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Spotify Says ‘No’ To Sales Rumor
June 20, 2016 by admin
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Daniel Ek, co-founder of Swedish music streaming service Spotify which boasts the largest paid subscriber base in the world, said on Thursday he had no intention of selling the company.
While investors believe privately owned Spotify is probably heading for a public listing, some industry analysts see the loss-making company as a takeover target for a larger tech giant with deeper pockets.
“My selfish ambition with Spotify is just trying to show … that we can create one of those super companies here in Europe,” he told journalists at the symposium Brilliant Minds, which aims to bring artists and musicians together with the tech community.
Asked if that meant he was not up for selling the firm, Ek said: “I’m not going to sell, no.”
Spotify, founded in 2006, pays more than 80 percent of its revenue to record labels and artists and has not yet shown a profit as it spends to grow internationally. It competes in a business crowded with formidable rivals such as Apple Music, Google Music and YouTube.
Many other European tech start-ups have been swallowed up by bigger Silicon Valley competitors.
Ek said Silicon Valley got an earlier start in building up its tech giants but that Europe finally has the right conditions to support its own entrepreneurs.
“For the first time now there’s an ecosystem around it with capital and experience that can actually help guide entrepreneurs,” he said.
“The number one advice I tell everyone is ‘don’t sell’, because that’s the biggest problem we have. All these things could grow gigantic if you just kept the course and kept doing what you’re doing,” he added.
Last year Spotify made an operating loss of 184.5 million euros ($205 million), widening from 165.1 million in 2014.
Spotify, whose investors include Northzone, DST Global and Accel, does not disclose details about its ownership but the co-founders no longer own a majority, having sold off stakes.
Courtesy-http://www.thegurureview.net/aroundnet-category/spotify-says-no-to-sales-rumor.html
Facebook Buys Onavo
October 25, 2013 by admin
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Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been shopping again. This time he picked up Onavo, the Tel Aviv based startup whose apps include services designed to monitor and compress mobile data.
The move will benefit Zuckerberg’s interests at two levels. With Facebook keenly emphasising its mobile credentials, the Onavo service could persuade doubters that it’s time to give the service a go.
Meanwhile his Internet.org initiative plans to bring internet connectivity to the parts that other means just can’t reach. Compression technology might make Facebook a viable option in parts of the developing world where data is an expensive luxury, while for the rest of us the prospect of lower roaming charges might be enticing.
As well as being a new subsidiary of Facebook, Onavo will become a satellite office for Facebook in Tel Aviv, the first time it has had a direct presence in Israel. So far there’s no information on how much money has changed hands, but figures of between $100m and $200m have been mentioned.
In a blog post, Onavo said, “We’re excited to join their team, and hope to play a critical role in reaching one of Internet.org’s most significant goals – using data more efficiently, so that more people around the world can connect and share.
“When the transaction closes, we plan to continue running the Onavo mobile utility apps as a standalone brand. As always, we remain committed to the privacy of people who use our application and that commitment will not change.”
However, we might speculate that the technology involved could also be integrated into mobile Facebook apps to make them more data efficient, luring more people to share their lives as they live them.
Yahoo On A Buying Spree
Yahoo has purchased a mobile gaming company, Loki Studios, taking its total acquisitions this month to four.
The company said over the weekend it welcomed Loki, Astrid, GoPollGo and MileWise to its growing mobile team. “We recently added 22 entrepreneurs to our growing mobile team,” the company said in a Twitter message in a possible reference to some of the people from the four companies who have moved to Yahoo.
Loki’s flagship application is its location-aware game, Geomon. “We are thrilled to be joining the exceptional folks at Yahoo!. We believe fully in their commitment to creating outstanding mobile products,” the Loki team said on their website.
Earlier in the week, Yahoo also acquired GoPollGo, a social polling tool. The company’s founder and team said they were moving to Yahoo, and would no longer be supporting their offerings.
It is not clear whether Yahoo has bought all these companies for their products and technology or just to get their experienced staff in the area of mobile as it tries to build up its own mobile capabilities. The way the services are being shut down suggests that their user base did not particularly interest Yahoo. The company could not be immediately reached for comment.
LinkedIn DropS BWP API
February 18, 2013 by admin
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LinkedIn has shut off its API access to “Bang With Professionals,” a Web service that was intended to facilitate more, say, intimate connections among users of the business-oriented social networking site.
The service was designed to allow LinkedIn users to anonymously search for people in their LinkedIn network who would be interested in meeting up for casual sex.
“We all had a good laugh,” the founders of Bang With Professionals said on last Friday on the website, less than a month after its launch. “We all knew it was a matter of time before our API key was revoked.”
LinkedIn said it shut off API (application programming interface) access for the free site, which was intended to work on all desktops and mobile devices, because it violated the social network’s terms of use in a manner that was “inconsistent with the goals of our developer program.”
Among other things, API access isn’t allowed for any application that contains or displays adult content.
Data about the site’s 6,000 subscribers is safe and all their user IDs have been deleted, the founders said. The only thing that remains now is the site’slanding page.
The origins of Bang With Professionals are not unique in the fast-paced social networking landscape. The site was built “by two guys in three days,” the landing page says. The total launch cost was US$57: $40 for stock images, $12 for the domain name and $5 for an account on the server CloudFlare.
The Twitter handle for the site has since been deactivated, but at press time, the Bang With Professionals blog on Tumblr was still accessible.