The latest example involves cable ties, AC-DC adapters, radiation detectors and the like. In April of last year, Amazon rolled out AmazonSupply, an e-commerce site featuring such industrial goods. Google followed suit this January, testing Google Shopping for Suppliers, which also helps shoppers find items tailored for businesses.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Here’s the summary of what Tremor executives will be telling investors:

• Last year they lost $16.4 million on revenue of $105.2 million; the previous year, they lost $21 million on revenue of $90.3 million.
• During that same time period, gross margins improved from 35.2 percent to 41.7 percent.
• Its ads run on more than 500 websites and mobile apps.
• Big backers include Canaan Partners, which owns more than 19 percent of the company, as well as W Capital, Masthead Venture Partners, Meritech Capital, DFJ and General Catalyst.
• Tremor wants to raise at least $86 million, and plans to trade on the NYSE as TRMR.

Video industry officials expect that rival video ad nets YuMe and Adapt.tv may also go public this year; all of them will be looking to compete in a space dominated by Google’s YouTube, along with smaller players like Hulu.

Other carriers also have so-called “below-the-line” fees, named that because they frequently appear at the bottom of the phone bill after the service charges. Such fees help boost revenue growth in a massive organization, but consumer groups criticize them because they are less likely to be noticed by users and allow carriers to advertise lower prices than they actually charge.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

While the subcommittee panel described Apple on paper as an “egregious offender” that has “sought the Holy Grail of tax avoidance,” it took a very different tone while meeting in person with Cook. “So nice to meet you. I have an iPad,” Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R.-N.H., said while greeting the Apple CEO — a cordial, but fawning, welcome, surpassed only by that of her counterpart, Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo. who said simply: “I love Apple. … I love Apple.”

All of this was great fodder for Jon Stewart and “The Daily Show” team. As Stewart quipped during last night’s broadcast, “Who are those people? What is the opposite of a Genius Bar?”

“Apparently there is nothing Apple can do to get us mad at them,” Stewart marveled. “We could find out they’re using kitten hearts to power iPhones and we’d be like, ‘Well, if it doubles battery life, I’ll take two!’”

Yahoo’s design chief, the effervescent Tim Parsey, will be leaving his job at the Silicon Valley Internet giant, sources said.

As SVP of User Experience Design at Yahoo, which centralized the task under Parsey, he has been part of a range of redesigns of its major properties, including its homepage, Flickr photo-sharing site, email and more.

As I noted when Parsey arrived in early 2011, “in the 67-ring circus that has been Yahoo’s product organization, design was widely dispersed.”

Translation: It was not pretty, unless you enjoyed the Web stylings of 1997.

Parsey certainly had the cred in the design industry, with stints at Apple, Microsoft’s entertainment and devices unit, Mattel and Motorola. Just before Yahoo, he was a principal at a Seattle-based design firm called shiftalliance.

The British native ran Apple’s design studio for five years in the early 1990s and was the main dude behind Motorola’s freaky V70 switchblade mobile phone in 2001.

It’s not clear why he is leaving now, or where the crackerjack designer is headed. But, amid a lot of Yahoo turmoil since he arrived, Parsey certainly stabilized the design culture at the company.

Also in play, according to numerous sources: New Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has a very “hands-on” style with regard to design — she pretty much considers herself the last and only stop on that train, among others, based on her experience at Google running a number of products including its pristine and much acclaimed front page search box. No surprise, then, she has involved herself strongly in the design process.

On his LinkedIn profile, which still lists him as working at Yahoo, Parsey talked about his ethos of design there:

“This is about weaving a global UX and UER organization from the existing 200+ designers and researchers that today support an array of different businesses. It’s part of a rather cool broader corporate transition project. It’s also very much about establishing design as a potent, world-class entity that’s fun to be part of.”

He also notes: “These days I’m very excited about the correlation between internal cultures that are truly ‘meaningful’ to designers ( and other functions ), and world-class design innovation.”

Media giant Hearst has hired two senior execs — Demand Media’s Joanne Bradford and former Los Angeles Times CEO Jeffrey Johnson — in a significant move to digitally turbocharge and jumpstart its flagship but long-suffering newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle and its SFGate.com website.

“They have deep publishing and new media experience and believe in the power of great content with a valued brand,” said Heart CEO Frank Bennack in a statement. “We are excited to work with them to redefine the choices for how and where readers can experience the trusted Chronicle content they depend on.”

In the new leadership, Johnson will be the publisher of the Chronicle, while Bradford will be its president. Both will report to Hearst Newspapers President Mark Aldam. Current publisher Frank Vega — an old-style publisher who has had a controversial tenure at the Chronicle — will retire, though Hearst said he will continue as chairman through the transition.

“The San Francisco Chronicle should be a shining star and use case of how to build a community and cover local news,” said Bradford in a text to me today.

Indeed. While the Chronicle and its website is the largest for local news in the Bay area, it has lagged a lot in aggressively covering key trends — such as tech — and the fast growth of the region. While the area has blossomed, the Chronicle, like many big-city newspapers, has suffered, as digital businesses of all kinds have made incursions on its business.

Its daily print circulation is now 265,000, and combined with its website it reaches close to two million people.

Getting all that a whole lot higher — and, perhaps more importantly, a lot more relevant — will be a tough job and will likely require a major reinvention of the Chronicle brand.

That is especially true since the San Francisco area, including Silicon Valley, is the world’s key digital hub, as well as a leader in a number of areas — from top-notch sports teams to having one of the most innovative food and indie cultures. After a few years of rough economic times, the city is on a bit of a roll, including being the location of some upcoming major events such as the Super Bowl and America’s Cup.

Bradford has a lot of experience in both old and new media and is well known in the online media advertising space, having had top sales and media jobs at BusinessWeek magazine, Microsoft, Yahoo and, now, Demand.

She has been at that content site, where she has been its chief revenue and marketing officer, since 2010. At Yahoo, previous to Demand, she was an SVP in charge of North American revenue and also worked on branded entertainment partnerships. At Microsoft, she was a corporate VP and chief media officer of MSN Media Network.

And, although I have known her well over many years — full disclosure: We are very good friends — I had no idea she had an undergraduate degree in journalism from San Diego State University.

Johnson is also a longtime media exec. He has recently been an operating partner at the Yucaipa Companies — owned by kingpin Ron Burkle — focusing on media investments since 2007. Previous to that, he was president, publisher and CEO of the Los Angeles Times for just a year, but had been its SVP and GM since 2000. At the Times, he was responsible for the newspaper’s digital and print operations including editorial, advertising, circulation, consumer sales and marketing, finance and technology. Johnson has also worked at the Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel and has an undergraduate degree in accounting from the University of Illinois and an MBA from the University of Chicago.

The Chronicle is the largest newspaper in Northern California, founded in 1865 by Charles and Michael de Young. Its owner, the privately-held Hearst, is one of the nation’s largest media companies, with dozens of daily and weekly newspapers; has a huge group of television stations and cable network stakes, such as Lifetime, A&E and ESPN; hundreds of magazines, such as Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan and Elle; and many other varied holdings.

Bradford will be replaced at Demand Media by Jeff Dossett.

But that plan is now on hold.

“While Facebook works to create a better Facebook Home experience, they have recommended that Orange in France and EE in the U.K. hold off on launching the HTC First at this time,” a France Telecom-Orange representative told AllThingsD.

Facebook is saying that it wants to work on retooling Home before it renews its effort to get the software preloaded on new devices. “As a result of customer feedback, Facebook has decided to focus on adding customization features to Facebook Home, and will limit support for new devices at this time,” Orange said.

At the launch of Facebook Home, the social network talked about a program to get more phone makers to preload the software. It showed a slide listing other hardware partners, including Samsung, ZTE, Lenovo, Sony, Alcatel One Touch and Huawei, in addition to launch partner HTC.

Neither AT&T nor HTC has commented directly on sales of the HTC First, though the carrier has dropped the price to 99 cents with a contract, down from the initial $99 sticker price.

Whether the HTC First will ever see the light of day in Europe remains unclear, though Orange said it still wants to work closely with the social network.

“Orange remains committed to bringing our customers the newest and best mobile experiences, and we will continue to build on our strong relationship with Facebook to provide these new experiences in the future,” the carrier said.

News flash! Netflix still hasn’t provided numbers about “House of Cards.”

There was a brief suggestion to the contrary on Wednesday, when the Hollywood Reporter published an interview with Netflix content boss Ted Sarandos. In the Q&A, Sarandos compared the audience for “House of Cards” to that of AMC’s “Walking Dead,” which caused a few of us TV-watching-watchers to wonder if Sarandos was saying that “House of Cards” had a similar number of viewers as “Walking Dead.”

If so, that would be a pretty big deal, since “Walking Dead” is one of the most popular shows on TV. The cable TV show drew nearly 12.5 million viewers for its season finale this year, and frequently beat out big broadcast shows throughout the spring.

Netflix, meanwhile, has about 30 million U.S. subscribers, period. It would be amazing if nearly half of them were watching a single show, right? And it would also say a lot about the future of TV.

Maybe one day, it will. For now, though, we will have to keep guessing about the “House of Cards” audience.

Via email, Netflix PR head Jonathan Friedland said that Sarandos was not talking about aggregate numbers when he said that “viewing is much more on par with the large-scale mainstream things like ‘The Walking Dead.’”

Instead, Friedland said, Sarandos was talking about the show’s demographic appeal, which Netflix said is wider than it might have thought. “He was saying that the viewing audience is broad, in the same way that ‘Walking Dead’s’ audience is larger than horror fans,” Friedland wrote.

That makes sense. It would be much more surprising if Netflix decided to deviate from a pledge it made loudly and often a few months ago.

For the record, here’s the full excerpt of Sarandos’s chat with THR’s excellent Lacey Rose:

THR: You’ve been reticent to share ratings data, but tell us what you have learned about the “House of Cards” audience.

Sarandos: The major international appeal for “House of Cards” was kind of a surprise because it’s a very American show. What we learned is that American politics is very American, but greed and corruption and all of that is very global. Corrupt politics is not new in Latin America, as it turns out. (Laughs.) Within the U.S., you could have argued that most people who watch “Mad Men” would watch “House of Cards.” But the viewing is much more on par with the large-scale mainstream things like “The Walking Dead.” It was much younger than we thought. One of the things that surprised me was that women love the show because they love Robin Wright. And younger people love Kate Mara. Everyone is able to gravitate to this show for very different reasons.

Ben Ling, a longtime Silicon Valley angel investor and Internet exec, has joined Khosla Ventures as a venture partner.

Ling is the second hire of high-profile operating execs by Khosla. Former Square, Slide and PayPal exec Keith Rabois — who is a close friend of Ling’s — joined the firm in February.

In an interview today, Ling said he has been contemplating his next move, and the idea of becoming a VC after years of operations was appealing.

“I thought a lot about the ability to have impact across a broad set of companies, and was attracted to Khosla’s model of venture assistance,” said Ling, who added that he will focus a lot on the mobile ecosystem. “When I was younger, I thought it would be fascinating to be an investor, and here I can help a lot of companies grow and scale.”

Ling is a former Google and Facebook product exec, as well as an active investor in 80 startups, including such high-profile ones as Fab.com, Square and Quora. He was most recently COO at Badoo, but left the company last fall.

At Google, he worked on search, YouTube and local products, and was closely linked with former Googler Marissa Mayer, whom he followed internally when her responsibilities shifted there. Many thought he might next pop up at Yahoo, where she is now CEO.

Not so, but also not a surprise; Mayer provided Khosla with a lovely statement about Ling: “Ben is an amazing entrepreneurial leader and has a great eye as an investor for both talent and ideas. I’m excited to see him join Khosla Ventures to find and foster the next set of entrepreneurs who will define the technology world.”

That’s a massive amount of product to move in the first month after the device’s commercial debut. But, as noted here last week, this number doesn’t refer to devices sold to consumers, but to carriers: “The S4 may well be selling much faster than its predecessor, but not so much faster that there will be 10 million units in consumer hands next week. Some will still be sitting on carrier shelves awaiting purchase.”

And that’s worth noting. Because while many handset vendors like to tout shipments into the channel as sales, there is some variation. Apple, when it posts quarterly earnings, reports iPhone “sell in” numbers to retail partners. But when it makes its annual “First Weekend iPhone Sales Top TK” news release, it’s referring to sales to consumers. So, when Apple said last September that it sold more than five million of its iPhone 5 in three days, it wasn’t referring to devices sitting on retail shelves, but to those purchased by end users.

In a key hire, Jawbone said today that it had hired Mindy Mount, a top corporate VP at Microsoft, as its president.

The move by the San Francisco-based maker of wireless, music and wearable devices is part of what has been a major upgrading of its management and board. Recently, Jawbone added Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and Rob Wiesenthal of Warner Music as directors.

Jawbone has also recently done a big acquisition — purchasing BodyMedia, a wearable health and fitness company, for $100 million. The move comes just a couple months after it bought data and digital-design companies Massive Health and Visere.

All this expansion requires tight organizational efforts and Mount has a lot of financial and operational experience, having held several key jobs at the software giant. She was most recently corporate VP and CFO at Microsoft’s Online Services Division, which includes Bing, MSN and Microsoft Advertising. Before that she held a similar job at the Entertainment and Devices Division, which has the Xbox, Zune and Windows Phone units.

Previous to that, Mount ran AOL’s U.K. unit, worked in strategy at Time Warner and also was an exec at Morgan Stanley. She has an MBA from the Harvard Graduate School of Business and an undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

In an interview today, Mount said that what attracted her to Jawbone was the challenge of scaling the fast-growth company, which is helmed by CEO and co-founder Hosain Rahman.

“Right out of the block, I’ll be spending time on business operations, since the scale and scope and complexity of Jawbone has really increased,” she said. “What really attracted me to the role is that it is a really meaty one … It’s a company with great products, where I can come in and have real impact, because consumer electronics companies really have to execute.”

Jawbone products include Jawbone wireless headsets, Jambox speakers and the Up personal fitness wristbands. The company has raised a lot of funding, totaling about $210 million from such venture firms as Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital, as well as Deutsche Telekom, investor Yuri Milner and others.

Asked about his favorite apps, Kutcher pulled out his phone to look at his home screen.

“I use Facebook and Twitter a lot,” Kutcher said at the CTIA trade show in Las Vegas, adding that he also spends a lot of time using Flipboard, Path and Couple — three companies he has invested in.

The actor and investor talked about the importance of mobile, and its current challenges when it comes to user experience and app discovery.

“I don’t think anyone has mastered mobile,” Kutcher said.

Kutcher is the wrap-up speaker at what will be the last spring show for CTIA, which is going from two shows a year to one, with next year’s event planned for September, back in Las Vegas. The final fall show focused on enterprise wireless will be in October in San Jose.

Lenovo’s solid results stand out in the global PC industry, which is struggling with weak demand as more consumers turn to tablet computers and smartphones. Global PC shipments in the first quarter fell 14 percent from a year earlier, according to research group IDC.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »