Moonfruit Finally Exits...

In the white heat of the current tech market it’s sometimes easy to forget that some companies, although taking their time, simply become viable businesses – instead of waiting for a call from Facebook or Twitter that may never come. I’ve been covering web site and shop builder Moonfruit for longer than I care to remember (they launched in 2000), but along the way husband and wife team Joe and Wendy White kept on pushing the company until it was one of the most innovative of its kind out there. Today that hard work is rewarded in Moonfruit’s acquisition by directories giant Yell for $29 million (£18m) in cash. Unusually for a UK acquisition announcement, Yell has also made the golden hand-cuffs explicit for the founders. Retention bonuses of £5.2m (£2.7m grossed up) will be paid to Moonfruit’s executive management team of Joe White, Eirik Pettersen and Wendy Tan-White after two years, provided that they remain exclusively employed by Yell. Most people know Yell as a yellow pages directory for its 1.3 million SME customers. Clearly what it must become to survive in the era of Google is a online marketplace providing not just listings but business tools for that market. Over 5 million sites and 230,000 shops have been built using Moonfruit, which is now the no. 1 hosted site builder in the UK, and has seen over 1.5 million sites built in the US. It’s also build a very sticky Facebook integration . While the competition includes Weebly and Yola (rebranded from Synthasite) in the US Moonfruit has been profitable on a subscription model, these competitors have entered the market more recently and are focused on a free, no ads model. There is also the German-born Jimdo which has since concentrated on Asia. Moonfruit has moved towards a freemium model, with a premium upgrade path for users, but with a new advanced HTML5 engine that build not just sites but shops and mobile versions. Moonfruit’s engine will be a key component of Yell’s new “eMarketplace” strategy comprising a platform and portal where consumers and SMEs can connect and transact. Yell already has an enterprise commerce solution in the form of Znode, an Ohio company it acquired last year for $19.2 million (£12 million). What Yell did not have however was the ability for customer to create “light” commerce and web presence services in the way Moonfruit had. Both parties seem to win out of this deal. Yell gets a much better offering for SMEs which pulls them out of the pit of just being a classifieds provider, while it accelerates Moonfruit’s own expansion worldwide, building on its growth in the UK and US. Mike Pocock, Chief Executive Officer of Yell, said: “The addition of Moonfruit’s services and team helps us provide competitive advantage to our global SME customers in connecting with consumers through digital, mobile and social.” Moonfruit took £1.57 million in funding in 2010 from US investment bank Stephens and Silicon Valley based angels including Dave McClure of 500 Startups, Robbie Van-Adibe and Theorem. The value of the assets, which are the subject of the transaction, as reflected on Moonfruit’s balance sheet as at 31 December 2011, is £4.88 million. For the year ended 31 December 2011, Sitemaker Software Limited, Moonfruit’s wholly-owned subsidiary, made a loss before tax of £1.26 million. As Wendy Tan White told us: “All the partnership conversations we had in the US became acquisition conversations, we had several players on the table but Yell’s offer was the best, all cash, clean exit for all our investors and they’ve incentivised us to stay and help them turn a very cash generative, global directory and print business into a global digital services player. “Basically it seemed like a fun, challenge for at least the next 2 years. They feel like a ‘corporate startup’, lot’s of resources but taking the risks to turnaround their business. They feel in a similar space to Prudential which disrupted UK retail banking with Egg, the first UK internet bank – that was my first taste of a startup project.” “We were also swayed by the fact they are British headquartered but 50% of their customers are in the US. I felt like we weren’t selling out to the US but we will get the US and global distribution we were looking for. We like a challenge! We may well be hanging out in Seattle for a while so we’ll get more US tech experience. And who knows what we’ll do next!” Last year Yell had had 1.3m SME customers, £2bn in revenue, £500m EBITDA and £250m free cash flow on top of £200m reserves. But they need to move from their old directory and print business to digital services like Moonfruit’s. Yell now has a new Chief Digital Officer who was ex-president of MSN and Yahoo Media based in Seattle, where the Whites will report into. It’s all a long way from giving away MacBooks Airs on Twitter in 2009, but it looks like the plan came together in the end.

Factual Releases Three ...

Open data platform  Factual.com  is beefing up its Global Places offering today with three new APIs that will provide mobile developers with access to a ton of new data which can help them build better location-aware apps. But the company notes that the APIs’ launch will be of special interest to mobile ad providers, including mobile ad networks, demand-side platforms and agencies, who are looking for new data points around geography. This is particularly important on mobile where traditional methods of ad targeting – beacons and cookies – aren’t viable. The Geopluse API (beta) is the first of three, and works to reveal directionally where users intend to go, rather than signaling their arrival at a destination. The API provides everything Factual knows about the location. You provide it latitude and longitude, and Factual returns additional attributes which it calls “pulses.” These pulses use Factual’s network of signals, calculated metrics, and census data, which come from Factual itself, publicly-available data, or from third parties. The first few “pulses” to become available include: Factual Commercial Density: Relative density of businesses near a location Factual Commercial Profile: Types of businesses near a location Nearest: provides the nearest Factual Place (a business or landmark) Demographics: Age, gender, race, median household income for a given location (U.S. only) The more interesting ones here are the Factual Commercial Density and Factual Commercial Profile. The company has taken its Places data and provided overviews of the density and type of businesses in the area. A potential use case for this API could involve a brand like Starbucks, which wants to know when, where and to whom it should serve its ads to in order to get the highest yield and conversions. With the API, the company would know not only the exact location of the consumer (the latitude and longitude), but also all the contextual info about and around the location, too. More “pulses” will arrive in the next few months. Factual says that pricing will depend on use case and usage volume. The second API is the  Reverse Geocoder API  (beta) which converts longitude and latitude into an address (U.S. only) or region (49 other countries). There a a few of these out there already from Google, Yahoo and MapQuest, Factual notes. While the company says that it does not see itself getting into the mapping business, it does see a need to serve its own API to complement the other offerings in its Places product. Finally, there is the world World Geographies API (beta) which is primarily used to translate place names between languages, and determine what cities are found in what regions, what states in what countries, etc. This is another complementary service, as Factual has already published small businesses and landmarks. This adds 6 million more natural and administrative geographies. Factual admits that there are a few other players that have similar products to those it announced today, but wants to differentiate itself with data (especially in terms of the Commercial Density data, above), speed and scale. The company claims to provide near real-time access to these datasets well-under 100ms.

BBC Worldwide Extends I...

BBC Worldwide , the commercial arm of the BBC, today announced an extension of its relationship with social, online TV site Viki . On the heels of a strategic investment it made last year — BBC Worldwide participated in a $20 million Series B round that also included SK Planet, Greylock Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures, Neoteny Labs and others — and a content licensing deal, now BBC Worldwide will also working on advertising for Viki. Through its BBC Advertising arm, the BBC will be pooling together ad inventory from its own BBC Worldwide operations with that of Viki, which is accessed in over 200 countries and offers TV shows, movies and other premium content in over 150 languages — with those translations powered by its user base. The deal will mean that BBC can add further scale to its own advertising operations to target a class of larger advertisers looking to reach that international audience on a wide scale. The agreement covers Viki’s operations in Asia, Europe and the Americas, the companies said, and has already resulted in one successful campaigns trialled in South East Asia for Coca Cola, Procter & Gamble and Samsung. Viki provides a kind of open-source approach to world-wide video consumption: it gets the rights to TV shows, films and music videos and then volunteers in its community use Viki’s software to provide subtitles for that content. That content is then broadcast online, on mobile and via smart TVs. Viki says that to date some one billion videos have been viewed on its service, with some 200 million words translated. But that is a very long-tail approach to online video — and while Razmig Hovaghimian, CEO and co-founder of Viki, says its viewership is growing “by millions each month,” that is happening across a massive footprint that might otherwise be difficult to sell against for advertising. Working with another partner like the BBC can help consolidate some of that audience in different national markets. On the other side of the equation — the content side — Viki has amassed an impressive list of partners for sourcing the original content. In addition to BBC Worldwide, it also features Korean dramas, Japanese Anime, Spanish novellas, Bollywood, and independent films, including distribution deals with Hulu, Netflix, Yahoo and MSN; and from NBC, A&E; TVB in Hong Kong, SBS in South Korea, Fuji TV in Japan and Amedia in Russia.

Quora Raises $50M At $4...

Q&A site Quora has raised $50 million at a $400 million pre-money valuation  according to a report  by the Wall Street Journal and confirmed to me by the founders themselves. We had reported that Quora was raising in this range  back in April and it looks like Facebook board member Peter Thiel has beat out many other investors including a much-rumored KPCB to lead the round. Also investing is Matrix’s Josh Hannah and Northbridge’s Jonathan Heiliger . According to our own sources, Quora co-founder Adam D’Angelo put $20 million of his own money into the Series B financing. Thiel is leading personally and not through Founders Fund, breaking up the remaining $30 million between Matrix and Northbridge. “Thiel added a lot of value to Facebook,” D’Angelo said about the Thiel investment, “And he’s been very helpful to us in the past. He understands these kinds of companies.” The participation of  Wikihow co-founder Hannah is also interesting to note, as he is painfully familiar with the Q&A space, through his WikiHow and eHow investments. “Quora is a phenomenal resource to capture and share all the information where there are multiple points of view,” Hannah told me over the phone, “The Yahoo Answers and Answers.coms of the world have all fallen down to the lowest common denominator because of pandering to search traffic. Quora’s long-term vision to take the high road and create a platform for high quality discourse completely differentiates it from competitors.” D’Angelo tells me that he’s going use the money to scale and grow the company even further, “It lets us focus on the long-term. And helps us build a really good team.” According to AppData , 20K daily active users and 180K monthly active users log into Quora through Facebook Connect — Bear in mind that this is a small fraction of its total number of users, which Cheever and D’Angelo famously never reveal. “[The site] grows every week,” D’Angelo said, “I don’t really think of mainstream as a binary thing. I think that as it grows bigger, more and more people will use it to tell their stories.”

Yahoo announces big dat...

One day following the news that Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson will step down due to controversy over his resume embellishments, the company announced the scheduled debut of a solution called Genome in July.