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Sociomantic Launches Singapore Office, Hires Another Googler To Run Operations
Ad-bidding platform, Sociomantic is expanding into Southeast Asia with a Singapore office, to be launched on July 1.
The startup provides a real-time bidding platform targeted at ad buyers. When a site loads, its engine will match the highest bidder for the particular visitor’s profile and show its ad. Proponents of ad-bidding technology say it allows advertisers to show more specific ads to target audiences.
Sociomantic is headquartered in Berlin. Its new managing director for Southeast Asia, Rohit Kumar, is moving from the UK to Singapore to head up the operations here. Kumar was a founding member of Google’s EMEA ad exchange team in 2010.
Kumar joins a number of former Googlers that have joined Sociomantic in the past 12 months. Most recently, former Google mobile head in India, Mahesh Narayanan, was hired for the company’s new Mumbai office.
And former AdMeld chief revenue officer, Jason Kelly, was hired late last year to be Sociomantic’s CEO. AdMeld was acquired by Google in December 2011 for $400 million.
The four year-old startup has been on quite the expansion spree since 2011. It expanded into Europe that year, with new offices in Warsaw, Paris and Amsterdam. In 2012 it opened offices in London, Moscow, Sao Paolo and Madrid, and also kicked off its US expansion with New York.
This year, it’s already opened in San Francisco, Chicago and just last month, Mumbai.
It’s done all this with no external funding said Kumar, who declined to reveal how much revenue the company makes. Each office is likely kept pretty lean; the company has 120 staff globally, with the majority in Berlin. A sales head for Southeast Asia will join the team soon, and it’s hiring a couple more positions for its Singapore office.
Sociomantic competes with other bidding exchanges such as Invite Media (bought by Google for $81 million in 2010). San Francisco-based Triggit is another demand-side ad platform, and raised a $4.2 million funding round in 2010.
Sociomantic’s entry into the region will offer companies a way to advertise on Facebook Exchange—a first for the Southeast Asia, it claims. Triggit said at the start of this year that it rechanneled its business into Facebook from Google’s ad exchange, and that Facebook performs 36 percent better than the search giant’s competing platform.
One contender in Singapore is homegrown ad-matching platform AdzCentral. In March this year, it raised a $3.2 million Series A round to expand from the island state into Southeast Asia.
Rent The Runway Acquires Fashion-Focused Photo Sharing And Styling App Go Try It On
Rent The Runway, the Netflix for designer clothes, accessories and jewelry; has acquired Go Try It On, a startup that allows users to share photos of themselves and get opinions on their looks. As part of the acquisition, Go Try It On’s founder Marissa Evans will join Rent the Runway as Head of Radical Innovation. Financial terms of the acquisition was not disclosed.
Go Try It On allows you to upload a photo of yourself (with Instagram-like filters), add descriptions of the brands you are wearing and include context around the choice of the outfit (i.e. concert, holiday party). The site’s community can then comment on the site and provide feedback on fellow members’ outfits. Users can choose to ask the greater Go Try It On community, just share with their friends on Facebook, or ask a brand or professional stylist for advice.
The startup has also partnered with a number of fashion brands including Barneys New York, Sephora, Rebecca Minkoff, Kimberly Ovitz, NET-A-PORTER.COM and Cut25 by Yigal Azrouël to include pieces for users to buy from the app. Go Try It On, which has raised $3 million in funding from SPA Investments, Index Ventures and others; says it has 400,000 iPhone app users.
For background, Rent The Runway allows women to rent designer clothes and accessories at a marked down price. Once you pick a design on the site that you’d like to wear, you can schedule a delivery date. Rent The Runway will send two sizes, to ensure that you receive a dress that fits. Rentals on the site run from $50 to $200 for a four night loan, or 10% of the retail price. The startup has over 3 million members and 170 designer brands.
The acquisition is partly for talent, and partly for technology. The addition of Evans, who understands the the fashion-tech world, is an asset for Rent The Runway.
Rent The Runway has also been trying to add more social features and recently introduced its own online social shopping platform, Our Runway, which allows women to shop based on user-generated photos of real women with similar body types. The app allows women to enter their height, bust size, dress size and age, in order to view thousands of diverse women with comparable shapes in dresses available for rent.
Rent The Runway, which has raised $54 million in funding, is backed by AmEx, Condé Nast Publications, Bain Capital Ventures, Highland Capital Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Novel TMT Ventures.
European Publishers, Others Slam Google On “Abusive” Practices, Ask EC To Reject Google Proposal
It looks like it may be back to the drawing board for Google on the European competitive front: hundreds of publishers and publishing trade associations today are coming out in force to ask the European Commission and its Vice President Joaquín Almunia to “reject outright” Google’s draft remedies, which Google suggested to rebalance competition in search and other online products where it is dominant in the region. The move, by the European Publishers’ Council, comes on the same day that other would-be Google competitors, including online mapping and travel companies, as well as the Fairsearch consortium, are also expected to call for much deeper scrutiny of Google and rejection of its proposals.
Google originally published its draft remedies on April 25, which included suggestions for how it would offer competitors some concessions such as labelling Google’s own links more clearly (a more detailed list of the remedies Google proposed is below). Google competitors were already stirring with negative responses early on, but Almunia, who oversees antitrust and other competition issues, gave them had until June 27 to respond formally. What’s coming out today appears to be a concerted effort to coordinate those negative reponses — claiming Google’s suggestions do not go far enough — for maximum effect.
We will be listening into the Fairsearch-led press conference later today and will update the post with more as we learn it.
The EPC includes big names like the FT, News International, Guardian Media Group, Axel Springer, Thomson Reuters and Reed Elsevier, but also more regional players. Among those coming out against Google, for example, is Dr. Hubert Burda, president of the German magazine publishers’ association VDZ. He echoes the basic line that Google needs to go back to the drawing board.
“If Google does not come up with fundamentally improved proposals very soon, we call on the Commission to use its full legal powers, including an immediate Statement of Objections with effective remedies,” he said in a statement. “Fair and non-discriminatory search with equal criteria for all websites is an essential prerequisite for the prosperous development of the European media and technology sector.”
As we reported before, here are the proposals as Google has made them to date:
- label promoted links to its own specialised search services so that users can distinguish them from natural web search results,
- clearly separate these promoted links from other web search results by clear graphical features (such as a frame), and
- display links to three rival specialised search services close to its own services, in a place that is clearly visible to users;
- offer all websites the option to opt-out from the use of all their content in Google’s specialised search services, while ensuring that any opt-out does not unduly affect the ranking of those web sites in Google’s general web search results,
- offer all specialised search web sites that focus on product search or local search the option to mark certain categories of information in such a way that such information is not indexed or used by Google,
- provide newspaper publishers with a mechanism allowing them to control on a web page per web page basis the display of their content in Google News,
- no longer include in its agreements with publishers any written or unwritten obligations that would require them to source online search advertisements exclusively from Google, and
- no longer impose obligations that would prevent advertisers from managing search advertising campaigns across competing advertising platforms.
It looks like the approach that competitors are taking is to take each of these suggestions, line by line, and show how they are not feasible. For example, on the suggestion on opting out from specialized searches (number three in the list below), the publishers’ group responds: “In other words, ‘if you don’t want us to steal your content, you need to make sure we can’t find it.’ An opt out from a 90% dominant player means of course that you become invisible to readers and is no option at all.”
We are reaching out to all the parties, including Google, for further comment.
More to come. Refresh for updates.
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