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Buyers outside the United States who planned on buying iPads are going to have to grit their teeth a while longer yet, as the release date has changed. Based on the strong U.S. demand for Apple's new iPads, the company has decided it would delay the product's international release for a month. Sponsor According to the official Apple statement on the matter, the sale of 500,000 of the tablets stateside in its first week of availability has put the screws to the supply. The company has "made the difficult decision to postpone the international launch of iPad by one month, until the end of May" Apple "will announce international pricing and begin taking online pre-orders on Monday, May 10." Discuss
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Apple Delays International Sales of iPads
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Here at ReadWriteStart, we've mentioned the importance of credibility as an entrepreneur when meeting with venture capitalists and potential investors, but it is also important to carry that credibility forward into your company as you interface with customers. Amid rumors that it was extorting businesses by offering to de-emphasize negative reviews in return for adverting purchases, social review site Yelp announced Monday that it would be "lifting the veil" on its review system and removing controversial features in hopes of securing customer trust. Sponsor Yelp features a review filter that sorts through reviews of local businesses to determine which is more trustworthy and places the top ones on the business' profile page. Some have claimed that Yelp was helping businesses pick the best reviews to show if that company was purchasing advertising on Yelp, a clear case of extortion that the company has vehemently denied , calling the claims a "conspiracy theory." Now when users visit a business' Yelp profile, they can choose to look over the reviews the filter has automatically reviewed by clicking a link near the bottom of the page near the pagination links (not exactly the easiest feature to find, I had to search for "filter" to find it). Yelp has put a CAPTCHA pop-up between the profile and the filtered results to keep robots from crawling the filtered data. Perhaps this is an attempt to prevent them from figuring out how to game the system. When I tested this new feature on one of my favorite downtown Phoenix restaurants, LoLo's Chicken and Waffles , I saw some similarities among the 25 filtered reviews. A handful were from users who live in other states or who are what Yelp calls "less established users," and some were either very short, or filled to the brim with Internet abbreviations and misspellings or slang. Others, whose content was hidden from view, had managed to violate Yelp's review guidelines or terms of service, which I can assume means a variety of things including profanity or obvious spam. Yelp is also discontinuing the use of the "Favorite Review" feature, which Yelp packed with advertising deals to businesses. Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman says they decided to remove the feature in hopes of eliminating any confusion. "Despite our best efforts to educate consumers and the small business community, myths about Yelp have persisted," writes Stoppelman. "[The "Favorite Review" feature] led some people to the wrong conclusions about whether businesses could control the review content on their page. (They can't.) So, to eliminate the opportunity for that misconception, we've eliminated the feature." By allowing users to go under the hood and see filtered results, Yelp is, I believe, taking a significant step in the name of transparency and openness. While they aren't revealing any special algorithms for how they determine what makes trustworthy reviews, they are responding in a timely and appropriate manner to the continued allegations of foul play. Regardless of the merit of these claims, Yelp seems bent on securing the trust of their users, a practice every startup should mimic. Also it is important to remember that a certain level of transparency is attractive to users, but not too much. There is a boundary between what should be shared with the community and what should be deeply guarded company secrets, such as fancy algorithms or the inner workings of the site's major functions. Users can trust a company more when they feel they have some sort of insider's view of the company through partial transparency. Simply blogging about the company's activity is sometimes enough to satisfy this need, but other times is may be appropriate, as Yelp has done, to incorporate features which help to underscore the product's attempts at truth, honesty and validity, if those are major facets of your business. Discuss
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Lessons From Yelp's Ordeal: Retaining Customer Trust is Key
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Web-video management startup Brightcove announced Monday that it had secured an additional $12 million in venture funding and hopes to make its first public offering as soon as next year. As we reported Monday, the first quarter of 2010 saw a significant rise in IPO and M&A activity for venture-backed companies, and Brightcove seems to preparing itself for one of these options in the next year. Sponsor Josh Hawkins, director of corporate communications for Brightcove, mentioned on the company's blog that the new funding would be used toward "expansion in Asia and Europe, the rollout of new product lines like Brightcove Express on a worldwide basis, R&D innovation, and possible M&A activity." Brightcove has three offices in the U.S. as well as offices in England, Spain, Germany, China and Japan. Much of its strategy for 2010 seems to be focused on expanding its presence in these regions, possibly by using some of its fresh cash to buy out upstart companies in those areas. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company also plans to use what could be their final round of funding to build runway before going public, and that it could see revenues as high as $50 million in 2010. The news of Brightcove's plans to go public is further evidence of the rebounding M&A and IPO market that we mentioned on Monday , especially if investors are willing to pump money into the web-video industry which has seen less than stellar revenues. Brightcove also can serve as an excellent example for young startups looking for an IPO or buyout day of their own in the future. The company is not sitting back and hoping the day comes that it can go public or be acquired; it is making sure they have the proper capital to continue to innovate and grow its company to that point. The company realizes that being able to go public is not entirely about having a steady revenue stream, but it is also about carving out a significant portion of its market by expanding its current products and creating new ones. Just last week the company announced it was launching a service to allow its customers to create iPad-compatible HTML5 based video players , keeping the company on the cutting edge of video management. Last year rumors circulated that Google was in talks to buy Brightcove, but the rumors were later revealed to be false . It seems they weren't far off, however, as Google just last week announced it had acquired video service Episodic . Google, which has been picking up companies left and right in 2010 , could be signaling an impending consolidation within the web-video industry with their recent purchase and rumored interest in Brightcove. Brightcove appears to be hunkered down with its new funding and is ready for future prosperity, a strategy every startup should recognize and attempt to emulate in their future rounds of funding. Followers of Internet startups have been waiting for a major IPO for a few years and Brightcove could provide that in the next twelve months. Discuss
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Brightcove Closes Series D Funding, Expects IPO By 2011
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I've learned a lot about startup culture since I started writing about it at the beginning of January, and there is a trend that I have noticed that is different from the stereotypical outsider's point-of-view - one that I had not too long ago. There seems to be a growing number of companies that are holding off from either being bought out or going public because they are more vested in the interests of their company or their idea than they are about having a big payday. Sponsor IPOs have fallen off a cliff in recent years, and it seems like each month we hear about who is potentially looking to buy Twitter or Yelp . Facebook is huge, and makes a good amount of money, but it is still a venture backed company with no IPO. Over the weekend, Spark Capital investor Bijan Sabet published a blog post that reaffirmed my theory that more companies are perfectly content with raising round after round of funding. And when they do allow themselves to be bought, Sabet says that startups are getting a lot pickier with who they will sell to. "Recently I heard about a startup that turned down a higher offer from one company in favor of a lower offer from a different buyer," writes Sabet. "It's not enough to wave a huge checkbook around. That isn't sufficient for the best startups. Big companies need to show startups how they will fit into the bigger picture, give the startup employees challenging & important positions, demonstrate why the combination will be in everyone's interest." Startups and entrepreneurs are maturing. Quickly launching an innovative idea in hopes of being snatched up by Google in order to sit on the beach and sip mai tais until the cows come home is fading - if not already erased - from the "get-rich-quick" stereotype. Entrepreneurs these days are more genuinely passionate and attached to their companies (or their "babies") and want to see the product succeed more than they want to benefit financially from it. It is this passion that has morphed into a stronger sense of self for startups; they are more confident with their positions and are not afraid to turn down a multi-million dollar buyout if the terms don't look good to them. For many entrepreneurs, a big payday is certainly a goal, and Paul Graham even recently defined success as "the founders end up rich," but more seem to be holding out and holding on to their companies. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that venture capitalists are getting better at identifying the truly passionate entrepreneurs from the ones looking to turn a pretty penny from whatever idea gets the job done. This concurs with the general consensus from a roundup of VC pitch advice last week: you are pitching yourselves just as much if not more than you are your idea. VCs are more interested in investing their money with passionate entrepreneurs than a fantastic idea because, after all, a great idea in the wrong hands can fail spectacularly. Discuss
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As Startups Grow Up, More Seem to Hold Their Ground
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Cisco is betting heavily on the network as the platform. We took a look at the role of the network in the emerging landscape of cloud computing as part one of analysis of " Will One Company be Dominant in Cloud Computing ". We started with Cisco, since the cloud implies the network to float upon. Like religion itself, Cisco is a company that evokes deep emotions. Many IT leaders believe in Cisco and bet their operations on the company. And to unbelievers, using Cisco gear is one of the deadly sins. Sponsor Following that analogy, on the first day, there was IP. And the Internet was formed. And on the second day there was virtualization, and the virtual machine was born. On day three there was pay-as-you-go computing, and Amazon released EC2. On day four, the iPhone was released. And there was rejoicing. We're not sure yet what will happen on days five and six - but on the seventh day, there was a globally interconnected cloud, powered by the Internet, IP, and more than likely, Cisco gear. In Cisco's prophecy, this leads to The Human Network . Cloud Computing is the Next Version of the Internet Cisco enjoyed massive benefits in the first phase of the Internet in the late 1990s. Its gear powered the Internet, and the market rewarded the company for its leadership. Cisco's business was built by the enterprise and their huge appetites for interconnected networks to connect companies and power Web applications. To diversify and expand its opportunities in the late 1990s, Cisco made big bets in the service provider and SMB marketplace. In the service provider space, Cisco drove combining voice, data, and video networks. In SMB, Cisco entered into the commodity space with Wi-Fi and lower-end products. These have paid off and have positioned the company to be ready for the next phase of the Internet. Charting Cisco's performance from its first day on NASDAQ 20 years ago to today shows a massive spike in its stock price during the rise of the Internet. In the next phase, we're seeing a repeat opportunity for Cisco to assist in the disruption of the datacenter in the move to virtual data centers and private clouds. At the same time, the company is going further in the hottest area of the service provider opportunity to the core of mobile computing. We wonder, will the market see another spike in Cisco as cloud computing goes mainstream? IP Everywhere - Networking is the Platform Cisco has invested in several trends that will define the next generation of the network. The network is a complex thing. If anything, the opportunity for Cisco is also the risk. Can it manage these complex infrastructures and prove that it is the one company that can bring it all together? First, working closely with VMware , Cisco has defined the virtual data center. The virtual data center is one with an aware unified fabric . Cisco's Nexus switches bridge storage, virtual instances and network. To get a high performing distributed virtualized data center, it is important to have all servers on a switched network, deployed as the same Layer 2 VLAN. This means extending VLANS over Layer 3 routed networks. To do this, Cisco has brought a new data center interconnect solution called Cisco Overlay Transport Virtualization (OTV), which has the goal of providing the performance of Layer 2 while still preserving most of the scalability, resiliency, multipathing, and failure-isolation characteristics of a Layer 3 connection. "OTV can be thought of as MAC-address routing, in which destinations are MAC addresses, and next hops are IP addresses. OTV simply maps MAC address destinations to IP next hops that are reachable through the network cloud. Traffic destined for a particular MAC address is encapsulated in IP and carried through the IP cloud to its MAC-address routing next hop. The rich information in the MAC-address routing protocol enables Layer 2 con- nectivity over Layer 3 networks based on MAC-address destinations." The second major area of innovation Cisco is making news in right now is the mobile core. Cisco announced in December 2009 that it has finished the acquistion of Starent Networks for over $1billion this year. The combined Starent-Cisco puts the company in a key leadership position in routing mobile data, delivering an end-to-end mobile multimedia IP architecture for the mobile operator packet core. Cisco sees the Internet of Things coming, and connecting mobile operations with virtualization is a part of making it all hapen. Virtualization and mobile coming together - two major trends that will form the future of cloud computing. This week, Cisco CEO and board chairman John Chambers shared his thoughts at Mobile World Congress on the value Cisco is bringing to the service provider. As the Next Generation Emerges, the Stakes are High On one hand, there is a joining that's happening where we see Cisco, EMC and VMware partnered in a significant way. The announcement in November 2009 describes a vision where the companies offer enterprises a coordinated set of solutions. These solutions cover the core three tiers of computing: OS, storage, and network. But on the other hand, HP and Cisco are parting ways. Even in the best of times, this relationship was a bit strained as Cisco and HP have been both competing and cooperating over the last few years. The companies signed a global partner agreement. But Cisco competes with HP in unified computing, and HP has introduced the ProCurve line of network devices and purchased 3Com. Now Cisco has decided to pull HP out of its partner program . HP seems to be the one company (outside of its network compeitors) that wants to challenge Cisco's destiny. Does cloud computing give Cisco a second chance to outperform the world as a dominant vendor? What are your hopes or fears of a Cisco-powered cloud computing fabric? Photo credit: rebeauty Discuss
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Rulers of the Cloud: Will Cloud Computing Be the Second Coming of Cisco?
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