Roku, the maker of a nifty device that plays a variety of content over televisions, is getting $45 million in a new round of investment from News Corp. and British Sky Broadcasting. (News Corp. owns this Web site.)

Current investors Menlo Ventures and Globespan Capital Partners will also be part of the new funding.

The company did not disclose the new valuation with the new investment. It has previously raised $22.4 million, including from Netflix.

The investments by News Corp. and BSkyB, in which the media giant owns about 40 percent, are separate. There is also another unnamed investor in the round.

As part of the deal, News Corp.’s Chief Digital Officer Jon Miller will be joining the board.

The money will be used for expansion, as well as for other initiatives, the Saratoga, Calif.-based Roku said.

It also said it will be launching the Roku Streaming Stick this fall, which it previously announced. It is a “wireless, dongle-sized streaming device that seamlessly integrates with newer TVs and consumer electronics devices. The streaming stick is Roku’s first step in expanding its platform from streaming players to Smart TVs and other devices connected to the TV.”

Here’s the official press release that is just going out:

Roku Raises $45 Million from News Corporation, BSkyB and Others
Strategic Round Underscores Roku’s Platform Lead as Content Distribution Moves to Internet

Saratoga, Calif. — July 26, 2012 Roku Inc. today announced it has received a $45 million strategic investment. News Corporation, British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB), prior Roku venture investors Menlo Ventures and Globespan Capital Partners as well as an unnamed strategic investor joined the round. The new relationships include both financial backing and business agreements that demonstrate the industry’s confidence in Roku as the distribution platform to bring streaming entertainment to mainstream consumers.

Roku will use the new capital to build further brand awareness through advertising, develop new international markets, and increase engineering and production to support sales growth of both hardware and digital media services on the platform including advertising, games, transactional and pay-per-view video as well as content packages. In addition to its line of popular and award-winning Roku streaming players, the company will launch the Roku Streaming Stick this fall — a wireless, dongle-sized streaming device that seamlessly integrates with newer TVs and consumer electronics devices. The streaming stick is Roku’s first step in expanding its platform from streaming players to Smart TVs and other devices connected to the TV.

“We have watched Roku maintain market leadership since the launch of its streaming platform four years ago and we look forward to deepening our relationship, having already worked closely together on the launch of several products,” said News Corporation Chief Digital Officer Jon Miller. “Roku’s significant technology advantage, coupled with a strong market position, places them in a unique position to be an integral part of the television landscape for years to come.”

“We’re delighted to have entered into this strategic relationship with Roku. As an innovative content company we’re committed to embracing a wide range of complementary platforms to create more choice and flexibility for customers,” said BSkyB Chief Financial Officer Andrew Griffith. “Coupled with the on-going strength of satellite distribution, online and mobile help us unlock even more value for customers. Working with Roku we look forward to extending our multi-platform leadership.”

“Our philosophy is to give consumers the best streaming TV experience, with the most content and at the best value in the market; and it has served us well as millions of consumers have brought Roku into their homes,” said Roku Founder and Chief Executive Officer Anthony Wood. “With the News Corporation and Sky strategic relationships, we are poised to further grow our leadership position and to become the TV distribution platform of the future.”

Jon Miller will join the Roku Board of Directors. Anthony Wood will remain Chairman of the Board.

That issue remains tabled for now, for there are issues of a more global concern at hand. Box will today announce its first global expansion, with the opening of a new office in London and a plan to hire 100 employees across Europe by the end of next year. Greg Strickland, Box’s VP of business operations, was named to run the London office as VP of global operations.

It’s sort of a funny thing. While other companies complain and their executives buy antacids over their “European exposure” — stemming from the sovereign debt crisis, the troubles facing nations participating in the euro currency union and a regional recession that seemingly has much of the continent by the throat — Box CEO Aaron Levie says business for Box in Europe has been solid.

“We’re kind of an international company by accident,” he told me by phone last week. About 40 percent of Box’s user base comes from outside the US, and much that is in Europe. The continent accounts for a “double digit percentage” of its annual revenue, he says.

Box is proving the relatively new adage of the cloud, that IT executives find it easy to trim their budgets by moving some services and applications to pay-as-you-go-type services in the cloud that can replace things that used to run on-premise on dedicated, underutilized hardware. “Cloud services do well in down cycles,” he says. It was true in the U.S. during 2008-10, and it’s true of Europe in 2012.

And it’s more than Europe. While the company doesn’t break down its business by geography, about half of its traffic comes from outside the U.S. Box now boasts 11 million individual users and 120,000 businesses, among them global players with a strong European presence like Procter & Gamble and O2 Media.

Box also said it has expanded its strategic relationship with Palo Alto neighbor Hewlett-Packard, aimed at small and medium businesses. HP is only the biggest among Box’s several partners and investors. Salesforce.com and SAP are both investors and partners, while NetSuite is a business partner.

Separately, Box announced that it has hired LinkedIn’s Stefan Apitz as its new VP of operations. Apitz was the one who oversaw LinkedIn’s infrastructure during a time when it was growing like crazy, which is exactly what Box is doing.

One early piece of business is already done for him: Box has just flipped the switch on a new data center capacity Las Vegas, adding to two facilities already operational in California. (Box also uses Amazon Web Services for things like fault tolerance.) They’re not Box-owned data centers — it’s not that big yet — but leased space in existing data centers. But Levie says a big part of Apitz’s job will be to oversee the growth in infrastructure internationally.

Then there’s also the murmuring in certain circles about the possibility that Box will go public in 2013. “There’s a certain amount of potential for that happening next year,” Levie told me. “But right now we’re getting as much done as we can as a private company.”

The blueprints would more than double Amazon’s current footprint in Seattle, and hints at the rapid corporate-level expansion the e-commerce company anticipates over the next decade.

Last month, Amazon purchased three contiguous blocks in downtown Seattle. Terms of the sale were not disclosed, but the multimillion dollar — maybe billion-dollar — deal will represent Amazon’s first significant land purchase, once it closes.

Last night, Amazon’s architects presented plans to Seattle’s review board, laying out the company’s vision for an urban campus, complete with three 37-floor office towers, an auditorium, retail space and a few shorter, six-story buildings, reports Eric Pryne, a reporter at the Seattle Times, who attended the meeting.

A 36-page report detailing all the different layouts and scenarios can be found on the city’s Web site here. An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment on its plans, and apparently no company spokesperson spoke at last night’s meeting.

The plans are fairly shocking, given the company’s rapid growth over the past few years. Clearly, the company’s leader Jeff Bezos has a lot more surprises in store that may push the company beyond its core online retail and digital businesses,  including the Kindle.

At the end of the year, Amazon had 56,200 employees, up 67 percent year over year. Most of the hiring occurred in operations and customer service, including 17 new fulfillment centers.

It’s not clear how many employees Amazon has in its Seattle headquarters, but it already leases about 2.7 million square feet, including 1.7 million square feet in the so-called South Lake Union neighborhood, which has recently been revitalized by Seattle tech leader Paul Allen, and sits just outside the downtown core.

Tomorrow, as part of the commitment that AllThingsD has to providing its readers with ever more high-quality content, this site will be launching a new reviews section, All Things Reviewed.

Simply put, we’re building on the consumer-tech reviews by Walt Mossberg and Katie Boehret that we’ve always run, with a fresh team of ATD reviewers, the first of whom is the talented Lauren Goode.

Lauren will be joined in the coming months by additional strong reviewers, who we will be adding soon, and each of whom will likely do one meaty review a week.

Katie, who will continue as a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, will also take on the added task of editing the new All Things Reviewed section, which we designed to be bright and graphical and easy to navigate.

We’ll also have plenty of timely, interesting consumer product news in addition to the in-depth reviews. It will all be integrated into the main ATD site, too, because we consider it a key part of providing a range of news, information, analysis and context to those who come to us for trustworthy, fair and accurate journalism.

Make no mistake: We think it is critical that reviews adhere to the same strict tenets of reporting we have for everything we post here. The reviews of the products we will feature take time, rigorous testing and deep critical analysis.

And, like Walt’s and Katie’s current reviews, these new ATD reviews will be based on thorough testing and aimed at smart consumers — and not just techies and enthusiasts.

That’s why we will pick carefully which products are significant or might be interesting to a broader range of readers. In other words, we won’t be reviewing every single slightly changed phone or laptop, or every me-too location app, and we won’t bore you with chip speeds and technobabble.

Thus, as hard as it is to say to the geeks who follow us, we will shun the rigid spec lists and templates used elsewhere, and instead present you with holistic, experience-based reviews that tell the story of the product — hardware, software, apps, games, Web sites and services.

Most importantly, we won’t be afraid to point out negatives, even if the manufacturer is an advertiser. Our aim is to earn your trust and be on your side, even if you disagree at times with our conclusions.

Like all new endeavors, we hope to get the entire section up to cruising speed as soon as possible, but we’ll be doing it in the careful, considered and high-quality manner we strive for in everything we do. (And, like all new stuff, we also had a party introducing the section to a packed crowd at the SXSW Interactive festival last night.)

We hope you’ll like the result and welcome your feedback as we begin our latest expansion. And, as usual, there will be much more to come.

The Cupertino, Calif., company said it will add 3,600 jobs in the next 10 years to its existing work force of 3,500 employees there. Apple said the move is part of a rapid expansion from 1,000 employees in 2004.

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But while the company most recently has been testing in L.A. and Toronto, Uber founder and CEO Travis Kalanick has said it soon expects to tackle a much bigger market: Asia.

Kalanick said in a recent interview with AllThingsD that the company is aiming to establish a presence there by the end of this year. He declined to say which Asian cities Uber is targeting first, except to say it would focus on the “obvious” ones.

Uber, which launched in 2010 and late last year received $32 million in Series B funding, doesn’t own or directly manage fleets of cars, but acts a system through which town-car drivers can sign up and users can summon them — at a premium cost — through their smartphones. The app itself is free, and works on both iPhones and Android phones.

It has been recognized as a highly disruptive service, one that frequent customers praise for its ease of use, but also one that has raised the ire of taxicab commissions in some cities.

Uber also came under some criticism around the recent holiday season, when it charged riders surge prices on New Year’s Eve, due to high demand. Some customers complained that the information about surge pricing was not presented clearly to them through the app; Uber refunded customers on a case-by-case basis.

Kalanick wouldn’t offer specifics on Uber’s pricing plans for the future, though it’s expected that the company will continue to experiment with dynamic pricing as it manages town-car supply in different cities.

Outside of the seven U.S. cities that have Uber cars running, Uber is testing in Toronto and operates in Paris, and has expressed a desire to push further into Europe, aiming to reach around 25 cities worldwide in the next several months.

For some tech start-ups, expansion into Asia — especially China — presents unique challenges. And in cities like Singapore, Beijing and Hong Kong, there are already some services that allow people to summon a car or cab through an app, or that use GPS to help riders pick up other riders while in the cab (and thereby split costs).

But Kalanick isn’t overly concerned with either competition or regulatory roadblocks. “We’re dealing with city rules and regulations with every individual city we expand to,” he said. “For us, the challenges aren’t necessarily about which country we’re in.” For example, cab regulations in San Francisco mirror regulations in Paris, Kalanick said, while New York City is a different beast entirely.

(Photo courtesy of Flickr/Ilya Genkin)

As the father of eight kids — now all between the ages of 12 and 21 — he knows a thing or two about the importance of finding the perfect place. (Note: Kaufer delicately calls family trips “adventures,” while getaways with his wife are “vacations.”)

Since then, TripAdvisor has become the online go-to destination for reviews of hotels from Barbados to bed-and-breakfasts in New York City.

In 2004, Kaufer sold the company to IAC for $210 million, setting off a somewhat complicated operating journey. A year later, TripAdvisor spun out of IAC as part of Expedia. It remained a division within the online travel agency until last month, when it broke off into an independent publicly held company.

Today, the Newton, Mass.-based company has 1,100 employees, attracts more than 50 million unique visitors and has published more than 60 million reviews. It trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “TRIP,” while Expedia continues to trade under the symbol “EXPE.”

Kaufer talked to AllThingsD about being an independently traded company, and about the media company’s prospects for growth:

AllThingsD: What is it like to be out from under Expedia’s wing?

Stephen Kaufer: There was a joke when we were spun out as part of Expedia from IAC. People asked me, “What’s your vision for TripAdvisor?” I would always say, “I want to be bigger than Expedia,” and people’s response always was, “That’s what the little brother might say.”

A year or two ago, we passed Expedia in comScore metrics, and are still experiencing growth. It’s a free service that’s valuable. It’s worldwide. TripAdvisor is in 21 languages, and three-fourths of the traffic comes from outside of the U.S.

Now that you are out from under Expedia, do you have more flexibility on where you send leads that are generated from people reading reviews on TripAdvisor?

Under Expedia, we had no obligation to send traffic to them … That never happened, and we were allowed to run independently. But at the end of the day, they [competitors] knew their marketing spend was going into Expedia’s pocket. That’s the most exciting thing. We are now completely independent. Expedia now owns no stock, so when I talk to Orbitz or Priceline, these folks can now partner with TripAdvisor without any hint of helping to fuel the competitors.

Why the spinoff now?

It was announced back in April, but basically there was a view that there was a class of investors that liked a pure Internet category leader and a fast-growing media company like TripAdvisor, and there’s another class that appreciates Expedia, which is in the dominant online travel agency position.

We were blurring the two when they were together. It gives Wall Street the opportunity to invest in either, and each company will find its own set of investors.

Do you think Wall Street is correctly valuing TripAdvisor? (The stock failed to come roaring out of the gate.)

No. But I’m not complaining. I think Wall Street, over the next couple of quarters, will appreciate how both companies perform as independent companies. The numbers have been a little hidden because they were jumbled together. … They’ve never seen TripAdvisor operate independently. They ask, “What will you do differently? How will things be the same?” Watch us, and I think you’ll like what you see.

Will you grow mostly organically, or through M&A?

We have a good track record on acquisition and product innovation.

The last few acquisitions, you saw a focus on our strategic priorities: A mobile company, a social company, two vacation rental companies and a company in China. Our four key investment areas that we called out are vacation rentals, mobile, social and geographic expansion.

In many ways, TripAdvisor was one of the original social networks, where users shared information on their vacations. Now you see Facebook getting into the space with Facebook Connect and other initiatives, too.

Everyone feels like being able to get travel recommendations from their friends is a natural evolution for getting a better recommendation, period.

There’s a couple of different angles. Some social travel companies are focused on making planning a group trip easier. No site out there has scale and does that well, and we don’t do that now. Facebook is a great platform to do it on, and it may be interesting to us in the future.

Our focus is leveraging the friend graph on Facebook and our rich content to give someone the experience of seeing recommendations or ratings from friends.

We love the concept, and we are furiously building up our own product offering to make it more valuable. If it’s not too early to call someone a leader, we are clearly it, because we have the content and the friend graph. We aren’t a site that’s based on Facebook, which is an advantage, because you can do anyting you want to do on the Web or the tablet or mobile.

What about Google moving into travel?

They have a couple of different approaches. They have Google Places, which reviews everything; and they have Google Hotels, which is a hotel finder; and then Google Flights, to help you find the best fare.

With Google Places, they still can’t seem to generate enough high-quality reviews to be useful. They compete with Yelp and us, and I’ve yet to be concerned. I was concerned about Google Flights — a lot — before they launched, but you cannot book through an online travel agent like Expedia — only directly through the airlines for now.

It’s an incomplete product, so I still use TripAdvisor flights, or go to Expedia or Orbitz. They get better results, and maybe aren’t as fast, but more information is still better.

They say they want to include online travel agents, but the airlines won’t let them. … Don’t mistake my tone for being sympathetic to Google on this one.

What about vacation rentals? HomeAway went public last year.

After HomeAway, there’s not that much.

We agree it’s a great market, and it deserves to be online. It helps consumers and there’s a need to bring a trust element into the equation. Folks who have tried it have liked (renting homes), and a whole lot of people haven’t tried it, because a hotel is all they’ve ever tried.

If they are reading hotel reviews, but I see that you are trying to stay seven nights in Orlando, I might say, “Did you know that you might be able to save money and get a private swimming pool?” They never would have thought of that as an opportunity, but there’s lots of great opportunities in Orlando and tons of other cities.

HomeAway dominates the category, but there’s plenty of room for a second, third and fourth.

I’m surprised that already three-fourths of your traffic comes from outside the U.S.

Yes, and that portion is growing. We have offices all over the globe, and our biggest investment opportunity is in China. We purchased a metasearch site for air, hotel and train in China. We view international growth as a tailwind to the business.

So what’s your price target for the stock? It’s currently trading around $25 a share.

I’m looking at how I can grow the business over the long term, and that’s why we are making some of these investments. I might be ahead of it, or other folks ahead of me, but I’m a nuts-and-bolts operator. I like to build stuff, and getting TripAdvisor to the next level of functionality and awareness is my priority — not the stock price.

We are thrilled to welcome another strong reporter to the AllThingsD team: Lauren Goode, who will cover consumer tech products and issues. She’ll be based in New York.

Lauren comes to us from the digital arm of our sister news organization, The Wall Street Journal, where she was a video producer and reporter, from 2008 to 2011. She helped launch the Journal’s live-streaming video programming and produced and co-hosted the daily “Digits” technology show, which regularly features our ATD staff along with Journal reporters and editors. (We hope to see her there from time to time as a guest herself now.) She was also a contributing writer to the Digits blog on WSJ.com, and wrote posts on consumer technology products.

Prior to joining the Journal, Lauren worked in cable television from 2003 to 2008, producing and writing shows for A&E Television Networks’ award-winning “Biography” series, after having started her career as a production assistant at ESPN in New York.

The addition of Lauren to AllThingsD is just the latest move in an expansion that has seen our staff more than double in the past year, including adding new reporters, editors and developers. This has allowed us to broaden and deepen our coverage, to break more news and also to begin doing different types of stories than many other blogs offer, such as our recent series on Facebook’s smartphone effort.

We have more new coverage and staff expansions planned, so stay tuned. And, as always, thanks for your readership, which has been increasing strongly quarter after quarter. We aim to keep earning your loyalty and trust.

Going forward, Lauren can be reached at lauren@allthingsd.com, and you can read more about her bio and ethics statement here.

– Walt & Kara

We are now posting the full videos from the recent AsiaD conference, which took place in Hong Kong in October.

Over the next week or so, we’re going to follow the schedule of the actual event. Up now: LivingSocial CEO Tim O’Shaughnessy, along with the head of the daily deals site’s two recent acquisitions in Asia, Daniel Shin of South Korea’s TicketMonster and Paul Srivorakul of Indonesia’s Ensogo Group.

The panel, interviewed onstage by Ina Fried, talked about a range of topics, from its Asian expansion to thoughts about rival Groupon to the future of the social buying space.

Here’s the video:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111109/the-livingsocial-trio-talk-asian-expansion-groupon-and-more-the-full-asiad-interview-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111109/canadas-dealfind-expands-to-18-more-u-s-cities/ http://allthingsd.com/20111109/canadas-dealfind-expands-to-18-more-u-s-cities/#comments Wed, 09 Nov 2011 15:00:37 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=142115 Undeterred by U.S. daily deal companies like Groupon and Google, Toronto-based Dealfind is launching offers in 18 more cities today. In all, Dealfind now covers 41 U.S. cities and 28 in Canada. New markets include Austin, Charlotte, Cleveland, Detroit, Fort Lauderdale and Indianapolis.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111109/canadas-dealfind-expands-to-18-more-u-s-cities/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111024/netflix-heads-to-uk-to-take-on-amazon/ http://allthingsd.com/20111024/netflix-heads-to-uk-to-take-on-amazon/#comments Mon, 24 Oct 2011 11:04:35 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=136028 Netflix says it will bring its streaming video service — but not its DVDs — to the United Kingdom and Ireland in “early 2012.” The announcement confirms earlier reports and speculation that the company would target the U.K. after a Latin American expansion in 2011; other reports have the company moving into Spain as well. Unlike other Netflix expansion moves, in the U.K. the company will run up against its first entrenched digital competitor: Amazon’s LoveFilm, most often known as “the Netflix of Europe.” Netflix reports Q3 earnings this afternoon.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111024/netflix-heads-to-uk-to-take-on-amazon/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110728/googles-growth-unsettles-mountain-view/ http://allthingsd.com/20110728/googles-growth-unsettles-mountain-view/#comments Thu, 28 Jul 2011 07:00:29 +0000 Amir Efrati http://allthingsd.com/?p=103560 Google Inc. is the single largest contributor to the coffers of Mountain View, where it is based. But as the Web giant expands its physical footprint and seeks to build new offices, housing and infrastructure, the city government is pushing back.

Earlier this month several city council members criticized a proposal by Google to build bridges over a creek that separates existing offices from land it leased from a federal agency. Starting in 2013, Google plans to construct up to 1.2 million square feet of buildings on the land, including offices, recreation facilities and corporate housing.

The new development will extend the Google campus into the leased land, crossing public trails along Stevens Creek that are used by commuters and outdoor enthusiasts. While the trail will remain public after Google’s expansion, council members said at a recent hearing they were concerned about the need to relocate part of the trail due to the construction of the bridges, among other things. The topic will be revisited in future hearings.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110728/googles-growth-unsettles-mountain-view/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110706/the-arianna-invasion-of-britain/ http://allthingsd.com/20110706/the-arianna-invasion-of-britain/#comments Wed, 06 Jul 2011 09:49:43 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=94863

The British version of the Huffington Post, which has been expected, went live today.

It is the site’s first major international expansion beyond North America (Canada was first).

While the content is aimed at the audience there, it will still have the usual HuffPo mix of saucy news, videos and blogs.

But in this case, instead of U.S. celebs and pols, those blogs will come from famous British luminaries, including former Prime Minister Tony Blair; Sarah Brown, wife of another former PM, Gordon Brown; and entertainers Ricky Gervais and Tracey Ullman.

The Huffington Post apparently already attracts a monthly audience in excess of 1.2 million in the U.K.

AOL — which bought the high-profile news and opinion site for $315 million — has given its content head, Arianna Huffington, a lot of backing and also funding for expansion, including globally.

Other international Huffington Post sites are likely to roll out soon.

Here’s the official press release:

BRITAIN WAKES UP TO THE HUFFINGTON POST UK TODAY

Latest Edition of “HuffPost” Blends Brand’s Unique Mix of News, Opinion, Community, and Engagement with Original, UK-centric Content

6th July, 2011, London – The Huffington Post UK (http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/), a UK version of The Huffington Post (“HuffPost”), the popular American news and opinion site, goes live today. The site features HuffPost’s unique combination of original reporting, aggregation, a leading-edge commenting forum, pioneering social engagement tools, and a vibrant platform for a wide range of bloggers. High profile bloggers already lined up to contribute through the site include Tony Blair, Jeremy Hunt and Sarah Brown as well as comedy and entertainment luminaries such as Ricky Gervais, Tracey Ullman, Imogen Edwards-Jones, Jonathan Meades and Kate Garraway .

The Huffington Post UK is edited by Carla Buzasi (nee Bevan), Editor-in-Chief, AOL Europe who leads an initial team of ten dedicated editors and writers, with further support from the wider AOL editorial team in the UK, as well as The Huffington Post team in the United States. The Huffington Post UK platform gives hundreds of British bloggers the opportunity to showcase their work to millions of readers globally.

Other recent new hires include Political Editor Chris Wimpress, a former political correspondent for BBC Radio 4; News Editor Jacqui Head, formerly an Online Journalist at Al-Jazeera, with stints at BBC and CNN; and Caroline Frost, Entertainment Editor, previously an Arts Producer for BBC News, and Online Entertainment Editor at the Herald Sun in Melbourne. Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, Chief Executive Officer of E.L. Rothschild and board member of Estee Lauder and The Economist Group, is the site’s Editor-at-Large.

The Huffington Post (US) was founded in May 2005, and has become an influential and oft-quoted media brand, “The Internet Newspaper.” It attracts 36 million* readers and only last month overtook the New York Times to become the world’s biggest newspaper online.

The UK site offers coverage of politics, entertainment, living, style, world news, technology, comedy, and is a top destination for news, blogs and original content. In the coming months, The Huffington Post UK will evolve to feature even more content across a whole range of genres.

Commenting on the launch of the UK site, Arianna Huffington, President and Editor-in-Chief of AOL Huffington Post Media Group, said: “We are arriving here in the midst of a rich and thriving media culture marked by great innovation. We look forward to adding HuffPost UK to the mix, and to our real-time ‘digital water cooler’ — which embraces the best of the new (immediacy, transparency, interactivity) and the best of the old (fact-checking, accuracy, fairness, and an emphasis on storytelling) — becoming the spark for many interesting conversations.”

Kate Burns, SVP, AOL Europe, said: “The Huffington Post has pioneered a new way for people to connect with the news of the day, and with each other, so we’re excited to bring this unique platform to the UK. We’re giving people the chance to write, share and debate opinions, creating a democratic site that can give Joe Bloggs the same platform as Ricky Gervais.”

The Huffington Post (US) already attracts a monthly audience in excess of 1.2 million [comScore, May 2011] UK based readers who are engaged, influential, and affluent. The UK site will feature premium ad formats, including the recently launched “Project Devil,” which has generated unprecedented engagement levels, time spent on ads and time spent viewing ad videos. At launch The Huffington Post UK will showcase an LG Project Devil campaign brokered through leading media agency Mindshare and a Dell PLE campaign negotiated by Mediacom.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110706/the-arianna-invasion-of-britain/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110505/liveblogging-demand-medias-q1-earnings-perky-perfecting/ http://allthingsd.com/20110505/liveblogging-demand-medias-q1-earnings-perky-perfecting/#comments Thu, 05 May 2011 21:13:31 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=43614

Today, after Demand Media beat Wall Street expectations, its execs got on the horn with investors to explain how it plans to beat the Panda.

That would be the beastly name for Google’s rejiggering of its search algorithm, in order to rid search results of poor quality content.

Along with many other sites, Demand has gotten smacked by its raging paw.

Still, the Santa Monica, Calif.-based company reported revenue of $79.5 million and six cents a share in adjusted net income.

Wall Street was expecting the company to report about $69.6 million in revenue for the three months, with four cents a share in adjusted profits.

On a GAAP basis, net loss per share was 13 cents compared to 94 cents a year ago.

Here’s the liveblog of the conference call:

2 pm PT: Demand’s investor relations dude came on and I immediately tuned out until CEO Richard Rosenblatt got on the line to talk about the results.

He was as perky as ever, launching right into the meat of the situation–how Demand was going to pretty up its offerings, such as a redesign of its flagship eHow site and its new editorial arrangement with another perky person, food lady Rachael Ray and the also perky fashionista/talk show lady Tyra Banks.

Gone will be user-generated content that Demand used to let people post at will on its eHow site that was, well, less than good.

As in, bad.

Instead, it’s “curation,” “editorial innovation” and feedback cycles.

We old-timers like to call that journalism and copyediting, complete with mean old editors who spiked said copy when it was crappy.

“Let me be clear,” said Rosenblatt, the Google changes did negatively impact Demand’s traffic. But Rosenblatt said the company dug into its content and has been improving it since.

2:17 pm: Now it was CFO Charles Hillard reading the results themselves. I am sorry, Mr. Finance Guy, but I can read it myself, so this is always the time in earnings calls when I check out and spend my time improving my content.

So when I heard words such as “stock-based comp,” I moved on to fixing all the typos that a very nice reader alerted me to, since I was writing too quickly.

Then, I briefly considered writing a high-quality post for eHow on how to write earnings and fix typos at the same time. I am that good.

2:30 pm: The CFO dude finished up and the Q&A with analysts started.

All Panda questions, natch!

Rosenblatt seemed calm, cool and collected.

“We think on this one, they did a very good job,” he said of Google’s search-fixing efforts, trying to soothe the savage beast. “We all continue to evolve.”

Which translated to: Google says jump and we say: “How high?”

Which is then followed by: “Please sir, can I have some more (traffic)?”

More Google algo change questions.

I suspect there is a new tactic afoot by Demand: Bore us into submission about the traffic devastation from Larry Page’s minions with endless questions about algo.

Finally, a question about mobile and international expansion. Apparently, Demand content is going to be translated into five different languages.

Yay! I am readying my version of “How to Boil Water” in French! (“Comment Faire Bouillir L’eau”!)

Mobile is going to be big too for Demand, which it is for everyone.

Then it was onto a question about improving content, including paying its writers more moolah, which would then eat into the Demand cheaper content business model.

I liked that question! I suddenly decided I was going to shift to a lugubrious post on the history of the Maginot Line in 132 parts!

Oops, Rosenblatt said the data has to show that the peeps want those longer pieces.

Back to the boiling water opus!

It’s on to some video questions and then back to search, as in diversifying away from relying on search to get traffic and premium prices for its advertising.

As in, how much are you going to cozy up to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg?

“It’s less about where traffic comes from and more about where they land,” said Rosenblatt, except you just know he sent a lovely floral bouquet plus a hefty selection of citrus to Zuckerberg’s new house in Silicon Valley right after Panda roared.

Rosenblatt deflected a lot of questions in this arena. “We still think that search is a fantastic way” to gain traffic, he said, making sure Google’s Page did not chomp off his hand as he courted his social networking nemesis at Facebook.

But as the old Kikuyu proverb goes: “When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.”

More likely, as Mary Chapin Carpenter sings: “Sometimes you’re the windshield. Sometimes you’re the bug.”

We’ll see which is which for Demand in the quarters ahead.

Until then, here’s Carpenter performing her song, “The Bug”:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110505/liveblogging-demand-medias-q1-earnings-perky-perfecting/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110414/exclusive-flipboard-confirms-50-million-funding-at-200-million-valuation/ http://allthingsd.com/20110414/exclusive-flipboard-confirms-50-million-funding-at-200-million-valuation/#comments Thu, 14 Apr 2011 20:23:12 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=42652

Late last month, BoomTown posted about a huge venture funding effort by the high-profile and even more highly designed social media reading app for the Apple iPad, Flipboard.

Today, its co-founder and CEO Mike McCue confirmed the $50 million round at an eye-popping $200 million valuation, in a wide-ranging interview at the start-up’s Palo Alto, Calif., HQ.

“We’re obviously thrilled, because we think it confirms our focus that people want a beautifully designed way to interact with content and to share it,” he said. “And there is a lot more to come–on a scale of one to 10, we’re just at a two or three.”

The bulk of the new second round of funding–Flipboard had previously raised $10.5 million–came from New York-based Insight Venture Partners.

Insight’s Jerry Murdock said in an interview that he was excited about the idea of “social endorsement” that Flipboard was pioneering.

“We back great entrepreneurs and Flipboard is that and also in an obviously unique position to solve a problem of media consumption in the digital age,” he said. “The sky is the limit. Or more precisely it is the best environment to consume curated real-time content for Twitter and Facebook, because of the user experience and social endorsement integration with the content.”

Insight is also an investor in Twitter.

Also stepping up in the new Flipboard round is Comcast’s venture arm, as well as previous investors, including Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures and a spate of well known angels, such as Twitter co-founder and product guru Jack Dorsey, Facebook co-founder and Asana dude Dustin Moskovitz, the ubiquitous Ron Conway, actor Ashton Kutcher and the investment company of former News Corp. exec Peter Chernin.

“From a Comcast perspective, we’re intrigued with Mike and what he’s doing with content aggregation,” said Amy Banse, Comcast Interactive Capital’s new head. “We think we can learn from him and he from us.”

Co-founded by longtime entrepreneur McCue (Netscape, Tellme) and former Apple iPhone engineer Evan Doll in January, Flipboard launched to much attention in July.

The elegant Flipboard–which McCue recently told me in an onstage interview at the South by Southwest conference in Austin had zero revenues thus far–has changed the game on the consumption of social media.

Its innovative social magazine concept is attempting to make the social networking universe more accessible, consumable and, perhaps most importantly, visually arresting via its rich app.

Essentially, Flipboard pulls information from media RSS feeds and sites such as Twitter and Facebook data streams and then reassembles it in an easy-to-navigate, personalized format in a mobile tablet touchscreen environment.

In its current offering, there are pull-quotes, photos, videos, status updates and even the first paragraphs of linked-out content. There is also the ability to comment and share, as if one were on a social networking or microblogging site.

McCue said the new giant pile of cash will be used to increase its 32-person staff to about 50, international expansion, small acquisitions and more product development on more platforms.

The next in the arena will be the iPhone version of Flipboard, said McCue, followed by one for the Google Android mobile operating system eventually.

Left unsaid, of course, was the need for funding to fight the likelihood of increased competition in the hot space for delivering both professional and social content to consumers on a wide range of devices.

Rivals are varied, such as Silicon Valley’s most adorable news reader start-up Pulse and also Zite, a news reader which was recently sued for copyright infringement by a group of major publishers.

There are bigger potential players, such as Google, which is trying to find various ways to move into the social space.

In fact, said several sources, Google and others have made acquisition approaches to Flipboard, which has instead opted for raising more funding and staying independent for now.

McCue declined to talk about that, but did note that he is not surprised by publisher interest, especially of the worried and wary kind, in the arena.

“Anyone not respectful of others’ content is going to get in that kind of trouble,” he said, noting Flipboard has struck deals with 17 big publishers so far, including this morning’s announcement about a partnership with Oprah Winfrey’s and Discovery’s OWN cable network. “There is not one half to this equation.”

Right now, the Flipboard app is free and the business plan is advertising and some possible subscription scenarios.

McCue said advertising will be the key to Flipboard’s business plan in the future, although it’s not clear if the company will ever sell advertising itself.

Rather, it will partner with publishers seeking better distribution in the explosive tablet and smartphone market, where Flipboard has been gaining traction quickly.

But until that is sorted out, there is now $50 million more in the Flipboard kitty to figure it all out.

“With this funding, we can grow at the right pace and have a lot of flexibility to get the product right,” said McCue. “And, that’s the most important thing.”

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