Wednesday, November 26, 2014

• Amazon is circling Jabong; potential deal size ~$1-1.2B, two sources privy to the development told Techcircle.in. According to a source, the meeting took place very recently and it has not even been a week. Restructuring would be complicated: Jabong is an inventory-based e-tailer, where foreign investment is not allowed at present. Another source cited above said that Amazon would keep Jabong as a separate property post the acquisition. “It (deal) would be very much on the lines of Amazon’s acquisition of Zappos in the US,” he said. Jabong, which is one of the two top lifestyle e-tailers in the country along with Flipkart owned Myntra, reported gross merchandise value (GMV) of Rs 509.5 crore from 3.197 million orders in the January-June 2014 period. This marked a three-fold rise over the previous year. If it maintains the same growth through the rest of the year it may end with GMV of around Rs 1,300-1,500 crore for the year ending March 31, 2015. Accepted fair valuation in e-com space internationally is pegged at 3.5x sales which would value Jabong at around Rs 5,000 crore. Jabong could be looking to drive a hard bargain given the strategic play of Amazon in India and significance of the deal to win in the high stakes game in the country.

• Twitter launches Twitter Offers, Which Link To Your Credit Or Debit Card; Separately Twitter's CFO commits a DM Fail: Companies will be able to offer cashback rewards in their tweets, and those rewards will tie directly into consumers’ credit and debit cards. The card-based approach should offer some significant advantages. If you see an offer in your timeline (to use the example in the screenshot above, it might be $2 back on a $5 purchase at a coffee shop), you should be able to add it to your card without leaving Twitter. Then when you go into the store, you don’t need to change your behavior — instead of bringing a coupon, you just pay with that card and the cashback payment should show up on your statement shortly after. A Twitter spokesperson said the card integration was already built by CardSpring, which Twitter acquired in July.Meanwhile, this gives businesses a way to track when their Twitter ads are actually driving consumers to make purchases in the store. From a security standpoint, Twitter says your card information will be encrypted and can be removed from your account at any time. Twitter Offers are being tested initially on desktop and mobile in the United States. The post says Twitter will be working with “a handful of brands” to test these offers in holiday-related promotions, and it will announce those brands “in the near future.”

• Uber is close to a round of financing at $35-$40B valuation: T. Rowe Price Group Inc. is in discussions to be a new investor, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the details are private. Existing investor Fidelity Investments is also set to participate in the funding, they said. Uber is raising at least $1 billion, the people said. The financing hasn’t closed and the terms and investor group may still change, one of the people said. T. Rowe previously considered investing in Uber and may still end up passing this time, two of the people said. If Uber completes the funding, a valuation of $35 billion to $40 billion would more than double its $17 billion value from a June financing. At the time, the valuation was a record for a U.S. technology startup in a direct investment round. That put Uber at the front of a pack of elite U.S. technology startups that are valued in the eleven-digit range, including Airbnb Inc. and Dropbox Inc. Such valuations are spreading internationally. In China, smartphone maker Xiaomi Corp. is in talks for a funding round that would value it at $40 billion to $50 billion, people familiar with the matter have said.
• Tumblr Overtakes Instagram As Fastest-Growing Social Platform, Snapchat Is The Fastest-Growing App; Facebook saturated: While Tumblr and Pinterest appear to have seen the most growth, they are not seeing as much use when it comes to frequency, where the numbers almost appear to invert. With 1.35 billion active monthly users, Facebook continues to be the world’s largest social network by some margin, but  when it comes to picking up new users, it appears to have reached a saturation point. Research out today from the Global Web Index notes that Tumblr’s active user base in the last six months grew by 120%, while Facebook’s grew by only 2%.  And in overall member growth, Pinterest took the lead with 57% growth while Facebook’s member base grew by 6%. In mobile apps specifically, while Facebook is the largest app today, Snapchat — with an emphasis on teen and 20-something users — is the fastest growing of them all, up 56% this year. It is however followed closely by Facebook Messenger and Instagram — a sign of not just how Facebook’s mobile apps continue to represent the company’s growth drivers, but also how its push to drive more users to the standalone app by cutting out Messaging from the main app has helped it grow. China continues to be dominated by home-grown social networks. Sina Weibo, Qzone and Tencent Weibo lead, while Youku and Tudou round out the top 5.