The company managed to increase online marketing revenue by 40 percent to 40 percent to $958.5 million (5.95 billion RMB), and increased active online customers by 28 percent to 410,000 compared to the previous year. Revenue per online customer, however, slipped 6.5 percent from the previous quarter.

Meanwhile, the company’s selling, administrative and general costs rose 77 percent, while R&D jumped 83 percent, stymieing its profit despite the recent growth.

The company’s efforts to buy a stake in online video site iQiyi last November also cut into its profit rate.

“For the quarter, we also recognized a whole quarter consolidation of iQiyi,” said Baidu CFO Jennifer Li.

The company predicted second quarter revenue to be between $1.19 billion and $1.22 billion, which analysts are also expecting.

Though Baidu’s CEO Robin Li admitted the company was rapidly “burning through cash,” he described the overall results for the quarter as “healthy” during an earnings call.

“Continually developing the most advanced search technology remains central to Baidu’s overall strategy, and we’re very excited by the possibilities opened up by innovation in image and voice recognition,” Li said. “Our focus will remain on tightly integrating our leading search core with valuable vertical products in areas such as travel, e-commerce and location-based service to bring users the information they want as quickly as possible on both desktop and mobile devices.”

 IVP and Index Ventures co-led the round with equal investments and were joined by Atomico.

Perhaps even more impressive than the valuation and the size of the check is the company’s accelerating revenues. Supercell earned $179 million last quarter, including $104 million in pure profit. It earned $100 million last year, and is on track to earn at least $800 million this year, and perhaps even a billion dollars. The company earns $2.4 million per day.

It’s a far cry from Zynga, a once golden jewel of the gaming industry that currently trades for a third of its opening day IPO price due to declining revenues. The company had approached a billion dollars in revenue four years after its 2007 founding, but saw earnings continually plummet since mid-2012 as public interest in its games wanes.

As Supercell’s CEO Ilkka Paananen explains to Forbes, Supercell focuses more on the fun of the game than the revenue it will earn. “It really is that simple–just design something great, something that users love,” Paananen told the publication. It is known for celebrating failure, or more exactly, “the learning that comes from failure,” Paananen told Forbes. Whenever a game fails to make it to market, the entire company celebrates with a champagne toast, discusses what went wrong and what they can do better.

Another unique approach the company takes is the cellular game design model. Each game is built by a cellular team that reportedly has no autocratic leader by design.

Though the Finnish company currently has only two titles, Clash of Clans and Hay Day, they’re immensely popular at 8.5 million daily players who each play an average of 10 minutes every day. Supercell’s usage numbers are actually lower than Zynga’s, proving the company has more effective monetization of its base.

With the kind of profitable revenue Supercell has been raking in, it doesn’t really need the cash. It took the money and ran in order to pay off early investors, reward its employees, and avoid going public, at least for a while.

All shareholders, including Accel Partners who invested $12 million at a $52.3 million valuation, as well as employees sold 16.7 percent of their holdings to the new investors. Everyone walked away with some cash in their pockets, not just the executives and early investors.

Supercell plans to live up to its $770 million valuation. It strives to become the Pixar of mobile games, and plans to expand into Asia in the next three years to give billion-dollar Japanese companies GREE and DeNA a run for their money.

Supercell’s investors are certainly confident they can do it.

“…Staggering customer traction, revenue growth and profitability were not the main reasons we invested in Supercell,” explained Index Ventures Neil Rimer on his blog. “We have seen impressive numbers before– granted none quite as impressive as these — but what we found uniquely compelling was the way in which Ilkka Paananen and his team had managed to deliver two incredibly popular games which were showing no telltale signs of declining engagement, with such limited resources. … From our point of view, the Supercell rocket still has a long way to go. We believe it will be one of the companies that will leave a lasting mark on its industry….”

Supercell is proving that the Finnish market still has some impressive startups to deliver, despite the tumble of Nokia that has created a vacuum in the region. Rovio, another Finnish company, was a popular gaming entity with its popular title Angry Birds, and continues to offer a great degree of relevance in the market. Supercell is just another example of the region’s vitality. VCs are betting that its fast growth trajectory is only the beginning of a long journey to come.

The company will expand into eight new countries, bringing its total markets to 28. The new locations include Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Mexico, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Iceland.

“Today we’re thrilled to announce that we’re bringing a new world of music to eight new markets

across the globe,” Spotify announced on its blog. “We’re taking our first steps in Latin America with Mexico, and Asia with Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore. Plus we’re thrilled to make new friends in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Iceland. This fantastic step now brings us to 28 markets and closer to our dream of making all the world’s music available instantly to everyone, wherever and whenever they want it.”

Based in Stockholm, the company already serves users in the US, most of Europe, Australia and New Zealand.

Founded in 2008, Spotify offers on-demand music content. The company offers a free service that enables users to listen to an unlimited amount of music on desktops for free with advertising sponsorship. That aspect of the service currently has over 24 million active users, which are defined by anyone who has used it in the last 30 days. Spotify Unlimited lets users listen to advertising free music on desktops for $5 per month. The company also offers a premium edition that is advertising free, enables users to download an unlimited amount of music, and listen to the service on any device, including mobile. The paid service downloads can also be listened to without an Internet connection. It has six million paid subscribers.

The company pays about 70 percent of its revenue back to copyright owners, sharing royalty revenue with record labels and artists. It claims to be the solution to Internet piracy by offering users cheap access to music that circumvents the need for illegal downloads and file sharing.

Spotify is rivaled by Pandora, another streaming service that acts as a curated Internet radio based on the tastes of the user. Pandora vastly outsizes Spotify in its free service with 69 million users, but has struggled to earn a profit due to the hefty fees it pays in royalties.

The Spotify Unlimited Service will not be offered in Asia, the Next Web pointed out, as that service requires a desktop and the vast number of Asians using the service will likely do so through mobile. Users can choose a free option, which acts as a curated radio station similar to Pandora, or choose a Premium service for SG$9.90/HK$48.00/MYR 14.90 per month.

The expansion is certainly significant, especially considering the size of the Asian market. Facebook’s biggest market is Asia with more than 250 million registered users, so the region offers plenty of room for growth as the company strives to increase its paid user base.

And with 242 million Chinese Internet users purchasing goods last year in a country of more than 1.3 billion people, there is still plenty of room to grow. Despite the high numbers, ecommerce purchases still made up only 6.1 percent of the total retail sales for all consumer goods in China.

The growth was the result of widespread adoption of mobile, which has introduced the Internet to a growing segment of the Chinese population. In the last half of 2012, 40.7 percent of online shoppers used a mobile device to browse ecommerce sites, with 53.6 accessing ecommerce channels via mobile instead of a traditional desktop.

The most common purchases were clothing, at 81.8 percent, daily necessities, at 31.6 percent, and computers and digital electronics, at 29.6 percent.

About 53.3 percent of respondents used their mobile devices to shop while still at home, as many are turning to mobile instead of desktops to research ecommerce options. About 26.2 percent reported browsing on smartphones at work or school, while 10.6 percent research ecommerce options while in commute or using public transport.

Those are some serious numbers, but it’s only the beginning. China’s ecommerce market is set to soon overtake the US. Last November, China’s “Double Eleven,” a Chinese holiday for singles on November 11 similar to Valentine’s Day, helped Chinese ecommerce site Taobao to earn $3 billion in a single day, more than twice the $1.25 billion Cyber Monday earned in the US just before. Continue to expect startling growth rates from China as its sizable population enters the middle class and can afford next generation technologies.

Global Founders Capital will include three partners, including Siegel, Oliver and Marc Samwer, with a €150 million ($194 million) fund provided by unnamed tech entrepreneurs. It will operate separate from Rocket Internet, and will be location agnostic, but given the Samwer brothers name and its European base, it can be assumed that some regions will be given more focus, especially those where funding is scarce. With deals at €100,000 to €10 million, the new fund will focus on anything from seed to late stage that has the potential to lead one or several markets. It is said the fund will be similar to the European Founders Fund, previously launched by the Samwer brothers.

“I was fortunate throughout the last 15 years building Internet businesses. I believe the Internet is providing a once in a lifetime opportunity to entrepreneurs around the world,” Oliver Samwer said in a statement. “With Global Founders Capital we want to support these entrepreneurs with operational know-how, our network and the required funding to scale their businesses.”

Rather than providing follow-up funding or growth capital for Rocket Internet startups, this fund will focus on projects Rocket can’t do.

Though the fund has yet to announce any investments, the partners have already whittled down 800 leads to 130, with the expectation to do about 30 deals, the Wall St. Journal reported. The first investments will be announced later this year.

Much of the selection will have a data focus.

“A lot of VCs don’t appear to have a system. I am going to do 30 deals, but what happens to the 770 deals I am not doing? I want to track them, I want to look at the data. What can we learn from that?” Siegel told the Wall St. Journal. “Maybe we can build something that is more like a machine, that we can understand what works and what doesn’t. Or maybe we will find that it is all gut feeling after all.”

The center examined 1,400 apps downloaded from a variety of app markets, and found that 66.9 percent tracked users’ data, while 34.5 percent tracked data that was completely unrelated to the task of the app.

The apps were found to download text message history, address books, call records, and location data. More than half of the apps tracked user’s location, and 13.2 percent tracked location even though location had nothing to do with the functionality of the app. In fact, study and beauty apps tended to track location the most.  About 21 percent checked user’s address books, 18 percent tracked call records, and 12 percent read text history. About 15 percent of the apps also made calls or sent texts without the user’s consent, leaving some users to pay for the unexpected cost.

Users received no notification that such data would be accessed.

Most of the apps have nothing to do with Google. Google Play does not support paid apps in China, in part because of Google’s strained relationship with the Chinese government over censorship, but also out of the concern that Android’s openness would be easy for spammers and cyber criminals to abuse. Most Chinese users turn to unofficial websites for Android apps.

Google’s hands off approach has created a fragmented climate in the Chinese market that has led to a sort of app anarchy .  Non-official Android apps have been dubbed ChinaDroids, or generic apps equipped with modified versions of Android.

Though Google has little control over the Android app market in China, the Chinese government has expressed concerns over Android’s dominance of the app market. China’s Ministry of Information Technology recently accused Google in a white paper that said the Android market gave Google too much control over China’s smartphone industry and discriminated against Chinese companies by making it difficult for Chinese companies to develop their own systems.

Clearly, Google has little control over an app market that doesn’t even take place under its own watch.

“This deal represents the international recognition of a highly successful local business,” stated Samih Toukan, Chairman of Jabbar Internet Group. “With Paul Kenny, we created a company that led the way in regional group buying, and took on global players on our own turf. While this deal represents a successful exit for the Jabbar Group, we have little doubt in Cobone’s commitment to the region and in Paul’s determination to continue excelling and leading his brainchild to new successes.”

Though the price of the deal was undisclosed, Zawya pegged the price between $20 million to $40 million, citing sources close to the deal. The deal was a mix of cash and equity stakes for the management, and retains founder of CEO Paul Kenny, head of strategy and sales Pieter Sleeboom, and marketing head Warwick Godfrey.

“This deal represents a very exciting future for Cobone as it reaffirms its commitment to the Middle Eastern market and e-commerce industry,” Kenny said. “Tiger Global gives us the international clout and the financial resources to expand regionally and surpass already high customer expectations.”

Like other daily deals sites like Groupon and LivingSocial, the company’s revenue is overshadowed by its expenses. The company posted an overall loss despite earning $32 million. It plans to restructure its operations to hopefully profit this year. Founded in 2010, the company has grown to become the largest daily deals site in the Middle East with operations in operations in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

It has maintained its position from LivingSocial, which forayed into the Middle East through its purchase of GoNabit in June of 2011, and then shut down operations in the region a year later.
Ecommerce has been slow to catch on in the Middle East. When Cobone first launched in 2010, the majority of its shoppers simply ordered on the site and paid cash on delivery due to the lack of a cohesive payments option in the region.

The requests for private user information come in the form of National Security Letters, which allow the government to get detailed data on the finances and communications of American citizens without the approval of a judge. NSL’s were expanded to include Internet activity following 9-11, and the FBI regularly uses them to solicit information from credit companies, financial institutions, and web entities like Google. Typically, receivers of NSL’s are prohibited from discussing them outside of legal counsel. Google struck a deal with the Obama administration to disclose some details of the requests, but could only use ranges of figures rather than specifics. The Transparency Report list ballpark figures for requests Google has received since 2009.

Google was ordered to provide the government data in 1,000 to 1,999 user accounts in 2009, 2011 and 2012. The number reached 2,000 to 2,999 users in 2010.

The requested information could include the name, address, and billing records of a subscriber, but not Gmail content or IP addresses.

NSL’s have raised the concerns of civil rights proponents, including the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. According to Wired, a justice department inspector in 2007 found misuse of NSLs by the government in numerous instances, including the stationing of FBI agents as employees of Verizon and AT&T who illegally examined customer’s records without the proper paperwork.

PayPal already has an established presence in the UK, so it already has brand recognition. The company launched PayPal Here in the US and several countries last year to give Square a run for its money. Square launched in 2009 with a small device that could plug into smartphones and tablets to allow merchants to take mobile payments, a handy convenience for trade shows, flea markets, and anybody selling merchandise on the go. Square has yet to launch in the UK.

PayPal had yet to launch in the UK, mostly because the country uses the “Chip and Pin” payment system, in which readers read a microchip embedded in financial cards that are protected by a PIN identification provided by the user. For its foray into Europe, the company launched PayPal Here with a separate device it designed from scratch to handle Europe’s system of payments. The device is about the size of a smartphone, and connects via Bluetooth to a smartphone app.

“It’s a great example of our renewed focus on creating beautiful and easy-to-use products that are tailored to address our customers’ specific need,” Hill Ferguson, VP of Global Product, wrote on PayPal’s blog announcing the service’s launch in the UK. “In this case, for small businesses to finally offer their customers an easy to use alternative to cash.”

PayPal has yet to set a price or a launch date for the device, though other competitors on the continent have charged 2.75 percent per transaction with readers priced around €49 ($65). PayPal has indicated it will strive to be competitive.

The UK is definitely offers promise. At 61 percent penetration, the UK currently has one of the highest smartphone penetrations in Europe, according to Kantar Worldpanel Comtech. However, it is also a crowded space, with other competitors that include Payleven, iZettle, mPowa, and SumUp with an already established presence.

PayPal, however, has size and brand recognition on its side. The company provides small business owners with a recognized way to take payments, meaning more Europeans can rely on their cards instead of cash or check and step into the 21st century.

When Amazon goes down, so does everyone else. Outages last October and June caused the disruption of Flipboard, Foursquare, Netflix, Pinterest, Instagram and others.

So why put all your cloud data in one basket?

With the release of version 3.0 of the TransLattice Elastic Database (TED), you no longer have to. TransLattice now provides the world’s first geographically distributed Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) to deploy on multiple public cloud provider networks at the same time, as well as on virtual machines (VMs), physical hardware or any combination thereof. No longer do you have to trust your database to a single cloud, but can instead have it span several clouds, distributed around the world, which makes surviving the next mega hurricane practically a breeze.

“TransLattice provides the world’s first and only cross-cloud database, and we control the data within all availability zones in those clouds,” TransLattice’s CEO Frank Huerta told Red Herring. “We can be in Amazon East, but not West, or not in Amazon Europe, or only in Amazon Europe. What’s unique about what we do now is we can tie multiple clouds together for redundancy, to avoid vendor lock in.”

The company’s latest version of TED also features upgraded monitoring capabilities to become a stronger, more robust product, Huerta said. Along with the release of the new version of TED, the company also announced a new partnership with Amazon to use its infrastructure.

TransLattice effectively geographically distributes the data through multiple clouds, but keeps it all under one unique database. Companies no longer need to federate systems or run isolated databases, which can be very costly and cumbersome.

“We can handle transactions from all over the globe, in and out of cloud, and globally resolve those, all in the right order, through one unique data base,” Huerta explained.

Most centralized databases in a geographically distributed world rely on a single backup source, which can be difficult to scale geographically and compliance is often an issue, as certain data can’t be sent to China, while data in German data centers can’t leave the country, for example. And the backup is often not reliable due to increasing complexity. TransLattice can provide multiple backup from multiple locations and can control the data, so that German data remains in Germany or guarantying sensitive data is never stored in China. “Nobody else can do that,” Huerta said.

Plus, TransLattice can distribute data locally so “the speed of light works in your favor,” Huerta said. The company can instantly move data closer to where it is being requested. If a travelling Palo Alto executive requests data in New York or Europe, for example, that data will be instantly transferred to data centers local to her location to ensure the greatest speed.

“We provide redundancy, but through one global database, not isolated databases as the industry operates today,” Huerta said.

TransLattice provides such elastic infrastructure at a fraction of the industry standard. Based on the company’s own internal estimates, it can save customers 50 to 70 percent of the cost of deploying a database. “We price by the node, not users, and our system is very easy to scale,” Huerta said.

“When you need more memory or storage, you can just add nodes as you need like Lego bricks.”
Further savings come from a simpler approach.

“We really started from scratch with the architecture, so it’s much simpler, more elegant and fundamentally much better,” said Louise Funke, VP of Marketing for TransLattice. “There are no expensive SANs to replicate data or synchronize data. Customers can combine it with existing infrastructure or existing clouds in other regions. It makes it very easy for enterprises to dip their toe in the water. We help accelerate moving to the cloud.”

TransLattice’s technology provides the financial services industry multi-site redundancy delivered with 24×7 availability with no single point of failure, as well as global visibility of data. Content development and mobile infrastructure entities can distribute data at the point closest to users to minimize latency. Military intelligence agencies can distribute computing infrastructure closer to the front, without individual node failure affecting availability. Cloud providers are guaranteed their cloud database will keep running even if major infrastructure goes down.

Naturally, there will be competition, and Huerta admits that he maintains a healthy sense of paranoia. Nevertheless, most competing vendors are deeply wedded to older models, which will make the transition difficult, according to Huerta. “We have important IP that won’t be easy to replicate,” Huerta said.

This technology is the future, one in which TransLattice hopes to lead, Huerta maintained.
“In the next three to five years, 30 to 40 percent of networks will run this way with distributed architecture,” Huerta predicted. “It’s an emerging trend that will keep growing. We’re not going to unseat every database today, but this type of technology is going to have a big seat at the table, and hopefully TransLattice will be at the forefront.”