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Here's Why Microsoft Coming To Foursquare's Salvation Might Make Sense
Rumors that Foursquare is looking to take on a strategic investment from a large technology company kicked up a gear when several sources have reported that Microsoft is perhaps the potential suitor, and, to quote Dina Bass of Bloomberg, the talks are “advanced.”
What the hell, you might be thinking, does Microsoft want with Foursquare? It’s not application support for its platforms, that’s already a done deal.
Instead, I think that the investment is being considered for the same reason that Microsoft pumped hundreds of millions into Facebook: Bing. By buying into Facebook as its only corporate investor, Microsoft has locked up a long-term deal to provide mapping and search capabilities for the social giant.
Snagging a chunk of Foursquare is pro-Bing, albeit in a different fashion. Bing competes with Google and Apple to provide local data, and mapping. The two domains are increasingly overlapping as mobile maps become increasingly multifaceted and less about directions, and more about how to live. Bing, of course, on Windows Phone has Local Scout, a tool that combines geolocation and local business information.
Foursquare fits into this by simply having data that Microsoft wants. The startup has spent years accreting information from its users about more than restaurants, hotels, houses, and everything in between. Back that into Bing and it could enrich its offering perhaps past what Google proffers to mobile users.
This would improve the user experience of Windows 8, 8.1, Windows Phone 8, and the online desktop Bing experience.
Now, why not buy Foursquare outright? I don’t think that Microsoft has to. Foursquare’s last round valued the firm at $600 million. Investors would want a premium, and Microsoft has cash. It would not be a cheap acquisition, even given Foursquare current weaknesses.
But with say, $50 million, Microsoft could bail Foursquare out of its most recent loans, and inject enough capital for it to prove a revenue-fueled future. Microsoft gets access to its data, and doesn’t have to pay a meaningful (it’s quite rich) price for it. And, if Foursquare really does unwind, who would be there to pick up the pieces and pick out the assets that it wants but Microsoft, a current shareholder.
We’re also hearing that Yahoo is a possibility. Let the games begin.
Top Image Credit: Robert Scoble
Anki, Nest, Shasta, And Skycatch To Discuss The Present And Future Of Robotics At Disrupt SF
Next up on the agenda for Disrupt SF: Robots!
Now, when I bring up robots, you may be thinking about C-3PO from Star Wars, or Rosie, the maid from The Jetsons, or something else entirely. But I’m guessing that we’ve got something similar in mind — a machine that looks and acts kind of like a human being, something that’s still years in the future at best.
But after a discussion with Rob Coneybeer, co-founder of Shasta Ventures, we started to think about the ways that robots, or robot-type devices, are already starting to infiltrate our lives: Industrial robots, robotic vehicles, robotic devices in the home, and more.
So we decided to bring together companies that are doing exciting work that with machine that resemble the traditional science fiction robots, for a panel titled “These Aren’t The Droids You’re Looking For.” We’ll talk about the work they’re doing (some of them may stretch the traditional definition of a robot, but hey, that’s kind of the point), where they see the most interesting trends, and I think we’ve got at least one cool demo in the works.
Rob Coneybeer, who co-founded Shasta Ventures in 2005. He previously worked as an aerospace engineer and automotive engine tester. As an investor, Coneybeer focuses on smartphone companies, collaborative consumption, and The Internet of Things, and his investments include smart thermostat company Nest Labs.
Matt Rogers, co-founder and vice president of engineering at Nest Labs. Prior to co-founding Nest, Rogers was part of the iPod software development team and an early iPhone and iPad engineer.
Christian Sanz, co-founder and CEO at Skycatch, a platform for deploying automated drones for commercial use. He was previously founder of DroneGames, CTO at Storify, chief architect at Break Media, and a software engineer for Disney Interactive.
Boris Sofman, co-founder and CEO at Anki, a company you may remember from its on-stage racing demo at Apple’s most recent Worldwide Developers Conference. The company is working to bring robotics and artificial intelligence to the real world, for example by helping machines understand where they are in the physical space.
Disrupt SF will run from Septeber 7 to 11, and the robotics panel will take place at 11:35am on the 9th. General-admission tickets and exhibitor packages are currently available. Buy tickets here.
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With Sinofsky On Board, Box Is Now Capable Of Mounting The First Credible Threat To Office
Today Box announced that Steven Sinofsky has joined its operations as an adviser. The relationship was kicked off via Facebook message, consummated over pho, and gives Box key talent and experience that it needs to grow its enterprise-facing document storage solution.
And to build its next set of products. The race to store your files online is not a mere struggle for dominance of low-margin cloud document management. Price pressure via increasing competition from wealthy technology companies is already leading to, in some cases, the elimination of consumer storage costs. For example, Flickr will give you a terabyte of space for your pictures, and Outlook.com has essentially unlimited storage.
However, on the enterprise side of things, Microsoft and Box are currently locked in a mini arms race, with Microsoft boosting its SkyDrive Pro business offering to 25GB of storage per seat. Box recently doubled its consumer offering to 10GB, and added a new, $5 per month per seat plan that gives small businesses 100GB per employee.
So the marginal price of storage is rapidly declining, and those savings are being passed to consumers and customers in the form of price cuts that lead to constant pressure for storage companies. Thus, Box will want to expand beyond its current key offering — file storage and syncing — and into something harder to commoditize.
We stated earlier that the struggle to store your files is about more than their mere storage. It works out like this in practice: The company that stores your files is the firm with the best shot at helping you edit them due to sheer proximity and convenience. Therefore, he who holds the files, gets to generate software income from their ownership.
The analog to this situation is a hard drive and a new set of Office apps. The files were on your hard drive, and Office lived in the same environment, making their existence harmonious. Now, cloud storage has moved that content away from Office, leaving Microsoft to scramble to build a suite of web apps to handle the editing work that had begun to slip out of its control.
Box has done a terrific job at signing up corporate clients to its service. Clients that, I presume, are Office users. Eventually, those customers will have the choice of upgrading their Office software, or snagging Office 365 subscriptions for their employees. But if their files are stored with Box, how palatable is that? At best a connection would have to be built between their productivity software, and their files that Box holds. This is not a perfect solution.
What if there were another option? What if Box built a set of editing tools on top of its cloud storage service, moving its business up the value stack, while defending its margins in the face of slipping data-retention fees. To do something like that, it would want to have on board someone with intimate knowledge of Microsoft and its Office products and how to sell productivity software to enterprise customers.
That’s Steven Sinofsky.
Box claims to have 180,000 business customers and expects 100 percent revenue growth in 2013. Those figures indicate that Box could scale a productivity solution to a meaningful size in short order. It would need to be damn good code, of course. I am not saying that this would be easy, more that it is now possible.
Box has hinted that it is working on some internal software that could be construed as indicative that it is working on the above. In an interview with TechCrunch, CEO Levie stated that the company is testing “some of [its] own applications.”
There are ample reasons for the success of Office, and Office 365 has shown rapid growth in its early stages. The cloud productivity suite is at a $1.5 billion yearly run rate, up 50 percent in a single quarter. If Box generates $8,333 in yearly income from each of its 180,000 business clients, the two are the same size (this calculation is more for fun than any other reason).
I am not saying in any way that Box is an Office “killer” or any such baiting nonesense. The gist of this is that Box has an enviable enterprise install base, a key strategic advantage as being The Holder of the Files, and now the exec that called the Office shots at Microsoft for years. That sums together into an enterprise-facing productivity solution, in my view.
Box is going public sometime soon — I’m trying to get more on that, but haven’t heard much lately — and when it does it will want to tell investors how it will increase its per-seat revenue to ease fears of margin pressure. We know at least one way they could do that.
Top Image Credit: Robert Scoble
Lodgify Launches Its Build-Your-Own Solution For Vacation Rental Websites And Listings
Barcelona-based startup Lodgify is launching its product today, which aims to be the “Shopify of vacation rentals” according to its co-founder Naveen Sharma. Like Shopify, Lodgify allows small business owners to easily set up an online commerce presence – but this time the target is people who are renting out their homes to vacationers and short-term renters.
Lodgify has some existing competition in the space, thanks to MyVR, a startup that raised $1.4 million in seed funding and came out of Y Combinator in March last year. According to Sharma, Lodgify has some key advantages over MyVR, however, including a better user interface, an instant booking function powered by Stripe and PayPal, website templates that feature responsive design and integration with vacation rental listing sites 9flats and Roomorama out of the gate, with HomeAway coming soon.
Forr the same reason that Hotel owners don’t exclusively list on Booking.com and abandon their own website, VR hosts don’t want to list exclusively on Airbnb,” Sharma explained in an interview. “VR owners can increase their income by having their own proprietary website and by additionally listing on multiple booking channels, such as Airbnb, Homeaway, 9flats, Roomorama, etc. The problem here is that it is very costly and time-consuming to build your own website and manage all these listings on multiple sites manually. That’s where Lodgify comes into play.”
The Lodgify platform allows VR proprietors to combine site building with listing on multiple rental services (including those mentioned above and 20 more channels on the roadmap for inclusion by end of year) at once, saving them time and money with a platform offered on a SaaS basis for plans starting at $9 per month, with no additional fees for making bookings or setup. And while MyVR is a competitor in that vision, Lodgify’s focus is primarily on the UK and Europe, and the built-in “book now” feature is a key competitive advantage.
Vacation rentals are a growing industry, rising faster than hotels and on track to become a hugely important player in the hospitality sector in the next half-decade or so. Sharma says this represents both opportunity and challenge for Lodgify, as it attempts to evolve with the changing demands of an evolving market.
“We’ll have to stay on our toes and closely monitor travel and booking habits,” he said. “We’ll need to constantly develop features and functions to meet the needs of future owners and travelers. Especially our focus on mobile devices and analytics will steadily increase to match demand.”
While MyVR is a noteworthy competitor, it sounds like the vacation rental space is progressing at such a clip that it can support more than a few players. We might see consolidation down the road, but for now, a major European opportunity exists that the bootstrapped Lodgify has plenty of breathing room to capitalize on.
Flickr Grows Post-Relaunch, Tumblr Now 7.2% Of Site's Referral Traffic
Yahoo’s efforts at improving Flickr with new pricing plans, acquisitions, and revamped web and mobile experiences, appear to be paying off, at least in the form of website traffic and engagement. According to a new report from SimilarWeb, visits to Flickr have been increasing steadily, and are now up by 38 percent since April.
Note, though, that the big Flickr redesign was at the end of May. That’s when the site dropped its Pro pricing tier, introducing instead an ad-free tier and power user option ($500/year for another terabyte of space). The site also got a visual makeover, and updated mobile apps as part of Yahoo’s bigger product push under CEO Marissa Mayer’s lead.
From April to May, monthly site visits to Flickr went from 86 million to 90 million – indicating that Flickr was still seeing some growth, despite what was then a bit of stagnation in terms of look-and-feel and feature set. But post-relaunch, site visits increased to 107 million in June, and then 110 million in July.
In addition, the average time on site grew by 11 percent since April (4.5 minutes) to 4.9 minutes in June, and then to a full 5 minutes by July. Social traffic also increased from 9.7 million in April to 12 million in June, and then to 13.7 million by July, which seems to point to Flickr benefitting from the social media buzz regarding all its changes.
What’s also interesting is that Yahoo acquisition Tumblr plays a special role here, as it’s the biggest referring website for Flickr outside of search engines and social networks. 7.2 percent of Flickr’s referral traffic over the past three months came from Tumblr (4.75 million visits) – another reason why Yahoo may have wanted to add the site to its portfolio. That referral traffic has remained relatively consistent pre and post Tumblr purchase, SimilarWeb tells us, however many photographers have long since found this to be the case. For instance, at the time of the Flickr overhaul, professional photographer and blogger Thomas Hawk noted that: “already, I get the most viral views on my Flickr photos from Tumblr, more than any other site.”
The crossover between the two social services, Flickr and Tumblr, could leave the door open to some interesting potential integrations in the future. Post-acquisition, Flickr users began brainstorming ideas, thinking up tools that would allow easier image posting to Tumblr from Flickr, backup to Flickr of photos posted to Tumblr, and more.
Of course SimilarWeb, like many third-party web traffic analysis products, relies on a panel of users to determine site rankings. In SimilarWeb’s case, it has a large network of unbranded, consumer-facing plugins doing this work, while others use toolbars and other means. Numbers then should not be determined to be exact, but rather, when viewed at a distance, are able to tell the story of a site’s changes over time. In that case, it’s worth pointing out that several of these traffic measurement tools point to bumps in site traffic following the Flickr revamp.
For example, in Flickr’s largest market, the U.S., you can see post-relaunch growth via Quantcast (estimated) and Compete. However, Quantcast data hints that there’s still the potential for the site’s growth to drop again after the initial post-relaunch glow (see third chart from Google Trends) wears off.
Deliv Partners With Mall Operator GGP To Enable Same-Day Deliveries From Its Stores
Peer-to-peer delivery startup Deliv wants to provide a new way for major retailers to offer up same-day delivery to their customers. And it just partnered with one of the biggest mall operators in the country, General Growth Properties, to begin making that vision a reality.
Deliv is kind of like Lyft or SideCar, in that it isn’t building out a big fleet infrastructure of trucks and drivers to make deliveries for it. Instead, it’s looking to crowdsource drivers to make delivery runs for in their own cars. By doing so, it massively reduces costs associated with deliveries, while also enabling brick-and-mortar retailers to provide speedy deliveries that beat Amazon Prime.
To make the plan work, Deliv needs to get retailers on board. And that’s where GGP comes in.
GGP is the second-largest mall operator in the country, with 123 regional malls nationwide. And it’s got hundreds of millions of square feet of shopping space, according to Scott Morey, Chief Information and Technology Officer of GGP. In that respect, it’s not that different from a bunch of big warehouses around the country, he said. Which means that reatilers can almost use the malls like Amazon uses its various distribution outlets.
The pact will enable a mix of online and offline sales and deliveries to occur through stores that sign up in select GGP malls. In the online case, shoppers going to certain retailers’ e-commerce sites will be able to add items to their cart and then select same-day delivery from the store. At the mall, runners will collect the goods and hand them off to a Deliv driver.
But the partnership will also enable deliveries to be made on purchases made in-store at certain GGP malls. In that way, customers will be able to buy from multiple stores and have their purchases aggregated in one spot before delivering to a user’s home. That’ll be perfect for folks who came on shopping trips together with friends or who took public transportation to the mall in question.
In either case, the service is designed to make the deliveries the same price, or even cheaper than, standard shipping costs.
To begin, the service will be available in four GGP malls, including Stonestown Galleria in San Francisco, Eastridge in San Jose, Glendale Galleria in Los Angeles, and Oakbrook Center in Chicago. The whole thing will hopefully be launched around the holidays, according to Deliv founder and CEO Daphne Carmeli.
While Deliv has GGP’s support, though, ultimately it will be up to the retailers to decide whether they want to participate or not. To get them on board, Deliv and GGP have been meeting with a number of retailers to convince them to offer same-day delivery and “out-Amazon Amazon.”
Deliv has raised $1 million in seed funding from investors that include General Catalyst, Redpoint Ventures, Trinity Ventures, Operators Fund, and PivotNorth.
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