The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Yahoo Gets A New Marketing Director For Europe, Too
- Obama On The Go: Clippz Launches Mobile Channel For White House Videos
- Viralheat Emerges From Private Beta; Now Analyzes Content From Websites
- Amazon Ordered To Pay Back $119 Million In Taxes In Japan. More Tax Trouble May Be Ahead.
- Ad Network Consolidation: Hi-Media Buys AdLink Media
- Techfuga Is Taking A Couple Of Months Off Delivering Breaking Tech News
- blueTunes: Music In The Cloud Comes To Your Desktop
- Prepare Yourself For iPod Video
- The Doctor Is In: ABC Content Comes To Hulu, Starting With Grey’s Anatomy
- Details on Marc Andreessen’s New Fund (Plus Five Other Interesting Things He Said)
- NTT Docomo Buys 35 Percent Of PacketVideo For $45.5 Million
- Tweetraising: The Potential For Charities On Twitter
- iPhone 3GS. Jailbreak. Mac.
- Japan’s Rakuten: Can The Biggest E-Commerce Site You Never Heard Of Become a Threat for Amazon Globally?
- Way Too Competitive: Tech Gurus Flock To World Series Of Poker
- Since March, Internet Explorer Lost 11.4 Percent Share To Firefox, Safari, And Chrome
| Yahoo Gets A New Marketing Director For Europe, Too Posted: 06 Jul 2009 07:09 AM PDT
We’ve learned former consumer marketing director at Yahoo James Tipple (pictured in the middle) will take over the role of European senior marketing director, effectively replacing Fahy. Tipple joined Yahoo in 2006 from Vodafone Live! where he was group marketing manager. He has previously held marketing roles at BT Cellnet (now 02) and GlaxoSmithKline. Yahoo is clearly ramping up for the upcoming overhaul of its brand and marketing push, which is frankly long overdue if you ask me. (Picture credit: keely.tauman @ Flickr) Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| Obama On The Go: Clippz Launches Mobile Channel For White House Videos Posted: 06 Jul 2009 06:38 AM PDT
This morning, Clippz dedicated a channel to material from the Obama Administration. Aptly named, ‘The White House’ channel offers mobile-optimized videos from the official White House YouTube channel for download, free of charge. Clippz’ Mobile Video Platform delivers video in multiple formats that cover the vast majority of mobile devices from cellphones to portable media players and smartphones. The videos play on the standard media players found in each device, which means no additional software needs to be installed. If you want to get your fix of streaming President Obama on the go, Clippz’ new channel is definitely worth a second look, even if it’s kind of weird to even consider downloading videos to your computer in this age of streaming. Which the startup humorously address in the about section of their website:
Clippz is funded by angel investors and is looking to score another round of funding with institutional investors. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| Viralheat Emerges From Private Beta; Now Analyzes Content From Websites Posted: 06 Jul 2009 06:00 AM PDT Viralheat, the affordable social media measurement product that scours social video sites including YouTube, Hulu and Vimeo, and Twitter to deliver real-time results of consumer generated content on these sites, has exited private beta and added additional functionality to its monitoring service. You can read our initial review of the site here. Viralheat will now give users a real-time listing of blogs and Web sites that are actively being discussed and shared about a topic or brand. Viralheat allows you to create profiles to track an individual's name or a company's name across nearly 30 video sites, the web and Twitter. The platform's new website monitoring tool gives you data on the number of websites that mentioned a topic in a given week and day, the country where users are most actively mentioning a topic, the average number of mentions per day, the breakdown of mentions between blogs and websites and more. Additionally, the service will provide a real-time stream of topic mentions between blogs and websites.  The service’s nifty Twitter tool provides data on how many total mentions an item had on Twitter for the week and for the given day, the most active Twitter user who has Tweet about a brand, the most common language of Tweets, percentage of Tweets about a brand that are Retweets, the most active day of the week for mention of a brand and a sentiment breakdown of Tweets. The service also provides a graph of the number of Tweets over the past week and shows the most recent Tweets about the item updated in real-time, which you can Tweet out directly from Viralheat's platform or email to others. The video tool will filter the breakdown of a brand or individual over video sites, letting you know how many mentions were made over each video platform. The video dashboard will let you know what the most popular video was, how many videos were found with a certain brand or name in a given week, the average number of video downloads per day and how many total views the videos received in a week. Similar to the Viralheat's twitter and website feeds, the site pulls in a real-time feed of the videos and allows you to email or tweet links to the videos directly from the platform. There are a good amount of services, including Radian6, Visible Measures, Omgili, ScoutLab, and Omniture , that offer tools to monitor blogs, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and other social media sites for mentions of a company or individual’s name. But the differentiating factor for Viralheat is in its price. The site is affordable—for $10 per month, you can track 10 profiles on the site. For $40 per month, you can track 50 profiles. From big companies and brands to small businesses, this price is manageable. After our initial review a few months ago, Viralheat has 3000 beta signups in 24 hours from brands, PR firms and even government agencies. Current clients include Coca-Cola, Tivo, U.S. State Department, Weber Shandwick, Nokia, Hilton Hotels, HP, and Microsoft. Viralheat plans to add more data sources like image sharing sites (Flickr), Facebook, and Linkedin, which would make its service even more compelling. And the startup will offer additional in-depth analysis packages to users which they can add on to their monitoring service. The pricing has yet to be determined. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| Amazon Ordered To Pay Back $119 Million In Taxes In Japan. More Tax Trouble May Be Ahead. Posted: 06 Jul 2009 05:41 AM PDT
Japanese tax authorities started making these allegations as early as 2007 but now seem ready to pull out the hammer. The way Amazon operated so far is that every time Japanese customers buy something from Amazon’s Japanese website, they legally make contracts of purchase with Amazon offices in the US. The problem for the Japanese taxation bureau: These sales were booked and taxed in the US, even though Amazon operates two companies in Japan, Amazon Japan and Amazon Japan Logistics. (Click here for more background on Amazon’s position in Japan.) Reportedly, income of several hundred of millions of dollars wasn’t taxed in Japan under the U.S.-Japan tax treaty, as demanded by local tax authorities now. Amazon is currently in talks with authorities to invalidate the accusations. Amazon has a history of getting in trouble for the way they deal with taxes. In its 2008 annual report [PDF] released in April this year, Amazon.com disclosed that even more trouble may be on the horizon, especially in Japan (page 73):
(emphasis supplied) But even the $119 million tax bill in Japan isn’t peanuts, even for Amazon (provided they really end up having to pay it): Their operating income, for example, stood at $842 million last year for the Amazon group as a whole, with the Japanese subsidiary estimated to having contributed 10% of that number. We’ll stay tuned. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| Ad Network Consolidation: Hi-Media Buys AdLink Media Posted: 06 Jul 2009 04:05 AM PDT
The acquisition comes about 18 months after the latter assigned Morgan Stanley to assist in the sale of the European display advertising power-broker. At that time, a Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung report citing anonymous sources indicated that AdLink Group expected a three-digit million euro sum from the sale of the unit, adding that AdLink’s valuation was nearly €400 million. That’s a far cry from today, with AdLINK Media getting valued south of €30 million. The terms of agreement, which are fairly complex, straight from the press release:
AdLINK Internet Media AG will become a major shareholder in Hi-media Group with 10.7% of the capital, along with investors IDI and BV capital, and will henceforth concentrate operationally on its other business units. According to its website, AdLink Media currently boasts sales offices in 13 countries and powered the display advertising network for about 4,000 websites, claiming a guaranteed reach of more than 80 million unique visitors across Europe (press release says 93 million uniques per month). Its employee count is about 200, and according to its latest earnings report AdLink Media had sales of €14.2 million in the first quarter of this year. Hi-media currently employs over 390 people and operates in 9 countries: France, Germany, Sweden, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, China, USA and Brazil. The company deploys a range of services linking website publishing (via Hi-media Publishing) and audience monetization (via Hi-media Services). Founded in 1996, Hi-media currently boasts over 50 million unique monthly visitors on its proprietary websites. Its latest financial statement shows that the group reported a consolidated turnover of €135.7 million for 2008, with a net income of about €10 million. And thus, the consolidation on the display advertising market continues. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| Techfuga Is Taking A Couple Of Months Off Delivering Breaking Tech News Posted: 06 Jul 2009 02:44 AM PDT
Techmeme is undeniably the leader of the pack; it has solid algorithms and ranking systems in place that can quickly detect breaking news and gives you a clean overview of which other technology news sites and blogs are discussing it practically with minimal lag. It has its flaws, sure, but I dare you to show me a service that does what Techmeme is supposed to do better than they are. The only web service that I’ve ever seen pop up of which I thought it could potentially become a real Techmeme competitor was Techfuga, a site that mimicked Techmeme in many ways but added some extra bells and whistles (like Twitter search, for example). At launch, the site garnered quite a bit of positive commentary. Louis Gray said Techfuga was the result of mating between Techmeme and Alltop, and Robert Scoble said the site was showing Techmeme how to innovate. But don’t bother going to the site right now to check if they were right. It’s been down for a few days and you won’t see it come back up again for a couple of months. While we’re still awaiting a formal response from Techfuga founder Joao Azevedo, we gather from his latest tweets and FriendFeed chatter that he plans to rebuild the entire platform and come back with a completely overhauled Techfuga in a couple of months. It’s beyond me why the startup doesn’t just keep this version live and switch to the new one whenever it’s ready for prime time, but Joao says on FriendFeed that this is because of “set up and costs management during this development time”. Judging from its traffic estimates, I doubt a lot of people are actually going to miss it. That said, I do hope they come back with something awesome, because I happen to think we need more competition in this space. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  
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| blueTunes: Music In The Cloud Comes To Your Desktop Posted: 06 Jul 2009 01:44 AM PDT
For those who aren’t familiar with the service, blueTunes lets you scan your hard drive for music files and upload them to the site’s servers, which you can then stream from wherever you are. This process would take a very long time (and quite a bit of bandwidth) were it not for a shortcut the site is employing: while you still have to prove that you own your music (the site uses a Java app to check through you music folders), the site only makes you upload songs that aren’t already in its database. In other words, unless you’ve got a really eclectic collection, you’ll be able to transfer your library to the cloud without having to move many files. The benefits of a desktop client for this kind of music service are fairly obvious. When you’re using a site like MySpace Music, you generally have to keep a browser tab open at all times, and when tabs are grouped together in the browser it can be tricky to figure out which one is actually controlling the music coming out of your speakers. And there’s always the possibility that your browser will freeze as you peruse another site, taking down your tunes with it. Using blueTunes through a desktop app, you don’t have to deal with these problems. It’s a welcome addition to the service, and it’s nice to see that the startup is still chugging along without having to come up against any legal hurdles. As we noted when we last covered the site, blueTunes’ easy-upload model sounds a lot like the one that was used by MP3.com in 2000, which was later sued into oblivion. That said, founder Nick Alexander says that blueTunes hasn’t had any issues with the labels, and that the company is taking as many precautions as possible. Another music site that also lets you stream your music library from the cloud is Lala, which we’ve been following pretty closely since the service’s relaunch last year. As with blueTunes, Lala only makes you upload songs that aren’t already in its library, and Lala also has the benefit of deals with all the major record labels, so it doesn’t have to worry about any potential legal troubles. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  
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| Prepare Yourself For iPod Video Posted: 06 Jul 2009 01:09 AM PDT
Thank God those iPhones are so expensive, and Apple will only sell 20 million or so of them in 2009. If Apple added cameras to its line of iPods, there would be another 3+million of them hitting the market per month, and the low end of the digital video camera market could be crushed. Uh oh. That’s exactly what we’re hearing is going to happen. One of our sources in Asia say that Apple has placed an order for a massive number of camera modules of the type that they include in the iPhone. These are inexpensive cameras, in the $10 range. And the size of the order, our source says, means they can only be used for one thing - the iPods. Update: Macrumors features two images of cases that are supposed to be designed for the upcoming iPod Touch and iPod Nano, and suggest that the next generation of said devices will indeed include a camera. Putting a camera in the iPod touch, which uses the same operating system as the iPhone, is a logical next step for Apple. But the order size is supposedly so large that some people in Taiwan are speculating that Apple may be planning to put cameras in the lower end of the iPod line, too. “Everything but the Shuffle may have a camera in it soon,” says our source. We don’t have even close to enough information to speculate that the Nano and Classic iPods could be video-ready anytime soon. But I could easily see these lower end iPods include the camera just for taking pictures. Apple never turned video on in the iPhone 3G, but lots of people were using it via unlaunched apps from Qik, Ustream and others anyway. They could be planning the same thing for the Nano. But back to video: The iPod touch starts at $229, and if they add the camera module, turning on video is a no-brainer, particularly since the software, already working on the iPhone, is ready to go. That’s exactly the same price as the high end Flip Mino HD that we gush about so often. The Flip will take marginally better video, but it doesn’t have on-device editing and uploading to YouTube. Nor does it support Internet browsing, email and the thousands of games and other apps available for the iPod Touch. And we haven’t even mentioned the iPod’s primary purpose - music. Guess which one wins? Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| The Doctor Is In: ABC Content Comes To Hulu, Starting With Grey’s Anatomy Posted: 05 Jul 2009 11:37 PM PDT
Beginning this evening Hulu now features Grey’s Anatomy, a very popular prime-time medical drama that’s sure to be a crowd-pleaser. The episode selection for the show is pretty sparse right now — you have five episodes from the most recent fifth season to choose from (with large gaps in between each) but we may well see the selection rotate through the summer. Hulu plans to release more ABC shows over the next two weeks, which will include Desperate Housewives, Ugly Betty, Scrubs, and I Survived a Japanese Game Show. The news may be just the shot in the arm Hulu needs to carry its strong traffic numbers through the summer. The site had seen very impressive growth all year, in no small part due to its Super Bowl and subsequent star-studded ad campaign. But last month came word that the site’s growth was dropping off, and the number of unique visitors to the site actually decreased between March and April. Hulu hasn’t been around long enough to figure out exactly what to attribute this to — it could well be television’s seasonal surges in popularity or possibly a saturated market. In any case, the site is still extremely popular, but I’m sure they’d like to keep that arrow going up and to the right. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  
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| Details on Marc Andreessen’s New Fund (Plus Five Other Interesting Things He Said) Posted: 05 Jul 2009 08:50 PM PDT
The fund will make investments of $50,000 to $50 million (yes, $50 million), but will generally focus on early stage opportunities. And here’s a fun fact: they don’t currently have a website, and apparently they aren’t sure they will have one in the future. For now they’ve reserved a16z.com for use if they do ever launch a site. Basically, if you don’t already know Andreessen or Horowitz, or know someone who knows them, getting in contact with them is going to be…difficult. Andreessen has long been one of my favorite people to interview, because he is tapped into nearly every hot company and isn't afraid to answer questions directly. That is, when you can actually get him to sit down with you and a camera, notepad or tape recorder. But last week, he had to chat it up with the press since he and long-time partner Ben Horowitz were announcing their the new venture fund. This is not going to be your typical venture capital firm. For one thing, there's that $300 million fund size. That's pretty big for a first-time fund and gargantuan when you consider there are only two general partners, Andreessen and Horowitz. It's big enough that some people didn't think they'd be able to pull it off. How did they? Well, did we mention Andreessen was one of the partners? Heard of the browser? And the lesser-known Horowitz is no slouch. He was the CEO of their second venture, Opsware, which sold to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion. As instant as Netscape's success may have been, Opsware was the opposite, a hard post-bubble slog. It's too early to tell how well Andreessen’s third company, Ning, will do, but Andreessen and Horowitz's angel stakes in companies like LinkedIn, Delicious and Twitter show their savvy at picking good teams and how much other entrepreneurs in the Valley value their advice. For instance, Andreessen is the only independent member on Facebook's tiny board of directors. And investors were impressed by the 45 or so companies that Andreessen has independently invested in over the years. Just one, TipMobile, has gone under so far. So, that's how they raised $300 million in the worst fundraising environment in 40 years, here's why: Andreessen says there are only fifteen companies started each year that matter. By "matter," he means they've got the potential to generate $100 million year or more in revenues, and those companies wind up making up 97% of the aggregate industry returns. The firm wants the flexibility to invest as much as they want in those fifteen names, whether it’s $500,000 or $50 million per deal. Considering the two have run big teams and small teams over their time at Netscape, Opsware and Ning, there's no logical reason they should tether themselves to just one stage of investing. Like Founders Fund and unlike most everyone else, Andreessen and Horowitz are more comfortable investing when an entrepreneur wants to stay the CEO. Hiring a "grown up" CEO always sounds like a great idea, but almost always hastens a company's failure, Andreessen argues. There's strong evidence that the biggest hits come when the founders stay engaged at a C-level position. See: Google, Oracle, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Amazon, Apple and Facebook. Another distinction: They're not meddlers. Because there are just two of them, Horowitz and Andreessen won't always take board seats. If they pick the right entrepreneurs, Andreessen argues they shouldn't have to. The whole interview lasted about an hour, and you can see many of the highlights on my Yahoo show, TechTicker, today. Meanwhile, here are five other interesting things he said: 1. Twitter and Facebook's investors aren't worried about monetization, but "it's sweet" of you to. Twitter has spent about $15 million acquiring 30 million users. It'd be a no-brainer to recoup that if need be. Meanwhile, Facebook will generate more than $500 million in revenues this year—it's spent far less than that to build the company to date. In other words, these are pretty fiscally conservatively run businesses with huge growth potential and no trouble raising additional cash. 2. Digg isn't done. Andreessen is still bullish on Digg, citing the fact that Kevin Rose is no longer distracted with Pownce and Jay Adelson is moving to San Francisco to manage the company full-time. He thinks having both guys focused on the company will make a huge difference in the next twelve months. 3. The venture capital market should stop whining about Sarbox and other factors that are hurting their ability to take companies public. Says Andreessen, "Build Companies More Valuable and You Won't Have this Problem." That said, he sees a conceivable scenario where public markets are no longer how investors get returns at all. Instead, the same institutional names that used to buy the bulk of the shares at an issue, will just buy out VCs at premiums in private deals. That'll essentially mean everyday Joes can no longer invest in high growth companies. That's a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how many scars you have from the dot com bust. 4. At least 300 venture firms will go out of business in the next five-to-ten years. 5. Innovation and opportunities to build businesses on the Web aren't done. They won't be done for a long time because the Web is one of the only inventions that's pure software, compared to computers, the television or even the railroads. That means it can completely change without having to fit into set molds. Anyone—Andreessen included—is deluding themselves if they think they know where it's going. (In other words, don't listen to anyone making Web 3.0 predictions.) Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| NTT Docomo Buys 35 Percent Of PacketVideo For $45.5 Million Posted: 05 Jul 2009 08:31 PM PDT Mobile video is taking off in Japan, where mobile operator NTT DoCoMo just invested $45.5 million in PacketVideo, which s a long-time supplier of mobile video software. The all-cash investment gives NTT Docomo a 35 percent stake in PacketVideo, which is s subsidiary of NextWave Wireless (a holding company that owns rights to wireless spectrum in the U.S. which it plans to use for a Wimax network). NextWave acquired PacketVideo in 2005 and the company is now its main source of cash. The investment indicates how important PacketVideo’s technology is to NTT Docomo, and raises the possibility of an outright purchase down the line. Other customers of PacketVideo include Verizon Wireless, Orange (in France), and T-Mobile. They might not feel so warm and fuzzy about PacketVideo now being so closely aligned with another carrier, even if it is in Japan. In the past, NTT DoCoMo tried to expand abroad through an aggressive investment program. Maybe it sees cheap assets it wants to grab once again. The $45.5 million investment values PacketVideo at $130 million. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  
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| Tweetraising: The Potential For Charities On Twitter Posted: 05 Jul 2009 04:30 PM PDT Twitter has been hailed as an incredibly useful marketing tool for businesses and brands, both big and small, to disseminate information and engage with consumers on a massive scale. But what about non-profits? The ability to use social media to fundraise for charitable purposes has been questionable. A few months ago, the Washington Post reported that Causes, one of Facebook’s popular applications used by non-profits to raise money, was not netting much money for charities, despite its large amount of users (according to the application’s page, it has 26 million monthly users). Twitter, the current darling of the social media world, is increasingly being used by charities. In addition to building awareness, Twitter has potential to raise charitable contributions. One of the more successful initiatives launched in the Twittosphere was February’s global Twestival, which raised over $250,000 for charity:water, a non-profit organization devoted to bringing clean drinking water to developing nations. The volunteer-run organization held events to bring Twitter communities in nearly 200 cities together. 250K sounds like an awful lot of dough to raise over the microblogging network, but this amount fell way below Twestival’s goal of $1 million. Still, Twitter’s viral, real-time nature allows for a fast (and relatively low-cost) way to raise funds. Tweetsgiving, another Twitter-based charitable initiative raised over $10,000 in just 48 hours in November of 2008 to fund a new classroom for a school in Tanzania. Beth Kantor reports that she was able to raise over $3000 via Twitter in just 90 minutes. Other charities have used guerrilla follower tactics, developing ‘follower-challenges’ to raise money for causes. For example, Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong Foundation recently found a donor who was willing to give $25,000 if the Foundation’s CEO, Doug Ulman, could reach 25,000 followers in three days (he started with roughly 10,000 followers at the beginning of the challenge). Ulman was able to surpass 25,000 and reach the goal. Ashton Kutcher added a philanthropic element to the race with CNN to reach a million followers by promising donations to Malaria No More if he won. And Kutcher even initiated a follow-up fundraising effort for the charity shortly after. Hugh Jackman recently issued a challenge on Twitter to give $100,000 to the any charity that is best described within the 140 character limit. Even on a smaller scale, there are some capabilities that Twitter provides on its platform that other social media outlets don’t have. For example, hashtags are one part of a fundraising effort on Twitter that can make it easy to search and identify a particular trend. Blame Drew’s Cancer (hashtag: #blamedrewscancer) is a great example of this. Drew Olanoff recently contracted Hodgkins Lymphoma, and launched Blame Drew’s Cancer as a way to get Twitter users who are complaining about something to use the hashtag #BlameDrewsCancer. The tweets are pulled into www.blamedrewscancer.com with the hope the Tweets would be tallied to elicit a large donation from a non-profit organization. The site recently announced that Livestrong will be a partner. The examples I mention above are just a sampling of ways non-profits and philanthropists are using Twitter to fundraise. Twollars and Tweet4Good also offer interesting ways for non-profits to raise money over Twitter. But it’s pretty clear that there are many compelling ways to use Twitter’s viral nature as a valuable fundraising tool for charities. Some may argue that the thousands raised through social media sites doesn’t match the millions raised through traditional tactics, including direct mail and events. But most charities are relatively late-adopters to new technologies, and the success we have seen this early is probably a strong indication of the potential that is yet to be unharnessed. This isn’t to suggest that Twitter will replace conventional ways of fundraising, but it provides a low-cost, yet engaging way to diversify a charity’s fundraising efforts. And in this economy, diversification is too important to ignore. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| Posted: 05 Jul 2009 02:57 PM PDT
Click the image above and then click the logo you know all too well to download. Happy jailbreaking, and in case you didn’t know yet: happy unlocking too. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| Posted: 05 Jul 2009 12:19 PM PDT
In North America, Amazon is the 800-pound gorilla in the B2C arena - by very, very far. After the US launch in 1995, the company quickly established separate websites in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, China, and Japan. But although Amazon wins in Canada and Europe, things are not going as well in Asia. In China (where Amazon started offering a localized site in 2004), it practically gets destroyed by local player Taobao [CN]. Traffic-wise, Amazon gets dwarfed by a local e-commerce site in Japan, too: Rakuten. Amazon is active in Japan for a good reason: In its last report [JP, PDF], the Japanese government said the country’s online B2C sector grew by 21.7% to over $55 billion in 2007 on a year-on-year basis. (Note: Statistics from different sources can vary widely because of totally different methods of measurement. The Japanese numbers, for examples, do include travel.) Now it seems Rakuten wants to take its global plans (laid out numerous times in the past) to the next level, with CEO Hiroshi Mikitani saying just this weekend he wants to see his company generating $1 million in daily sales outside Japan by the end of this year. This short case study tries to shed light on Rakuten’s background and key success factors, why they win against Amazon in Japan and what efforts they make to go global. 1. Rakuten vs. Amazon Japan And they’ve been very successful with it, even though Amazon launched their Japanese site as early as 2000. Look at the table below for a head-to-head and a Google Trends traffic comparison chart: 2. Rakuten’s success factors: Aggressive pricing and wide diversification In parallel, the company stepped away from its original B2B2C roots in the last years, quickly turning into a gigantic web conglomerate. And the company transformed more radically than Amazon did in the US: Rakuten acquired popular online portal Infoseek (Alexa Japan rank: 20) to drive traffic to the main site, established an auction service (now Japan’s third largest), provides online securities brokerage, bought an online travel service (Rakuten Travel is now Japan’s biggest hotel reservation site) and offers a blogging platform (the No. 3 in blogging-crazy Japan). In addition, there is a Rakuten credit card (nearly 2 million Japanese own one), a personal consumer credit service, an e-bank (Japan’s biggest), a ticket sales service, a real-world Rakuten baseball team, a popular golf court reservation sub-site etc. etc. You get the picture. 3. Rakuten Marketplace: 35 million items from $1 to $100,000 The price level is relatively low for many items, as many shops offer identical products and the collected setting allows for users to quickly compare prices. Shipping is generally free on all books, DVDs, CDs and similar media. Rakuten also has the so-called “Super Points” system in place, a reward program for members (you are not required to register to buy on the site). Amazon’s counter offer, “Amazon Point”, was established as late as 2007. Here is the translated version of Rakuten Ichiba’s massive top page (click to enlarge): 4. Amazon Japan’s strong position But Amazon isn’t doing business as usual in Japan, making additional investments in its subsidiary instead. Next month, the company will set up a new distribution center just outside Osaka (it will be Amazon’s biggest in Japan). In the last weeks, three new categories with some 130,000 items were added to the site. And it’s possible for Japanese retailers to open an online shop on Amazon since 2006 already. Overall, Amazon has positioned itself very well in Japan, proving that foreign web companies can enter this country successfully. And they also show that being inferior in traffic doesn’t always translate to being (proportionally) inferior in sales. Amazon’s parent company doesn’t break down sales figures on a country level, but some sources [JP] estimate the Japanese subsidiary rakes in roughly 10% of Amazon’s total sales and income. Assuming this is true, this would bring sales in this country to around $1.9 billion and operating income to a handsome $84 million (even though just yesterday, Japanese tax authorities reportedly demanded back $119 million in taxes from the company for unreported income). 5. Rakuten’s internationalization efforts and English services International customers can already book hotels in many Asian countries through Rakuten Travel’s English interface (which is on Rakuten Japan and works very well). About a fourth of all items available for Japanese customers can be ordered from selected countries through a service called Rakuten International Shipping Services. Non-Japanese users can access Google-translated item pages (24 languages are currently supported), place an order, pay via credit card and then wait for direct delivery from Japan (it’s even possible for foreigners to collect Super Points). This is just a makeshift solution, sure, but way better than what many other Japanese online retailers offer. 6. Conclusion But the current economic crisis has triggered what seems to become a trend among online giants: selective internationalization. MySpace decimated non-US staff just recently, Facebook is rumored to have second thoughts about China and Germany-based business social network Xing last week decided to shelve expansion plans for the US and China. That’s why my guess is Rakuten will avoid battling it out with Amazon in their core markets and focus on untapped countries or niche segments instead - despite those aggressive announcements of the past. (In January last year, for example, the company said it will make inroads into 27 different countries by 2013. Mikitani regularly claims his final aim is to build the world’s biggest Internet company.) Things are going quite well in Japan, but on a global level, Rakuten will have a tough time. The big competitors will certainly not cede markets such as Latin America, Africa, India or South East Asia to them standing by and doing nothing. In the US and core markets in Europe, Amazon dominates. In China, Taobao already established itself with 120 million users. For the time being, there shouldn’t be a realistic chance for external players to win these markets over. This is true even for a conglomerate like Rakuten and its charismatic leader (who, in addition, still has to deal with a pretty strong service called Amazon domestically). Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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| Way Too Competitive: Tech Gurus Flock To World Series Of Poker Posted: 05 Jul 2009 11:02 AM PDT 6,000 or so people have congregated at the Rio hotel in Las Vegas for this year’s World Series of Poker to fight for $50 million or so that will be split among the last 10% of players left standing. Among them are a number of tech startup entrepreneurs. We’re tracking four of them, plus any others that pop up. This is David Sacks’ third WSOP. Sacks, a former PayPal exec and the CEO of Geni/Yammer, walked away with nothing two years ago. Last year he took home $25k in prize money, and twittered every hand. This year he’s way up after the first day, with $91k in chips. That likely puts him in the top 10% of players. He is twittering summaries of his play at @davidsacks. You can see his player card here with last year’s results.
Facebook exec Chamath Palihapitiya is playing beginning today as well. And we’ve heard but haven’t verified that former Yahoo exec David Goldberg (currently CEO of SurveyMonkey) is at the WSOP too. The tournament has just started so there isn’t much to report yet. One concern we have - Sacks is set to speak at our real time event this Friday, which is day three of the tournament. He told me today that if he makes it to day three he “has to play,” and won’t make the event. My response? It was NSFW. Good luck to everyone. Except Sacks. I hope he loses it all on day 2. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| Since March, Internet Explorer Lost 11.4 Percent Share To Firefox, Safari, And Chrome Posted: 05 Jul 2009 10:10 AM PDT The new browser wars on on. More than a decade after Microsoft killed off Netscape with Internet Explorer, competition in the browser market has never been stronger. Just last week, Mozilla released Firefox 3.5, which has now been downloaded nearly 14 million times. Earlier in June, Apple released Safari 4. In March, Microsoft introduced Internet Explorer 8, and Google came out with a speedier beta of its Chrome browser. Some early data is coming in showing relative market share and how fast people are upgrading. If you look at the chart above from Statcounter, it indicates that since March Internet Explorer has lost 11.4 percent market share to other browsers. That is the combined market share of IE8, IE7, and IE6. Certainly IE8 (the light blue line) has been growing strong since its release last March, capturing 16.7 percent of the market as of July 4. Those strong gains make up for most of the drop in IE7’s market share from 49.1 percent in March to 30.1 percent yesterday, indicating that Microsoft is doing a good job of getting existing IE7 users to upgrade at a steady pace. And in mid-June, IE8 finally surpassed IE6, which still stubbornly holds a 7.6 percent share. Add those three up, (IE6+IE7+IE8), however, and IE all together holds only a 54.4 percent market share versus the 65.8 percent combined share in March, 2009. In just over three months, Internet Explorer has seen its overall market share erode by 11.4 percent. Where did that go? It went to Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. Nearly 5 percent of that, or about half, went to Firefox 3.0, which currently has 27.6 percent market share. That doesn’t count last week’s upgrade. See the dotted line just below the light blue IE8 line? That is a combined set of “other” browsers and appears to include Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, and Chrome 2.0. If you look at a 30-day version of that same chart, it shows Safari 4 with 4 percent market share and Chrome with 3 percent market share. It doesn’t yet break out Firefox 3.5, but if you assume that makes up the bulk of the remaining dotted line which jumped to nearly pass IE6 in the past week, you can figure out more or less which browsers are taking share from Microsoft. (I’ve used data from the most recent daily chart in this post, but embedded the monthly chart below which has data as of June 30). As I said, this is early data from one source. Net Applications, another commonly cited source for browser market share, is currently reviewing its June numbers, but I have a feeling they will show similar trends. (This Wikipedia page shows other browser market share sources, most of them haven’t been updated since March). It is difficult to make any firm conclusions at this point, since market share is shifting so rapidly as every major (and minor) browser tries to convince users to upgrade. But we are in the midst of a major upgrade cycle simultaneously across IE, FireFox, and Safari (with the Chrome wild card thrown in). When all is said and done, we might see a major shake-up in market share and almost definitely will see leadership pass from IE7 to another browser. The question is will that be IE8 or Firefox? Whichever one wins, the good news is that IE6 is finally dying.
Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Browser Version Market Share Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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