THE BUSINESS OF TECHNOLOGY
Pinterest has raised a $200 million round that values the company at $2.5 billion. The cash essentially buys the social sharing site more time to figure out how to actually make money to justify that valuation. The round included participation from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners and FirstMark Capital, along … [Read more...]
Step aside USA. China has become the world’s largest smartphone market, surpassing the US for the first time for actively used smartphones and tablets, according to recent data released by Flurry, the mobile analytics firm. Flurry tracked more than 2.4 billion application sessions across more than 275,000 applications around the world. The firm … [Read more...]
ComScore released its Digital Future in Focus report for 2013, revealing that nearly 6 trillion ad impressions were served up the US. What’s more, social media is steadily taking the lead, accounting for 16.6 and will soon surpass portals as the most engaging online activity. Facebook naturally leads this surge, contributing to the largest share of … [Read more...]
A US District court dismissed four shareholder lawsuits related to Facebook’s botched IPO, on the grounds that the individual investors behind the cases purchased the company’s stock after the company had already amended IPO filings, including warnings about an unproven ability to monetize its mobile efforts, Reuters reported. The lawsuit, as … [Read more...]
Liberty Global, the US cable heavy weight, has agreed to purchase Virgin Media, a large cable and broadband provider in the UK, for $23.3 billion, both companies recently announced in a press release. If approved by regulators, the deal would make Liberty Global the largest cable and broadband company in the world outside of China. The company … [Read more...]
Oracle, the world's third largest software maker and top producer of high end business computers, will pay $1.7 billion to acquire Acme packet, a company that sells telecommunications VoIP hardware. “The addition of Acme Packet to Oracle’s leading communications portfolio will enable service providers and enterprises to deliver innovative … [Read more...]
by MATT GALLAGHER, Red Herring Streaming video across multiple devices is far from the easy breeze it looks. With the launch of its new Elastic Transcoder service, however, Amazon not only makes it a synch, but much more affordable than other options currently offered on the market. Launched this week, Amazon's Elastic Transcoder service is … [Read more...]
Ribbit Capital, a new Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm, has closed on a $100 million fund that will be focused solely on finance-based startups. The firm will focus on startups specializing in lending, payments, insurance, accounting, tax preparation, personal financial management, and other financial services. The firm will target … [Read more...]
Facebook rolled out its Graph Search, a functional search tool that provides results based on social connections. It's a big step for Facebook that evolves its social function to provide relevant knowledge based on relationships. Search for “friends of friends who are single women,” and you completely revamp the nature of dating. Search for … [Read more...]
Testing “extreme price points” in a potential paid messaging service, Facebook offered to send messages directly to CEO Mark Zuckerberg's inbox for $100, Mashable was the first to notice. The company is considering allowing users to pay to send messages to people who are not their friends that would go directly to the inbox, with the high fee … [Read more...]