TechCrunch
To Humanize Its Marketplace, Rakuten.com Teams Up With Tidal Labs For Rakuten Essential To Add Blog Posts To Buying
Rakuten, the Japanese e-commerce powerhouse with ambitions to take on Amazon, is today kicking off a new feature on its U.S. site Rakuten.com that it hopes will help the company better differentiate itself from its bigger rival, and also open the door to a new swathe of users. Rakuten Essential, as the feature is called, will bring in content from bloggers on the Tidal Labs network that complements the products that Rakuten sells.
The idea is that by giving consumers more of a narrative behind what’s being sold, they will feel more drawn into buying things, or at the least return to Rakuten.com more to raise the chance of that happening.
Tidal Labs, for those who don’t know it, is akin somewhat to a white-label Huffington Post or one of the many sites out there like About.com that rely on armies of bloggers who are enthusiastic about certain subjects, and as is the case with HuffPo, keen enough to write about those topics almost regardless of whether or not they will be paid — although some do get paid. The difference is that the main part of what Tidal is focused on is partnering with other sites to produce content for them.
“We pay some people, but not everybody,” Matt Myers, the co-founder and CEO of Tidal, tells me. As one example, he cites the Conde Nast-owned Lucky.com, which sources content from Tidal. “There are thousands of Tidal bloggers in Lucky community, and some can earn their way up. But for a lot of them it’s just enough to have more exposure and get invited to events.”
Since launching in 2011, partners have included, in addition to Conde Nast, HarperCollins and specific brands like Pepsi, which weave content from the Tidal network into their online products to complement work that may be produced in-house.
Some of that has clearly had a commercial angle — think those “sponsored content” pieces that you sometimes come across; or supplementary text that accompanies features that encourage readers to buy things — Rakuten Essential is a new step forward for Tidal, putting the writing and other content being specifically on an e-commerce site.
This is also an important step in the gradual evolution of Rakuten.com. Once known as Buy.com, the site got rebranded after getting acquired by Rakuten in 2010 for $250 million. Bernard Luthi, the COO of Rakuten.com Shopping, notes that at the time of that purchase, Buy.com was largely known for selling consumer electronics and gadgets — and had the demographics to match it (youngish and male). The aim for the past couple of years has been to shift that to include other types of buyers — such as women, older people and kids, and the hope is that Rakuten Essential will help in that ambition.
“We were a very tech-focused organization, so our typical consumer was an electronics buyer, a 17-35 year old male,” he says. “But if you look at the last 18 months we’ve seen a fairly big shift to female and family demographics. When we think of Rakuten we want to think of product diversity. The goal is to expand beyond our core.”
Luthi also notes that while this deal will initially focus on bringing Tidal content on to Rakuten.com, longer term we could also see this as a route to taking the products sold on Rakuten out to other sites, in the form of widgets that run alongside Tidal’s content.
“This would give us the ability to put products into blogs,” he says, “and if that gets syndicated that’s now getting impressions and views from people who didn’t know what Rakuten was before.”
While the two are not revealing any financial terms of the partnership, Myers is quick to point out that Tidal has, up to now, never taken private funding for its operation, relying solely on its commercial deals. It also leaves to one side how and if there will ever be an integration between what Tidal does and one of the other key parts of the Rakuten portfolio, its stake in Pinterest, which itself has now started to take baby steps towards monetization.
Google Apologizes, Says Gmail Uptime Not Affected By Yesterday's Email Delivery Delays
Google has apologized and offered up an explanation of sorts for yesterday’s lengthy issues involving Gmail delivery delays. For those who receive so little email that you may have missed this (lucky you): on Monday, the company said that “less than 50 percent” of Gmail’s user base were seeing email slowdowns, where messages weren’t arriving in a timely fashion, and some attachments were failing to download.
Though we experienced and heard from others who saw messages arriving as long as several hours after first being sent out, Google says today that, on average, the average delivery delay was just 2.6 seconds, and 71 percent of messages were unaffected. However, it did admit that around 1.5 percent of messages were severely delayed, meaning for longer than two hours.
The company had been regularly posting updates as to the status of the issue throughout Monday on its Apps status dashboard, where the first report of trouble was publicly confirmed at 10:25 AM ET. Partial service restoration came in at 3:00 PM ET, with a promise that full resolution was only an hour away. But when 4:00 PM ET rolled around, Google said that it would still take another 3 hours to fix the problem for all users. By 7 PM ET, it stopped promising a timeframe to a resolution, and said the fix would arrive “in the near future.” The issue wasn’t fully resolved until 10 PM ET – a full 12 hours after the first report of troubles. The fix, we noticed, involved some previous read emails reappearing as unread messages, which added to the confusion.
Google apologized for the outage’s length this morning, saying “we realize that our users rely on Gmail to be always available and always fast, and for several hours we didn’t deliver.” It also offered a post-mortem, explaining that message delivery delays were triggered by a dual network failure, a rare event where two separate, redundant network paths both stop working at the same time. In layman’s terms, that’s getting pretty close to a worst-case scenario, given Gmail’s always-on nature and its uptime SLA for businesses on Google Apps.
The messages began piling up just before 9 AM ET, but although deliveries remained slow throughout the day Monday, Gmail itself never fully went offline. That gives it some wiggle room as its SLA agreement is focused on downtime, measured by server-side error rates. (Google hints at this subject, noting in the post’s conclusion: “Gmail remains well above 99.9% available…!”) Technically speaking, Gmail was up all day, but had slowed down to the point that email itself became unreliable for many of its users, who had to turn to alternative and backup email accounts to get their work done. (Isn’t iCloud.com pretty, by the way?)
The company says it’s now planning for rare events like this going forward, and will work to make Gmail message delivery more resilient to network capacity shortfalls going forward.
A Rare Launch In Europe - Big New Law Firm Dedicated To Tech Startups
We don’t normally cover tech law firms, and fear not, we’re not about to flood your feed with chatter about those guys. But the launch of a new firm specialising in tech is such a rare event (most law firms typically hang around for millennia…) that it seemed worthy of a mention. JAG Shaw Baker is is not the first law firm in Europe dedicated to venture capital and advising entrepreneurs, companies and investors in high growth industries, but it’s clearly the newest. And the fact it’s in London signals the fact that the ecosystem there is growing at a clip, and is rapidly acting as a hub for international startups.
The team is also one of the largest and most experienced in venture capital law in the region. For US readers, think the Gunderson or the Wilson Sonsini of Europe.
The founding partners of the firm are James Shaw and Tina Baker, experienced venture capital lawyers with a background in tech, life sciences and clean tech. Baker was formally the chair of the European Emerging Technologies and Venture Capital Practice in the London office of Brown Rudnick, an international law firm. Shaw is formally of SJ Berwin LLP and was a Partner of Brown Rudnick.
They are joined by Richard Penfold (formerly of Brown Rudnick) as Head of the Intellectual Property practice, Susanna Stanfield (formerly of Taylor Wessing) as corporate Partner with a particular focus on Cambridge, and Morven Greig as Managing Partner. In addition, Charles Crosthwaite, also formerly of Brown Rudnick, heads the M&A and IPO practice. (So, sucks to be Brown Rudnick right now). Firms they are working with – generally on fund-raising deals – now include TransferWise, Fits.me and Glysure.
While Orrick is probably the biggest firm in this sector, they tend to focus on company-side representation, whereas JAG plans a mix of companies and investors.
Anecdotally, it’s a good time for law firms right now (I’m sure you’re all happy about that). There are a number of funding rounds going on at the moment upwards of C rounds – and 2013 is seeing a lot more M&A activity. And it looks like the next two years is going to see a lot of roll-ups and consolidation in the market.
Discovr Delivers Total iOS 7 Overhaul For Its Music Discovery App With Streaming And Social Features
Discovr is one of those apps that has managed considerable success on the basis of doing one thing very well, in a number of different ways. The Australian startup behind the Discovr apps, Filter Squad, was founded in 2011 and since they’ve had strong numbers across four apps, including Discovr Apps, Discovr People, Discovr Movies, and its first, Discovr Music. That last one gets a huge update today, with a complete reimagining in terms of function and redesign.
The original Discovr focused on a single central mechanic, which essentially gave you a mind map you could explore to find networks of related artists via a visual interface designed for touch. The new Discovr retains that element, but calls it a “Music Map” and makes it simply a small feature of the larger whole. Now, the app’s home screen is dominated by a social network-like feed, with artists, releases and video presented to a user.
Like on Twitter, you now follow your favorite artists, and that generates content recommendations. Discovr feeds you the catalogues of artists you like, complete with full-length previews provided by partners including Spotify, Rdio, Deezer, Soundcloud and YouTube. The app suggests new artists to check out based on the ones you follow, and also allows you to follow other users and see the music they’re sharing. You get alerts about new music releases from your favourite artists on iTunes, Rdio and Spotify, and you can share everything with your own followers and network.
In other words, Discovr feels a lot more like existing music discovery tools including Twitter Music, or Rdio and Spotify’s built-in social discovery features. So why go from being unique, to more closely mirroring some of the competition?
“We get a lot of great user feedback about the UI, but we’ve realized that what our users love the most is actually getting to discover new artists, dig deep into their music and content, and share what they find,” explained Dave McKinney, one half of the Australian duo behind Filter Squad, in an interview. “The UI is fun, and interactive, and will always be a core part of Discovr, but it’s also just a tool to get a job done – to explore music. We think there are lots of different ways that people can discover and enjoy music, and so this update is really about that. “
McKinney says that real-world music discovery is much more varied than how it works via most online products. You could hear about new music from a friend, or catch a song on the radio, find it on YouTube or by visiting the record store. Discovr’s newfound goal is to unify all those methods of discovery into a single app. And as to its defining visual maps feature, that’s not going away; it’s just changing.
The music maps in the new release are sharable, as live, interactive pieces of content that the receiving party can then explore fully. And they’re also the basis for an upcoming feature that allows for generation and sharing of playlists, which will be called “Visual Radio,” McKinney tells me.
Discovr is adding complexity to its product, but it’s also providing more of a consumption experience, McKinney says, vs. the previous version’s high user input requirements.
“The stream that you see in the new Discovr is all about bringing you the music that matters to you,” he said. “It’s a much more passive mode. This means we can support our more mainstream users with passive discovery, and our early adopter users with very active (map graph) discovery.”
The new Discovr app features a big boost thanks to new streaming content partnerships, but the startup is also going direct to artists for further its goals of helping promote musicians, and it’s starting at home with Tame Impala, a band based in Perth, which is also Filter Squad’s home base. Both types of partners represent possible revenue opportunities for Discovr.
Discovr’s new app is free, and designed for iOS 7. It’s a marked departure from Filter Squad’s previous formula, which has so far netted the startup over 3 million downloads across all of its apps, but it could be the key to unlocking renewed growth in a space that’s become lots more crowded over the past two years.
Y Combinator Alum Strikingly Begins Marketing Its Mobile Site Builder In Southeast Asia
Strikingly, the mobile Web site builder we profiled when it was part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2013 class, is honing in on the Southeast Asia market to leverage the region’s rapidly increasing smartphone penetration.
Strikingly’s platform is designed to let people with little or no Web development experience build mobile-optimized sites in a few minutes. Since we first wrote about Strikingly in February, it has redesigned its dashboard, added new templates and customization options, and improved SEO by enabling subdomains. The platform’s app store also has new products that allow users to integrate platforms like Facebook, SoundCloud, Google Maps and Twitter into their sites.
Most of Strikingly’s existing marketing efforts have focused on the U.S. and Japan, but co-founder and CEO David Haisha Chen says Singapore, the Philippines and Malaysia are also among the startup’s fastest growing markets. Angela Ognev, the company’s new Singapore-based “Chief Happiness Officer,” will be responsible for organizing monthly live meet-ups, a key part of Strikingly’s marketing strategy in the region. The meet-ups are meant to allow the startup’s core user base of entrepreneurs and job seekers to network and, in turn, increase sign-ups through word-of-mouth referrals.
“When I was in the U.S., we did user meet-ups, though they were not as consistent. Then we started to realize the importance of building a 360-degree touchpoint with events and fostering users on a constant basis,” says Chen. Though most customers build and maintain sites for their businesses, Strikingly has also been used for personal projects like one man’s mobile-optimized Valentine’s Day love letter to his girlfriend.
One of the key things that sets Strikingly’s Southeast Asia users apart from their counterparts in the U.S. and Japan is that many of them are using the platform to build their first Web sites, instead of converting sites first built on another platform.
“In the U.S. people are familiar with tools like WordPress or can get friends to build their Web site for them,” Chen says. “But it’s still something that most people in [Southeast Asia] haven’t tried. It seemed out of reach, though use cases are similar.”
Practice Fusion Lands A Whopping $70M To Bring A Big Data Cure To The Healthcare Crisis
The world of digital health startups has begun to explode over the last two years — and innovation in healthcare along with it — but nonetheless, the latest reports show a landscape that is still suffering from a dearth of seed investments, investors that are still “dabbling,” and an absence of a powerful player like Google or Facebook. Today, however, Practice Fusion appears poised to take up the reigns and perhaps create that blockbuster IPO that the digital health space has been waiting for.
Since its inception in 2005, Practice Fusion has been on a mission to re-invent the stodgy, archaic world of Healthcare IT by offering a free, digital platform for Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) to doctors, their practices and their patients. Fast forward to 2013, and over 100,000 doctors have adopted Practice Fusion’s EMR platform and are now using it to prescribe, communicate with providers, order labs and document visits.
Today, the startup made it clear just how strong its growth has been over the past few years, announcing a whopping $70 million Series D investment, led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) and institutional investors OrbiMed Advisors and Deerfield Management Company. The startup’s existing investors, including Artis Ventures, Morgenthaler Ventures and Felicis Ventures also contributed to the round, which brings its total capital to $134 million.
The big question, of course, is just what this massive infusion of capital means for a company at this stage in the game. In a conversation this week, Practice Fusion founder and CEO Ryan Howard was unwilling to put a timeline on a potential IPO, but he did say that the company’s new $70 million would give it the capital it needs to head in that direction and that, looking forward, he has “every intent of taking [Practice Fusion] public.”
With Bloomberg reporting that this new round values the company in the ballpark of $700 million, Practice Fusion has become one of the largest digital health startups of this new generation, and it seems that, on the IPO front, it’s not a matter of “if” but “when.” The company’s growth, Howard says, has compounded since raising $34 million in series C back in June of 2012.
Today, more than four million patient visits are being managed on the startup’s platform, a number which has grown 75 percent year-over-year over the last 24-odd months. In turn, this has allowed Practice Fusion to expand its aspirations on the data front, increasing its de-identified data platform, which Howard claims is now the largest realtime clinical dataset in the U.S. Companies in the healthcare market, today, he says, are feeling the pressure of consolidation, which is why the team has been pulling all available levers to scale as quickly as possible.
The team itself has expanded to over 300, a large chunk of those hires coming in the last 12 months, and the company recently purchased another handful of floors in its office building in downtown San Francisco. With its new funding, Howard says that he plans to continue expanding both its team and the ways in which its leveraging its data platform, which has become a significant driver of its revenue growth — a growth rate that, by the way, has increased 300 percent since 2012, he says.
This clinical dataset, Howard claims, is now nearly four times the size of comparable systems owned by Kaiser Permanente and Veterans Administrations combined. Earlier this year, the company launched a new subscription research tool for doctors, reporters, analysts and pharmaceutical companies, called “Insight,” which was designed to showcase the ways in which it’s beginning to leverage its dataset to increase access to patient health information — and help diverse set of players involved in healthcare glean insight from that data.
The company also launched Patient Fusion, another example of how the company is productizing its data set, and has since set its sights on becoming “the Salesforce.com for doctors and the Facebook for health,” as we wrote earlier this year. With Patient Fusion, the company’s platform now allows anyone to compare compare doctor reviews and book appointments within an hour of arriving at the doctor’s office.
Yet, unlike Yelp, as I wrote in Many, “which would allow users to rate doctors even if they’ve never stepped foot in their office, Patient Fusion aggregates ratings from patients after their visits. This allows the company to not only build a database of verified reviews (based on visits it knows actually took place), but to lay the groundwork for a sizable local physician search engine as well.”
The site’s reviews now number in the millions, and through these products, along with a tool that helps patients better understand and manage their health spending, the company has been looking to take the next step towards becoming a full-service health information platform. “If the initial launch of Patient Fusion brought the company into Yelp (and ZocDoc) territory,” we surmised at the time, “then its new free service marks the beginning of Practice Fusion’s own version of Mint.com for health.”
The company has been busy on the product front with Patient Fusion and Insight, but with the new round, Practice Fusion has also been looking to beef up its strategic partners, especially those who can help the company leverage its growth (on both product and business fronts) and guide it down the road to a future IPO.
As part of its $70 million infusion, for example, Beth Seidenberg, MD, a general partner at Kleiner Perkins, will be joining the startup’s board of directors. Thus far, although it operates in a world of old, traditional healthcare players, Practice Fusion has identified more as a technology company than a healthcare company, in the traditional sense. But, with Seidenberg now on its board, who brings experience as the founding CEO of two biotech companies and the former Senior VP and Chief Medical Officer of Amgen — along with its strategic investments from OrbiMed Advisors and Deerfield Management Company — Practice Fusion is showing that its begun to listen to the Old World as well.
And, as the company accelerates the rate at which its growing (and scaling) and works toward a potential IPO, advice and counsel from these stakeholders will become increasingly valuable. Especially considering that the U.S. healthcare landscape is undergoing a seismic transformation, particularly concerning the coordination of care, how healthcare providers measure their own performance and optimize for cost efficiency. Healthcare is moving toward a more patient-centric model, in which the success of care will be more focused on patient outcomes, whether they understand treatments and care and whether that care is actually living up to its promise.
Howard believes that Practice Fusion is in a unique position, sitting as it does between the tech and healthcare industries, to effect national health reform and, through its partnerships with life sciences companies, help them develop new population health management initiatives, which include compliance with public health guidelines and reports on market trends, among others. Today, Howard says, Practice Fusion has struck partnerships with 18 of the 20 largest pharmaceutical companies in the U.S.
In turn, its new funding will also enable Practice Fusion to continue to expand its relationships with the enterprise, including labs, billing centers and imaging centers, which today number over 300. Through these enterprise partnerships (and its APIs), the company has helped its partners manage more than one million lab transactions and 2.7 million prescriptions — in September alone.
Looking forward, the CEO says that his company will look to expand its API platform in the coming year to further develop its relationships with health developers and engineers and reach into the vast (and growing) landscape of mobile health apps on the market — a number that is closing in on 100,000.
All in all, Practice Fusion is moving quickly toward its goal of providing healthcare providers and patients with a more holistic view of their health, from EMRs to expenses. Howard believes that its growing dataset can help open the door to a laundry list of new innovations, cures, and, through partnerships, help solve some of the biggest costs and pain points that inflict the average patient. Considering that 30 percent of all health care spending in the U.S. (or more than $750B per year) could be avoided without reducing outcomes, Practice Fusion’s contributions is well-positioned to help move that needle.
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