Month: July 2018

Following Discovery Communications $14.6 acquisition of Scripps Networks Interactive in March, the company is now toying with the idea of launching its own direct-to-consumer service. According to remarks made by Discovery CEO David Zaslav at an industry event, AdWeek reports [paywalled], the company is considering a service with all of Discovery’s networks at a price point of $5 to $8 per month.

Whether the service would be U.S.-only has not been determined, nor did the CEO hint at any kind of timeframe for a launch.

However, Zaslav did note that he was encouraged by other newcomers in the streaming space, including the low-cost skinny bundle Philo, and AT&T’s just launched WatchTV.

Discovery’s channels today are available on a number of the over-the-top live TV services, including WatchTV, which houses 30 of its networks.

Following its merger with Scripps, the company operates four of the top five cable networks for women 25-54, the exec also said – ID, HGTV, Food Network and TLC. And it accounts for 22 to 25 percent of the U.S. female audience on any given night, he claimed. That sizable chunk of the viewing audience, plus demand for its popular fare like “Shark Week,” could drive customers to a standalone service.

However, it’s unclear if that many consumers would pay for Discovery as a standalone offering, given how competitive the streaming landscape has become these days.

Beyond the big three – Netflix, Hulu and Amazon – consumers are being asked to consider a variety of other add-ons, ranging from premium cable networks like HBO, Showtime, Starz and Cinemax, to channels’ own apps, as with CBS All Access, to streaming sports services like fuboTV.

Then there are the over-the-top live TV offerings including Sling TV, Hulu with Live TV, YouTube TV, PlayStation Vue, AT&T’s DirecTV Now and Watch TV, and Philo.

It’s possible Discovery could have some success through Amazon’s Prime Video Channels, which allow consumers to build a true a la carte service.

Amazon’s Channels today reportedly account for 55 percent of all direct-to-consumer video subscriptions, and is growing. But critics have suggested that even with Scripps, Discovery would need to pick up another company to make its offering more appealing and competitive – especially in light of industry consolidation efforts, like Disney’s Fox acquisition, and its plans to take on Netflix in streaming in 2019, as well as AT&T’s purchase of Time Warner.

With so much choice today, and the high-quality, award-winning shows appearing on services like Netflix, Discovery’s traditional cable TV fare – like reality shows, home makeovers, animal documentaries, and cooking shows – may not have enough pull to support a standalone offering.

Even as the Argentine government was announcing the biggest slide in the country’s economic output in nearly a decade, technology investors in the nation’s capital are all gearing up for record fundraising years.

Three of the country’s biggest firms (which are still small by international standards) are raising new, exponentially larger, funds in a sign that technology companies are showing promise despite the bleak picture painted by the broader economy in Latin America.

Leading the pack is NXTP Labs, the early stage investor that’s developing a regional network of accelerators and seed investment funds through partnerships that extend from Mexico City to Montevideo and Sao Paulo up to San Francisco. Despite its regional reach, home for NXTP is Buenos Aires and it’s there that the firm began accelerating and investing in early stage companies back in 2011.

NXTP has already had 13 exits, according to Crunchbase, and is perhaps the most mature of the crop of investment firms in the country. It’s also looking to be among the largest as it capitalizes on that track record of exists and a portfolio of investments that has raised follow-on capital of nearly half a billion dollars. 

The firm is currently knocking on doors to raise $120 million, a significant step up from its previous $38.5 million investment vehicle.

NXTP Labs isn’t the only firm based in Argentina that’s looking to significantly expand its capital under management. Jaguar Ventures, a firm that invests in both Argentina and Mexico, and Draper Cygnus, an Argentine-focused, Buenos Aires-based investment firm has already raised roughly $30 million of the $60 million it has targeted for its new fund,

While Cygnus is very much focused on the early-stage Argentine opportunity (which makes sense given the track record of technology companies coming out of the country — and the capital behind the firm) both NXTP and Jaguar have more of a regional perspective. And Jaguar, too, is massively increasing the size of its fund.

While its first fund was only $10 million, the new one will be closer to $60 million, according to one person with knowledge of the firm’s plans.

Behind the surge of confidence in the region’s technology fortunes, despite the economic turmoil that continues to roil the region, is a growing track record of valuable companies — all with a homebase in Latin America’s largest market.

And while Brazil remains the region’s undisputed economic powerhouse, there’re growing numbers of tech giants coming from Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, and Chile, investors said.

As Gonzalo Costa, a co-founder of NXTP Labs wrote in an editorial for TechCrunch earlier this week:

For the first time, companies are raising rounds of $100 million plus. 99 (acquired by Didi Chuxing), Nubank and Rappi, have all raised mega rounds in the past two years. Others have raised large rounds, such as Selina and Movile, with $90 million-plus, or Auth0 (part of our portfolio), with $50 million rounds in 2018. But the increase in dollar amounts is not only driven by mega rounds. More than 30 transactions of $3 million or more happened in 2017, which is triple in amount of rounds of that figure when compared to 2016. This shows a market maturity not seen before.

Not only are companies attracting more capital, but entrepreneurs are launching companies across a dizzying array of technology verticals.

These are companies like NubiMetrics, which provides competitive analysis and data for marketplaces like MercadoLibre; or Satellogic, which is developing a network of satellites for earth observation (and raised $27 million last year); or Pago Rural, which provides financing options for farmers in Latin America (and is raising a $20 million round, according to sources).

It’s clear that venture capital and tech in Argentina (and across Latin America) is having a moment. But with a broader base of local capital, it’s possible that this moment could become a movement. And that would have a profound effect on economies around the world.

With the big cloud companies reporting recently, we can be sure of a couple of things: the market continues to expand rapidly and AWS is going to be hard to catch. Depending on whose numbers you look at, the market grew around 50 percent as it continues its unprecedented expansion.

Let’s start with market leader, Amazon Web Services. Canalys has them with 31 percent of the market while Synergy Research puts them at 34 percent. That’s close enough to be considered a dead heat. As Synergy’s John Dinsdale points out, AWS is so dominant that in spite of mega growth numbers from other vendors, it is still bigger than the next four competitors combined, even after all these years.

Those competitors, by the way, are no slouches by any means. They include Microsoft, Google, IBM and Alibaba, so some pretty elite enterprise players. As we’ve noted in past analyses, one of the primary issues for all the competitors is how late they were to the market. They gave Amazon a massive head start, and they show no signs of ceding that lead any time soon.

Of course, AWS isn’t standing still either, it grew 48 percent last quarter by Canalys’ estimate, while Synergy has AWS marketshare up a tick to 34 percent.

Interestingly, Synergy finds this overall competitor growth did not cut into Amazon’s marketshare at all, but was the result of continued growth in the marketplace, as companies continue to shift workloads to the cloud. “The rapid growth of Microsoft, Google and Alibaba sees them all increase their market shares too, but it is not at the expense of AWS,” Synergy’s John Dinsdale pointed out in a statement.

Microsoft and Google still growing fast

That is not to say that Microsoft and Google are not growing too. In fact, Canalys had Microsoft growing at an 89 percent clip last quarter while Google grew an amazing 108 percent. It’s always important to point out that it’s easier to grow from a small number to a bigger number than it is to grow from a big number to a bigger number. Yet AWS continues to defy that idea and grow anyway, although not quite at the rate of its competitors.

Synergy reports these marketshare percentages for the competitors: Microsoft 14 percent, IBM 8 percent, Google 6 percent and Alibaba 4 percent, while Canalys shows Microsoft with 18 percent and Google with 8 percent. It did not report on IBM or Alibaba.

While these growth numbers have to drop at some point, they could continue to grow for the next several years as large companies get more comfortable with the cloud and move increasing percentages of their workloads.

Of course, even then it’s not a zero sum game. As we see increasing use of data-intensive workloads involving internet of things, blockchain and artificial intelligence, it’s entirely possible that the market will continue to grow even with fewer workloads moving from private data centers.

For now, even with their eye-popping growth numbers, the competition continues to chase AWS. Even as these companies find ways to differentiate themselves with different approaches, offerings and services, the market dynamics are hardening and catching AWS seems less and less likely.

It also seems increasingly less likely that some small upstart can come in and undermine the top players, as it just takes too much investment to keep up with them and their scale. “In a large and strategically vital market that is growing at exceptional rates, [the market leaders] are throwing the gauntlet down to their smaller competitors by continuing to invest enormous amounts in their data center infrastructure and operations. Their increased market share is clear evidence that their strategies are working,” Synergy’s Dinsdale said a statement.

What the competitors need to do now is continue to focus on customer requirements and what they can offer in terms of price and service to continue to take advantage of their own unique strengths. There’s plenty of room in this space for everyone to thrive, but some will thrive more than others. That’s just the nature of the market.

Opera is now a public company. The Norway-based company priced its initial public offering at $12 a share — the company initially expected to price its share in the $10 to $12 price range. Trading opened at $14.34 per share, up 19.5 percent. The company raised over $115 million with this IPO.

Opera Ltd. filed for an initial public offering in the U.S. earlier this month. The company is now trading on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol OPRA.

Chances are you are reading this article in Google Chrome on your computer or Android phone, or in Safari if you’re reading from an iPhone. Opera has a tiny market share compared to its competitors. But it’s such a huge market that it’s enough to generate revenue.

In its F-1 document, the company revealed that it generated $128.9 million in operating revenue in 2017, which resulted in $6.1 million in net profit.

The history of the company behind Opera is a bit complicated. A few years ago, Opera shareholders decided to sell the browser operations to a consortium of Chinese companies. The adtech operations now form a separate company called Otello.

Opera Ltd., the company that just went public, has a handful of products — a desktop browser, different mobile browsers and a standalone Opera News app. Overall, around 182 million people use at least one Opera product every month.

The main challenge for Opera is that most of its revenue comes from two deals with search engines — Google and Yandex. Those two companies pay a fee to be the default search engine in Opera products. Yandex is the default option in Russia, while Google is enabled by default for the rest of the world.

The company also makes money from ads and licensing deals. When you first install Opera, the browser is pre-populated with websites by default, such as eBay and Booking.com. Those companies pay Opera to be there.

Now, Opera will need to attract as many users as possible and remain relevant against tech giants. Opera’s business model is directly correlated to its user base. If there are more people using Opera, the company will get more money from Google, Yandex and its advertising partners.

In a truly bizarre move, LinkedIn is adding voice messages to the professional networking platform.

The voice recording feature, which will roll out to all users over the coming weeks, is available via the iOS or Android app. Users can receive messages on both mobile and on the LinkedIn website. The voice messages can be up to one minute long.

While LinkedIn has proven itself a powerful tool for professional networking, with particular popularity among recruiters and HR professionals, it can also feel a bit like a second overwhelming email inbox. Voice messages could prove to be a nice break from the text, but could also add a new weight to all the inbound messages users receive on the platform.

So why did LinkedIn add voice messaging?

According to the blog post, the reasons are three-fold.

The first reason is for convenience — LinkedIn thinks that sending voice messages on the go is easier than typing them out. The second reason is that the asynchronous nature of LinkedIn, as compared to phone calls and voicemails, is easier for recipients of voice messages. And finally, the company believes that users can better express themselves via voice.

While all that may be true, I’m not sure voice messages fit with the overall purpose of LinkedIn. LinkedIn is predominantly used for connecting with people that you don’t already know, in a professional setting. It’s relatively rare to call up someone you don’t know at all to discuss potential employment or recruiting, whereas sending that person an email is perfectly acceptable.

Using the feature seems pretty easy. Simply tap and hold the microphone icon to record your message, and release the icon to send. To cancel, slide your finger off the microphone icon before you release.

LinkedIn, which was purchased by Microsoft in 2016, now has 562 million users.

Google is cracking down on the apps published to the Play Store. An updated version of the company’s Developer Policy, released this week, indicates the company will now ban a wider variety of apps including cryptocurrency miners, those selling firearms and accessories, those that aim to trick children into downloading adult-themed apps, and apps built using automated tools or wizard services, or based on templates.

The latter move is especially interesting, as Apple did something similar last December that resulted in developer backlash, controversy, and even a U.S. Congressman reaching out to Apple to clarify its intent and reconsider its policy.

While it’s true that apps made with templates and wizards lead to spam apps and App Store clutter, several developers felt Apple, with its blanket ban, was wiping out small businesses from being able to participate in the App Store. The issue at hand was the fact that many smaller businesses, nonprofits and other organizations used an app templating service to create their own app. For example, templates and wizards were often used by local restaurants, schools, churches, clubs, and other small businesses that couldn’t invest in the design and development of their own apps.

As a result of the backlash, Apple revised its policy so it only impacted developers attempting to spam the App Store with multiple copies of a certain type of app. Instead of banning all templated apps, Apple’s new policy said that apps built using templates would be allowed if they were submitted by the provider of the app’s content. That is, if the local pizza place wanted its own app, it could submit its templated-built app itself.

Google clearly made a point not to make the same mistake with its own policy changes.

Its new policy clarifies the ban effects only:

Apps that are created by an automated tool, wizard service, or based on templates and submitted to Google Play by the operator of that service on behalf of other persons are not allowed. Such apps are only permissible if they are published by an individually registered developer account belonging to the user of the automated tool, not the operator of the service.

This more careful wording ensures that the policy will only address the problems with app store spam, and not with small business customers, or the app development services they use.

Another Google Play policy change bans apps that mine cryptocurrency on devices – something that could make it easier for Google Play to directly kick out apps that market themselves as something else, then mine on the sly without user’s consent. This follows a Google’s ban of mining apps from the Chrome Store this spring, due to a number of sketchy extensions that were misleading users.

Meanwhile, Google takes an almost moral position with the addition of a ban of apps that ” facilitate the sale of explosives, firearms, ammunition, or certain firearms accessories.” Specifically, Google calls out apps that sell accessories used to simulate automatic fire or convert firearms to automatic fire. This includes bump stocks, gatling triggers, drop-in auto sears, conversion kits, and magazines or belts carrying more than 30 rounds.

The change here follows the approval of several newer state laws banning bump stocks across the U.S., in the wake of an increasing number of school shootings. Gun control advocates believe that the loss of life in mass shootings could be lessened if the perpetrators didn’t have ready access to guns and accessories that allow for automatic fire.

It doesn’t seem Google has taken action on this category, however:

Other policy changes take aim at various types of misleading apps, including those adult-themed apps that appeal to children (something Google’s YouTube struggles to moderate as well, in terms of misleading video); apps that only seem to exist to serve ads (ads appear after every tap, e.g.); and apps engaging in impersonation.

Many of Google’s policy changes address areas of app spam and clutter Apple had already tackled, having announced a year ago its plans to clean up the App Store. Its cleanup was so sizable, in fact, that the App Store shrank for the first time ever in 2017. It’s now around 2+ million apps.

At this year’s WWDC, Apple again updated its guidelines to further secure the App Store, which included its own version of a crypto mining ban.

Google’s Play Store has been in need of a similar cleanup. Although Google regularly kicks out sizable numbers of malicious apps, it has always been more lenient on spammy apps than Apple. That’s allowed the store to grow to 3.5 million apps, as of December 2017. Many of those apps should now be removed, if Google chooses to retroactively enforce its new policies at scale – which remains to be seen.

(h/t to Android Police, which first saw the policy changes) 

There are those who will almost certainly take Samsung’s declaration of an “unbreakable” display as a challenge. That’s just human nature. For every one else, there’s something undeniably appealing in the idea of a phone that can be dropped from up to six feet, without a any sign of damage.

As far as when (or, rather, if) Samsung’s new flexible OLED tech will actually appear in devices, that remains to be seen. Before you get your hopes up too much, Samsung and LG are in the habit of showing these kinds of technology previews all the time, regardless of economic feasibility. That’s just one of the many cruel jokes that comes with paying attention to this sort of stuff.

That said, a new round of rumors point to a “foldable” display device coming at some point next year, so who knows, maybe all of our wildest dreams are about to come true then. In the meantime, the tests certainly point to an impressive component.

UL’s drop testing (no doubt the funnest part of that person’s day) involved letting the display go from around four feet up, 26 times in a row. The phone was also exposed to extreme temperatures and — as mentioned above — dropped from around six feet, just for kicks. None of which appear to damage the screen.

Here’s Samsung GM Hojung Kim on the tech, “The fortified plastic window is especially suitable for portable electronic devices not only because of its unbreakable characteristics, but also because of its lightweight, transmissivity and hardness, which are all very similar to glass.”

In addition to phones, the tech may also be used in cars, gaming consoles and tablets.

Netflix has optioned Shoe Dog, the bestselling memoir by Nike co-founder and former CEO Phil Knight.

While the streaming service has had its most high-profile success with original shows like Orange is the New Black and Stranger Things, it sounds like it’s planning to turn Shoe Dog into a film. Knight and Frank Marshall will produce, while Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (the true-life-focused writing team behind Ed Wood, Man on the Moon and The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story) pen the screenplay.

Netflix’s announcement says Marshall and Knight first met on the set of Back to the Future, where Marshall was one of the executive producers.

“Ever since our collaboration on BTTF and being a runner myself, I’ve always been fascinated by Phil’s story and how the company came to be,” Marshall said in a statement. “It’s an amazing tale about what the path to success really looks like, with its mistakes, struggles, sacrifice and even luck. It’s about how a company can grow with the right people, dedication, a belief in the power of sport and a shared mission to build a brand that would change everything.”

This isn’t the first time Netflix has tried to tell business stories drawn from the real world. It adapted Sophia Amoruso’s Girlboss into a series last year, then canceled the show after one season.

Shoe Dog was published in 2016. Bill Gates wrote that in contrast to most books about entrepreneurship, Knight’s memoir is “a refreshingly honest reminder of what the path to business success really looks like.” It remains on the New York Times besteller list more than two years later.

It’s also worth noting that Knight also has a connection to the film world through his ownership of the Laika, the stop motion animation studio behind Coraline and Kubo and the Two Strings — the latter film was directed by Laika CEO (and Knight’s son) Travis Knight.

Twitter has no intention of easing up on its fight against spam users and other factors that jeopardize the “health” of its service, despite the approach costing it three million in ‘lost’ monthly active users.

Investor panic sent Twitter’s stock price down by nearly 20 percent in early trading today following its latest financial report. Twitter posted a record profit of $100 million for Q2, but its monthly user count dropped by one million, with its U.S. number in particular down to 68 million from 69 million in the previous quarter.

The company said on an earnings call that efforts aimed at “prioritizing the health of the platform” combined with other factors cost it three million monthly users — a number which could have turned the user decline into a more favorable story of growth.

The company is anticipating another drop in the next quarter as it continues to double down on fighting spam and bots on its service. That isn’t the only factor reducing numbers, however. A reassessment of its paid partnerships with carriers worldwide — which help bring in and retain new users — in response to the development of its Lite app is also forecast to reduce MAU.

Investors may be concerned, but Twitter is bullish that an increase in the quality of users is ultimately better in the long run that the short-term gain of higher numbers.

Answering questions on an earnings call, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said the clean-up strategy would be ongoing as Twitter intends to “build [concerns for platform health] into our DNA.”

“When we do focus on removing some of the burden of people blocking/muting, we see positive results in our numbers,” he added. “We believe this will encourage our growth story.”

Yet the execs also played down the material impact by explaining that “many” of the “tens of millions” of removed accounts were already not counted within Twitter’s MAU metrics. Some, they added, had never been counted because they had been identified as questionable right from when they were registered.

Twitter explained as much in its earnings release:

When we suspend accounts, many of the removed accounts have already been excluded from MAU or DAU, either because the accounts were already inactive for more than one month at the time of suspension, or because they were caught at signup and were never included in MAU or DAU. We will continue to work hard to improve the health of the platform, providing updates on our progress at least quarterly, and prioritizing health efforts regardless of the near-term impact on metrics, as we believe the best driver of long-term growth of Twitter as a daily utility is a healthy conversation.

On the positive side, the executives played up the development of overseas revenue, which grew 44 percent year-on-year and now accounts for 48 percent of Twitter’s total income.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This was one hell of a week. Happily, we had our own Connie Loizos, Matthew Lynley, and Alex Wilhelm on hand, along with Initialized Capital’s Alexis Ohanian to pick over the mix.

First up we had zero choice but to talk about Facebook. The social company’s epic repricing in the middle of the week blotted out the news sun. It may keep us in the shade for another week, too. Facebook’s dive has implications for social startups and competing public companies alike. Like, say, Reddit.

Moving along, Crunchbase News recently dropped a report digging into the rise of $100 million and larger rounds. From a turning point in 2013 to today, megarounds have been on the rise. Why? When does it stop? Whose fault is it really? And is going public really that bad? We worked through each question, even tagging the structure of the stock market along the way. (Even more data here.)

From there we took a quick pivot to a company that is known for raising megarounds — Slack — and its new IRL BFF Atlassian. Yes, the Slack-Atlassian deal dropped right before we recorded. Our take is that the agreement makes sense, especially in light of a competitive landscape that keeps getting tougher for Slack.

That said, everyone agreed that Slack is one hell of a business.

And then we ran out of time. But, happily, we also worked in an advertisement for Melbourne and riffed one of Ohanian’s recent investments.

Thanks for comin’ round, and we’ll see you all in a week!