Dan Schawbel is a New York Times bestselling author, Partner and Research Director at Future Workplace, and the Founder of both Millennial Branding and WorkplaceTrends.com. His new book is...
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Original author: jyotsna popuri
16 Hits
Jul
01
Oct
27
Sramana Mitra: You raised $3.1 million. You finished Y Combinator and you’re walking out with a great network. What happens next? Karn Saroya: From there on, it was about proving out the model and...
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Original author: Sramana Mitra
13 Hits
Oct
26
To keep up with the rising demand for short-term rentals in U.S. cities and compete with the home-sharing giant Airbnb, travel booking site Expedia has picked up a pair of venture-backed hospitality startups, Pillow and ApartmentJet.
Employees of both companies will join Expedia . The company declined to disclose the financial terms of the deals.
“Acquiring Pillow and ApartmentJet will help unlock urban growth opportunities that, over time, will contribute to HomeAway’s ability to add an even broader selection of accommodations to its marketplace and marketplaces across Expedia Group brands, ensuring travelers always find the perfect place to stay,” the company explained in a statement.
Expedia paid $3.9 billion for HomeAway and its portfolio of travel brands in 2015. The deal was its first major move in the alternative accommodations space, as well as the beginning of a series of efforts to outdo VC darling Airbnb. Its latest targets provide software tools for property managers to easily manage short-term rentals on Airbnb competitors like HomeAway and VRBO.
Located in San Francisco, Pillow helps residents list their apartments as short-term rentals without violating their leases. It’s raised a total of $16.5 million in VC backing since 2013, including a $13.5 million round last year led by Mayfield, with participation from Sterling.VC, Peak Capital Partners, Expansion VC, Chris Anderson, Gary Vaynerchuk, Dennis Phelps and Veritas Investments.
ApartmentJet helps property owners earn money off vacancies. Founded in 2016, the Chicago-headquartered startup had raised a reported $1.2 million in capital from Network Ventures and BlueTree.
Bellevue-based Expedia Group owns several travel brands, including HomeAway, VRBO, Travelocity, trivago, Orbitz and Hotels.com. The company is both an active investor in and acquirer of startups.
Expedia’s shares rose 9.4 percent Thursday after its third-quarter earnings beat analyst expectations. The company posted $3.28 billion in revenue, a notable increase from last year’s $2.97 billion.
17 Hits
Oct
26
Chat fiction startups have been exploring the types of stories you can tell in the form of text message conversations, and now Hooked is taking that exploration one step further with the launch of “Dark Matter.” The company describes this as its first feature-length story.
“Dark Matter” tells the story of Tasneem (Taz) Singh, a South Asian American student at Stanford who, after the mysterious death of her twin sister, discovers that she has the ability to interact with the paranormal.
The story debuts today on Snapchat, with a new chapter coming out every day until Tuesday, October 30. According to CEO Prerna Gupta, the full script totals 32,000 words — the length of a feature film script or short novel: “I think it’s fair to say this is the longest chat fiction story. It’s certainly the longest one we’ve ever produced for Hooked.”
If you’re not already a chat fiction fan, you may be skeptical about reading something that long in text message format. Gupta admitted that she and her husband Parag Chordia had similar doubts when they started the company together.
“I would be lying if I didn’t say if we also didn’t have that question ourselves,” she told me. “When a new kind of format or really new medium comes up, you start with the basics first. You tell the simplest stories, then as you become more adept at communicating with that format, you can start to go deeper.”
That’s meant going beyond text — “Dark Matter,” for example, will include a voice track and custom illustrations.
“The length makes a big difference,” Gupta added. “You can take your time, slow it down and spend more time with world building, developing deeper relationships between the characters.”
“Dark Matter” was written by Hooked staff writer Elyse Endick, but Gupta said the writing process was “almost more like a writers’ room — it was very collaborative, she did a show bible, then at each step she and I and our head of content would sit in a Google Hangout and just kind of flesh it out.”
Although the story is premiering on Snapchat, it will also make its way to the main Hooked app. Gupta said that she’s less focused on owning the distribution channel than on reaching big, global audiences — and distributing via Snapchat can help with that. (The company says 100 million unique readers have accessed its stories across the Hooked app and Snapchat.)
“I’m not trying to be the next Instagram,” she said. “It’s not about the app or any given app. For me, it’s really about our stories.”
And while Snapchat has recently lost some of its luster (daily active user count fell by another 1 percent in its most recent quarter), Gupta said, “I think people are underestimating their whole strategy around entertainment, around being TV for the next generation.”
She added that engagement around Hooked content on Snapchat has been “insane.”
“Why are we investing our resources with Snap? Because of what we’re seeing,” she said. “Our audience and how engaged they are, that’s real.”
26 Hits
Sep
08
MakeSpace founder and former CEO Samuel Rosen is ready to launch his next venture, and it has little or nothing to do with the on-demand economy. This time, Rosen is setting his sights on the world of water.
Tap aims to be the world’s first public index and global search engine for drinking water.
Plastic water bottles are, in many ways, the scourge of the planet. More than 90 percent of the environmental impact of plastic water bottles happens during manufacture, and the Guardian reported that more than 1 million plastic water bottles were sold a minute across the globe in 2016.
Some people have switched over to reusable water bottles and canteens, but once they do, there is no way to search for water fountains or sources of drinking water. That’s where Tap comes in.
In its first iteration, Tap is a bit like the Waze for water. Using a combination of user-generated content and data from water fountain manufacturers, Tap aims to be a public search engine for where to find water. As it stands now, Tap has more than 34,000 Refill Stations across 30 countries indexed on the app.
But Tap also has ambitions to offer a backend system for water fountain companies. Normally, these companies sell a number of units to airports or other commercial or government properties. Those customers then install the fountains wherever they see fit, and the water fountain company is more or less uninvolved.
However, those companies then need to maintain the fountains, installing new filters and repairing broken parts, etc. But one fountain may be far more trafficked than another, and thus need higher frequency maintenance.
Tap wants to offer an SDK to these companies so that when users report bad filters or a broken water fountain, that information shows up on their dashboard.
Rosen sees an opportunity to generate revenue in a manner similar to Google, offering an advertising product for companies down the line.
42 Hits
Oct
26
It pays to have the most popular game in the world.
Epic Games, the creators of the runaway gaming smash hit Fortnite, have raised $1.25 billion in a new round of financing.
It’s been 20 years since Epic Games first released its Unreal game development engine in concert with its first person shooter, Unreal. Since then, the company has been releasing free-to-play games as a loss leader to show off what its powerful development toolkit can do.
Now, with the insane success of Fortnite, the company has flipped the script.
Since Fortnite became the thing that nearly every gamer in the world plays, the company has slashed prices on the Unreal game engine even as it keeps upgrading the technology.
And the company has been plowing that cash back into the community to support esports tournaments with a $100 million prize pool to support competitive Fortnite gamers.
The company’s game has become the kind of old-school cultural phenomenon that one rarely sees in the fractured age of internet silos. It’s inspired dance crazes, Halloween costumes, and even a Monopoly game and a Nerf gun.
And now it appears that the game has also inspired some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley’s venture capital investment scene to commit huge sums to continue its success.
Investors in the latest round include KKR, Iconiq Capital, Smash Ventures,Vulcan Capital, Kleiner Perkins and Lightspeed Venture Partners, as well as gaming companies like aXiomatic, which announced a significant investment from the NBA legend Michael Jordan earlier in October.
The new investors are joining Tencent, Disney, and Endeavor as minority shareholders in the company — which amazingly still is controlled by its chief executive and founder, Tim Sweeney.
“Epic Games has fundamentally changed the model for interactive entertainment under the company’s visionary leadership,” said Ted Oberwager of KKR, in a statement.
67 Hits
Oct
26
Sramana Mitra: The point at which it makes sense to take a lot more money is if you know that if you put in $10, you’re going to make $100. There are certain companies that figure out the...
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Original author: Sramana Mitra
82 Hits
Oct
26
In a clever bit of sleuthing by Corin Faife at Breaker, we find that over half of the most popular crypto blogs offer pay-for-play posts including “CEO interviews” that are not labelled as sponsored. Further, many sites offer premium services in which blog writers will repost PR content without a sponsored tag.
As I noted a few weeks ago, the crypto industry is awash with money and “journalists” are taking advantage of the naivety and dishonesty of the marketers tasked with pushing another me-too crypto product in front of an unreceptive audience. Faife received multiple emails like this one asking him to accept payment for placing articles at the places he worked, including Motherboard and Coindesk:
“I know that I would never take money for coverage, nor would any serious journalist. But covering the cryptocurrency industry, I read content on a daily basis that comes from a large number of outlets that I can’t vouch for. If these offers of pay-for-post are out there, can we rely on all of the journalists and editors to turn them down? Can we believe in the objectivity of the coverage we see every day, or has it simply been paid for by a company flush with cash?” he wrote. “The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like there was a simple way to find out. As a BREAKER investigation, we’d ask to pay for coverage of an ICO, and see who said yes.”
Faife reached out to 28 cryptocurrency news sites and received 22 definitive responses. Posing as a Russian PR professional, Faife first asked for rates for posting information on the site. When he received a response, he asked if the posts would have a “sponsored” tag, a traditional signal that a post wasn’t explicitly written by the news organization’s reporters.
Of the 22 replies, he received 14 agreeable responses including an offer to remove the sponsored tag for $4,500. This helpful graph from Faife’s story shows how quickly sites will abandon journalistic ethics to grab a little cash:
One site, NewsBTC, responded to Faife when pressed about payola:
Contacted about the story, Samuel Rae, CEO of NewsBTC, responded:
“It’s come to my attention that one of our sales team has mistakenly suggested that we could publish content without disclosure that it has been paid for (i.e. a sponsored article) to one of your undercover reporters posing as a PR agent. This is not our policy. The sales executive offering this has been removed from our company active immediately and won’t be dealing with/offering our advertising (or otherwise) services again, be it to a PR company, a reseller or anyone else.”
Pressed to offer evidence that the staff member had been removed, and to explain a second source quoting NewsBTC’s willingness to publish sponsored content without disclosure, Rae declined to give further comment.
The important thing to note here are the sums of money that many of these crypto and ICO organizations will raise thanks to a small investment in media. A solid blog post can move untrained “investors” to buy or sell crypto and tokens in an instant, creating situations ripe for pump and dump schemes where the actual level of interest in a company is clouded by payola. Most sane, mature news organizations see this problem and address it by refusing to accept paid content. That said, times are changing and the lines are blurring between paid and unpaid content. Ultimately, however, the behavior Faife uncovered is implicitly wrong.
There’s an old saying: fools and their money are soon parted. Uneducated and uninformed crypto investors are fools, but they visit crypto sites for a proper education. When news organizations create so-called fake news in order to drum up a little advertising cash, everyone loses.
30 Hits
Oct
26
It has been a volatile time for the stock market this week. The Dow crashed more than 600 points earlier this week, erasing all of the gains made during the year. The market is concerned about a...
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Original author: MitraSramana
56 Hits
Oct
26
Entrepreneurs are invited to the 421st FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, November 1, 2018, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur,...
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Original author: Maureen Kelly
69 Hits
Oct
26
In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:
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Original author: Maureen Kelly
63 Hits
Oct
26
Karn Saroya: When it comes to segmentation, it’s exactly what you would expect. 80% of our customers are under the age of 35. A quarter of those are homeowners. We tend to get the types of folks who...
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Original author: Sramana Mitra
79 Hits
Oct
26
REUTERS/Dado Ruvic
Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this Friday.
The New York Times has exposed a culture of sexual harassment at Google, in a report claiming that former executive Andy Rubin was paid $90 million in an exit package after a credible sexual misconduct accusation. Other male executives at Google had consensual and non-consensual workplace relationships, according to the report, and all were protected by the company. Google's chief executive, Sundar Pichai, has admitted the company has a harassment problem and told employees that the firm had fired 48 employees for sexual misconduct over the last two years. Thirteen of the 48 were senior managers or above, and were not given an exit package, he said. The fiasco at Google threatened to overshadow its parent company's third-quarter earnings, which were slightly below Wall Street expectations. Google's revenue increased 22% in the third quarter driven by healthy performance in its mobile search business, but the results were slightly below analyst expectations and the stock took a dive. Facebook has been issued the maximum fine of £500,000 ($645,000) by the UK's data watchdog for the Cambridge Analytica data breach. Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham said Facebook "should have known better and it should have done better." Twitter's share price rocketed after the company beat analyst expectations on revenue and profit for its third quarter. The company reported earnings of $0.21 a share on revenue of $758.1 million, but also lost 4 million users from the same period in 2017. Amazon's share price took a plunge after disappointing revenue and guidance seemed to outweigh otherwise standout third quarter earnings. Amazon's profit blew away analyst expectations, but revenue for the period was lower than expected, and it offered a disappointing revenue forecast for the fourth quarter. Snap blamed a third-quarter loss in users on its Android app, which the company is in the process of updating. The company lost 2 million daily active users in the three months to September, sending the stock crashing. US president Donald Trump claimed reports he uses an unsecured iPhone are "soooo wrong!". His said he always uses government phones, after The New York Times reported that he uses his iPhone to make calls, and that Chinese and Russian spies listen in. Former Facebook security boss Alex Stamos criticised Tim Cook's hypocrisy after the Apple CEO launched a blistering attack on firms that flout user privacy. Stamos pointed to Apple's trade practices in China, which block privacy-enabling features like end-to-end encryption and installing VPNs. Vice found in an investigation it was able to place fake political adverts on Facebook on behalf of US vice president Mike Pence and terrorist group ISIS. That's despite Facebook building new tools to create more transparency around who pays for political ads in its News Feed.Have an Amazon Alexa device? Now you can hear 10 Things in Tech each morning. Just search for "Business Insider" in your Alexa's flash briefing settings.
Original author: Shona Ghosh
103 Hits
Oct
26
The White House on Thursday flatly denied that President Donald Trump's cellphone was compromised after a New York Times report suggested Chinese spies were listening to his phone calls.
"The article written by the New York Times presented inaccurate information about the President's cell phone and its usage," White House deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley said in a statement.
Current and former US officials warned that Trump's personal Apple iPhone was monitored by Chinese spies, according to The Times' report published Wednesday. Trump reportedly used two iPhones that were programmed by the National Security Agency for official use, but also kept a third, personal phone that was unaltered â much like the normal iPhones on the consumer market.
Trump was said to use the unaltered personal iPhone because of its ability to store contacts, the officials said in the report. One of the two official phones was designated for making calls, and the other one was for Twitter.
Gidley rejected The Times' reporting on the number of Trump's iPhones and also downplayed the threat they may have posed.
"The President does not have three cellular phones," Gidley said in the statement. "He has one official government iPhone. This phone security follows industry best practices and is closely managed under government supervision in conjunction with recommendations from industry partners."
"The phone is rotated on a regular basis and is constantly monitored for any security vulnerabilities and attacks, in accordance with recommendations from the intelligence community," Gidley added.
Trump also played down the reported threat by brushing it off on Twitter.
"The so-called experts on Trump over at the New York Times wrote a long and boring article on my cellphone usage that is so incorrect I do not have time here to correct it," Trump said in a tweet on Thursday morning. "I only use Government Phones, and have only one seldom used government cell phone. Story is soooo wrong!"
According to the sources cited by The Times, the information Chinese spies have collected included who Trump regularly speaks to and was part of a wider lobbying effort to influence his friends and business associates. US intelligence agencies discovered the espionage campaign from sources in foreign governments and intercepted communications from foreign officials.
Original author: David Choi
84 Hits
Sep
08
The rich are getting richer and more numerous.
The world added 332 billionaires last year, with their cumulative wealth increasing 19% to a record $8.9 trillion, according to an annual survey from UBS and PwC.
What's behind this phenomenon? Explosive wealth creation in China.
"China is where we're seeing unbelievable and unprecedented growth," said John Mathews, head of ultra high net worth Americas for UBS Global Wealth Management. For the first time ever, billionaire growth in Asia Pacific outpaced that of the US last year.
In 2006, there were just 16 Chinese billionaires. But in 2017, the tally hit 373 - a fifth of the global total. The US still leads regionally, with 585 billionaires, but wealth creation in the region is slowing. The US created 53 billionaires in 2017, compared with 87 in 2012.
In China, 106 people became billionaires in 2017 (although a number dropped off the list from 2016). That comes out to roughly one new billionaire every three days.
If current trends hold, Asian billionaires' wealth will surpass that of their American counterparts in three years.
Samantha Lee/Business Insider
That growth has been driven by self-made entrepreneurs in China, particularly in the technology industry.
More than 300 Chinese companies went public last year, unlocking what UBS deems "stealth wealth," the difficult-to-measure wealth of individuals in private markets with little transparency.
About 97 percent of Chinese billionaires are self-made, and, at 56 years old on average, they're about a decade younger than their North American counterparts.
US entrepreneurs could play catch-up next year, though. Mathews said major anticipated initial public offerings in 2019, including Uber, could reveal more stealth wealth, potentially adding more billionaires to the US's count. Of the 53 new billionaires in the US last year, 30 were self-made.
Original author: Meghan Morris
72 Hits
Sep
10
On Friday, General Motors proposed a nationwide program for zero-emissions credits that would greatly extend the current nine-state framework and encourage automakers to introduce more electrified vehicles.
In a statement, GM said the National Zero Emissions Vehicle (NZEV) program "has the potential to place more than seven million long-range [electric vehicles] on the road by 2030, yielding a cumulative incremental reduction of 375 million tons of CO2 emissions between 2021 and 2030 over the existing ZEV program."
At the moment, the ZEV program is limited to California and nine additional states.
What is ZEV? Read more about the program from this helpful primer published by The Union of Concerned Scientists.
GM offered the proposal as part of its comments on the Safer Affordable Fuel-Efficient (SAFE) Vehicles Rule for Model Years 2021-2026 Passenger Cars and Light Trucks, a process undertaken by the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to review federal fuel-economy standards established under the Obama administration.
The Trump administration reopened the review process, a decision supported by the auto industry. Some environmental groups have opposed the move.
Trump vs. California vs. the auto industry
GM CEO Mary Barra and President Donald Trump. Getty Images
But carmakers have also found themselves in the awkward position of contending with a political showdown between Trump and California, which exercises a waiver from the EPA to set its own emissions standards.
That prerogative goes all the way back to the passage of the Clean Air Act in 1963. And because California is such a large vehicle market, its standard is followed by numerous other states, making it something of a de facto national standard.
The prospects of revoking the waiver has created a nightmare scenario for carmakers â one in which they would have to design and engineer vehicles to multiple standards, if California retains its own standards while elsewhere in the country, they're rolled back.
In this context, GM's proposal achieves two objectives.
First, it seeks to create a nationwide emissions solution, based on the market-oriented ZEV-credit system already in place. Second, it supports GM's ambitious objective of introducing 20 new electric vehicles by 2023, as well as CEO Mary Barra's plan to push toward "zero crashes, zero emissions and zero congestion."GM furnished details of the proposal, including an increasing scale of ZEV credits for all 50 states, "starting at 7% in 2021, increasing 2% each year to 15% by 2025, then 25% by 2030." The program would "terminate when 25% target is met, or based on a determination that the battery cost or infrastructure targets are not practicable within the timeframe," the automaker said.
The NZEV credits would be "modeled on the current ZEV program: credits per vehicle, based on EV range, as well as averaging, banking, and trading."
The plan also calls for the establishment of a Zero Emissions Task Force.
Addressing climate change with an industrial strategy, led by the US
GM vice-president Mark Reuss. GM
"We believe in a policy approach that better promotes US innovation and starts a much-needed national discussion on electric vehicle development and deployment in this country," Executive Vice-President Mark Reuss said. "It's past time for national policy to address climate change, with an industrial strategy that advances US leadership in the technology that delivers the most benefit: Electrification."
Reuss added that GM isn't "standing still on this." He noted that the carmaker is already reducing the weight of its car and trucks by 400-500 lbs. and developing new engine technologies, along with committed to a fresh battery-electric design for vehicles that will follow the launch of the Chevy Bolt EV.
In a conference with reporters on Thursday to preview the NZEV proposal, he also said that the if adopted the idea would facilitate more automakers focusing on EVs, and that it would make their efforts more efficient. For GM, the NZEV credits could create a new revenue stream, helping the automaker offset some of the costs of vehicle development and the creation of EV-charging infrastructure.
"It could take the guesswork out," he said. "We're making bets now, but there's a lot of uncertainty, and that can destroy capital."
Original author: Matthew DeBord
59 Hits
Oct
26
Innovusion, a two-year-old startup developing LiDAR sensor technology for autonomous vehicles, has raised $30 million in a Series A funding round co-led by Chinese firms Nio Capital and Eight Roads Ventures along with U.S.-based F-Prime Capital.
Other seed round and strategic investors joined the round, the startup said.
Nio Capital is the venture arm of Nio, the Chinese electric automaker aiming to compete with Tesla. Nio, which raised $1 billion when it debuted on the New York Stock Exchange in September, has operations in the U.S., U.K. and Germany, although it only sells its ES8 vehicle in China.
Innovusion, which was founded in November 2016, says it will use the funding to scale up its operations, specifically to ramp up production of its light detection and ranging sensor system called Innovusion Cheetah. The company began shipping samples of the system in the second quarter of 2018 and is beginning to take customer orders.
The round of funding will allow the Los Altos, California-based company to expand its R&D team and manufacturing facilities to more quickly develop, market and deliver Innovusion Cheetah LiDAR to customers around the world, according to Junwei Bao, the company’s co-founder and CEO. The company primarily is targeting customers in China and the U.S.
LiDAR is used by companies developing autonomous vehicles to detect and measure objects on the road around them. Most of the companies testing AVs believe LiDAR is an essential sensor required to deploy self-driving vehicles safely on public roads. It’s what has propelled demand for LiDAR and, in turn, an array of startups to pop up and try to capture market share away from Velodyne, the long-time dominant leader in the space.
25 Hits
Oct
26
(Reuters) - Google Inc Chief Executive Sundar Pichai said on Thursday the company had fired 48 employees for sexual harassment over the past two years.
Pichai sent an email to Google employees in response to a New York Times story that was published earlier in the day.
The report said the search engine giant protected three senior executives from allegations of sexual misconduct by offering them payouts.
The email, a copy of which was seen by Reuters, said of the 48 that were fired, 13 were senior managers or held more senior posts.
However, Pichai said none of those employees received an exit package.
The email, which was also signed by Google's vice president of people operations Eileen Naughton, said that company employees could use internal tools to report cases of inappropriate behavior anonymously.
It also said that Google has updated its policy to require all vice presidents and senior vice presidents to disclose any relationship with a co-worker regardless of reporting line or presence of conflict.
"We are committed to ensuring that Google is a workplace where you can feel safe to do your best work, and where there are serious consequences for anyone who behaves inappropriately," the email said.
Original author: Reuters
52 Hits
Oct
26
Something interesting happened during Google's quarterly earnings report on Thursday and it had nothing to do with the cost-per-click, the traffic-acquisition-cost or any of the other arcane metrics that Wall Street folks love to geek out over.
In fact, what happened on the investor call wasn't intended for investors at all. The intended audience was the man in the White House, and Google didn't try to be very subtle about it.
As Google CEO Sundar Pichai neared the conclusion of his prepared remarks, he noted that Google parent company Alphabet is investing "closer to home." In the third quarter, he pointed out, "more than 80% of Alphabet's total cap-ex was in the US."
"Not only do these investments in datacenters, machines and offices allow us to bring great services to our users, they have a strong positive impact on the communities around them, supporting thousands of jobs and countless local businesses. This year to date we added more than 9,000 new employees in the US and we continue to grow faster outside the [San Francisco] Bay Area than within it."
It's not the kind of detail that Google â one of the least transparent companies when it comes to its business â typically goes into during its earnings reports. But these are not ordinary times, and Google, like many of its Big Tech peers, is doing whatever it can to wrap itself in the American flag and show what a good citizen it is.
Maybe it's because US Attorney General Jeff Sessions has said he wants to investigate internet companies for supposedly stifling conservative speech. Or maybe it's because Trump's 2020 campaign manager has called Google a "threat to the republic."Or perhaps because Trump himself has accused Google of rigging its search results against him (it didn't).
AP
Google is also on the defensive because of its decision not to pursue weapons-related contracts with the US Department of Defense, a policy which other Trump punching bags like Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos have pounced upon, as if to improve their own image with the president.
Let's be clear, the fact that Google is investing 80% of its capital expenditures in the US is obviously a good thing. Google spent $5.3 billion in cap-ex during the third quarter, so that's real money, and a lot of it.
But chances are that money was always intended to be spent in the US. One of the key line items of Google's capital expenditures are datacenters, giant infrastructure projects that take years of planning.
The only thing that's changed is the sudden need for Google to loudly proclaim its patriotic bona fides. For a company as powerful as Google, the unusual flag-waving is a stunning show of deference to, and likely fear of, the White House.
Yes, right now Google is singing to the commander-in-chief about some very laudable achievements. But there are lots of dangerous "Make America Great Again" policies of which Google has been a vocal opponent, from the travel ban that targeted people from Muslim-majority countries, to transgender rights.
A lot of vulnerable people depend on powerful entities, even profit-driven corporations, to champion their causes.
Now that Google has gotten used to bending its knees and kowtowing, what will it say, or do, the next time it needs to curry favor with Trump?
Original author: Alexei Oreskovic
38 Hits
Jun
22
Companies of all kinds renewed their appetite for tech firms in the third quarter.
The value of tech-related mergers and acquisitions announced in the period hit $66.4 billion, according to a new report from consulting firm PwC. That was not only the highest total in nearly two years, it was more than double the value of the deals announced in the second quarter.
"After a lackluster performance in Q2 2018, the technology deals market regained its shine," PwC said in the report.
The firm predicted the deal market would remain robust going forward, despite some potential ups and downs. Funding was up in the quarter for startups, which often represent prime takeover targets as they get bigger, PwC said. And companies of all stripes are placing a premium on innovation and technology, it said.
"We remain bullish on the prospects for Technology deals regardless of the macro market trends," the firm said.
Broadcom's takeover of CA Technologies boosted the market
The deal market's third quarter rebound was driven in part by one big transaction â Broadcom's $18.9 billion deal to takeover of CA Technologies. Broadcom announced that deal just months after the Trump administration barred its attempted acquisition of Qualcomm on national security grounds.
But the deal market saw strength across the board. Some 485 deals were announced in the period, which was up 15% from the second quarter. More than half of those were for less than $100 million, while another 23% were valued at between $100 million to $500 million.
The quarter saw one other deal of more than $5 billion â Renesas' $6.7 billion planned acquisition of IDT. And it saw 12 deals valued at between $1 billion to $5 billion, up from just nine such deals in the second quarter.
PwC
Software companies were hot commodities
By far the most popular sector for acquisitions in the quarter was software. Around 250 deals involving such companies were announced in the quarter. The combined value of those transactions was $41.9 billion. That was up from a mere $9.9 billion in the second quarter.
Information technology services was a relatively hot sector as well. The number of such deals topped 100 and their combined value hit $8.8 billion. That was up from just $5.4 billion in the second quarter and represented the highest total value for the sector since 2016.
PwC
Money flooded in from outside
A return of foreign buyers also helped boost the deal market. Some 75 deals in the most recent period involved foreign companies attempting to buy US tech firms. That was up from just 53 such deals in the second quarter. The total value of deals involving foreign buyers was $16.4 billion. That was up from $4.9 billion in the second quarter and was the highest total since the fourth quarter of 2016.
The Trump administration has been taking a harder line on foreign companies acquiring US technologies and tech firms, subjecting them to more thorough national security reviews. That's led to greater uncertainty over whether deals will go through.
In addition to a surge of foreign buyers, the deal market saw an influx of acquirers from outside the tech industry. The total number of deals involving non-tech companies reached 137 in the period, up from 80 in the second quarter. That was the highest level in more than two years.
Meanwhile, the value of deals involving non-tech companies hit $13.3 billion, up from just $5.5 billion in the previous quarter. That was the third highest total in the last 11 quarters.
PwC
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Original author: Troy Wolverton
45 Hits
