Netizen: eBay

Showing posts with label eBay. Show all posts

Friday, May 22, 2015

Reverse Brain Drain?

Best viewed large. The main terminal of the brand new Bangalore International Airport. I was one of the first few people at the airport. My mother arrived on the third flight into this new airport. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Top Indian talent in Silicon Valley moves back home to join star startups

Top Indian talent is moving from globally iconic American technology companies to India's star startups. And homes are being shifted from Bay Area to Bangalore. ...... from Google to Flipkart, from Disney and Facebook to Zomato, from Symantec to Snapdeal ..... Matching dollar salaries and the sheer range of future career opportunities are the hooks India's tech blue chips are offering to Indian talent in Silicon Valley. ...... "The smart entrepreneurs have already returned, tens of thousands more will return over the next 2-3 years" ...... being wooed by at least half-adozen Indian startups valued anywhere between $1 billion and $15 billion. ...... All salaries look handsome and Silicon Valley-competitive in dollar terms, and most assignments involve complex technology solutions for the mobile platform...... startups such as Zomato, whose restaurant discovery app is now present in 22 countries, are articulating their ambitions on a global scale. For Silicon Valley's top talent, nothing attracts more than a mission to dominate the world. "The idea is always world domination, if you speak anything less than that, you are not ambitious enough. ......... Both are being paid Valley salaries too — $5-6 million annual packages. ...... but it's just a whole new level of intensity here ..... "India is at the forefront of the mobile innovation" ...... "I made the decision to move here in less than 30 seconds," said Mani. "Hundreds of millions of Indians will experience the Internet for the first time on a smartphone in the next few years" ........ "India will see a technology boom over the next 5 years that will make the US dotcom boom look lame. There will be dozens of billion-dollar companies emerging from India's ecosystem which will transform business, industry and society." ......... "History is witness to the savviest, smartest and most entrepreneurial people usually going off to crazy places at regular intervals. This is relatively reasonable"

Thursday, October 23, 2014

Thiel

Seven Takeaways from Marc Andreessen's Interview With Peter Thiel

The eBay acquisition of PayPal was famously drawn-out and, in fact, took five separate negotiations to finally complete. .... "In June 2002, there was this eBay convention in Anaheim. We managed to get a booth there even though they weren’t that friendly to us at the time, so we sent 30 people down to the convention. And we handed out all these PayPal T-shirts. They saw all their power sellers wearing PayPal T-shirts, and at that point, they decided to buy the company.” ......... how Musk crashed his uninsured million-dollar sportscar with Thiel in the passenger seat on the way to a venture capital meeting

http://a16z.com/2014/10/17/a16z-podcast-the-definite-optimism-of-peter-thiel/

Thiel is a big picture person. He has a stellar track record. And he paints in broad strokes.

Tuesday, May 06, 2014

The Alibaba IPO

AliBaba (Photo credit: Stewf)

I never doubted Marissa Mayer's fundamentals as a tech executive, I think she is a trailblazer, but cynics claim 100% of her "success" at Yahoo can be attributed to Yahoo's stake in the Chinese tech giant Alibaba. Alibaba sells actual things. This is a signal that investors in America and other developed markets need to eye other emerging markets. There is an Alibaba waiting to happen in India, in Nigeria, in Brazil. And just like one Craig's List has fragmented into dozens of new, massive companies, and one inbox has fragmented into dozens of massive companies, Facebook among them (since you shared pictures over email before Facebook came along), I think Alibaba itself is a signal the Chinese ecommerce market can be broken up into smaller, more well-defined pieces. Alibaba's number one thing is ecommerce. There is a lesson. That you need a local approach to ecommerce in unique markets like China, and homegrown companies are best served. Other than founding Yahoo, investing early in Alibaba might be Jerry Yang's major masterstroke in life.

The Chinese are coming!

Alibaba Files to Go Public in US IPO of E-Commerce Giant

Founded by former English teacher Jack Ma, 49, in a Hangzhou apartment, Alibaba started with a few dozen items for sale. Alibaba’s market value is estimated at $168 billion, bigger than 95 percent of the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index -- and the most valuable Internet company after Google Inc....... Alibaba now provides various marketplaces for buyers and sellers, as well as services that help them conduct their businesses. Taobao Marketplace, founded in 2003, enables millions of individuals and small businesses to sell products. Tmall.com operates as a virtual shopping mall, with retailers and brands offering products. Alibaba’s other businesses include Juhuasuan, a flash-sales model, and eTao, a shopping search engine.

Alibaba’s Massive U.S. IPO Could Top Facebook’s Debut

Last year, the Chinese e-commerce business that is part-owned by Yahoo handled $248 billion in transactions, more than Amazon and eBay combined. ..... If successful, Alibaba’s IPO could eventually value the company at substantially more than $150 billion ...... a windfall for Yahoo, which owns 24% of the e-commerce giant...... dominates the Chinese e-commerce market, powering four-fifths of all online commerce in that country ..... the company also operates a digital payments service and a cloud computing business..... Alibaba accounts for about 75% of Yahoo’s valuation ...... At $200 billion, Alibaba would be worth more than U.S. tech titans Facebook and Amazon, but it would still trail Apple and Google, the world’s two most valuable technology companies. ..... Last year, Alibaba handled $248 billion in online transactions ... more than Amazon and eBay combined. ....... Alibaba’s meteoric growth has been powered by economic and demographic trends in China, including the ongoing emergence of a large, tech-savvy middle class. In its IPO filing, Alibaba cited China’s population of 1.35 billion people, including 618 million Internet users. The company said there are 500 million mobile Internet users and 302 million Internet shoppers in China. ..... There is less of a retail culture in China, ie. ‘Let’s go shopping on Sunday,’ ..... “The bottom line is that Yahoo’s stock continues to be driven by Alibaba results”

Yahoo’s Alibaba Stake Is Valued at $26 Billion

its stakes in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan, another Asian asset where it has a stake estimated at $9 billion..... Together, those holdings are worth about $35 billion, just under Yahoo’s current market capitalization of $36.7 billion. ...... Yahoo paid $1 billion for a 40% stake in Alibaba in 2005 and in 2012 Alibaba agreed to repurchased more than $7 billion in shares. Yahoo now owns 22.6%, according to Alibaba, and is required to sell 208 million shares in the IPO, worth $10.4 billion based on the most recent fair value. ..... Alibaba paid Yahoo $561 million in 2012 to license its intellectual property

With Alibaba IPO filing, pressure mounts on Yahoo

Marissa Mayer has dramatically changed the story line at Yahoo during her nearly two years as CEO ..... But even as Mayer has moved Yahoo away from under the cloud of worry which dogged it for so long, she'll soon be under growing pressure to prove that the company's turnaround is for real and not simply the result of a brilliant investment decision almost a decade ago. ...... In 2005, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang led the company through an investment in the little-known Alibaba, ponying up $1 billion for a 40 percent stake in the company. Today, Alibaba is valued anywhere from $150-$250 billion. Yahoo currently owns a 22.6 percent stake in the company. After Alibaba's IPO, Yahoo could end up with $12 billion in cash on its balance sheet ........ the challenge Yahoo faces as it seeks to compete in all these areas is that the incumbents are some of the fiercest names in technology: Google, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and others. And without the security blanket of leaning on Alibaba's might during earnings reports, the pressure is on for Mayer to find something else to fill the void.

Alibaba's $1 billion IPO: The numbers to know

Known in the U.S. primarily for its association with Yahoo, Alibaba is an eBay-meets-Amazon and then some kind of business....... Most of Alibaba's revenue derives from online marketing and ads. Other revenue streams include membership and transaction fees, value-added services, and cloud services.

Meet Alibaba’s Jack Ma
Chinese Giant Alibaba Files for IPO, Perhaps the Largest in U.S. History
How Alibaba could change American business
Alibaba Sees SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son Staying on Board Post-IPO
10 Surprising Things You Can Buy Using Alibaba

Monday, April 01, 2013

Business Insider Is Doing Something Right

English: Arianna Huffington attending the premiere of The Union at the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The online publication Business Insider is doing something right and it reminds me of The Huffington Post. The Post did commenting really, really well, and it was and is very good at linking to others, but a paragraph of quote first. Business Insider does that too. It often links to others. But what it does really good is taking you to read other related stories. You read one, and the next thing you know you are reading five others. And it is also smart about getting page hits from pictures and infographics. It sure "gets" digital. It feels lightweight but deals with plenty of heavy topics.

Timothy Thomas: Why China Is Reading Your Email
Henry Blodget Is Quietly Planning a Stunning Return to Wall Street
Exclusive: Snapdeal raises $50 million from eBay and existing investors
YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley announces MixBit video collaboration site
E-Commerce Companies Bypass the Middlemen

NYC Subways Deploy A Touch-Screen Network, Complete With Apps
Washington Post seeks blogger for Style section
Why did Apple hire Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch?

Sunday, October 21, 2012

Mobile: Stating The Obvious

To say right now we are in the mobile era is to state the obvious. It is like in the 1980s AIDS became big news. But people are still figuring out AIDS. I have a feeling mobile is something like that. Tech giants might spend the rest of this decade trying to figure out mobile.

Mobile first companies have a leg up in that sense. But then they are going to have to figure out the web in due time.

Mobile is not the Internet as we knew it, just like the Internet was not computers as we knew them. Mobile is a new beast with its own particulars.

A child is not a small adult. Mobile is not a smaller version of the web, it is not MiniMe. Mobile is no child.

Fred Wilson, Mark Zuckerberg And Mobile
Mark Suster's Web Second Applies To Instagram
2011-2015: A Mobile Stretch
Netizen Has Arrived: A Link From AVC
Twitter, FourSquare: Mobile Web Thingies

Mobile revolution, economy trip up tech giants

consumers' waning love affair with the stalwart PC and infatuation with mobile -- the most significant tectonic shift in the industry since the advent of the Internet ...... raging mobile hardware demand .... About 800,000 shoppers made their first-ever eBay purchase through a mobile device. ..... "Mobile is not proving to be as straightforward as people thought." ...... a worsening macroeconomic environment. ..... The biggest stunner was perhaps Google, which shed more than $20 billion of market value after it reported that its core advertising business had slowed. ....... Click prices declined for the fourth consecutive quarter .... Zynga, the poster child for mobile transition woes ..... the evolution of mobile Internet, social networking is usually the first to spread around the world, followed by games and then advertising ...... Perhaps hardest-hit are Intel and others closely tied to the PC chain .. While Intel dominated that space in its prime, in smartphones its market share is less than 1 percent

Monday, July 30, 2012

adMarketplace: Beyond Google, Yahoo, Bing

adMarketplace goes where Google, Yahoo and Bing do not go.

adMarketplace On Facebook, On Twitter.

adMarketplace is a technology company with the largest search advertising network outside of Google and Yahoo. The 8th fastest-growing private company in New York, adMarketplace delivers data-driven performance to the Internet's leading marketers through the only search syndication platform that adjusts bids by both keyword and traffic source.

adMarketplace Delivers Accountability shar.es/vW9XS
— Paramendra Bhagat (@paramendra) July 30, 2012

adMarketplace Delivers Accountability Syndicated search for the world beyond Google, Yahoo and Bing

Jamie Hill, CEO of adMarketplace. .... “When you’ve maxed out your efficiencies on the search engines, we’ll give you that extra 10 to 15 percent lift through our publisher network.” ..... adMarketplace’s data-driven technology platform is used to derive ROI from a wide range of global traffic sources. ...... type-in domain (where an Internet user types search terms into the browser nav¬igation bar instead of a search engine), toolbar search, opt-in email, rollover, contextual and mobile. .... The platform itself features tools for filtering, scoring and pricing, as well as a robust analytics suite. For large marketers, adMarketplace is offered as a managed service working with the company’s staff, and it is available as a self-serve service to advertisers of all sizes. ..... adMarketplace has seen its business increase 80 percent over the last year, and its headcount nearly double to more than 100 employees. On any given day, it may be serving upwards of 10,000 clients representing a range of vertical industries such as education, pharmaceuticals, insurance, auto, finance, legal and lead generation

Adam Epstein, adMarketplace: 27 Million And Counting

AdMarketplace - Wikipedia

Search Syndication is a sizable but often overlooked segment of the Search Engine Marketing industry. ..... adMarketplace was founded by James Hill in 2000. From 2003 to 2006, it was the exclusive search result advertising platform for eBay; when that exclusivity ended, the company opened its platform to all advertisers and publishers ...... The company is exclusively focused on search syndication advertising, placing text ads on web sites outside search engine result pages. ..... adMarketplace distributes text ads via toolbar search boxes, domain portfolios, email, mobile, rollover/in-text and type-in domains and has a proprietary data-driven technology platform comprising filtering, scoring, targeting, pricing and analytics. Its campaign analytics incorporate results based on both user behavior, including impressions and click-thrus, to conversion and even post-conversion data, such as sign-ups and purchases. adMarketplace’s pricing engine and analytics allow for real-time bid adjustment by ad placements, which the company claims results in a higher ROI

The Technology