The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘markets’

Do you remember the Bowlingual, the portable dog language translator that was released in Japan last year ? The basic concept behind the $250 device (which people living outside Japan can get here ) will soon be used for an iPhone app that translates what a dog “says” into human language and emoticons in real-time.

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Bowlingual: iPhone app translates what your dog barks, posts it to Twitter

In less than six months, online restaurant reservation site OpenTable has seated an additional one million diners via its mobile apps. In late October, OpenTable had reached the milestone of seating one million diners via its mobile offerings, a year after its iPhone app launched. It took only four and a half months to seat another million diners. Additionally, the site says that based on an estimation of a $50 average check per diner, OpenTable claims that diners using its mobile applications have generated more than $100 million in revenue for its restaurant partners.

OpenTable allows diners to find and book reservations at more than 11,000 different restaurants in multiple countries via mobile applications for the iPhone, Palm, Blackberry and Android. Other smartphone users can book reservations through OpenTable’s mobile-optimized Web site.

The company also reported strong earnings this afternoon, with Q4 2009 revenue coming in at $19.2 million, representing a a 32% increase over Q4 2008 revenue, which was $14.5 million. OpenTable’s total revenues for 2009 were $68.6 million, up 23% over 2008 revenues of $55.8 million. In 2009, OpenTable increased its number of participating restaurants in North America by 17%, with a total of 10,850 partners by the end of 2009. The number of international partners also increased, rising by 44% to 1501 participating establishments. Total number of diners in North American were 11.8 million, a 39% increase from Q4 2008.

Last year, OpenTable filed for a healthy IPO, despite recessionary conditions in the markets. OpenTable is a solid internet company that has a viable business model. On the restaurant side, OpenTable delivers reservation management software to establishments through a Web browser and collects monthly subscription revenues, similar in theory to the offerings that software companies like Salesforce sell to clients.

It’s official: the European Commission has granted regulatory approval for Oracle to acquire Sun Microsystems for approximately $7.4 billion, without further conditions. In a statement released moments ago, Oracle says it expects unconditional approval from China and Russia as well and intends to close the transaction shortly.

Oracle will host an all-day live event for customers, partners, press and analysts on January 27th, 2010 at 9:00 AM Pacific time at its headquarters in Redwood Shores, California.

Just in case you weren’t planning on attending or following the major Apple event.

The approval comes after an in-depth antitrust investigation opened in September amid concerns that Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL would stifle competition in the database market. In August 2009, the Departement of Justice had already given the deal green light.

From the press release:

The Commission’s in-depth investigation showed that although MySQL and Oracle compete in certain parts of the database market, they are not close competitors in others, such as the high-end segment.

Given the open source nature of MySQL, the Commission also assessed Oracle’s ability and incentive to remove the constraint exerted by MySQL after the merger and the extent to which this constraint could, if necessary, be replaced by other actors on the database market.

“I am now satisfied that competition and innovation will be preserved on all the markets concerned. Oracle’s acquisition of Sun has the potential to revitalize important assets and create new and innovative products,” said Neelie Kroes, the European antitrust commissioner.

The database market is highly concentrated with the three main proprietary database vendors – Oracle, IBM and Microsoft – accounting for approximately 85% of the market in terms of revenue, the commission added.

SMS GupShup, a Twitter-like service in India that is primarily accessed via SMS, has raised $12 million in funding led by Globespan Capital Partners with existing investors Charles River Ventures and Helion Venture Partners participating in the round.

The latest capital injection brings SMS GupShup’s total funding to $37 million.

Launched in April 2007, SMS GupShup (spawned from Webaroo) serves 26 million users across India. The startup has seen rapid growth in users primarily due to the immense popularity of mobile devices in India. According to the startup, there are 550 million mobile phone users in the country and only 50 million web users. With a 10 to 1 mobile-to-PC ratio and SMS serving as the most popular communications platform, the market is ripe for SMS GupShup to take off. SMS GupShup currently processes over 480 million messages a month and accounts for 5 percent of all texts sent within India. The new funding will be used for expand into other markets such as the Philippines and Indonesia, for product development and to hire new staff in engineering, advertising and marketing.

In fact, the mobile social network has even attracted the attention of leaders in the space, like Facebook. Last year, Facebook partnered with SMS GupShup to powere and deliver its users’ status updates via text messages. And besides partnerships, SMS GupShup also has an advertising strategy. Over 100 advertisers currently run on the network including local insurance provider ICICI Lombard and international brands like Puma, Microsoft and Cadbury.

India is a huge market for social networks, with Facebook, Orkut and even Twitter vying for a share of the growing number of web users who are increasingly flocking to social networks in their day-to-day routines. But clearly, SMS GupShup has tapped into the mobile side of social networks and is seeing success from this in India. It should be interesting to see how SMS GupShup will fare in other countries. It seems that in developing countries where mobile phone usage is much highers than web-usage the service is sure to take off. But the question remains if the service could ever take off in Europe or the U.S., which seems to be Twitter territory.

Is an iPhone price war about to break out in the UK? After Vodafone and Orange bagged the iPhone – when O2’s two year monopoly expired in September – we learn today that Tesco, the UK supermarket leviathan, is to sell the iPhone on Tesco Mobile, its MVNO joint venture partnership with O2.

This news just sent the iPhone directly into the mainstream. UK iPhone app developers are looking at an even bigger gold rush than before.

Both iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS handsets will be sold in Tesco Phone Shops and online through Tesco Direct in the UK, possibly before the Christmas holidays.

Tesco Mobile normally focuses on the low end of the market with voice and text, and we’re told the prices will be “competitive”. As an MVNO, Tesco has a fairly free hand regarding the the markets it goes after. O2 says it has sold over one million iPhones since September 2007, clearly to early adopters.

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KIDO’Z, the Israeli company behind the eponymous media browser for kids, has released a new version of its program and insists that we now refer to it as a Web OS for kids instead.

It’s certainly not an invalid point, since the new KIDO’Z incorporates communication features besides content consumption elements only, and the company is making strides in signing up computer manufacturers to have the platform pre-installed on machines.

KIDO’Z (an Adobe AIR desktop application) has put a social layer on top of the content part, enabling kids to communicate with each other as well as their parents aside from browsing pre-approved websites and playing videos or games online. Clearly, this is an oft-requested feature, as we’ve noticed when KIDO’Z competitor KidZui recently implemented a bunch of sharing and communication options as well.

Parents can now approve ‘friends’ for their kids to socialize with, which can be other children, the parents themselves, grand parents, and so on. A newly integrated Mail application enables kids to send and receive e-mails, e-cards, drawings, animated backgrounds, stickers etc., allowing the children to express themselves creatively even if they haven’t yet mastered reading or writing skills.

Also new is the addition of Places, which are essentially virtual rooms where kids can socialize with others in a cartoonesque setting. Kids can create an avatar and visit and create their own rooms, and communicate with other kids or exchange virtual gifts in a safe, child-friendly environment.

The Israeli company behind the application has now also added a premium version dubbed KIDO’Z PLUS, enabling parents to unlock more features (statistics, advanced security settings, etc.) for a monthly fee that ranges from $4.18 to $7.5 depending on how long you’d like to subscribe.

The company informs us that KIDO’Z already comes pre-installed on over half a million MSI computers, and that it expects to be on 6 million computers next year. Also worth noting: the startup has managed to attract former National Geographic Kids Entertainment President and Founder Donna Friedman Meir as its Chief of Content and Strategy.

Give KIDO’Z a whirl and let us know what you (and your kids) think.

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Transactional advertising network provider Adgregate Markets, a finalist at the 2008 TechCrunch50 conference is launching ShopCloud, a platform for building portable shopping carts and other e-commerce applications.

ShopCloud’s platform lets developers build a variety of applications around e-commerce, including distributed shopping carts, lead generation forms, polls and surveys, and social media apps. The platform also promises security and the ability to build and run secure transactional applications even in non-secure content pages.

And the shopping cart technology is already being implemented on commerce sites. Adgregate Networks’ client Warner Bros. is using ShopCloud to power the CW channel’s shopping cart. ShopCloud joins Adgregate’s ShopAds product, a fairly innovative advertising network that enables customers to complete secure transactions within Flash-based ad banners.

The startup has seen a good amount of growth since it’s launch last year; recently acquiring widget business Gydget and scoring a deal with distribution deal with Google’s DoubleClick, enabling advertisers on that platform to integrate ShopAds widgets with just a few mouse-clicks.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Online restaurant reservation site OpenTable has hit a milestone today, seating one million diners via its mobile apps. And the site says that based on an estimation of a $50 average check per diner, OpenTable believes that diners using its mobile applications have generated more than $50 million in revenue for its restaurant partners.

OpenTable allows diners to find and book reservations at more than 11,000 different restaurants in multiple countries via mobile applications for the iPhone, Palm, Blackberry and Android. Other smartphone users can book reservations through OpenTable’s mobile-optimized Web site.

This year OpenTable filed for a healthy IPO, despite recessionary conditions in the markets. OpenTable is a solid internet company that has a viable business model. On the restaurant side, OpenTable delivers reservation management software to establishments through a Web browser and collects monthly subscription revenues, similar in theory to the offerings that software companies like Salesforce sell to clients.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

I was Tweeting with Michael Gartenberg last night about all the great Android games. After all, the Android Marketplace has so many great titles like Civilization Revolution, Canabalt, iShoot, and… oh… wait…

All kidding aside, the reason there is such a dearth of great games has to do with some programming choices in Android itself and it’s a problem that can - and should - be fixed before the Droid comes to market this November.

Intelius is trying to dip its toes into the public market again. Last year we wrote about their business, which combined for-pay people search information with a post transaction marketing scam. After purchasing people information, users were encouraged to take a survey for $10 cash back. In reality, if users clicked yes the $10 was never mentioned again and they were signed up for a nearly impossible to cancel $20 monthly credit card charge.

The IPO never happened. But last week the company quietly filed a new registration statement with the SEC, indicating their attempt to try the markets once again.

Little has changed with their business. They are still selling people information that you can find on other sites like WhitePages.com for free. And during and immediately after the transaction, users are asked if they want $10 cash back. If they click yes, they are signed up for a $25/month credit card subscription.

Consumer complaints continue to flood the company. 1,159 consumer complaints have been filed with the Better Business Bureau in the last 36 months. There are another 214 complaints on RipoffReport. And they have had to deal with class action lawsuits in both Washington and California. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The company even acknowledges that complaints are getting worse. From the registration statement: “Over the past two years the number of customer complaints has risen more rapidly than the number of transactions.”

The company had revenues of $123 million in 2008 and $74 million in the first three quarters of 2009. Net income in 2008 was $12 million.

Without the post transaction marketing scam, the company wouldn’t be profitable. 2008 PTM revenue was $33 million, or about 27% of total revenue. And that percentage is increasing – For 2009 so far, PTM revenue is $22.6 million, or 31% of total revenue.

In my recent test searches I found that Intelius was charging even when there was no data (which you don’t see until you pay). And when the data is available, in all cases I was able to find it elsewhere for free.

Intelius is not a business. It’s a huge toxic scam from start to finish.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0