Saavn partners with Twitter - will play requests tweeted to @SaavnRadio, other social features coming: Saavn is upping its social game after it partnered with Twitter to introduce a tweet-powered radio station for its users. Saavn launched its radio mode one year ago, and now it is taking requests from users who tweet to the @SaavnRadio account. The station will also mix in tracks that Saavn users are sharing to Twitter from the service, although the company said specific requests will be prioritized over social shares. Saavn Co-Founder and CEO Rishi Malhotra told TechCrunch in an interview that the radio feature already accounts for over half of all activity on the service and, since a large number of users are already active on Twitter, the union was a no-brainer for him. “Music streaming has always been an inherently social service, we [at Saavn] already see lots of activity from users worldwide and identified a natural opportunity to create a radio station. This puts the power of programming into our users’ hands,” he said. Malhotra also hinted that Saavn is preparing more social features next year, but he said that these new releases will be within the Saavn service itself, such as collaborative playlists.
Amazon maybe on the hook for in-app purchases made by kids without parental authorization - burden of proof rests with Amazon: A federal judge won't dismiss the Federal Trade Commission's lawsuit against Amazon over the company's practice of billing parents for in-app purchases their children made without parental approval. The lawsuit alleges that Amazon failed to stop children from spending millions of dollars of their parents' money for virtual items in online games and other apps on devices such as Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet. Some of these individual purchases cost as much as $100 each. Amazon argues that it adequately warns customers when an app allows for in-app purchases. It also says that the FTC couldn't prove that the bills that the kids racked up were "unauthorized" by parents. But Judge John C. Coughenour disagreed with that reasoning Monday, saying Amazon may still have violated federal laws against unfair billing, whether the charges were authorized or not. In any event, Coughenour added, it's Amazon's responsibility to prove that the charges were authorized, and it has not done that.
SoftBank Invests $250M In GrabTaxi, Uber’s Archrival In Southeast Asia; valuation > $1B: Neither party has confirmed what the deal values GrabTaxi at, but the company’s valuation is likely to exceed the $1 billion mark. The duo did confirm that SoftBank has become GrabTaxi’s largest investor. The round is the highest raise for a startup in Southeast Asia to date — Rocket Internet companies aside — and it is GrabTaxi’s fourth funding activity this calendar year, taking it past $320 million in capital from investors. GrabTaxi’s previous $65 million round closed in October and was led by Tiger Global — which also invested in Uber rival Ola — while GGV Capital led a $15 million raise in May. Its $10 million-plus Series A was announced in April. GrabTaxi was founded in Malaysia in 2012, has over 500 staff and is live in 17 cities across six countries in Southeast Asia: Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam and Indonesia. Its core offering is a service that connects registered taxis with would-be passengers via its app — thus working with the existing industry rather than against it — but it also offers an Uber-like private car service and is trialling motorbike taxis in Vietnam.
Uber's take on hiring tech talent: tie up with a collective - then hire the team and open an engineering office around them: To spearhead its mobile growth, Uber is setting up a mobile development shop in Amsterdam, led by one of its earliest employees and staffed by a set of new hires: a team of Dutch developers who originally worked on Uber’s Spotify integration and have served as advisors to the company since 2009. Uber has effectively taken on 10 former employees from Dutch firm Moop.me, which effectively functions as a collective of engineers and designers. Uber has not acquired the whole agency, because Moop’s people have also taken on other projects that have very little synergy with what Uber is today. Those projects, and Moop, will continue.
Stripe doubled its valuation to $3.5B; payment start-up that partners with Apple Pay, Alipay, Facebook, Twitter: Stripe, an e-commerce start-up based in San Francisco, announced on Tuesday that it had raised a new $70 million round in venture capital. The round, which includes Sequoia Capital and Thrive Capital, values Stripe at $3.5 billion, twice the amount the company was valued at less than one year ago. The company, which was founded by brothers, John and Patrick Collison, in 2009, offers payment processing services for small and medium-size businesses that want to sell items online. It competes with the likes of companies like PayPal, which has long dominated the online payments industry. The company has also secured partnerships with Facebook and Twitter — which allow for users to buy things directly inside of these social platforms — and recently announced a deal with Alipay, one of the largest e-commerce platforms in China. Stripe plans to use its new capital to continue to add to its existing staff of 180 employees, and push harder into international markets. It also plans to bolster the set of tools it offers to developers who use Stripe to process payments for their businesses. More here and here.
IBM signs $1.25B cloud deal with WPP, and differentiates with hybrid focus: IBM seeks to differentiate its offering by focusing on hybrid clouds, which mix together the private, on-premise computer systems for which it has long been known with newer public-facing Internet, mobile and analytics systems, allowing clients to move existing systems to the cloud at their own pace. This hybrid approach means companies can wait for years before they consider moving their most sensitive core financial systems to the cloud computers. It also gives them the option of never having to move. Secondly, European clients demand that their data remain stored locally in European data center, a requirement IBM has met by building seven public cloud data centers across Europe in London, Amsterdam, Paris and one in Germany, with another to follow there shortly.
Tumblr adds action buttons - simpler than Twitter buy button, but no payment integration: Tumblr, which has apparently overtaken Instagram as the fastest-growing social media property — has today announced a test of a new feature that will give it more interactivity, and more of a social commerce spin. Users that post links from a selection of sites — Etsy, Artsy, Kickstarter and Do Something — will now automatically see action buttons appear in the top right corner of the posts for people to “buy”, “browse”, “pledge”, or “do something”. For now, the actions are limited to these four sites. Down the road, if Tumblr decides to integrate the buttons into links from a wider range of properties — taking in e-commerce behemoths like Amazon and eBay, for example — it could feasibly become much more of a competitor against the likes of Pinterest, Facebook and others, positioning Tumblr not just as a place to consume content but to transact, too. the buttons on Tumblr are somewhat reminiscent of the buttons that Twitter has been adding to Tweets,but Tumblr’s buttons are much more simple for anyone (not just businesses or power users) to create — they come up literally when you a copy/paste of a link. And while Twitter has integrated with payments companies to underpin its own buy button, Tumblr’s implementation is, well, a bit more rough and tumble. It’s unclear, for example, if Tumblr is getting an affiliate cut on any traffic that it sends to these sites as a result of the button. If anything, it feels more like Tumblr has added these buttons to test the waters, looking at how such a feature might potentially get monetised in the future, perhaps as an ad unit for businesses using the button. The offering is desktop only — not mobile.
Smart home-audio market continues to heat up - Sonos raises $130M: After Amazon's launch of Echo, and Apple's purchase of Beats, Sonos, in the smart home audio business since 2002, just raised $130 million, according to an SEC filing. The funding adds to Sonos’ previous $325 million, bringing it to around $455 million. That makes it a very, very well capitalized startup. It’s so big that probably no one but Google or Apple could afford to acquire it. Considering Apple’s personal audio buyout of Beats’ headphones business, and Google’s invasion of the smart home, either could be a smart alternative to an IPO for Sonos. Sonos has been steadily improving its core product — home stereo systems where each room can be separately controlled to wirelessly play music from online and local sources. It ditched its proprietary controller to let you use iOS and Android devices as remotes, and eliminated the need for its “Bridge” gadget you had to plug into your wireless router. Alongside Spotify, Pandora, iTunes, Deezer, Sirius XM, and your own music library, Sonos recently added support for SoundCloud and Google Music. What’s left is to become a household name. Sonos has already begun buying expensive commercials on primetime music TV shows like The X Factor. It’s also running huge outdoor ad campaigns on the sides of buildings in Europe
Amazon has installed 15,000 robots in 10 of its 50 US warehouses. (article here, video here): The robots are made by Kiva, acquired by Amazon in 2012 for 775M. Each robot weighs 320 lbs, and can carry 750 lbs. The robots are guided by stickers on the warehouse floors. This is fast and space-efficient: unloading a trailer now takes 30 minutes, instead of hours. Each warehouse can now hold up to 50% more inventory because racks can be placed closer together. The robots typically run for 2 hours before needing a recharge (which they do on their own). The robots can thus work 24x7 and fulfil an order every 20seconds. In some cases, the robots have allowed Amazon to get packages out the door in as little as 13 minutes from the pick stations, compared to about an hour and a half on average in older centers. The move comes at a cost. Amazon estimated in June 2013 that it would spend about $46 million to install Kiva robots at its warehouse in Ruskin, Florida, including $26.1 million for the equipment, according to company filings to local government.
For Uber, Airbnb, OpenTable, Customer Ratings also help rate the customer: Travelers are often asked to review their hotel, restaurant and car service. But increasingly, it goes both ways. Drivers for Uber and Lyft, for example, rate their passengers from one to five stars at the end of each ride. If a rider receives three stars or fewer, the driver and passenger will not be paired up again. And at OpenTable, the restaurant booking system, customers are banned if they do not show for a reservation too many times. While guest-tracking systems are generally for internal use only, guests who use the Airbnb online booking service to find lodging may find themselves publicly reviewed. This allows potential hosts to see how a guest was perceived by previous ones before agreeing to allow that person to stay in their home. The online dining reservation system OpenTable allows a restaurant to identify guests who booked through the system. Using OpenTable, each restaurant can make private notes about the guests, like indicating table location preference or if they often send their food back. Those notes are not shared with other restaurants. “Overwhelmingly restaurants use the notes feature to enhance the hospitality experience for their guests,” said a spokeswoman, Tiffany Fox. She added that it will ban a customer who fails to show up for a reservation four times in a 12-month period. These are among the ways that sophisticated rating systems can turn on the customer, identifying the best and worst among them. The rating systems are allowing businesses to formalize a longstanding practice: focusing on their best customers. The worst customers “demand too much, complain too much and cost too much,” said Christopher Muller, professor of hospitality management at Boston University. Beyond that, he said, bad clients make employees unhappy. Companies, he said, do better by spending time on their best and most profitable patrons. “It sounds draconian, but not all customers are created equal,” he said.
Uber switches fully to Paytm wallet-based pay mode, discontinues Indian card payments: Global online car hire service major Uber Technologies Inc has stopped accepting credit and debit card payments from cards issued in India, and will now only allow payments made through Paytm wallet in the country, the company announced in a blog post. Last month, Uber had partnered with Paytm, the digital goods and services marketplace owned by Noida-based One97 Communications Ltd, to integrate its payment system. With this integration, Uber can sidestep the regulations that require every transaction made with an Indian credit card to include two-factor authentication (2FA). Earlier, it had come under fire from Indian monetary authority RBI over its automated credit card based payment system.
US offline retailers ran TV, radio ads targeting Alibaba: Several of the largest U.S. retailers warned that Alibaba Group Holding Inc may "decimate" local companies unless Congress closes tax loopholes for online retailers, singling out the Chinese company before it has even established a major American consumer presence. In TV and radio ads over the weekend, the Alliance for Main Street Fairness, which includes Best Buy, Target, JC Penney and other major chains, called on Congress to end special tax treatment for Alibaba and other online giants. "Main Street will never look the same," it said. The ad marks one of the biggest public marketing campaigns against a Chinese company that handles more e-commerce than Amazon and eBay combined, even though Alibaba only surfaced in the American consciousness after it went public in the world's largest-ever IPO in September. U.S. retailers and industry analysts expect Alibaba to soon launch a service targeted at American consumers, armed with its IPO war chest.
Thanksgiving sales shocker: fewer shoppers, lower spend-per-shopper send Thanksgiving weekend sales (online + offline) down 11% Y/Y to $50.9 billion, from $57.4 billion last year, according to preliminary survey results released Sunday by the National Retail Federation. Sales fell despite many stores’ opening earlier than ever on Thanksgiving Day. And though many retailers offered the same aggressive discounts online as they did in their stores, the web failed to attract more shoppers or spending over the four-day holiday weekend than it did last year, the group said. The average person who shopped over the weekend spent $159.55 at online retailers, down 10.2 percent from last year. Over all, 133.7 million people shopped or planned to shop at stores or online over the four-day weekend, 5.2 percent fewer than last year, the federation said. And shoppers spent an average of $380.95 over the four days, 6.4 percent less than the $407.02 they spent last year. Executives at the retail federation, which had predicted strong growth in sales this holiday season, appeared at a loss to fully explain the drop-off. Black Friday itself may be waning in importance, as retailers increasingly offer deep discounts days, and even weeks, before the traditional year-end sales period. That means many people may have simply done their shopping earlier and stayed home during the Thanksgiving weekend. But even there, the picture was not clear: Mr. Shay said that people also might be holding out for even better deals as the season progressed. He said that the continuous sales had conditioned consumers to expect better deals the longer they waited. “Holiday sales are now a marathon, not a sprint.”
Amazon's play in after-sale services - among the highest profit margin revenue streams for retailers: Amazon publicly introduced an early release of Selling Services, which we had previously mentioned the company was working on a few months ago. Amazon is developing a marketplace that offers after-sale services such as car alarm installation, iPhone repair, and computer hardware setup to consumers buying relevant products. Today, the marketplace is available in 15 early rollout cities, including New York City and Lexington, Kentucky. For each product, Amazon will list the available services next to the listing, guaranteeing visibility and even potentially increasing sales among customers who are unsure if they can install or use a product. Geek Squad, which was founded by Robert Stephens in 1994 and sold to Best Buy in 2002, is perhaps the most prominent example of a success in this domain. As the Minneapolis Star Tribune wrote last year about the hometown retailer, “Over the past decade, Geek Squad has been a cash cow for Best Buy. […A]nalysts estimate Geek Squad generates a gross profit margin of 40 to 50 percent based on a minimum annual revenue of $2 billion, or about 4 percent of Best Buy’s total revenue of $50 billion.” Amazon will share with Geek Squad has one critical advantage that many other startups in the domain lack: point-of-sale access.
How Facebook plans to become one of the most powerful tools in politics: The end goal for the company seems clear: Replace, as much as possible, expensive, blanketed television advertising with much more immediate, much more specific ads appearing in users' feeds -- and then cash a whole lot of checks. Assuming you have a Facebook account, which you do, Facebook knows your email address. It probably knows your name, your birthday, where you work, where you worked, and who you're friends with. It knows far more than that, of course, both directly and indirectly. Facebook's partner in the effort Acxiom, also provides a wide swath of other data to Facebook, beyond what you've entered on the site or "liked." This allows campaigns (as it does other advertisers) to target very, very specific groups of people linked tightly to the campaign's voter file. One of the best practices for campaign communication is to sandwich messages, layering a communication (like a piece of mail or a TV spot) with some other spur (like an email or a Facebook ad) both before and after.
Lazada raises $250M Led By Temasek; valuation at $1.25B; H1 2014 GMV $91M (+202% Y/Y): The round is lead by Singapore’s Temasek Holdings, which manages a $100-billion-plus portfolio and this year invested in another Amazon rival: Snapdeal in India. Lazada operates in six countries in Southeast Asia — Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam — largely in tandem with Zalora, another well-backed e-commerce service started by Rocket Internet. This new funding round takes Lazada to more than $700 million in money from investors. Its most recent round was also $250 million back in December 2013, which included an interesting strategic investment from UK retail giant Tesco. Together, Zalora and Lazada have probably raised around $1 billion in funding, although the value of some rounds were left undisclosed. Raw figures about its business did reach the public domain this summer, however, as part of Rocket Internet’s IPO in Germany. According to a filing reported by Tech In Asia, Lazada brought in $91.4 million in the first six months of 2014, generating 1.8 million orders from 1.4 million active users. Those modest returns perhaps explain why it has been placing more emphasis on its marketplace. Lazada says its marketplace now accounts for 70 percent of its revenue.
An interesting linguistic analysis of online reviews: In general, the length of a review corresponded with an item’s price. The most frequent interjections were “wow,” “yeah,” “yuck,” “yikes,” “sheesh,” “yum” and “yippee.” Slang terms that showed up most often were “meh,” “whatever” and “the bomb.” And adjectives were not always what they seemed. Wherever it appeared, the word “delicious” was always unambiguously positive, but not so with “good.” On all five sites, “good” often appeared very close to the words “but” and “not,” indicating ambivalence. Reviewers often wrote statements like “It’s good, but I’m not in love with it,” or “It’s good but not fall on the floor dance a jig good.” Among the most frequent three-word phrases, or three-grams, were “in the room” and “the front desk.” From these patterns, she surmised that consumers who stayed in hotels were about equally focused on the room’s quality as they were on customer service. Frequent four-grams included “in the middle of,” “the rest of the” and “at the end of.” That fits with Dr. Vásquez’s observation that when people write about hotels, recipes or diaper bags, they like to tell stories. Narratives, she found, are more likely to appear in negative reviews than in positive ones.
Using mobile apps to interact with merchandise: Using the Quikkly iOS or Android app, you scan what the company is calling an Action Tag — its own proprietary barcode-esque tech — and this immediately invokes an online action, such as listening to a track on Spotify, adding a contact to your address book, following someone on Twitter, or even connecting to a public WiFi spot. “When you see interesting stuff online and there’s a button to interact with it, you can click on it and something happens immediately. ‘Like’ on Facebook, ‘Follow’ on Twitter, add to Basket, listen to the song. In the physical world, it’s considerably more difficult,” says Quikkly CEO Fergal Walker. “If you’re interested, you would have to manually search for the item, hope you find the right one, and hope it works on your mobile. Quikkly removes the hassle and makes it as simple as it is online.” Quikkly also makes it pretty easy for anyone to create their own Action Tags, to be included on, for example, a business card, flyer or poster. This can be done via the website or mobile app. In fact, Quikkly is talking up its mobile-first play. To create an Action Tag, you simply select from a grid of pre-defined actions and fill in the needed details, such as URL and custom message.
Using mobile apps to interact with toys: “We want to draw kids out of a two-dimensional screen, to blend a hands-on physical experience with an app, and make something new come to life,” said Vikas Gupta, a co-founder and the chief executive of Wonder Workshop, a start-up that makes Dash and Dot, two programmable toy robots that will begin shipping to early backers this holiday season. Dash and Dot are controlled by a mobile app, but they can also be taught to understand and react to events that happen in the real world — to play a real tune on a xylophone, say, or to bark in response to a child’s clap. Wonder Workshop is on the vanguard of a trend that threatens to overrun much of the traditional, mass-manufactured toy business.
Twitter Experiments With Engagement Stats Directly In Tweets: Want to know just how many people actually care about what you’re tweeting? A new Twitter experiment spotted by ex-Twitter platform head Ryan Sarver will show many you how users are clicking on the links in the updates you post, with a handy link directly in the expanded Tweet view in the iOS application. As usual with Twitter’s features, this is limited to a small sample pool of users at first, but could roll out more widely if deemed successful. At the bottom of the tweet view, for those with this feature enabled, you’ll see a “View Analytics Details” link, which takes you directly to a synopsis of the overall interaction with said tweet, including overall impressions, and “engagements,” which includes how many people actually clicked on a link you shared, how many expanded the tweet and more.
Uber is causing the price of taxi licenses to crash; separately, a legal setback causes Uber to suspend operations in Nevada; ~1000 jobs might be at risk: The average price of an individual New York City taxi medallion fell to $872,000 in October, down 17 percent from a peak reached in the spring of 2013, according to an analysis of sales data. In other big cities, medallion prices are also falling, often in conjunction with a sharp decline in sales volume. In Chicago, prices are down 17 percent. In Boston, they’re down at least 20 percent, though it’s hard to establish an exact market price because there have been only five trades since July. In Philadelphia, the taxi authority recently scrapped a planned medallion auction. Most major American cities have long used a system to limit the number of operating taxicabs, typically a medallion system: Drivers must own or rent a medallion to operate a taxi, and the city issues a fixed number of them. In New York, which established its medallion system in 1937, that number is 13,437. The number has risen only gradually since the late 1990s, even as the city’s economy has boomed.
Jack Ma was in India; reportedly met Snapdeal co-founder Kunal Bahl: Ma is in India as part of a 99-member business delegation from his home town of Zejiang. He arrived in India last night and is reportedly scheduled to meet home grown e-commerce firm Snapdeal’s co-founder Kunal Bahl. There have been reports of Alibaba considering an investment in Snapdeal. Indeed the two firms already counts Japan’s SoftBank as a common and single largest investor.Jack Ma who was in a short India visit as part of a Chinese business delegation, said on Wednesday that Alibaba plans to invest more in the Indian e-commerce ecosystem and work with Indian entrepreneurs. India is one of the nine countries where Alibaba’s B2B marketplace is present. Besides China and India is it also present in the US, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, South Korea, Turkey, Taiwan and Vietnam. Its B2C ventures Taobao among others are presently only in home country China.
Amazon UI too cluttered for you? Canopy has a Pinterest like skin on Amazon for curated community-driven shopping, recommendations : Canopy offers a cleaner, uncluttered interface for its shopping service – a big difference from Amazon.com itself. In its community, you can browse through products recommended by other users, see what’s trending, shop by category or brand, or even shop by personality type – the latter something that may come in handy as you struggle with your holiday shopping needs. Meanwhile, as you find products you like you can add these to collections within the app, which can later be accessed under your Profile section. Essentially, the service is like having a layer of curation overtop the massive Amazon.com catalog, presented in a more modern, almost Pinterest-like format.Canopy has seen around 22% average weekly growth in traffic over the past six months, says co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong, and 35% weekly growth in gross revenue. (The company declined to go into detail on customer numbers or revenue figures, however.) Currently, Canopy makes money via affiliate fees, not product placements or ads, which has allowed the company to bootstrap its service to where it is today.
Zomato is monetizing traffic using geo-targeted ads on its apps: Restaurant and event-listing site Zomato.com, run by Gurgaon-based Zomato Media Pvt Ltd, has added a new revenue stream by introducing advertisements on its mobile app. The revenue model is based on hyper-local advertising related to the user search criteria. What this basically means is that users searching for restaurants in a particular area will see ads for other relevant dining establishments in and around that location. According to the company, this allows restaurants to target customers already searching for dining options in their area. The new service is available across Zomato apps on the Android, iOS and Windows platforms.
Samsung announces $2B buyback; some businesses to be exited; generational shift underway - shares surge: Shares of South Korean tech giant Samsung Electronics Co Ltd opened sharply higher on Thursday on the news that it will buy back $2 billion of its own stock. Samsung shares were up 5.8 percent as of (7.02 a.m. EST) after opening 6 percent higher. Samsung announced the buyback plan, its first since 2007, after market close on Wednesday.
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.
