Updates over Media, Marketing en Publishing
Graduway, a startup that wants to help colleges and universities more effectively engage with their alumni, is officially launching today with $1.1 million in seed funding from BTG Pactual (Latin America’s largest investment bank), former 888 Holdings CEO Gigi Levy and RSL Venture Partners, which has recently invested in Vengo and OneSpot.
Like a growing number of students, Ben Kosinski attended multiple universities over the course of his collegiate career. Although these schools differed wildly in culture and the makeup of their student bodies, the one thing that seems to remain true at any school, he says, is the level of influence online social identities have come to play in the daily life of college students. Yet, in spite of this, the world’s biggest brands still struggle to reach college students — the most coveted demographic — instead, throwing money at the problem through ineffective advertising methods.
Once upon a time, the pinnacle of social networking was the ability to connect with former classmates and share what your cat had for breakfast. Today, the requirements for social networking have evolved and are more immediate. We need social networks to quickly connect us with the classrooms, businesses, hospitals, rallies and neighborhoods we frequent on a daily basis to allow private communications between parents and teachers, to notify neighbors about a burglary, to alert co-workers about emergencies, and so on.
Over the last year, it seems that we kept hearing that quality, legit HTML5 gaming was right around the corner. Well, here we are two months into 2013, and the market is still yet to see a single, widely adopted (or even slightly adopted) flagship HTML5 title.
Social TV and the second screen experience is quickly catching on among viewers, but the space as a whole is still nascent. While many are eager for a better social TV experience, as there’s plenty of upside for fans, advertisers and broadcasters alike, collectively we’ve all been waiting for one of these players to hit critical mass.
When Viggle announced in November that it would be merging with GetGlue, it seemed as if the combination of two of the leading apps in the space would be a step in that direction. But, fast forward two months, and the Viggle/GetGlue merger was dead in the water.
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In the fall of 2011, we caught up with social commerce startup, Yardsellr, which the founders claimed at the time had grown into a community of over 5 million people. The Facebook-based social commerce platform was listing 6K new items for sale each day (at the time) and had over 120K items for sale in total. This, by the way, came after the company raised $5 million from Accel in 2010.
However, at the time, only 175K of its 5 million users were active on the site each month — a number, which in retrospect, might have rung a bell. Last week, in a blog post, Yardsellr announced that it would be shutting down operations in the next 60 days.
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Basecamp, the project management platform developed by 37 Signals that launched in 2004, is still alive and kicking, which is something of a feat considering how many companies have come and gone in this space over the years. Plus, more recently, a slew of promising new players have entered the market, including Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein’s Asana, Joel Spolsky’s Trello, Siasto and Podio (now part of Citrix) — to name a few.
The business-focused networking site of record, LinkedIn, rode a wave of growth through 2012, turning itself into a Wall Street darling in the process. The race to win the professional networking market isn’t really “a race” anymore, as LinkedIn dominates online networking for the world’s working professionals, now over 200 million users-strong. Oh, and it’s adding an average of two users per second.
With growth continuing, LinkedIn has consistently outperformed expectations over the last three quarters, so this time around, expectations are high. The consensus estimate for revenues in the fourth quarter has been $280 million, up 68 percent from the same period last year. Meanwhile, adjusted earnings has been forecast at 19 cents per share, compared to 12 cents for Q4 2011.
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You may not be familiar with her name, but Judy Estrin has quietly become one of Silicon Valley’s most successful serial entrepreneurs and executives. She began her career working with Vint Cerf’s research group at Stanford University — the same one that played a central role in the development of the Internet. Since the early ’80s, she has founded seven technology companies, has served as the CTO of Cisco Systems and held board positions at FedEx for 20 years, Sun Microsystems for eight years, and currently sits on the board of The Walt Disney Company (a position she’s held since 1998). Oh, and she’s also the author of “Closing the Innovation Gap” and led the team that developed one of the first local area networks.
Today, Yelp announced its fourth-quarter earnings, and they weren’t as sunny as some as hoped. Net revenue was $41.2 million in Q4 of 2012 — a 65 percent growth in new revenue from 2011. In turn, net loss was $5.3 million, or $0.08 per share, compared to a net loss of $9.1 million, or $0.55 in the fourth quarter of 2011. Adjusted EBITDA was $1.8 million.
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