The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘business-model’

Last summer, at the inaugural Europas Awards, we launched the TechCrunch Europe Top 100 Index of the most innovative and highest-potential European tech companies. This has been the first time anyone has tried to actually track, in a pre-defined way, early stage tech companies in Europe. We’ve now updated the Index, which is focused on mobile and web companies in the EMEA region, once more.

As you can see, there are companies that are staying in the Index, some arriving and some, alas, leaving. The companies that have made great progress in the last few months are ones that have being doing important things like generating revenue. It’s quite clear from the refreshed Index that European startups know how to make money (in particular through e-commerce, private shopping, lead-generation and games). The Silicon Valley business model of scale and user acquisition, while still a hugely important arrow in the European startups quiver, is still just part of the equation, especially in a wide European market so divided by language and regulation. Although I’d like to see more European startups thinking globally from the start, and going for growth, no-one is saying one shouldn’t have at least half an eye trained on where the business model is going to come from.

I like to go to events here in Silicon Valley, and meet new people, but sometimes actually finding those events in your city is hard to do—especially for entrepreneurs. There are sites like Plancast, and Upcoming that let you plan ahead, but there are also many other solutions. Startup Digest is hoping to be one of those solutions. Startup Digest isn’t a complicated web service or anything—it’s an email list. An email list that has attracted over 12,000 subscribers in the last 90 days.

Plain and simple, you just subscribe to an email list, and then once a week, you get an email with five events that you should go to in your city. Currently, Startup Digest only has lists in Silicon Valley and New York City, but today, they are launching lists in three other cites; Tokyo, Atlanta and Vancouver.

In each of those cities, there are curators that come up with the events and talk to event organizers and make sure their events are on the list. The business model side of things is pretty simple too. In Silicon Valley, which has the most subscribers, there is an ad in each of the emails at the top. Each ad spot in one email is $1,000 to $5,000. Not bad for an email list! The only costs Startup Digest has is sending the email out through Mail Chimp, and hosting their web site.

It seems like a pretty smart idea to me, and it’s attracted folks like Guy Kawasaki, Dave McClure and a few other Silicon Valley heavyweights to subscribe to the list as well.

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More and more startups are finally focusing on real business models, ones that are based on actually selling a product or service. For money, you know.

The irony is that many get pretty far down the development path before realizing that adding billing infrastructure to their offering may not be as simple as integrating with PayPal’s API.

Choosing the right processor, and many times, processors, from a confusing multi-layered vendor ecosystem can be tricky. Poor decision-making when it comes to issues such as terms of pricing, business fit, or processing capability, can each be a deep gash in any startup’s jugular.

Payments-R-Us is trying to alleviate the confusion by providing a vendor-to-merchant wizard that makes it a snap to choose the right payment processor. The wizard is supplemented with some in-depth content aimed at educating merchants to better grasp the ins and outs of the terms and options offered by vendors so they can better negotiate agreements.

The Payments-R-Us wizard covers four major verticals: traditional US, international, digital goods and high risk. There are currently 15 processing vendors listed, with about a dozen more in the pipeline. CEO Michael Shatz stressed that most are considered ‘Tier 1′ processors, defined by the fact that they are listed in the top 50 of the annual Nilson Report on top processors.

The wizard is pretty thorough and will walk a merchant through a selection process that includes such options as multi-currency support, affiliate marketing, digital content, eCommerce hosting, alternative payments, as well as adult and gaming.

Payments-R-Us’ business model is a fairly simple one: affiliation. They get a commission for every merchant they refer to a vendor. Does the fact that Payments-R-Us earn a commission impact its objectivity? I don’t believe so. My main reasoning for this is that one of the founders and investors in the company is Yuval Tal, Founder & CEO of Payoneer, which we’ve previously written about (here & here). By all accounts, Tal is considered a stand-up entrepreneur in the Israeli startup community.

Payments-R-Us won’t be a billion dollar business. It serves a real need and has a clear hook for a business model which I imagine could run revenue up to six-figures per month. Its only challenge will be to situate itself as a key destination for merchants when making their processing vendor selection.

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Digital Sky Technologies (aka DST), the Russian Internet holding company that holds stakes in several major Russian-language social networking and communication players and notably also recently invested in Facebook, is melting two of its largest portfolio companies together into one online powerhouse.

Astrum Online Entertainment, itself formed by DST after merging five online game companies that were active mainly in Russia and Eastern Europe (Astrum Nival, Nikita.Online, IT Territory, TimeZero and DJ Games) back in 2007, will effectively become 100% owned by Mail.ru, the leading Internet portal in the Russian speaking world and equally majority-owned by DST.

The transaction is structured as an acquisition of Astrum Online shares by Mail.ru, paid for by a combination of the latter’s shares and an undisclosed amount in cash. The combined entity, DST claims, is capable of reaching some 300 million Russian located around the globe (the aggregate audience of both companies is said to be somewhere around 50 million users today). It will fly under the Mail.ru flag, which is arguably the most familiar brand name of the pair.

Curiously, the press release bares no mention of Naspers/ MIH Group, although the South-African conglomerate owns 43% of Mail.ru and was recently granted anti-trust permission to buy between 38% and 100% of Astrum Online from DST.

We’re digging for more information.

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Apple has a history of spoiling hackers’ fun. In fact, they’ve almost made a business model out of it. But hackers won’t be kept down, and a little netbook running OS X is too tempting a gadget to give up on.

See the rest here:
Hackintoshers, rejoice: Atom support returns to 10.6.2

More news about The Pirate Bay to bore you all! (Seriously, it’s not like people are still talking about the old Suprnova or Torrentspy anymore, yet the TPB has stuck around.) Some time ago, a Dutch court ordered TPB to delete a number of torrents and block Dutch IP addresses from being able to visit the site. Using a sledgehammer on a thumbtack, yes.

View original post here: 
Dutch court orders, again, TPB to delete torrents, block Dutch users

MojoPages, a local listings search engine, has raised $5 million in Series A funding led by Austin Ventures. MojoPages’s search technology powers local business listing search engines for local newspapers, and TV and radio stations.

Originally a stand alone search engine for business listings, the company found that it could not compete with bigger players like Citysearch and Yelp. So Jon Gardner, CEO of MojoPages, decided to overhaul the site’s business model and offer white label, branded local search engine technology to media companies. The site’s listings are similar to Yelp in that they offer user reviews and ratings of businesses. To date, MojoPages has contracted with more than 1,000 media sites to create branded local business search engines.

Gardner says MojoPages will use the funds to expand the capabilities of its Yelp-like search engine, so that the search engine will become an aggregator of listings and reviews. The site hopes to pull local info from sites like Yelp, CitySearch, and YellowPages into one engine.

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A couple weeks ago, we wrote a post detailing why there needs to be some sort of iPhone app recommendation system. Just like iTunes has its “Genius” feature for music and movies, with over 50,000 apps now in the App Store, there needs to be a way to filter out what you don’t want and find what you do. If you have a lot of friends with iPhones or iPod touches, AppsFire may offer just that.

The service, launching in private beta today, allows you to share your favorite apps with anyone. Now, to be clear, I don’t mean actually share the apps themselves, but rather share the names of the ones you like and give others one-click access to download them also, from the App Store. So, say I have 100 apps on my machine, but I only really would recommend 15 or so, I would select those 15, and could send them out to friends on the various social networks.

AppsFire is actually an application that you install on you machine. Right now, it only works on Macs, but it’s coming for PCs soon. And there will event be an iPhone app, we’re told. Once the software is on your machine, it scans your iTunes folder to find your apps. It then opens a personal webpage on the AppsFire site and places the icons for your apps in front of you, asking you to choose your favorites. Once you do that, you can share them using the social networks, via email, in a widget, or simply get a link back to your AppsFire page. For example, here’s the link a co-founder of AppsFire, Ouriel Ohayon’s page.

It’s hardly a perfect system. First of all, the sharing mechanisms are a little clunky. And this isn’t a way to get personally tailored app recommendations based on what apps you already have an like. But it is a way to potentially find some new and interesting applications based on what people you know enjoy using.

The model for this is straight-forward: Affiliate links (through LinkShare and Tradedoubler), though Ohayon promises a “surprise” in that regard soon.

The limited private beta will be open to about 1,000 users at first, we’re told. You can sign up here.

Disclosure: AppsFire co-founder Ouriel Ohayon is a former member of the TechCrunch family, and still contributes from time to time.

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VoIP startup Ooma has raised another $14 million in venture capital, we’ve heard from multiple sources, increasing the total amount of capital the company has raised to $56 million. This most recent round of financing was led by existing investor Worldview Technology Partners and was a restructuring that wiped out earlier investors who chose not to participate in this round.

The company was really on the ropes and down to its last few dollars, says one source. But sales, particularly at Best Buy, are brisk and the company should reach profitability with this new round of financing, he added.

Ooma first launched two years ago as a new type of consumer VoIP product. But a complicated business model (expensive hardware, free service) made it confusing for consumers to compare to competitive offerings from Vonage and others.

But customer reviews were very positive, and the company brought in seasoned sales executive Rich Buchanan, previously at Sling Media. Best Buy started selling the devices and have been very successful in moving them off the shelves.

The company also announced a new handset product called the Telo at CES earlier this year. It is not yet available for purchase.

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MySpace is planning to lay off 300 of its 450 non-U.S. employees, it announced this morning, confirming our earlier report. Just one person in three gets to keep his or her job. The company has now announced that over 700 of it’s 1,800 total employees have been or will be laid off - 30% of U.S. staff last week, and 66% of non-U.S. staff today.

The company will not confirm whether Managing Director Travis Katz is still with the company (we reported earlier this evening that he has left the company). Update: sources at MySpace are saying that Katz will remain with MySpace and that “his role hasn’t changed.” The company will still not respond to an on-the-record request for comment about Katz.

TechCrunch Europe has the press release and email from MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta to what’s left of staff.

The company also says that it will close “at least 4 of its offices outside the United States,” adding “Upon completion of the proposed plan, London, Berlin, and Sydney would become the primary regional hubs for MySpace’s international operations. Under the proposed plan, MySpace would place all existing offices in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Italy, Mexico, Russia, Sweden, and Spain under review for possible restructure. MySpace China, a locally owned, operated, and managed company, and MySpace’s joint venture in Japan would not be affected by the proposed plan.”

The email to employees notes absurdly that the “restructuring steps we have taken have laid the groundwork for an exciting new chapter of innovation for MySpace” (with nearly half of MySpace staff now laid off, the few that are left are thinking about everything except innovation). He also says “I look forward to working with you all and speaking with you in the coming days.” I’m sure he’ll get something less than a warm reception.

From: Owen Van Natta
Sent: martedì 23 giugno 2009 11.30
To: FIM MySpace All
Subject: IMPORTANT: PROPOSED INTERNATIONAL RESTRUCTURE
Importance: High

Everyone,

Last week we made a number of changes to MySpace’s domestic structure in order to create a leaner, more nimble organization. Today, we are announcing the next step in our overall restructuring effort - a proposal to streamline our operations abroad.

Unlike our recent domestic restructuring announcement, what we are announcing today is a formal proposal we intend to implement, rather than an executed plan. As required by laws in countries where we operate, we will not implement the plan until we have consulted with potentially affected employees. As a result, even though the plan we are proposing today would apply to all international divisions of the company, a finalized international restructuring will be put into action over a period of days.

Similar to our domestic restructuring, our international plan is designed to rein in growth in staff and expenses that we cannot sustain. Our proposal would reduce MySpace’s international staff from 450 employees to approximately 150 employees and close at least 4 of our offices outside the United States.

Upon completion of the proposed plan, London, Berlin, and Sydney would become the primary regional hubs for MySpace’s international operations. Under the proposed plan, MySpace would place all existing offices in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Italy, Mexico, Russia, Sweden, and Spain under review for possible restructure. MySpace China, a locally owned, operated, and managed company, and MySpace’s joint venture in Japan would not be affected by the proposed plan.

We are focusing on London, Berlin, and Sydney for two very simple reasons: (1) these are markets where we have a lot of MySpace users as well as the resources to allow us to compete effectively and (2) these are major international commerce centers where a robust MySpace presence can help our company develop new and innovative business partnerships.

As with the domestic changes we made last week, these proposed international reductions and eliminations will be extremely challenging – professionally and personally. These are difficult decisions and they are essential to our financial well-being and the re-establishment of our overall growth strategy.

Our goal to tap into as many international markets as possible drove us to create too many offices around the globe, and with them came inefficiencies. Under the new plan, we will refocus our efforts on regional business partnerships and integration in a smaller number of territories, while retaining a robust international presence. We remain steadfast in our commitment to reaching a global audience.

The last two weeks have been tough for everyone. The employees who leave us played an important role in the successes of MySpace in these international markets, and I thank them for their hard and dedicated work. The restructuring steps we have taken have laid the groundwork for an exciting new chapter of innovation for MySpace. I look forward to working with you all and speaking with you in the coming days.

Thank you,

Owen

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