LINKS 4/30: SAP's new CIO is only 31; Bloomberg knocks some consumer subscription services for lack of transparency

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The Future of Shopping:
Trapping You in a Club You Didn't Know You Joined (Bloomberg)
A knock on some consumer subscription services, including those of two First Round Capital portfolio companies.

Most of Yahoo’s shortlisted bidders reportedly offering cash deals
(VentureBeat)
Liberty Media said to be on short list, though I'm not sure its made a bid yet.

SAP Taps Thomas Saueressig to Succeed Helen Arnold as CIO (WSJ: CIO Journal)
SAP's new CIO is all of 31 years old.

Why image recognition is about to transform business (TechCrunch)



1

Rovi, with significant Philly area presence and roots, buys TiVo

Tom Paine

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Rovi, which yesterday announced it was acquiring TiVo for $1.1 billion, is based in San Carlos, CA, but has a strong Philly connection.

Of some 1000+ US employees, about 200 are located in the Philly area, according to Rovi's LinkedIn page .

Presumably, most are based in Rovi's location on East Swedesford Rd in Wayne, in view of Route 202.



What exactly Rovi does in Wayne, as opposed to its other locations, at this time is not entirely clear.

Much of Rovi's presence here can be traced to its (when it was called Macrovision) acquisition of Gemstar-TV Guide International in 2008. Gemstar-TV Guide was a 1999 combination of Radnor-based TV Guide (which Rupert Murdoch's News Corp bought as part its acquisition of Walter Annenberg's Triangle Publications for $3 billion in 1988) and Gemstar, and aimed to dominate not only the market for TV schedule listings but also the codes used to record programs to DVRs.

However, Gemstar-TV Guide shrunk in value in the circa-2000 tech crash and never really recovered. Gemstar's market capitalization fell from a high of $20 billion in 2000 to a low of little more than $1 billion in 2005.

Comcast and Gemstar-TV Guide International formed a joint venture in 2004, GuideWorks, LLC, to create and market interactive program guides for digital cable television, with Comcast owning a majority stake in the venture.

Rovi pulled out of the Guideworks joint venture in 2010.

Rovi, much like TiVo, exerts considerable effort protecting and gently reminding others of its presumed patent rights. In early April, Rovi filed suit against Comcast and its set-top suppliers, claiming they were infringing upon 14 of Rovi’s U.S. patents that deliver features such as remote recording, its AnyRoom DVR (multi-room) capabilities, and search for its X1 platform.

                                  Tom Carson
                                     Rovi President & CEO

John Burke, EVP & COO, appears to be Rovi's top ranking officer based out of Wayne. He
is a former top Motorola Home (now Arris) executive. Rovi President & CEO Tom Carson is a Villanova grad.

The combined company would take the TiVo name.

Links 4/29: Rovi to buy TiVo for $1.1 billion; PayPal Says Federal Trade Commission Investigating Venmo

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PayPal Says Federal Trade Commission Investigating Venmo (Bloomberg)

5 Lessons Venmo's Co-Founder Learned While Building a Twice-Acquired Company (Entrepreneur)

Rovi to buy DVR maker TiVo for $1.1 billion (Reuters)

TiVo is Dead. Long Live TiVo! (Zatz Not Funny)

Rovi Could Owe TiVo $36.6M if Deal Crumbles (Multichannel News)

Rovi Corporation Reports First Quarter 2016 Financial Results (Rovi)


Universal Pictures chief on Comcast's DreamWorks purchase: 'Movie business was everything they didn't like' (FierceCable)

EMC World: Sources Say EMC Will Target AWS S3 With New Easy Storage Connectivity To Virtustream (CRN)
A few months back, a prominent analyst basically zeroed out Virtustream's value to the 'EMC Federation.'

Ask Alexa what's playing on SyFy (Engadget)
SyFy, sn NBCU network, connects with Alexa in a way. Curious, though, at another small
sign of cooperation between a Comcast-owned property and Amazon.

Links 4/28: Amazon Web Services Forges Ahead; Cloudamize Secures Additional $1 Million in Financing

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Amazon Web Services Forges Ahead Like There Is No Competition (Fortune)

Cloudamize Secures Additional $1 Million in Financing to Fuel Growth Strategy (PR Web)
MissionOG Leads Funding; Jonathan Palmer Named to Board of Directors

Amazon plans to 'significantly' increase investment in video as it goes to war with Netflix (Business Insider)

Google Gets Beaten to the Punch by AT&T on Super-Fast Broadband (Bloomberg)

SpaceX Wins US Air Force Contract For GPS III Launch (Defense News)

How the Comcast-DreamWorks deal came together so fast (LA Times)


Qlik Tech Said to Draw Bids From Thoma Bravo, Bain, Permira (Bloomberg)

Amazon Seeing ‘Momentous’ Change of Guard as Public Cloud ‘Booms,’ Says JP Morgan (Barron's Tech Trader Daily)

Qlik Announces Strong First Quarter 2016 Financial Results (Qlik Technologies)

Oracle acquires Textura for $663 million; Will combine products with those of Bala Cynwyd-founded Primavera

Tom Paine

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Oracle today announced the acquisition of Deerfield, IL-based Textura for $663 million. Textura provides cloud services for the engineering and construction industry.

Textura's products will be combined with Oracle's existing Primavera project-management suite - the result of a 2008 acquisition - in the Oracle Engineering and Construction Global Business Unit, Oracle said.

Primavera, founded by Joel Koppelman, was based in Bala Cynwyd and still has a significant presence there, although I'm not sure of its scope. I've got a call into Oracle to find out more. Primavera became a primary player in the Project Portfolio Management market for large construction and engineering projects. Koppelman, a Drexel and Penn grad, was also a thought leader in the Project Portfolio Management field. I don't recall anyone offering up the exact price that Oracle paid for Primavera, but my recollection says it was at least a couple of hundred million dollars in a down market.

Koppleman stayed on briefly following the acquisition by Oracle before leaving the software business.

Textura is a bit like SAP's Ariba, but for engineering and construction projects. Textura’s cloud  processes $3.4 billion in payments for more than 6,000 projects each month, Oracle said, and more than 85,000 contractors and subcontractors are connected to the platform.

Oracle says it plans to continue to invest in the engineering and construction industry.

Comcast to acquire DreamWorks Animation

Tom Paine

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NBCUNIVERSAL ANNOUNCES DREAMWORKS ANIMATION ACQUISITION
(Comcast)

How the Comcast-DreamWorks deal came together so fast (LA Times)




-DreamWorks Animation valued at about $3.8 billion.

-"Acquisition builds on NBCUniversal’s presence in family and animation space. DreamWorks Animation to become unit of Universal Filmed Entertainment."

-Illumination Entertainment (unit of NBCUniversal) founder Chris Meledandri to "help guide the growth of the DreamWorks Animation business in the future."

-Jeffrey Katzenberg will become Chairman of DreamWorks New Media, which will be comprised of the company’s ownership interests in Awesomeness TV and NOVA.

-Agreement has been approved by the boards of directors of DreamWorks Animation and Comcast, and the controlling shareholder of DreamWorks Animation has approved the agreement by written consent.

-Transaction is expected to close by the end of 2016.


Update: WSJ reports that Dreamworks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg will step down from the company if Comcast acquires it. Presumably, this gives more substantiation to the entire acquisition scenario.

Comcast is reportedly in talks to buy DreamWorks Animation, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The reported price, if a deal occurred, would be more than $3 billion, a premium over the studio's current market value of $2.35 billion.

DreamWorks, founded in 2004 as a new kind of studio, has had some major successes, but is often perceived as too small for a stand alone studio. Like a small driller, it suffers if it hits a few dry wells. Last year a series of less than successful releases forced the company to cut 500 jobs, close its studio in Northern California and make management changes.

For Comcast, the deal would expand its successful animation business, with major implications for its theme parks and international expansion.

But the LA Times cautions that there have been several prior discussions by others with DreamWorks that ended without results.

The Journal suggests a deal would make Comcast a more formidable challenger to Disney in family entertainment, bringing back memories of its failed attempt to acquire Disney in 2004. Comcast reports earnings tomorrow, but rarely comments on breaking news at that time.

Links 4/27: Digital Ad Spending Surges to Record High; Amazon to open 2 NJ warehouses

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Oracle Combines Marketing Apps, Data Services (Fortune)

Digital Ad Spending Surges to Record High as Mobile and Social Grow More Than 50% (Ad Age)

Amazon to open 2 new facilities, provide 2,000 new jobs in N.J. (NJ.com)

Vox Media Names First CFO, Adds Former Yahoo President to Board (Bloomberg)

Venmo is growing ridiculously fast (Re/code)

Comcast earnings: Good sub growth and other items of interest

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Comcast posts earnings of 84 cents a share vs. 79 cents estimate (Reuters via CNBC)

Here's Why Comcast Just Reported Strong Earnings (Fortune)

Smit: Comcast Hasn’t Seen an OTT Model ‘That Really Hunts’ (Multichannel News)

Comcast Rising on Q1 Beat; What Might Synergies Be with DreamWorks? Asks B Riley (Barron's Tech Trader Daily)

Comcast raises trial data caps to a terabyte but won't commit to nationwide rollout (PCWorld)

Comcast reported in acquisItion talks with DreamWorks (Update: WSJ reports Katzenberg would step aside)

Tom Paine

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Update: WSJ reports that Dreamworks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg will step down from the company if Comcast acquires it. Presumably, this gives more substantiation to the entire acquisition scenario.

Comcast is reportedly in talks to buy DreamWorks Animation, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The reported price, if a deal occurred, would be more than $3 billion, a premium over the studio's current market value of $2.35 billion.

DreamWorks, founded in 2004 as a new kind of studio, has had some major successes, but is often perceived as too small for a stand alone studio. Like a small driller, it suffers if it hits a few dry wells. Last year a series of less than successful releases forced the company to cut 500 jobs, close its studio in Northern California and make management changes.

For Comcast, the deal would expand its successful animation business, with major implications for its theme parks and international expansion.

But the LA Times cautions that there have been several prior discussions by others with DreamWorks that ended without results.

The Journal suggests a deal would make Comcast a more formidable challenger to Disney in family entertainment, bringing back memories of its failed attempt to acquire Disney in 2004. Comcast reports earnings tomorrow, but rarely comments on breaking news at that time.

Links 4/26: Alibaba’s financial spinoff now world’s most valuable private internet company; Comcast earnings out in morning

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Alibaba’s financial spinoff is now the world’s most valuable private internet company (Quartz)

Comcast Q1: NBCU Film Weak, TV Ads Gain; Theme Parks Strong (Investor's Business Daily)

Comcast-backed start-up NextVR uses NAB to show it can take pay-TV viewers to the game (Daniel Frankel/ FierceCable)

Comcast WiFis with Wawa (Multichannel News)
Comcast/Wawa WiFi deal, though sponsored through Comcast Business, probably first time its offered consumer-reaching service beyond its footprint.

Time Warner's Turner Appeals to Film Nerds With Web-Only Service (Bloomberg)

ServiceMax brings performance metrics to field service (Diginomica)

Zuora moves to the center (Denis Pombriant/Enterprise Irregulars)

Philly Tech People News 4/26/2016: Tirico leaving ESPN for NBC Sports

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Mike Tirico is leaving ESPN for NBC Sports (Washington Post)

Jarecke-Cheng Named Global COO of Publicis Healthcare Comms. (O'Dwyer's)


Sungard Availability Services Appoints Randy J. Hendricks to Board of Directors (PR Newswire)
Exec at Workday.

Diez, after $20M PointRoll sale, heads to NY (Philly Deals)

Aqua America Welcomes New Chief Information Officer (Aqua America)


SmartThings poaches Amazon engineering director to start simplifying the smart home (The Verge)

Workday names Sisco CFO (ZDNet)


eMoney Advisor's CEO, Ed O'Brien, Named One of 25 of the Most Influential People in the Financial Advisory Industry (eMoney Advisor)


Fingerpaint Founder Ed Mitzen Named Industry Person of the Year at 2016 Med Ad News Manny Awards (Fingerpaint)
Fingerpaint is based in upstate New York, but has a significant Philly presence.

Thomas M. Montgomery Elected Senior Vice President and Comptroller (Ametek

Links 4/26: Regulators Approve Charter Communications Deal for Time Warner Cable; Microsoft, Dell reveal IoT plans

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Regulators Approve Charter Communications Deal for Time Warner Cable (NY Times)

Set Top Box Death Watch—Are You Kidding? (Rob Frieden / TeleFrieden)


Gannett Offers to Acquire Los Angeles Times Owner Tribune in $815M Deal (Hollywood Reporter)
People in Allentown can look forward to a slimmed-down Morrning Call if this deal goes through.

Newsonomics: After Gannett’s $815 million Tribune bid, here are eight things to look out for (Ken Doctor/Newsnomics)


SAP HANA enterprise cloud might even turn a profit in 2017
Rolling, two-year expansion planned for HEC (The Register)

After 16 Quarters Of Revenue Declines, When Will IBM Bounce Back? (Investor's Business Daily)


Microsoft extends the ‘Internet of Things’ to jet engines, refrigerators and more (GeekWire)

Dell Teams with GE, Microsoft, OSIsoft, PTC, SAP, Software AG and Others to Advance the Internet of Things (ARC Advisory Group)


Lutron lights up Amazon Echo’s life
(ReadWrite)

Electric Car Maker Fisker Has a New Name
(Fortune)
Not coming to Delaware any time soon (or probably never).

Uber drivers in N.J. want more flexibility (NorthJersey.com)

Uber has become the symbol of everything right and wrong with Silicon Valley today (Business Insider)

Remember the Inky / Daily News Android tablet?

Tom Paine

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Remember the days when the Inky/Daily News had its own tablet? (I can't remember under which reincarnation).

I wonder how many they sold? There are still probably some sitting in inventory somewhere.

It still lives on the Philly.com website.

Lutron President: The Best Leadership Advice I Ever Received (Fortune)

Lutron, based in Coopersburg Lehigh County PA, has become a star of the IoT world after more than 50 years in business.

Lutron has also made its Caséta Wireless system compatible with the Amazon Echo family of products.

Pepper Hamilton, Reed Smith end merger talks (Philadelphia Business Journal)

Fox, Disney, CBS, Time Warner, Viacom protest proposed FCC set-top box rules (LA Times: Company Town)

Linode: "Large DDoS attacks" in Tokyo (Frankfurt, London)

Tom Paine

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Linode has experienced some DDoS attacks recently in Tokyo, as its status report indicates:

We're currently working to mitigate another large DDoS attack causing connectivity issues and packet loss in Tokyo.
Posted about 14 hours ago. Apr 22, 2016 - 08:57 UTC

I reached out to Linode for comment, and received the following statement attributed to lead network engineer, Alex Forster:

"There were three attacks several hours apart, two of which lasted approximately a half hour and one of which lasted approximately one hour. Linode was being attacked directly, not any of our customers, and the effect of the attack was severe packet loss for a subset of customers (not all due to ECMP traffic hashing)."

"As many enterprises in the cloud can attest, DDoS attacks are ever more common in any shared hosting space. However, these latest hacks have been especially large. Even as we mitigate the attacks, we're working as outlined here to upgrade the Tokyo connectivity situation."

It is important to note that no further problems have been reported since that last report, and no other regions have been impacted.

But talk of "severe packet loss for a subset of customers" is a concern.


Saturday update: Have problems spread to Frankfurt?


Linode Status Report:


Identified
We've identified the cause of these connectivity issues as a large-scale DoS attack. We're working with our upstream provider to mitigate the attack and and harden our network in Frankfurt against further attacks and will provide updates as needed.
Apr 22, 13:07 UTC


The situation appears to have stabilized since then.


 Latest problem spot: London

Degraded Network Performance in London Incident Report for Linode

New Incident Status: Resolved The degraded network performance and packet loss that was affecting a subset of customers in our London datacenter has been identified as related to a large DoS attack that was directed at the entire London datacenter. This attack has been fully mitigated by our upstream provider at this time. Apr 23, 22:23 UTC

Why Dick's Sporting Goods decided to play its own game in e­commerce (TechRepublic)

LInks 4/21: AstraZeneca commits ‘hundreds of millions’ to sequencing genomes of 2M people over 10 years; Google Cast confirmed for Google Fiber hardware

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iCloud and Siri Teams at Odds as Apple Seeks to Move Cloud Services In-House (MacRumors)

Google Cast confirmed for Google Fiber hardware
(Zatz not Funny)

Comcast stabs set-top boxes in the back, pipes directly into smart TVs (The Register)

Udall to McConnell: Call Up Rosenworcel Nomination (Multichannel News)

Verizon warns strike could `pressure' earnings (USA Today)

AstraZeneca commits ‘hundreds of millions’ to sequencing genomes of 2M people over 10 years (Techcrunch)



Accenture Sells 60% of Duck Creek (Insurance Networking News)

Rapid Ratings Secures Growth Capital from LLR Partners to Accelerate Innovation in Financial Risk Management (Business Wire)
Targeting D&B.

Microsoft Cloud Stumbles But Company Sees Light Ahead
(Fortune)


Unisys CEO: Security Sales Set To Soar As Cybsecurity Software Is Taken Global (CRN)


Pennsylvania slapped Uber with an $11.4 million fine for operating without a license (PCWorld)

ServiceNow CEO – our approach to service management is different to the CRM vendors (Diginomica)

Alibaba's Cloud unit teams with SAP, Accenture in China to serve enterprise market (Update)

Tom Paine

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Alibaba’s cloud computing service unit, Aliyun, has teamed up with SAP and Accenture to provide services to the Enterprise market, the Shanghai Daily reports.

It has also built industry solutions in some sectors, including Internet of Things and online video streaming.

If I read the story correctly, the alliance is primarily aimed at the Chinese domestic market.

"It aims to can help both domestic companies to expand their overseas presence as well as establish local teams to boost revenues from foreign firms," according to the article.

Although its starting in China, Aliyun claims global presence, and its always possible the geographic scope of the partnership could expand.

Alibaba has been making huge investments in building a smarter cloud, with the aim of ultimately competing against Amazon Web Services.

Update: More info on partnership from Alibaba-owned South China Morning Post . Not clear what the specifics are behind the alliance agreement.

LINKS 4/20: Comcast to kill the cable set-top box; SAP Sees 2016 Sales on Track After Sluggish Start to Year

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A guide to New Jersey startups (NJBiz)

SAS targets digital marketing with Customer Intelligence 360, updates architecture and IoT tools (ZDNet Blogs)
Philly has always been a major market for SAS, particularly in Pharma.

SAP Sees 2016 Sales on Track After Sluggish Start to Year (Bloomberg)

Comcast to kill the cable set-top box (Boston Globe)


Update: Comcast Xfinity TV Program Cited in Set-Top Dust-up (Multichannel News)

Wall Street is about to ask Google some tough questions about its big bets (Business Insider)

PointRoll's value: Where did it go?

Tom Paine

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One tweet I made recently received a good deal of attention:

2005: Gannett buys #PointRoll for $100 million cash https://t.co/2Im1PgV1Br
Late 2015: sold for $11mm cash & 9mm loan

— tom paine (@phillytechnews) April 16, 2016

King of Prussia-based PointRoll, one of the Philly area's first new media successes, was actually sold by Tegna, the successor to Gannett that contains its non-newspaper properties; the newspapers were spun to a new Gannett Company.

Not that this is new news. After all, the deal was reached in late November, as Technically Philly reported at the time.

But the deterioration in value was perhaps more than some Ad tech people realized.

When it was acquired by Gannett, ClickZ referred to PointRoll as one of the "top four rich media companies", and its future seemed bright. But years of being a corporate kickball within Gannett, which seemed to me to never quite know why it owned it, probably dulled its creative and competitive edge and contributed to its shrinking value over time.

Also, the price PointRoll sold for may have reflected the current state of valuations in the Ad tech market as a whole:

@phillytechnews getting difficult for well-known but relatively small supply side platform like PointRoll to differentiate itself these days

— Emily Del Greco (@emilydelgreco) April 16, 2016

Sign of the adtech times ... more down & dirty rounds and fire sales TK? https://t.co/D7GEEb1zEJ

— Emily Del Greco (@emilydelgreco) April 16, 2016

There also was the late 2014 settlement of charges that PointRoll overrode Safari users' privacy preferences. It paid a $750,000 fine and agreed to monitoring.



PointRoll still has value to advertisers in certain segments. The CEO of the company that acquired PointRoll, New York-based Sizmek, said PointRoll serves a majority of ads from the automotive, CPG and retail industry, and it fit well with its strategy.

As to how many associates are left in King of Prussia, Technically Philly reported at the time of its acquisition by Sizmek that 100 out of approximately 300 were let go. But Sizmek's LinkedIn page has only 48 in the Greater Philadelphia area.

And the Inquirer reported a few days ago that PointRoll's CEO, Mario Diez, has left his job to take the top job at Elodina, a New York-based business software firm cofounded by another PointRoll vet.

Links 4/19: Pepper Hamilton Expands Technology Group; Cable Firms Prepare To Fight Set-Top Rules

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UPDATE: After rating Villanova over Wharton, Bloomberg stops undergrad B-school rankings: email https://t.co/7S1JAEV3Yz via @PhillyBusiness

— tom paine (@phillytechnews) April 19, 2016

Pepper Hamilton Expands Technology Group (Globe Newswire)

Cable Firms Prepare To Fight Set-Top Rules That Help Google, Apple (Investor's Business Daily)

Escaping the Digital Media ‘Crap Trap’
(Guest column/The Information)

Comcast Unifies Broadcast, Digital Video Distribution Platform (Multichannel News)


IBM’s new revenue streams have yet to deliver (Diginomica)

IBM Shares Tumble After Earnings Forecast Misses Estimates (Bloomberg)

New AWS service helps companies to move their apps to the cloud (PCWorld)

COREDIAL CEO: LINES ARE BEING REDRAWN ON TECHNOLOGIES COMPANIES (Channel Partners)


YP Plans First-Round Bid for Yahoo (Bloomberg)
Margins in the Yellow Pages biz sure aren't what they used to be.

Here are some of the brutal memes Googlers created about Tony Fadell and Nest (Re/code)

Republished from five years ago: Where I dismiss the very idea of a Trurmp candidacy

Tom Paine

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As the 2012 election approached, I wrote a brief post on the possibility of two Penn grads, Jon Huntsman Jr. and one Donald Trump, running for President.

Huntsman never gained traction in the GOP prmaries, and Trump chose not to run, presumably never to be mentioned again as a potential candidate.

Links 4/18: Verizon, wireline unions continue negotiations, but lock horns; Netflix Shares Slump As Subscriber Estimates Disappoint

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iPhone Rumors: Samsung-Made OLED Displays, All-Glass Design (Information Week)

Trump and Wharton: A complicated relationship (AP via Philly.com)


Verizon, wireline unions continue negotiations, but lock horns on healthcare, outsourcing jobs and pensions (FierceTelecom)


Netflix Shares Slump As Subscriber Estimates Disappoint (Fortune)


Comcast VP Fuels Second-Screen Startup (Donahue Report)


Investors are slashing startup valuations—and not even Uber and Airbnb are safe (Quartz)

Sunday Highlights: Tom Siebel's C3 IoT competes with ThingWorx; Amazon Aims at Netflix With Separate Prime, Video Subscriptions

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Tom Siebel's C3 IoT looks to expand, slay giants (ZDNet)
Siebel takes a bit of a slap at GE's Predix, which is closely allied with PTC's ThingWorx.

Oracle acquires Israeli big-data firm Crosswise for reported $50m (Times of Israel)

Oracle plans Exadata-as-a-service, in cloud or on-prem (The Register)

Amazon Aims at Netflix With Separate Prime, Video Subscriptions (Hollywood Reporter)

Verizon Makes Its Strike Case in Ad Buys (Multichannel News)


Sports Authority not the only sports retailer seeking new game plan (Philadelphia Inquirer)

Five leading banks, Safeguard Scientifics invest in $30 million Series E in Transactis

Tom Paine

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Today, Transactis announced that 5 major banks, Capital One, Fifth Third, PNC, TD, and Wells Fargo, along with Radnor-based Safeguard Scientifics, had participated in a $30 million financing as part of a Series E round into the New York-based company, a provider of electronic billing and payment solutions.

Each bank, along with Safeguard, invested an equal amount in Transactis as part of the Series E financing. Transactis has now raised $70 million, including this financing.

Safeguard led Transactis’ Series D financing in August 2014.

Transactis says it reaches more than 100M households and businesses in North America.

Saturday Highlights; Verizon reportedly plans FiOS overhaul with new internet-based set-top box

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Verizon reportedly plans FiOS overhaul with new internet-based set-top box     (Re/code)


True or False?

Ivan Seidenberg left Verizon a great gift in FiOS, and his successors
spat on it

— tom paine (@phillytechnews) March 24, 2016

Verizon IPTV Ambitions May Go Beyond Go90 (Light Reading)



GoDaddy's Head Tech And Cloud Guru Resigns To Join Google (Fortune)

Fieldglass gets a boost from SAP acquisition (Crain's Chicago Business)

Friday Links: Vanguard Lures More Fund Deposits Than All U.S. Rivals Combined; Obama Backs Wheeler's Set-Top Proposal, Big Time

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The Dichotomy of Big Data’s Risks and Benefits https://t.co/kgWakoOTOH

— tom paine (@phillytechnews) April 15, 2016

Vanguard Lures More Fund Deposits Than All U.S. Rivals Combined (Bloomberg)

Cablevision-Altice, Charter-TWC Mergers Seen Advancing (Investor's Business Daily)

Obama Backs Wheeler's Set-Top Proposal, Big Time (Multichannel News)


AirTV Streams Local Channels Directly Into Sling TV (Zatz Not Funny)

Arris/Weather Partner on OTT
(CableFax)

The floodgates are about to open in a critical sector for Amazon, Microsoft, and Google
(Business Insider)

Cardinal Health installs Business ByDesign SMB ERP in five months (SearchSAP)

GSI Health moves to Center City (Philly Deals)


Yes, startup funding really is slowing in San Francisco (Quartz)

Links 4/14: Rovi, TiVo Try to Bridge Difference on Valuation; FDA Wants Pharma to Ditch its Archaic Drug Making Process

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Thanks everyone who came out to #Phorum16 and congrats to @RedOwlytics on winning this years demo pit best in show! Great job!

— Allen Born (@apborn) April 14, 2016

SAP denial-of-service flaw combo poses remote hijack risk (The Register)

Google Fiber wants to beam wireless Internet to your home (Re/code)

Billing by Millionths of Pennies, Cloud Computing’s Giants Take In Billions     (NY Times)


The FDA Wants Pharma to Ditch its Archaic Drug Making Process (Fortune)

Changing production from batch to on demand, which seems to be the essence of the FDA recommendation, would
require major changes by production system and ERP vendors.

Rovi, TiVo Try to Bridge Difference on Valuation (Bloomberg)



Philadelphia Verizon workers take to streets (The Times-Leader)

DigitalOcean Gets $130 Million to Build a Bigger, Better Cloud (Fortune)

LINKS 4/13: About 40,000 Verizon unionized workers go on strike; More on SAP's Q1 miss

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About 40,000 Verizon unionized workers walk off the job (Reuters)

“Robo-advisor” Betterment raises $100 million (Fortune)

Report Confirms Large Cloud Providers Drive Q1 Leasing (Data Center Knowledge)

Dish’s Sling TV Launches Multi-Stream Plan Stocked With Fox Nets, but Without ESPN (Variety)

Comcast asks court to throw out Channel 7's NBC affiliate lawsuit (Boaton Business Journal)


A Year After IPO, Aaron Levie’s Box Is Showing Signs of Growing Up (Re/code)
Levie says Box' biggest need is connection to a major ERP system, mentioning SAP specifically.

SAP pre-announces revenue miss for Q1 FY2016, maintains full year guidance – an analysis (Diginomica)


Anexinet names new CEO, absorbs ListenLogic (Philly Deals)

Starbucks rolls out a more personalized mobile app along with a revamped Rewards program (TechCrunch)

Making the Most of Clinical Trial Data (New York Times Editorial)


Federal Reserve's Beige Book Raises Worries About Spending (Fortune)

What's up with Comcast-backed BuzzFeed? (Update 4/27: What's up with Vox Media?)

Tom Paine

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Update 4/27: Vox Media is reportedly living up to expectations, pretty much, and just made key CFO and board additions, Bloomberg
reports.

Last summer Comcast's NBCU invested $200 million in new media venture BuzzFeed, giving it a valuation of roughly $1.5 billion. A week earlier, NBCUniversal made a $200 million equity investment in a similar media startup, Vox Media. Comcast may not have totally understood this segment, but saw the growth opportunity it offered as attractive.

Of course, a few hundred million doesn't matter that much to Comcast. Just look at the $4 billion it funded former CEO Michael Angelakis' private equity venture with.

But BuzzFeed may be facing some tough headwinds. Today, the Financial Times reported that BuzzFeed missed its revenue target by 32 percent in 2015, and adjusted its revenue projections for 2016 from $500 million to $250 million.

Explanations offered by FT include custom content creation for advertisers taking much longer to complete than expected. Also, extensive video production in conjunction with NBCU has not begun to materialize.

Despite a reputation for having somewhat simplistic content, BuzzFeed has been investing in producing higher quality journalism. BuzzFeed, by the way, disputes FT's reporting. Its hard to say at this point, if the FT reports are accurate, whether this is an out of control startup, or a valuable company that's taking longer than expected to scale.

No word that I can find on Vox' financial performance, but it recently announced its first strategic partnership with NBCU,  an initiative to sell cross-platform, premium digital advertising.


Another view of the turbulance at BuzzFeed and
other new media sites.

Links 4/13: Verizon is actually expanding FiOS again, in Boston; Verizon workers could strike in morning

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BuzzFeed Slashes Revenue Forecast: Is This the Beginning of the End of the Millennial Media Bubble? (Vanity Fair)
Comcast’s NBCUniversal invested $200 million in BuzzFeed last summer at a $1.5 billion valuation.


SAP's Software-To-Cloud Growing Pains Reflect Industry Shift (Information Week)

Verizon is actually expanding FiOS again, with new fiber in Boston (Ars Technica)
But when are they going to finish wiring Philly ?

40K Verizon workers could strike Wednesday morning (NJ.com)


Secure IoT connectivity platform Electric Imp raises $21m (ReadWrite)

Links 4/ll: Comcast staffing up For Mobile Trials; Is it just SAP or the market?

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Layer3 TV’s Crazy Plan to Take on Comcast and Reinvent Cable (Wired)
Perhaps its crazy (with all due respect to the founders) because rapidly changing internet & cable technology and economics could make it obselete. Read below.

Will Layer3 TV Ever Launch? (Light Reading)


Comcast Staffs Up For Mobile Trials
(Donahue Report)

Comcast CEO Roberts: Snider 'understood his mortality' and planned for future
(Philadelphia Inquirer)

Google Fiber No Longer Free In Kansas City (Information Week)


Dell infosec unit SecureWorks given $1.42bn price tag in IPO (The Register)

SAP Warns on Q1; It’s the Market, Says Nomura; No, It’s Them, Says Stifel (Barron's
Tech Trader Daily)
"New cloud bookings grew only 22% Y/Y, well below the high 30% level a year ago on an organic (ex-Concur) CC basis," one analyst points out, which doesn't sound great considering the multiples SAP paid for its cloud acquistions.

Gartner: Global PC shipments fell 9.6% in Q1 2016, the first quarter below 65 million units since 2007 (VentureBeat)

Billy Penn owner Spirited Media narrows search for second city (Capital New York)

Philly Tech People News 4/10/2015: Verizon Hires NBCU Exec for go90; Franklin Square Hires Lewis Katz as Chief Business Development Officer

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Amazon Now Has Three CEOs (Fortune)

Verizon Hires NBCU Exec for go90 (The Information}

The 60-second interview: Linda Yaccarino, chairman of Ad Sales and Client Partnerships, NBCUniversal (Politico Media)

Franklin Square Hires Lewis Katz as Chief Business Development Officer (Franklin Square Capital Partners)
Katz had previously founded Clamour, a deep technology platform focused on personal finance.
ews
Exclusive: Former Obama Nutrition Policy Advisor Is a Partner in Campbell Soup-Backed VC Fund (Fortune)


Sungard Availability Services Names Susan Lynch Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer (PR Newswire)

Nutonian Appoints Jeff Dickerson as CEO, Chris Lynch as Chairman (Nutonian)
Dickerson served as Neat Company CEO until end of last year.


IBM Names Former AOL President Bob Lord as Chief Digital Officer (Re/code)

Temple University's Institute for Business and Information Technology names AmerisourceBergen CIO its Executive In Residence (Temple Fox School of Business)

Biondo Creative Named Google Partner (Biondo Creative)

New Jersey names new acting CIO
(State Scoop)