a green light: The key is holding drivers to a high enough standard, while letting them know they can succeed if they work at it and concentrate as well. GreenRoad has raised less than $40 million to date from Richard Branson's Virgin Green Fund, Balderton Capital in London, Benchmark and DAG Ventures. On Monday the company will be announcing another $10 million from Generation Investment, a fund started by Al Gore and David Blood, a former CEO of Goldman Sachs asset management. Sound like a lot of money? Consider how much the company saves. Fuel savings just from driving less aggressively can save a company some $300 per vehicle per year, and when you factor in crash savings it’s more like $1000 to $4000 in savings per vehicle per year. That makes it a very easy ROI sale for a company's CFO, environmental officer or safety officer. Now consider how much GreenRoad makes. It has 80 customers so far, and more than one of those customers have installed the technology in 20,000 of their cars. The three-year license goes for $1,000 per car, which the fuel savings alone cover. That's right: We're talking about $20 million contracts. And there's more where that came from. GreenRoad Senior VP Eric Weiss says there are 80 million professionally driven cars in the US and the EU. That puts GreenRoad in the middle of a $80 billion market. I haven't seen many companies like these since the good old days of enterprise software. And GreenRoad doesn't have a lot of competition. Weiss himself came from the enterprise software and mobile space. At first he wasn't sure about a tech company in such a weird, forgotten market, but pretty soon he got excited. "There are very few problems left of this size to solve," he says. "Besides, the world doesn't need another gadget for my phone or another ERP company. And he’s right. GreenRoad proves what a lot of smart investors have been saying for a while now—the best tech deals are no longer in a much picked over "tech sector" per say, they're applying technology to old-world industries.      
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| The Future Of Energy? Bloom Energy Boxes Already Power Google, eBay, Others Posted: 22 Feb 2010 12:00 AM PST
Bloom Energy are producing tiny fuel cell boxes they call “Bloom Boxes.” Two of these can apparently power a U.S. home (and only one for homes in countries that use less power). So how small are they? Look at the picture above, each device isn’t much bigger than a standard brick. Of course, they need to be surrounded by a larger unit that takes in an energy source (such as natural gas). But still, these units look to be about the size of a refrigerator and can easily fit outside of a home, providing it with clean, cheap energy. Currently, these boxes cost some $700,000-$800,000, but eventually, founder K.R. Sridhar envisions one in every home — and he thinks he can get the cost below $3,000 for a unit to make that happen. And he’s talking a 5 to 10 year timeframe for this. Naturally, there are plenty who are skeptical of something like this ever working. There have been no shortage of fuel cell ideas over the years, but none get their own segment on 60 Minutes showing working units. And none get to highlight the fact that they’re already installed at companies like Google, eBay, FedEx and others. In fact, four of these Bloom Boxes have apparently been powering a Google datacenter for the past 18 months. eBay says their five boxes have saved them over $100,000 in electricity costs over the past nine months. Bloom Energy also has former Secretary of State Colin Powell on its board of directors, and he talked up the Bloom Boxes on 60 minutes tonight also. And the company has something in the neighborhood of $400 million in funding from the likes of Kleiner Perkins and others. Kleiner’s John Doerr is also featured heavily in the 60 Minutes segment, talking about why he thinks this company can change the world perhaps even in a more profound way that another company he backed, Google, has. Bloom Energy was Kleiner’s first green tech investment. Again, just watch the video and decide for yourself whether to be skeptical or amazed at this point. Right now, I’m definitely in the latter camp considering this thing is already being tested out. Apparently, Bloom Energy is due for a big formal public unveiling on Wednesday in San Jose (they have a countdown up on their site) —expect to hear a lot more then.
     
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| MySpace’s Hail Mary Strategy: “Discovery” Posted: 21 Feb 2010 05:29 PM PST
The meeting was called in the wake of the firing of CEO Owen Van Natta and the related promotions of Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn to co-presidents. The meeting, which was held in the courtyard of MySpace’s Los Angeles headquarters to accomodate 600 or employees, was also broadcast to other offices around the world. The meeting began, say sources, with a discussion of the drama around the company over the last several weeks. Parent company News Corp’s Digital Chief Jon Miller apparently didn’t mince words, saying that Van Natta wasn’t moving fast enough and that there was too much conflict among the executive team. Hirschhorn also denied rumors that he ever considered leaving the company, which is contrary to the statements of about a dozen sources who’ve said the opposite to us. Miller also reiterated News Corp.’s commitment to MySpace and outlined how the co-president structure will work. “They get along really well,” he reportedly said. Hirschhorn handles product vision, Jones handles execution. More importantly, MySpace’s go forward vision was presented to employees, say our sources, and it was all about a single feature thrust that they’re calling “Discovery.” The idea is to hit users over the head with new stuff when they come to MySpace. New people they should be meeting. Movie trailers they should watch. Games they may want to play (perhaps against other MySpace users), music they should listen to, articles they should read. Etc. The activity stream that MySpace recently launched will be the backbone of Discovery, but other MySpace products will feed into this as well. If they get this right, the thinking goes, people will want to visit the site over and over again to see what new stuff they can do. This is effectively a recommendation engine around new content, says one source, but MySpace doesn’t want people calling it that. Still, the idea is that an algorithm (and advertisers) will determine what stuff you might like (or tolerate, in the case of ads) based on what other users are liking. The goal is to give users something to do on MySpace that’s somewhat different than Facebook. And get them to come back often.      
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| MySpace Launches An Activity And Content Stream Posted: 21 Feb 2010 02:18 PM PST
The company hasn’t formally announced the product, which sort of makes sense since they’re still playing catch up with similar features on Facebook. But it’s an important beachhead in their go-forward strategy, we’ve learned. More on that in our next post.      
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| RightSide Capital Announces New Seed Fund; Will Make 100-200 Investments Per Year Posted: 21 Feb 2010 01:50 PM PST  RightSide Capital Management is about to change the funding landscape. Led by David Lambert, Kevin Dick and John Lee, RightSide Capital believes that seed-stage capital needs a complete overhaul. RightSide will make 100-200 investments per year, and literally manufacture companies in a way that no firm has ever done. The fund, announced at TheFunded.com's Future of Funding event last Thursday, will debut in the second half of 2010 and may give the angel funding market a much-deserved shakeup. Partner Kevin Dick went on stage during a panel on alternative funding methods and laid out what he believes to be the future of funding. Quantity, not quality, is king in the seed stage. Entrepreneurs looking for funding won't have to go the traditional route of begging for a meeting and then having a second meeting and then waiting 3 months for traction until finally closing a deal. Instead, they will fill out an application - similar to applying to College - and receive a response in 2 weeks.
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| Why You Should Confess Everything Before You Get Caught Posted: 21 Feb 2010 01:28 PM PST Speaking as someone who lives in a glass house, the confession by InfoWorld that one of their writers was using a false identity and sometimes misrepresenting himself is great, along with the deletion of all his content. But it’s less great when it comes after you’ve been caught. This is exactly the type of situation we wanted to avoid, and it’s the reason why we published the facts about the Daniel Brusilovsky situation as soon as we fully understood them. We didn’t publish the name of the writer because of his age until he admitted to the situation himself. And we didn’t publish the names of the companies involved because, frankly, they were the victims of the whole thing. But everything else was disclosed as soon as we were sure of the facts. A lot of people criticized us for “throwing Daniel under the bus” and for otherwise handling the situation poorly. But anyone who runs a news organization knows that the truth tends to come out eventually. It’s best to just air everything out in the open right from the start. And hopefully our readers will know that there’s no funny stuff going on at TechCrunch. If there was, we’d be the first to write about it. In this case InfoWorld may not have known what was happening until they read about it on a competing website. In fact, they probably would have terminated him as soon as they discovered what he was up to. But it’s not clear that they would have publicly acknowledged it afterwards. And since the story broke before they were able to tell their readers what happened themselves, we’ll never know.      
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| Small Business Spotlight: Drink Some Wine At Local Wine Events Posted: 21 Feb 2010 12:35 PM PST
It’s a pretty straightforward business. You go there to find local wine events. People who are having wine events pay to list them there, and there is lots of other advertising as well. 1,500 new events are posted each week. Despite their size the site has gotten some big attention. Gary Vaynerchuck had owner Eric Orange on his show last year, and Apple has made their mobile site a staff pick and a Featured Web App for the iPhone. And this small business is profitable. Last year the company, with four employees, had $250,000 in gross profits.      
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| Mike Maples Talks Venture Capital And Thunder Lizards Posted: 21 Feb 2010 11:35 AM PST
The talk is highly entertaining and thought provoking. He argues against the notion that startups that want to have a huge exit need to raise big money, noting that Microsoft raised just $1 million and eBay just $5 million, in venture capital. He says small startups can be hugely disruptive, and have proportionally huge exits. he calls these companies Thunder Lizards. He’s talking about Godzilla, which eats his competitors and disrupts like crazy. These are the market leaders, he says. Second place is boring. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists tend to be wine sippers, he says, when beer slammers tend to be the big winners. He uses Chegg as an example, which grew to $50 million in revenue in just three years, but it took them two years to raise funding. The company, which rents textbooks to students, just didn’t make sense to most VCs. This is a perfect situation, he says, because there’s no real competition out there getting funded, either. He calls this being “non consensus right.” That’s the sweet spot. The key is to attack a huge potential market, with an emphasis on “potential.” You want to be right, and you want to be one of the only people to see it ahead of time. Great presentation. I’ll try to get the presentation to post as well. The video is below.
     
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Canadian performance marketing solutions company 
Over the past several years, there’s been no shortage of talk about alternative energy, and its potential to change the world. The problem is that most of it is just that — talk. But tonight, a report that aired on 60 Minutes showed one alternative that is not only real, it’s already being tested by companies such as Google and eBay. You simply 
MySpace’s new slogan, and the theme of their new product strategy, will be “Discover and be Discovered,” we’ve confirmed from multiple sources. This will be their differentiating factor from Facebook, execs told employees at an all hands meeting last Thursday.
The 
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