Singapore's SingTel Wants To Pump Another $1.6B Into Startup Investments
Singapore’s largest telecoms provider, SingTel, plans to set aside $1.6 billion (S$2 billion) over the next three years for startup acquisitions. Like those it has made in recent years, these are expected to be in the digital media space. All of these can be tracked back to the major restructuring of SingTel’s business arms last year, where it divided itself into three pillars called Consumer, ICT and Digital Life. The first two focus on consumer and enterprise segments, respectively, but the Digital Life arm is most representative of the change. The division was set up as a reaction to over-the-top competition from third party content providers, and SingTel said Digital Life was going to compete head on, providing smart TV, digital magazines and local content. Some of acquisitions so far include restaurant review sites, Hungrygowhere and Eatability, and photo app Pixable. SingTel has also been bullish as a VC. In 2010, it set up a separate venture arm called Innov8 to specifically look ...
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Baidu Confirms $370M Purchase Of PPS, Underscoring Online Video's Importance For Internet Companies Around The World
After weeks of rumors, Baidu finally confirmed today that it has acquired the online video business of Shanghai-based PPS for $370 million. PPS will be merged into iQiyi, Baidu’s video platform Baidu, to form China’s largest online video platform by the number of mobile users and video viewing time. The sale is expected to close in the second quarter of 2013. PPS will continue to operate as a brand of iQiyi. The deal allows Baidu to step up its competition with video platform Youku-Tudou. At the end of last month, before Baidu had officially announced the deal, Youku-Tudou president Dele Liu made a statement about his company’s competitors: “After the success and synergy created by the Youku Tudou merger, increasing consolidation was inevitable throughout the video industry. We are happy to see this purchase go forward, we expect this acquisition will further rationalize the industry and help reduce piracy in the sector.” Despite the somewhat cheeky tone of Liu’s comment, the ...
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Braintree Poaches Google Wallet Co-Creator Rob von Behren From Square
Braintree, the Chicago-based payments gateway that’s processing about $2 billion in mobile transactions per year, just poached one of Google Wallet’s creators Rob von Behren from Square. Von Behren was one of the co-founders of Google Wallet, the NFC-centric mobile payment system that was designed to let consumers pay directly for goods and services with their smartphones. Wallet hasn’t seen widespread traction thanks to the often conflicting motivations of carriers, banks, credit card companies and Google. But there were also internal politics too, which led to a diaspora of Google Wallet team members out into startups and growth-stage companies like Square and Braintree. At Braintree, von Behren says he’ll be working on their mobile e-commerce platform. “Smartphones are pervasive in developed economies, and people use them all the time while making purchasing decisions — but actually buying things with your phone is still really painful in most situations,” he said. Braintree ...
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Benchmark's Bill Gurley: “Uber Is Growing Faster Than eBay Did”
Today at Disrupt NY 2013, Benchmark partner Bill Gurley shared an interesting fact about Uber. “Uber is growing faster than eBay did,” Gurley said. In 1997, Benchmark invested $6.7 million in eBay. It was worth more than $5 billion less than two years later. Benchmark is also an investor in Uber. “Uber is probably the fastest growing company that we’ve ever had,” Gurley said. He insisted a lot on the quality of the product. If a company builds a good product, it will grow organically. Benchmark took part in Uber’s Series A and Series B rounds of respectively $11 million and $37 million. Gurley seemed very satisfied with this investment and only had good things to say about the car company. “The product is so good, there is no one spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on marketing,” Gurley said. eBay and Uber are both consumer companies that have reached a lot of customers in a very short time. It contrasts a lot with his comments about the past failures of the tech industry. ...
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Liberty Global's $15.8B Acquisition Of Virgin Media Is Sailing Through EU Antitrust Court
Reuters has reported, and TechCrunch has now confirmed with an independent source close to the situation, that the European Union's competition commission is approving the deal for Liberty Global to buy UK's Virgin Media for $15.75 billion, first announced in February when it was calculated to be worth up to $23.3 billion with debt factored in. As we understand it, there will be no antitrust conditions put on the merger, a crucial step for the two companies to close the deal more quickly.
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