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Monday, January 27, 2014
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AdColony says its mobile video ad platform has reached a $100 million gross revenue run rate.


That’s a number ad-tech startups seem to enjoy bragging about — RadiumOne, AdRoll, and TellApart all made similar announcements over the past few months.


In AdColony’s case, the company also says that its 2013 revenue was quadruple its revenue from 2012, and that the fourth quarter of last year was its tenth consecutive quarter of growth. eCPMs (the price advertisers pay for a thousand impressions) are up 30 percent and overall publisher earnings are up 418 percent.


(And just to be clear, that $100 million run rate refers to gross revenue — after publishers and partners take their cut, net revenue is likely to be significantly less.)


In my past meetings with the AdColony team, the company has emphasized its technology for delivering high-quality video ads, with no delays or choppiness. Those ads include “cards” at the end with customized calls to action, such as “click to buy” buttons or requests to Like the advertiser on Facebook. AdColony says its network reaches more than 150 million unique users globally, with publishers including A&E, ABC News, Flixster, and Supercell.


I spoke to CEO Will Kassoy about AdColony’s growth and he pointed to a few of big trends that the company is focused on. First, he said there’s growing interest in synchronizing TV and mobile ads, both by using data showing the overlap between the two audiences and through co-viewing/social TV apps. Second, he said that attribution is becoming more important to brand advertisers, so AdColony is offering data to help them “take advantage of all the streams in media.” Finally, he said AdColony is helping social app developers introduce video ads to their news feeds.





12:09 PM

AdColony says its mobile video ad platform has reached a $100 million gross revenue run rate. That’s a number ad-tech startups seem to enjo...

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Google today released the new version of Chrome for iOS. With this update, it is bringing a number of features that were previously only available in the Android app to Apple’s iPhone and iPad.


Just like the Android app, for example, Chrome for iOS now supports Google’s Opera Turbo-like, data-compression proxy. By having your web browsing flow through Google’s servers, the company can compress your data (and especially images) to help you save up to 50 percent of bandwidth while you are browsing. Google will not, however, use the proxy for any connections to any sites that use secure connections (HTTPS).


Users will have to explicitly enable this feature, which makes sense, given that once enabled, all your browsing will touch Google servers – something not everybody will be comfortable with.


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Also new in this release is built-in support for Google Translate, a feature both Android and desktop users have long been able to access. Whenever Chrome notices that you are surfing a site that isn’t in your native language, you can just tap the translation bar in Chrome and see the translated version.


With this update, Google is also starting to push out an updated new tab page for iOS that is meant to make “searching faster and easier.” As far as I can see, this means Google will show both a prominent Google Search bar on the new tab page, as well as a list of most-visited sites and recently closed tabs. Google says this part of the update will roll out slowly and will only be available on the iPhone at first.


Google had previously announced some of the iOS updates, though apparently it took the company a bit longer than planned to release the updated version.





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Google today released the new version of Chrome for iOS . With this update, it is bringing a number of features that were previously only a...

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Founders Arvid Magnus Louise Leo

Hoping to pick up the slack left by people people who want to get fit but find gym memberships too expensive or unproductive, Sweden’s Vint is a peer-to-peer marketplace and community for private training, either individual or in small groups. It consists of an iPhone app (and is currently only available in Stockholm, Sweden) that lets certified instructors, vetted by the startup itself, offer instruction in any sport, price range and skill level.


Today, Vint is announcing a seed round of $1.8 million, led by Nordics VC Creandum — money it will use to expand the reach of its marketplace, first across Sweden but also including a U.S. launch pegged for sometime in 2014. That would see it, to a certain degree, go up against U.S.-based Fitmob.


Others participating in the seed round include DN Capital, Kima Ventures, GP Bullhound, Edastra, and angel investors Richard Båge, Bryan Jonson, and Mathias Ackermand. In addition and noteworthy is that David Giampaolo, co-founder of the global gym chain 24 Hour Fitness and investor to the work-out concept ZUMBA, also joins the round.


So, perhaps, chalk Vint up as not so much gym competitor as reaching parts of the market that traditional gym chains are unable to reach. Or, maybe, Giampaolo has simply resolved the “innovator’s dilemma“.


iphone-7573cd0e906327469a87d8e6ac7631c5“We’re disrupting the way people work out through connecting experienced athletes with people who think what gym chains usually offer is too expensive, too advanced or simply do not have access,” Vint co-founder and CEO, Louise Eriksson, tells TechCrunch in an email.


“We’re giving our users a chance to get private training cheaper and easier but also more athletes to make a business of their interest. We want to grow the total market for training and increase the quality of every work out being done while doing so.”


Along with Eriksson, who formerly founded Scandinavia’s largest B2B ad network, AdProfit, Vint’s other founders are Magnus Hult, one of Spotify’s first engineers and co-founder of the digital gift cards app Wrapp, Leo Giertz, also co-founder of Wrapp and developer of Spotify’s first iOS app, and Arvid Janson, co-founder of Psykologifabriken and Hoa’s Tool Shop.


The connection to Spotify is particularly interesting given Vint backer Creandum was an early investor in the music streaming service. I’ll also say that, on paper at least, Vint’s team looks pretty strong.


The market opportunity appears to be decent, too. Vint claims the total training and fitness market in Sweden is $600 million, while the U.S. market is valued at $40 billion.





12:09 PM

Hoping to pick up the slack left by people people who want to get fit but find gym memberships too expensive or unproductive, Sweden’s Vint ...

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Hansoft

Launched all the way back in 2005, Sweden-headquartered Hansoft provides tools to help teams collaborate and manage the development of products and services using “Agile software development” — the umbrella term for a group of software development methods based on iterative and incremental development. The goal with Agile is to enable code to be developed, improved and shipped quicker. Software is eating the world, after all.


Interestingly, however, though not wholly surprising for a company that’s generated revenue from the get-go, Hansoft has, until now, been entirely self-funded. Today that changes with the announcement that it’s raised a first round of funding.


The company has raised $8.4 million in investment led by Stockholm-based VC and early backer in Spotify Creandum. A number of private individual investors also participated in the round, including (and noteworthy) Mårten Mickos, the former CEO MySQL and currently CEO of Eucalyptus Systems.


Although its legacy is in supporting video game, largely console game, studios, today Hansoft’s customers are companies making software and related hardware products and cloud services in a range of industries, such as telecom, game development, electronics, aerospace, space and defence.


What these companies have in common, says Hansoft co-founder and CEO, Patric Palm, is that they need to “not only scale Agile software development to very large teams, but also out-innovate their completion to stay competitive”. That’s the specific problem that Hansoft’s tools, which run on Mac, Windows and multiple Linux distributions, have been designed to solve.


“Most of our customers are trying to scale Agile development to large complex environments. Typically 5-10 scrum teams in each program and several programs making up a portfolio,” he adds.


My understanding is that this translates into a typical client buying around 1,000 “seats” — the company charges per-user — who are working on between 5 and 10 or so product programs, with 30-200 programers working on the same product.


When Agile methods were conceived and become popular, however, one could argue they were never originally envisioned to scale up to such large development teams, but this is exactly the space that Hansoft and its competitors are playing in, although Palm says that Hansoft is also used by startups and other smaller teams. It’s free for up 9 users.


I asked him why the company is only taking external funding now? “Our competitors are quite rich,” says Palm, adding that, while it’s been fun playing David and Goliath, “we’re not picking enough fights”. Those wealthy competitors include Jira (Atlassian), and IBM RTC, which Palm says many Hansoft customers migrate from. An even more direct rival is IPOed Rally.


Hansoft currently has 35 employees based in Sweden, with a second office in San Francisco housing 2 employees. With new funding, Palm says the company will expand the latter, including recruiting a Chief Growth Officer. Its distributed executive team will see Sweden focus on development, and San Francisco, sales.





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Launched all the way back in 2005, Sweden-headquartered Hansoft provides tools to help teams collaborate and manage the development of prod...

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With breaking news about data breaches a common occurrence, you'd think security threats to an organization's data would be something CEOs and their management teams were kept in the know about. Apparently not. Some 80 percent of IT pros in the United States and United Kingdom said they did not frequently communicate with executive management about potential cyberattacks to their organizations, in a survey conducted by the Ponemon Institute and released last week by Lancope, a network security company.


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Established retail banks around the world have bit of a problem. There are a whole bunch of new banking players that want to disrupt parts of their business, such as Wonga, Lenddo, Kueski and many others. It’s like being eaten by Piranhas. Now Kreditech is poised to be one of those players to really capitalise on this historic shift. Claiming to want to become “The Amazon for Consumer Finance”, the founders are Sebastian Diemer, Alexander Graubner-Müller and Felix Haas – the former Amiando founder.


Kreditech has a micro-loans product for consumers and, on the back-end, a credit rating service for enterprise customers. So, two bites of the cherry which help each-other. It’s now secured $15 million in debt financing from Kreos Capital. This is the third extension after the initial $5M loan in September 2013. This will finance it’s consumer lending activities in Poland, Spain, Czech Republic, Russia and Mexico and it will expand to Australia and other markets, including Peru and Brazil, during 2014. The startup raised $4 million in venture funding in 2012.


Its credit scoring service claims to process over 8,000 data points in real-time (location, social graph, e-commerce behaviour etc) to generate a credit score for a consumer which it then sells on to retailers. The company says it has a technology which means they don’t require any external credit bureau data in their risk model, because they do identification, fraud detection and scoring decisions based on globally available data sources such as social networks and e-commerce records. That means they can move fast into emerging markets.


It’s now diversifying from short-term microloans to consumer-focused finance products, such as unsecured instalment loans, credit cards and other products that will be launched soon.





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Bond credit rating agency Moody’s cut the credit rating of Sony from Baa3 to Ba1 with a stable outlook — Ba1 is also just below investment grade. In other words, Sony is considered a speculative investment right now and it will become harder for the company to borrow money.


Today’s downgrade comes from its volatile net profit. Despite many staff cuts, some divisions, such as its PC and TV activities, are still losing money or are barely in the black. Increased competition in these areas are to blame.


“We expect the majority of its core consumer electronics businesses — such as TVs, mobile, digital cameras and personal computers — to continue to face significant downward earnings pressure,” Moody’s wrote in a statement.


Yet, the PlayStation 4 was very well received by the company’s customers and reviewers — 4 million units were sold during the holidays. But newly launched consoles don’t generate a lot of profit because margins are very thin after launch. Though it’s still a very good sign for the long term outlook when it comes to selling games and consoles at a later stage in the product cycle.


Finally, Sony currently has a solid lineup of cameras, but other companies could take the lead, or smartphones could bring down prices.


Sony is also a major movie studio and music label. These divisions are apparently doing well, but it’s very tough to predict the future. The vast majority of the profit generated by a movie comes in the few months that follow its release in theaters. You have to start over every year and release hit after hit.


Standard & Poor’s still rates Sony at BBB, two ranks above junk status, while the company is rated junk by Fitch. Shares are currently trading at 16.03, 4.13 percent below yesterday’s closing price. With today’s downgrade, Moody’s also notes that the company shouldn’t expect any rating improvement in the near future.





10:40 AM

Bond credit rating agency Moody’s cut the credit rating of Sony from Baa3 to Ba1 with a stable outlook — Ba1 is also just below investment ...

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