Apple And China Mobile ...

The iPhone might be coming to the world’s largest mobile carrier, China Mobile. The world comes from Bloomberg quoting China Mobile’s chairman. The report also details that the phone might not hit the carrier’s 655 million subscribers yet this year. But the two sides are talking. That’s a start. Apple needs China Mobile and China Mobile needs Apple. “China Mobile and Apple both have the will to strengthen cooperation,” Xi said. “When there is more specific news, we will disclose it.” As Bloomberg notes, one of the sticking points has to do with China Mobile’s proprietary network that’s not friendly with the iPhone’s mobile radios. China Mobile is currently rolling out 4G service but only in six cities so far; three more cities are slated to get it this year. The rollout kicks into high gear next year with plans to expand the 4G base stations from 900 units to 200,000. Although China Mobile is the country’s, and the world’s, largest mobile carrier, its 3G network is starting to show its age relative to newer, faster 4G networks. A 4G iPhone is exactly what China Mobile needs to keep up with the times. The iPhone is already a hit in China even without China Mobile. Apple revenue in China is up threefold year-over-year for Apple. In fact, Apple has reported more revenue in China so far this year than it did all of last. Getting the iPhone on China Mobile is likely a top priority of Cook and Co. Cook said in the October 2011 earnings call : “For China — the sky’s the limit there. I’ve never seen so many people rise into the middle class who aspire to buy Apple products.”

Enterprise, Video Led T...

Instagram, Schminstagram. While flashy consumer deals keep getting all the headlines, it was actually cloud computing, enterprise and video that fueled the biggest deals of last quarter’s $25.1 billion in mergers and acquisitions, according to top-tier accounting firm Ernst & Young. The total value of all deals fell by 12 percent from the year before while the number of deals was about the same, according to a report the firm published today. While that’s not too huge a drop, the firm attributes it to “ongoing economic uncertainty.” (Thanks Greece.) Quarterly deal volume has apparently reached a plateau after two years of growth and is being restrained by concerns about the macroeconomic climate. If you’re curious what the biggest deals of last quarter were, here are they below. The leaderboard is topped by enterprise deals like  Cisco’s $5 billion agreement to buy NDS Group and Oracle’s $2 billion deal to buy Taleo , which helps companies manage recruiting.  There is also a consumer-facing deal in there with Youku , China’s version of YouTube, merging with its rival Tudou Holdings Ltd. for $1.1 billion in a pending acquisition. Instagram’s $1 billion deal doesn’t count because it happened after the quarter ended. If it was here, it would show up in seventh place. Ernst & Young says there are five megatrends driving deal-making. Basically, they include smart mobility, cloud computing, social networking and “big data” analytics. Shocker. Then there is one extra one, which Ernst calls “blur” or ”convergence, as technology sectors come together and the technology industry enters other industries as enabling innovation.” (Yes, “blur” is a big trend these days. Haven’t you heard?) Cloud computing and software-as-a-service deals had both the biggest number of deals and the biggest transaction sizes. The biggest deal of the quarter looped in both trends. Cisco’s $5 billion deal to get NDS will give the Silicon Valley networking giant a video software and content security solutions provider that’s a backbone of pay TV industry . The Tudou-Youku deal also skews the size of video and online gaming transactions. The Americas led most of the acquisitions, with 75 percent of global deal volume and 87 percent of global deal value. Buyers in Asia also tended to buy targets in other parts of the world. M&A activity dropped off dramatically in Europe thanks to continuing economic malaise there. Joe Steger, who leads global technology industry transaction advisory services, says the overall economic climate will keep M&A activity flat or slow this year. So here are a few more charts from the report: Again, here’s another way to look at how software-as-a-service is leading deals, representing $11.5 billion of all the target companies. Overall, there were were a few really large deals in the $1 billion-plus range that drove overall transactions up. There were also many more deals that didn’t have disclosed prices this quarter. Something that should keep things exciting for the rest of the year is the huge pile of cash the world’s biggest technology companies are accumulating. Ernst & Young estimates that the top 25 tech companies in the world have $668 billion in cash between them, up from $571 billion the year before. (Thanks Apple.) That should give bigger companies room to write checks for interesting targets. Europe actually was a net seller as many U.S. buyers picked up companies from across the pond. NDS, for example, originally was founded in Israel.

In First Report As A Pu...

In its first-ever earnings report as a publicly traded company, mobile advertising network Millennial Media said its net loss for the first quarter widened to $4 million  on increased costs. Revenues were up 53 percent year-over-year to $32.9 million. Millennial’s shares fell by 7.7 percent in after-hours trading, as the company’s annual forecast missed estimates.  For the year, Millennial is looking at $173 million and 176 million in annual revenues, which would be up by 68 percent from the year before. But that’s actually lower than the $202.8 million analysts were expecting on average, according to a Bloomberg survey. When the company went public two months ago, its shares popped more than 100% on the first day and gave the company a nearly $2 billion valuation . Since then, they’ve settled and fallen by 67 percent, giving the company a market cap of $1.16 billion. Millennial didn’t share much about eCPMs, a key metric that shows how much the company is earning per 1,000 ad impressions. It’s worth noting because many other consumer web giants including Google and Facebook are facing downward pressure on their average ad prices because mobile rates are so much lower than their desktop equivalents. Google’s cost-per-click growth (or the amount it earns every time a user clicks through on an ad) was down 12 percent year-over-year and down 6 percent quarter-over-quarter — largely because of the difference between mobile and web ads. Facebook similarly had to change its IPO filing last week to say that mobile usage was growing so fast that the company is not able to keep up with the pace in terms of how many ads it serves . Many Facebook pages on the web have as many as seven ads on them, while the mobile app just shows sponsored stories occasionally in the feed. Millennial didn’t share any numbers that would help us understand how the company is coping with these issues, except to say that better targeting is helping. “Overall, there is a mix and a shift toware more targeting and engaging ads, which have driven prices up for us,” the chief executive Paul Palmieri said on the call. As for the quarter itself, about $20.1 million of Millennial’s revenue came from existing clients, while the rest came from new customers. Millennial Media’s footprint is still very U.S. based. Only 12 percent of revenues come from abroad, although they’re growing with help from European markets. The company said fill rates are up as the company expands abroad. Before, those impressions would go unfilled because Millennial didn’t have a large sales team outside of the U.S.

Europe’s ‘OpenTable’ Li...

Livebookings , the restaurant booking and marketing service that competes with services like OpenTable, is announcing today that it has picked up another $24 million (£15 million) in funding to continue growing its business in Europe and beyond. The news highlights two trends we’ve seen emerging recently around here: companies dedicated to eating out are not going hungry in the current economic climate; and the more local, European counterparts to U.S.-based tech companies are getting a lot of attention from investors and consumers. Today’s round of funding, Livebookings’ fourth, is being led by existing investors Balderton Capital, Wellington Partners and Ekstranda and takes the total amount raised by the company to about $62 million . Colin Tenwick, CEO of Livebookings, has said that the funding will be used to fuel further growth. Existing business areas include online reservations and other restaurant services such as customer database management, email marketing campaigns, and the creation of special offers, and that menu of services may be getting longer: “Over the last 18 months we have put in place the engines that drive growth by investing in the development of new products, building a larger sales force and implementing new customer support systems to facilitate the growing customer base,” Tenwick said in a statement. “The market-leading increase in dined covers, customers and revenue is testament to this strategy and the new funds will help us to increase our market leading position, deliver the most innovative products to the marketplace and drive even more incremental revenue for our customers.” The company, headquartered in London, has operations in 23 countries including the U.S. and across Europe. Livebookings offers booking services directly to consumers, as well as through 300 distribution partners, including tastecard, Afternoon Tea and Eniro.se. In all there are 9,000 restaurants and chains powering online booking and other services through Livebookings. Livebookings does not disclose current revenues, nor whether it is yet profitable, but it notes that in Q1 it saw record sales numbers, with revenues up 34 percent compared to the same quarter a year before. At the same time, the number of seated diners booked through the site went up 65 percent to 3.8 million; and Bookatable, its consumer-facing website, exceeded one million visits for the first time in the quarter for its service that operates in nine languages across 19 countries. While it almost seems counter-intuitive for a businesses dedicated to eating out and spending more money to be thriving in the current economic climate in Europe, this isn’t the first time this has been noted. Just-Eat , a service that aggregates take-out/food delivery services from different restaurants, picked up $64 million in a third round of funding in April. Just-Eat said at the time that it was generating $750 million in sales generation annually. And while U.S. companies are also taking a big bite out of European business, they are not taking it all. Just as Qype is claiming that it is actually doing significantly better than Yelp in Europe, Livebookings is also giving OpenTable a run for its money and claims to be the European leader in the field. Still it should be noted that while growth is still coming for Livebookings, it looks like it may be slowing down somewhat: when the company announced its last round of funding, $10 million in April 2011 , it noted that restaurant reservations went up by 92 percent over the year, compared to 65 percent growth this year.

Dropbox Kicks Off Its B...

Last year, nearly half a million completed Dropbox ‘s very first “Dropquest.” This time, designer Jon Ying and engineer Rajeev Nayak say they “honestly don’t know” how many people will participate, but with the company’s rapid growth , it’s a safe bet that the number will be bigger. Nayak describes Dropquest as “a gift to our users.” It’s an online scavenger hunt where you solve logic puzzles while also learning about Dropbox’s key features. Everyone who finishes gets 1 extra gigabyte of free storage, and there are other prizes for the players who finish first — the grand prize winner will get a Dropbox employee hoodie, a Dropbox Hack Week T-shirt, a drawing signed by the entire Dropbox team, an invitation to write the next Dropquest, and a 100 gigabytes of free storage for life. It sounds like you’re going to have to work for that free storage, however — the game is designed to take 12 hours to complete. That’s about how long it was supposed to take last year, too, but someone finished in three hours. This year, it’s longer and more challenging, thanks to additional, harder puzzles, but Ying and Nayak admit there’s still some debate about exactly how long it will take. Puzzles aren’t the only new feature: There’s also a post-apocalyptic science fictional storyline. Dropquest is a product of the company’s Hack Week in March, where employees can work on whatever they want. This year, one week wasn’t enough to complete the game, so Ying and Nayak say they’ve continued working on-and-off on the game in the two months since. The contest starts at 10am Pacific time and will be online for three weeks — but don’t be late if you want one of the big prizes. You can read more about Dropquest here and play the game here (the second link goes live at 10).