THE BUSINESS OF TECHNOLOGY
KakaoTalk, a 3-year-and-change-old Korean messaging app, has eclipsed Facebook’s popularity in South Korea and Japan. The company leverages its simple, all-under-one-roof social media infrastructure and immersive, visual communication strategy––enhanced by digital content like custom themes and emoticons––to hook users. KakaoTalk has made great … [Read more...]
By Matt Gallagher, Red Herring Though many in the online food delivery space find themselves stuck in the rush hour of tech, Delivery Hero landed a decent funding round recently from the investor of an online food ordering rival. The $30 million Series D was led by Phenomen Ventures, a new Russian VC firm that also invested in Delivery Hero’s … [Read more...]
India has surpassed Japan in the smartphone market, becoming for the first time the third largest in the world behind the US and China, a new report from Strategy Analytics points out. The first quarter of 2013 alone saw India’s smartphone adoption grow an impressive 163 percent, four times faster than the global average of 39 percent. India also … [Read more...]
Google keeps pretty mum on the subject of YouTube revenue, leaving it to analysts to guess what kind of take the service racks in. Analysts from Morgan Stanley recently took a crack at it. They predict the company will reach $20 billion in gross revenue by 2020 to generate $5 billion in operating income, CNBC reported. The research analysts based … [Read more...]
Intel Corp. has made an offer to acquire Stonesoft, a public Finnish firewall security company, for $389 million in cash to bolster the offerings of its McAfee security software package. Public stock of the security company soared following the announcement. Stonesoft investors are poised to faire nicely at 4.50 euros ($5.90) a share, more than … [Read more...]
In a sign that social and ecommerce are becoming peas in the same pod, Alibaba, the Chinese Amazon giant, has purchased Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, for $586 million. The deal values Weibo at over $3 billion, according to Reuters. A number of analysts, who peg Weibo’s value at between $600 million and $2.5 billion, have described the … [Read more...]
Baidu, the largest search engine in China, has acquired PPStream, the Shanghai-based online video platform, for $370 million, the company confirmed this week following weeks of rumors on the deal. PPS will be merged into iQiyi, Baidu’s video platform, to become China’s largest video platform according to viewing time and number of mobile users. … [Read more...]
2013 Top 100 Europe from Red Herring on Vimeo. … [Read more...]
The Pentagon directly accused China of hacking US computer systems to gain access to its military technology. The accusations were part of an 83 page report to Congress on China’s military activity. It is the first time the US military has directly accused the Chinese government of cyber espionage activities into its computer systems. It is the … [Read more...]
by MATT GALLAGHER, Red Herring journalist A US military contractor, whose UK parent is a spinoff of the actual government lab that inspired Q in James Bond thrillers, has been the source of a massive Chinese hack, Bloomberg reported. Bloomberg reports that QinetiQ’s North American division’s systems have been hacked by Comment Crew, a team of … [Read more...]