It intends to raise $480 million to $540 million in the public markets, setting a valuation range between $10.1 billion and $11.4 billion. Here’s the entire document Groupon shared with Wall Street investors while on its road show.

In addition, the daily deals giant released third-quarter results today, which included improved numbers and a profit in North America.

It will trade on the Nasdaq exchange under the ticker “GRPN.”

The company said it plans to sell 30 million shares at $16 to $18 apiece, which will raise about half of the original $750 million it had intended to raise when it filed for the IPO back in June.

There will be an over-allotment of 4.5 million shares. In all, the company will end up selling nearly 5 percent of its Class A common stock before the allotment.

Since the company’s original filing, the Chicago-based darling has gone through the wringer. Updated amendments led to questions about the company’s strength, or whether it could sustain a profitable business over the long term. Additionally, a number of top-level executives have left the company under the watch of Groupon’s CEO Andrew Mason.

Some of those concerns will be muted, given the company’s financial performance in the quarter ended Sept. 30. In that period, it helped to demonstrate it can scale back its marketing costs and still grow.

Q3 revenues increased 426 percent year over year and 9.6 percent sequentially to $430.2 million. The company’s third-quarter net loss totaled $10.6 million, narrowed substantially from the prior quarter and year-ago period when it lost $101.2 million and $49 million, respectively.

Contributing to improved results was a profit in North America of $18.8 million, reversing a loss of $10.5 million in the second quarter. This is primarily due to a decrease in marketing expenses while still maintaining customer growth, which resulted in higher revenue.

The international markets had similar improvements; however, Groupon continued to invest heavily in countries such as South Korea, Australia and Japan, which adversely affected results. A bulk of the company’s revenues, or about 64 percent, occur in North America.

Critics skeptical that Groupon would have a hard time swapping losses for growth definitely have something to think about.

It now has $244 million cash on hand, up 8 percent since the prior quarter, and 255 percent since last year.

Groupon said in the filing that it plans to use the money to increase revenues by expanding domestically and internationally through gaining new subscribers and investing in technology.

At a prequel for the many VPs of Yahoo to the all-hands meeting for all 13,500 employees of the Silicon Valley Internet giant that is taking place at 11 am, Yahoo co-founder, director and former CEO Jerry Yang told the group the company was “not for sale.”

Even though, of course, it was hiring advisory firms, such as Allen & Co., to explore strategic options. Many justifiably feel “for sale” is just what Yahoo is.

Instead, Yang reassured the troops that it was business as usual at the company, in spite of the abrupt firing of its current CEO Carol Bartz yesterday.

One attendee emailed me: “Really?“

Yang told the group that the aim was to grow revenue and profit, but did not put forth a specific plan as yet. He also said the search was on for a new CEO.

Meanwhile, interim CEO Tim Morse spoke only at the end of the meeting, for the last 10 minutes.

Morse continued to be Yang’s sidekick at the all-hands meeting later, in which they reiterated their no-sale motto.

Still, the troops were restless and the event included a lot of pointed questions from employees about the ouster of Bartz and how that was going to get the company growing again.

One employee asked the board to give Bartz’s $10 million severance package to charity, to much applause.

Another query was about the shift on Bartz by Yahoo’s Chairman Roy Bostock, who praised her performance earlier this summer at the annual meeting.

How, asked the employee, did Yahoo go from full support of Bartz to fired? The basic answer from Yang: Things change!

Another employee asked about the bid to buy the Hulu premium video service. Americas head Ross Levinsohn’s answer: Yahoo did not need it to win.

Both Levinsohn and product head Blake Irving stressed how big Yahoo still is, although Yahoo’s kind of big today might not mean better.

Employees — I love them for channelling exactly what I would have asked — pressed Morse on when the strategery would be done this time. A few months, he said.

But perhaps the toughest query was about how did the board fire the CEO without first having a plan in place, which the questioning employee noted had further worsened trust issues with Yahoo leadership.

It got the biggest applause.

Trust us, said Yang.

That’s a big ask for beleaguered Yahoo staffers these days.

Meanwhile, Yahoo filed a new-less 8-K regulatory filing today about the Bartz firing.

In it, Yahoo wrote: “No new compensatory or severance arrangements were entered into in connection with these leadership changes. Ms. Bartz will receive severance benefits
for termination without cause as provided in her employment and equity award agreements.”

Here it is:

YHOO-20110907-8K-20110906

Related posts

• As Yahoo Continues to Wobble, Investors (And Board) Eye Options
• Exclusive: Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Tim Morse Named Interim CEO
• Carol Bartz’s Last F%*& You — Now Aimed at Yahoo Board
• Yahoo’s Statement on Bartz Ouster
• Wall Street Likes Bartz’s Firing — Yahoo Stock Spikes on News
• My Picks for Yahoo’s Next CEO — Maybe Snoop Dogg, Ya Digg?

The Seattle real estate company reported that revenues totaled $15.8 million, more than doubling from $7.3 million in the second quarter 2010.

The company also reported a net profit of $1.6 million, representing the first time the company has been profitable on a quarterly basis. In the year-ago period, Zillow lost $2 million.

In addition, the company said its monthly unique users during the quarter jumped 93 percent to a record 20.8 million, and that in July, it marked another record traffic month with 23.2 million unique users to both its Web sites and mobile applications.

Zillow’s largest source of revenue comes from agents, who subscribe for special listings. The company said premier agent subscribers totaled 13,385 as of the end of June, up 180 percent from 4,777 at the end of second quarter 2010.

The results come as PC makers benefit from a wave of companies upgrading their computer hardware. Lenovo has also benefited from business in China and other emerging markets, where demand is outperforming a weak consumer segment in the U.S. and other developed markets.

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The company’s shares surged in after-hours trading Thursday.

Nvidia swung to a profit in the second quarter and predicted revenue in the current quarter would grow 4% to 6%, while analysts had called for growth of 4%.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Alibaba.com, which operates Web sites that connect buyers and suppliers, said its net profit for the three months ended June 30 was 464.5 million yuan ($72.6 million), up from 363 million yuan.

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Today’s stock market rout hit tech stocks hard, with most declining as much as the broader indices.

With the Dow Jones Industrial Average down 4.3 percent and Nasdaq off 5.1 percent, shares of Google, Microsoft, AOL and Apple managed to stay in that range of losses.

Not so Yahoo and LinkedIn, whose shares were off 7.8 percent and 9.6 percent, respectively.

LinkedIn, the business networking site which reported its second-quarter earnings today, saw its shares seesaw down and up and down and then up again today.

While its results were in line with Wall Street expectations, the company also created some worry after it said profit margins are going to be cut in half for the next quarter.

Still, after its huge fall earlier today, in after-hours trading, LinkedIn has recovered a bit and is now up five percent.

But Yahoo has continued its increasingly troubling stock drop after the markets closed. Its shares are now dipping below $12, which gives the Silicon Valley Internet giant a very low $15.6 billion valuation.

The company’s stock has dropped 34 percent in the past three months, as worries over a range of issues — from its Asian assets to its display advertising business to its talent drain — continue to be a drag.

Sony, a consumer electronics bellwether for Japan and maker of iconic products like the Walkman music player, recorded a net loss of ¥15.5 billion ($198.7 million) in the quarter ended June. That compared with a net profit of ¥25.7 billion in the same period a year earlier.

Operating profit for the quarter was sliced by more than half to ¥27.5 billion from ¥67.02 billion a year earlier. Revenue declined about 10% to ¥1.49 trillion from ¥1.66 trillion.

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Earlier today, CNBC reported that the regulatory review of Groupon’s questionable use of certain accounting metrics in its IPO filing was delaying its offering until later in September.

While more questions from the Securities and Exchange Commission about how it accounts for its revenue and profits might indeed eventually push the IPO debut out, according to sources I have interviewed for months now, an offering in mid to late September was actually when the social buying company was planning to take its company public.

It makes sense, since August is seldom used for road shows for companies headed for an IPO — think Wall Street in the Hamptons and you’ll get why.

That said, the continued scrutiny by the SEC is not a welcome development for Chicago-based Groupon, which filed its S-1 documents in June.

In coming weeks, sources said, the company will be filing new financial information about both its growth and costs, which will undoubtedly be put under a microscope by investors and regulators.

That’s no surprise since the contents of the original filing immediately caused controversy, especially over the amount of its venture funding paid out to insiders and also over an unusual accounting treatment called adjusted consolidated segment operating income, or Adjusted CSOI.

As I wrote at the time:

Let’s be clear, this is a number that does not include important costs, such as critical online marketing expenses to attract new customers to Groupon.
Such accounting is called non-GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles).

In 2010 and the first quarter of 2011, Groupon said its Adjusted CSOI was $60.6 million and $81.6 million, respectively.

On a GAAP basis, Groupon lost $413.4 million million for 2010 and $113.9 million in the first three months of 2011.

Said Groupon about its accounting in its S-1 filing: “We believe Adjusted CSOI is an important measure of the performance of our business as it excludes expenses that are non-cash or otherwise not indicative of future operating expenses.”

Definitely sketchy enough to attract an SEC look-see, which caused Groupon to back away from Adjusted CSOI as a “valuation metric” in a recently amended S-1 filing. Groupon also stepped back a sloppy comment made after the filing by its Chairman Eric Lefkofsky — in a interview he apparently thought was off the record — that the company would be “wildly profitable.”

One thing is certain: There will surely be more amending of the Groupon S-1 in the weeks ahead as it stumbles toward its IPO, which will be one of the most prominent of the Web 2.0 era.

Baidu’s earnings have been surging for more than a year as the company has added advertisers and benefited from a new keyword advertising system. It has also continued to eclipse Google Inc.’s share of the local search market since the U.S. company moved its China search engine to Hong Kong last year because of concerns about censorship and hacking in China.

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Microsoft has a lot to crow about in its fourth-quarter earnings today, including a 30 percent jump in profits and strong overall revenue growth in its many divisions.

It is sure a lot better than what Yahoo and Nokia turned in this week in their quarterly results.

Here’s all the charts and other data to peruse before I start liveblogging the Microsoft conference call with Wall Street analysts at 2:30 pm PT:

SlidesFY11Q4

PressReleaseFY11Q4

FinancialStatementFY11Q4

In a move reminiscent of one done by Facebook in 2009, Twitter is close to completing an $800 million funding deal that will include a second part in which around $400 million of the total will be used to cash out current investors and also employees.

According to several sources close to the situation, the complex transaction could be completed within two weeks.

Along with basic funding needs, this is largely being done this way to give those with stakes in the San Francisco microblogging company an ability to monetize their privately held common stock and also to do this selling in a more organized — and legal — manner.

That is especially important since the company is not likely to go public for at least a year or more. And, while it could also be sold to a bigger company such as Google, that is also not in Twitter’s immediate future.

Before this secondary follow-on, the first part of the deal will be a $400 million investment for preferred shares by new and also existing shareholders, as was reported by the New York Times last week.

That round will indeed value Twitter at $8 billion, as the Times reported, which is a higher number than in other earlier reports.

This is more than double what Twitter was valued at when it got $200 million in venture funding from Kleiner Perkins in December at a $3.7 billion valuation.

Once the latest investments are complete, Twitter’s total cash haul since it was founded five years ago will be $760 million.

Key new moneybags are expected to be Russian investing heavyweight DST Global, which has invested in Facebook, Zynga and Groupon; as well as the digital growth fund of J.P. Morgan and perhaps others.

Current investors include Benchmark Capital, Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital and several other venture firms, as well as a spate of prominent angel investors.

The latest funding is an important one for Twitter and will up the pressure for its management, including CEO Dick Costolo, to really get its business growing in terms of revenue and profits.

Twitter is still struggling with coming up with a truly lucrative business model, and its execs have presented a number of them, such as promoted tweets, largely based on advertising.

It reportedly has $200 million in annual revenue from its efforts, which is still small in comparison to other Web 2.0 start-ups.

Interestingly, that was a similar situation to where Facebook found itself two years ago, when it allowed its employees to sell 20 percent of their shares.

That financing was part of a $100 million add-on to a $200 million investment in the social networking company by DST. At the time, the tender offer valued the company at $6.5 billion for the common stock, or $14.77 a share.

Of course, Facebook is worth upward of more than 10 times that now, so any Twitter sellers might want to consider their options carefully.

It is not clear exactly who can sell their Twitter shares, and in what amount, in the new deal. When Facebook did a similar move, for example, its top leadership could not sell any of their stakes.

A Twitter spokeswoman would not comment about any fund raising.

But, interestingly, in an onstage interview at a Fortune magazine tech conference this week, Costolo criticized stock trading of the shares of popular start-ups on secondary exchanges as a “distraction.” Like other companies, he said, Twitter had instituted stricter policies to limit the ability of its employees and investors to trade on those markets.

Zynga is poised to file for its initial public offering, according to sources close to the situation.

The filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission could come as early as this week, or next week at the latest.

The move is not entirely unexpected, given how well the recent IPOs of several Internet companies have done recently, including business networking site LinkedIn last week and Russian search giant Yandex today.

Their strong performances show the huge investor appetite for fast-growing and high-profile Web 2.0 firms. Wall Street is also prepping for eventual public offerings from social buying site Groupon and, the big fish, Facebook.

Zynga’s valuation in its last round of funding was $10 billion, but it is likely to price itself higher in an offering.

After all, LinkedIn now has a market valuation of $9 billion, double its pre-IPO price.

Whatever the price, a Zynga IPO is a major coup, especially given how quickly it has morphed into one of the most important forces in online gaming, largely via distribution on the Facebook platform.

The company claims that it has 250 million people actively playing its games every month. Its largest game currently is CityVille, which attracts 90 million monthly users, reports AppData. Its original Poker game still manages to attract 35 million monthly users.

Its early titles, such as FarmVille and Mafia Wars, first vaulted the San Francisco-based company into consumer prominence, and it has recently struck a number of high-profile branding deals with Lady Gaga and the makers of the upcoming animated movie “Kung Fu Panda 2,” among others.

That’s also meant a solid business. Zynga reportedly generated about $400 million in profit last year on about $850 million in revenue, although sources said the filing will reveal much more robust numbers.

The company has also grown its work force quickly. Last year, Zynga hired more than 800 people and today has more than 1,500 full-time employees in 13 offices, spanning six countries.

Recently, at the opening of its new Seattle office, its founder and CEO Mark Pincus–who has tried to hit the start-up jackpot many times before–said he had Amazon-sized ambitions for Zynga, referring to that city’s online retail giant.

Depending on how the offering goes, he might want to think bigger.

Sources said Goldman Sachs will be among the lead bankers in the Zynga offering.

Zynga declined to comment on its IPO plans.

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier tonight that Microsoft–in what would be its most aggressive acquisition in the digital space–was zeroing in on buying Skype for $8.5 billion all in with an assumption of the Luxembourg-based company’s debt.

Sources told BoomTown tonight that the deal for the online telephony and video communications giant is actually done and will be announced early tomorrow morning.

The purchase–which has been spearheaded in closely held negotiations by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, with an assist from Business Division CFO Amy Hood and top dealmaker Charles Songhurst–is a bold move for the software giant and its biggest acquisition in more than three decades.

The big price will give Microsoft–which has struggled in its online efforts and has lost billions of dollars for its work–a big brand name on the Web.

With Skype, which has been aggressively expanding, Microsoft will continue to lose money in its Internet efforts. Skype lost $7 million on revenue of $860 million. Operating profits, which Skype preferred to highlight, were $264 million.

And–let us not forget–Skype’s debt is $686 million. Silver lining: That’s slightly less than Microsoft’s Online Services division losses in its most recent quarter!

But, sources said, the concept is bigger than just money, including getting access to Skype’s 663 million registered users.

Skype, which had been headed bumpily toward an IPO until now, will apparently be integrated into Microsoft’s Windows Live and other online communications efforts in both the consumer and enterprise arenas, sources said.

Think Kinect connecting.

Skype has had a big-company owner before–eBay Inc. paid $2.6 billion in cash and stock for it in 2005, as a way for the auction site’s buyers and sellers to communicate.

A 70 percent stake in Skype was sold in 2009 to investors such as Silver Lake Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. It then valued Skype at $2.75 billion.

So, obviously, the deal is a big win for them. In addition, at the time they made their investments, Skype was a huge legal mess with lawsuits flying.

Skype has since gotten cleaned up enough to attract Microsoft.

Other suitors have looked at Skype, including Google, although acquisition interest by Facebook was very much overblown, said several sources.

Interestingly, Microsoft’s new smartphone partner Nokia also held meetings with Skype’s CEO Tony Bates, a former Cisco exec who arrived at the company last fall.

Interest in Skype by Microsoft was first reported by GigaOm’s Om Malik on Sunday.

Tune in at 5 am PT for the official press release, apparently, and lots and lots and lots of analysis of whether Microsoft paid too much for Skype.

“I will make more profits and certainly there is no technology company in the planet which is as profitable as we are.”

— Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, May 27, 2010

What was unimaginable just a decade ago has finally occured. Apple is now more profitable than Microsoft.

Posting earnings for its most recent quarter Thursday, Microsoft reported net income of $5.23 billion on revenues of $16.42 billion. Which turned out to be significantly less than the net profit of $5.99 billion on revenues of $24.67 billion Apple turned in last week.

Another remarkable–and remarkably ironic–milestone for Apple, which surpassed Microsoft in market cap last May. It was Microsoft, after all, that breathed new life into a struggling Apple back in 1997 with a $150 million investment in the company (see video below). What was it Bill Gates said at the time? “We think Apple makes a huge contribution in the computer industry. And we think it’s going to be a lot of fun helping out.”

Software giant Microsoft soundly beat Wall Street expectations in its third-quarter earnings released after the market closed today.

Microsoft said it had revenue of $16.43 billion for the quarter ended Mar. 31, 2011, which was up 13 percent from a year ago. Net income was $5.23 billion, or 61 cents per share, a rise of 31 percent and 36 percent, respectively.

Investors were expecting the Redmond, Wash. tech company to have profits of 56 cents per share, up 45 cents per share in the same quarter last year. Revenue was expected to come in at $16.2 billion.

As usual, Microsoft beating of expectations still has not helped its lackluster stock, which is down almost 14 percent year over year.

Its shares are currently down more than two percent in after-hours trading, to $26.09.

That’s due to worries about PC market growth, in the wake of an explosion of tablet and smartphone devices from competitors such as Apple and Google.

Most of Microsoft’s divisions were up in terms of revenue, especially its Xbox, Kinect and Office businesses. That offsetted slowing PC growth, Microsoft said, as well as a 4.5 percent drop in revenue in its flagship Windows and Windows Live division.

BoomTown will be liveblogging the earnings call at 2:30 pm PT.

Until then, here is the official press release:

letterheadFY11Q3 –

The Japanese videogame maker said its net profit for the fiscal year ended March 31 was ¥77.62 billion ($944.5 million), down 66 percent from the year-earlier ¥228.64 billion. Revenue was down 29 percent to ¥1.014 trillion while operating profit was off 52 percent to ¥171.08 billion. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters had forecast a net profit of ¥142.41 billion and revenue of ¥1.079.

Nintendo also said it plans in 2012 to launch a home console to replace the Wii, which has sold 86 million units since its 2006 debut. The company said it plans to show a working model at June’s E3 Expo in Los Angeles.

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HTC’s strong results reflect rising demand for smartphones as consumers continue to switch from traditional cellphones to gadgets that allow them to browse the Internet, write emails and watch videos.

The Taiwan-based smartphone maker, which is best known for making phones using Google Inc.’s operating system, has been growing at a rapid clip and is neck-and neck with Nokia Corp. in terms of market capitalization.

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Yesterday, BoomTown paid a long overdue visit on the Mountain View, Calif., HQ of Mozilla, the unusual public-private company that makes the Firefox browser, to chat with its (relatively) new CEO Gary Kovacs (pictured here).

There is a lot to talk about with the new exec, especially the near-to-official launch of Firefox 4, the increasing coopetition with Google and its Chrome efforts and where Mozilla goes next (mobile).

Kovacs, in fact, has a deep mobile background, having arrived in the late fall of 2010 to take over from John Lilly, who moved on to a stint as a venture capitalist.

Before Mozilla, Kovacs worked on a range of products at Sybase–until after its purchase by SAP–and also on mobile and devices at Adobe. Before that, he played a key role at Zi Corporation, a company specializing in embedded software and services for mobile and consumer devices.

He’ll need all that expertise if Firefox is to do as well on mobile devices as it has in gaining market share on the desktop, an effort that has been challenged by a continual and intense effort at upgrade and improvement by No. 3 Google especially.

According to a recent poll, for example, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer holds the dominant 56 percent share, with Mozilla’s Firefox at almost 23 percent and Google at just above 10 percent. Apple’s Safari and Opera follow.

Of course, Firefox has been playing nicer with Chrome cousin Android, which is beginning to dominate the smartphone market and is moving aggressively into the tablet arena. In fact, Mozilla just released a new beta in the marketplace for Google’s mobile operating system.

Still, some have fretted as Mozilla delayed its official release of Firefox 4 several times since last fall.

Nonetheless, by dislodging IE from its dominant market position, Firefox has proved not only that open-source projects can provide better software, but that it’s possible for a particularly well done one to become an everyday consumer application.

Despite its success, Mozilla still has to keep up its innovation and technical prowess. But given its unusual status as both a profit and nonprofit, it is hindered in that it is not likely to go public and shower its Silicon Valley employees with giant gobs of overhyped stock.

In the video below, Kovacs talks about Mozilla’s relationship with Google (not easy!), feature improvements in Firefox 4 (a new Chromish user interface!), how to hold onto talent in Silicon Valley (also not easy!) and what it’s like to deal with Apple (definitely not easy!).

Enjoy:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110224/video-mozilla-ceo-gary-kovacs-talks-firefox-4-competition-with-googles-chrome-and-more/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20110217/lenovo-net-jumps-25-percent/ http://allthingsd.com/20110217/lenovo-net-jumps-25-percent/#comments Thu, 17 Feb 2011 17:33:42 +0000 Loretta Chao http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=36470 China’s Lenovo Group Ltd., announcing its largest profit in two-and-a-half years, said Thursday it is making strong market-share gains in emerging markets, including China–which it forecasts will “soon” become the world’s top personal-computer market.

Lenovo’s net profit in its fiscal third quarter, which ended Dec. 31, was up 25% to $99.65 million, on $5.81 billion in revenue, thanks in part to lower component costs. Executives say they will focus on new products such as the Lepad tablet PC, due for release in China this quarter and overseas in June, and on expanding the company’s mobile-Internet business.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110217/lenovo-net-jumps-25-percent/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110216/comscore-posts-q4-loss-but-revenue-rises/ http://allthingsd.com/20110216/comscore-posts-q4-loss-but-revenue-rises/#comments Wed, 16 Feb 2011 23:33:32 +0000 Voices http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=36443 Digital metrics outfit comScore today reported a Q4 GAAP net loss of $0.02 a share, down from a profit of $0.05 a share in the same quarter last year, on record quarterly revenue of $51.2 million, up year-over-year by 52 percent. Both numbers were in line with analysts’ expectations.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110216/comscore-posts-q4-loss-but-revenue-rises/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110209/bubbly-voice-twitter-service-launches-in-the-philippines/ http://allthingsd.com/20110209/bubbly-voice-twitter-service-launches-in-the-philippines/#comments Thu, 10 Feb 2011 06:53:20 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=3444 I last wrote about Bubble Motion, provider of the Bubbly mobile messaging service, exactly a year ago. At the time, the company had 150,000 users. Today, it has more than seven million.

Bubble Motion, which is funded by Sequoia Capital and others, is now launching Bubbly in the Philippines, after releases in India, Indonesia and Japan (chosen because of their deep mobile phone penetration). Its launch partner in the Philippines is Globe Telecom.

By the midway point of this year, Bubbly will be rolled out to all major carriers in those four countries, for a total potential audience of 800 million.

Bubbly allows users to send each other voice-based status updates. People who follow a user receive an SMS each time a new status message is posted, and pay to listen to the status message with a fee added to their regular phone bill. This can be used both for communicating with friends and family and for subscribing to updates from celebrities.

Users pay either a monthly subscription fee for celebrities in India and Indonesia, or per message in the Philippines and Japan, following the carrier billing styles in each country. The average user gets one to two messages per day.

Celebrities on Bubbly often have two to three times as many followers as they have on Twitter, bragged Bubble Motion CEO Tom Clayton on a phone interview on Wednesday. And that’s despite the fact that Bubbly costs money and Twitter is free.

Part of the reason is Bubbly has more reach than Twitter in the four countries it has launched in, Clayton said, given it is a mobile service and Twitter is often accessed over the Internet.

But grooming a stable of stars might not be defensible in the long term, given Twitter is ramping up its mobile efforts and celebrities may want to have a broader reach than they can achieve with local phone carriers and voice updates. Clayton said another edge his company has is the infrastructure it has built to deliver voice files–250 million of them since Bubbly was first launched–without overloading carrier networks.

Clayton said Bubble Motion, which has raised about $30 million in funding, is not profitable yet but is growing revenue with a direct correlation to its traffic, which is to say, doubling every quarter.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110209/bubbly-voice-twitter-service-launches-in-the-philippines/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110208/strong-holiday-sales-boost-take-two-interactives-q3-earnings/ http://allthingsd.com/20110208/strong-holiday-sales-boost-take-two-interactives-q3-earnings/#comments Tue, 08 Feb 2011 21:32:23 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=2580 Strong holiday sales enabled Take-Two Interactive to deliver better-than-expected revenues in the third quarter and turn a profit for the nine-month period after reporting losses a year earlier.

The company’s nine-month results ended Dec. 31 included revenues of $954.6 million, jumping 80 percent, compared with the same period a year earlier. In that same period, income from continuing operations totaled $76.2 million, or 88 cents a diluted share, compared with a loss of $98.4 million, or $1.27 a share, for the year-ago period.

Third-quarter net revenues totaled $334.3 million on earnings of 45 cents per diluted share. That easily beat analyst expectations, which had forecasted revenues of $314 million and earnings per share of 34 cents.

The New York-based game maker, known for hit titles such as Grand Theft Auto and NBA 2K11, also increased its financial guidance for the fiscal year 2011. The company now expects revenues of $130 to $150 million in Q4, and revenues of up to $1.1 billion for the year ending March 31.

The company’s forecasts now call for Q4 non-GAAP earnings per share to be in the range of a loss of 40 to 45 cents, and for the year from 80 to 85 cents to easily beat analysts’ previous expectations of 62 cents for the year.

In a release, Strauss Zelnick, chairman and CEO of Take-Two, said strong holiday results enabled the better-than-expected results. Going forward, it’s evaluating new revenue streams. “These include opportunities in Asia and Latin America, evolving downloadable content models and online multiplayer experiences,” he said.

More to follow after the company’s earnings call.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110208/strong-holiday-sales-boost-take-two-interactives-q3-earnings/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110207/liveaol-explains-its-huffington-post-deal-to-wall-street/ http://allthingsd.com/20110207/liveaol-explains-its-huffington-post-deal-to-wall-street/#comments Mon, 07 Feb 2011 13:55:58 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=29429 Tim Armstrong and company spent yesterday explaining their $315 million Huffington Post purchase to the press. Now they’re doing the same for Wall Street, via a conference call.

AOL CFO Artie Minson prepped investors for the call with a memo laying out expectations. Short version: AOL thinks HuffPo will earn about $10 million on revenue of $50 million this year (as long as you’re okay with using “adjusted OIBDA” as a proxy for “profit”). It also thinks the purchase will save it $20 million a year, but it’s going to spend around $20 million on restructuring charges when the deal goes through.

I’ll liveblog the call below:

8:02 am: Greetings! About to start now.

8:03 am: On the call: Tim Armstrong, Arianna Huffington, Artie Minson.

8:03 am: Armstrong makes a Super Bowl joke that I can’t quite follow, and I like football. But now praising Arianna, co-founder Kenny Lerer and outgoing AOL CEO Eric Hippeau.

“The Huffington Post is one of the best properties on the Internet.” Armstrong, Huffington and Minson are all BlackBerry users.

8:06 am: On revenue: This gives an opportunity to serve more brand marketers, who are “very interested” in the scale this gives us.

8:07 am: Spending next 30 days on integration. “Really synergies to be had.”

Next steps: Next 72 hours communicating with employees, talking to partners. 1,500 AOL workers on the phone this morning explaining deal to others.

“This may be the smallest disruption” internally of any deal I’ve worked on. Majority of integration done within 35 to 40 days.

8:09 am: We’ve looked at a bunch of companies, though we’re mainly going to concentrate on organic growth. But Arianna is great [many superlatives] and she “also happens to be a woman.”

8:10 am: Here’s Arianna.

8:11 am: “Amazing” how aligned two orgs are.

8:11 am: HuffPo was profitable last year. We were thinking about bringing in additional investors last year, and an IPO down the line. But this made perfect sense.

8:12 am: This deal provides a “dramatic acceleration” for the plans we already had.

8:13 am: Some praise for Patch, AOL’s local strategy.

8:14 am: Can’t wait to start!

8:14 am: Alrighty, then. Here’s Artie Minson with some nuts and bolts.

Actually, it’s some color on the deal. But a lot of it is in the prepared remarks he put out earlier this morning.

8:15 am: Again, $20 million in cost savings here. And again, we’ll have to pay up for restructuring: $20 million for cuts, and $10 million for purchase price.

8:17 am: Still basically reading from prepared remarks. Some bookkeeping talk re: compensation accounting.

8:18 am: Remember, display ad growth coming will finally start showing up second half of this year.

8:19 am: Q&A:

Q: Talk about content strategy. Does HuffPo become hub for content going forward? Does it replace Seed? And how long is Arianna’s contract?

A: “The press” has been talking about our content strategy, so let me be clear–we’re focusing on premium content. Things like Seed and StudioNow are platforms–you can do whatever you want with them, different quality levels, at different types of scale.

And then the other thing that is important about those platforms is the ability they give us to work with advertisers.

One of our main interests in HuffPo is their technology and publishing system. So now we have multiple systems [which he is saying is a good thing]. “Our content strategy hasn’t changed.” The “stuff that was out in the press about the AOL Way” was just one way of doing things. [This is not very convincing]

Arianna, tell us how long you’re going to stay.

8:24 am: Arianna: “I’ve told Tim I want to stay here forever. I want this to be the last act of my life.” Anything I want to do I can do here.

[Sorry, missed next part but it was a defense/explanation of content strategy.]

8:26 am: Armstrong: Arianna has a multiyear contract, but it’s open-ended.

8:27 am: Arianna: By the way, we’re going to bring back commenting to AOL stories, and socialize them.

8:28 am: Q: Why buy instead of partnering? Were there other bidders? Also, how will HuffPo politics affect AOL?

8:28 am: Armstrong: We do partnerships where there is “limited upside to those arrangements” so ” we can really spend time on the areas we want to win”–i.e., we don’t care about sports, we do care about women.

“Arianna is somebody we’d rather have inside our building than outside our building.”

“If there were or weren’t bidders on the other side,” I think we got the right price.

8:30 am: Arianna. “As we’ve said, again and again, Huffington Post was not for sale….Nobody was in a hurry to cash out, everybody believed that we could do an IPO down the road.” It’s just that Tim gave us a great offer. [hrrrm.]

On politics–we used to be all about politics, now we’re not. Just 15 percent of our traffic. We have a divorce section now.

Talking up AOL’s “college” section.

8:33 am: Q: For Arianna: More on Patch, please. What do think about what AOL’s done with it, and what you can do with it?

8:33 am: [Every time Arianna says "local level" I think she's saying "locker level." It's happened at least twice, maybe more, on this call.]

There’s a “greatest person of the day” feature we have, and I think Patch should use that. [Or maybe vice-versa, sorry.] I also like their five percent “giving back” rule, cause marketing, etc.

8:35 am: Armstrong: Again, we can do national and local. That’s important. NFL rights are important, and so are local news stories.

8:36 am: Q: Who’s going to sell what? And can you talk about pricing disparity between AOL and HuffPo?

8:37 am: Armstrong: “We would like to maintain all the people from both sales forces [except for Greg Coleman!]. I think we will end up with a large-scale, large-property organization–I don’t know exactly what that’s going to look like, though.

On sell-through rate: Slightly lower at HuffPo, because they’ve been ramping up traffic, and sales force. On CPM, same story. So we can bring up sell-through rate and CPM, and have a larger sales force. [This is pretty much the best argument for the deal that Armstrong can make.]

[BTW: Good back-channel discussion on Twitter right now about AOL's SEO skills, and the people behind it. None of that coming up during this call right now.]

[Sorry, I meant HuffPo's SEO skills, much of which stem from blueprint BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti set out.]

Q: Why not use equity for this deal?

A: Because our equity is priced too low, essentially. But HuffPo employees did roll over 25 percent of deal consideration into AOL options. So as that equity gets more valuable, they’ll get upside.

8:45 am: Q: In your statement, you talked about OIBDA growth in 2013. More on that please.

Minson–probably going to stick to my prepared remarks on that one.

8:46 am: Last Q: Your acqusitions have been about toolsets or content. As you think about others going forward, what else do you want?

Armstrong: We have long-term vision. On plumbing: We’ve wanted to get platforms and plumbing straightened out, and we’re doing that now. Think about the bones or foundation of a very large property. That’s why we’ve been doing infrastructure, like with video–5Min and GoViral and StudioNow.

Going forward, we’ll be doing infrastructure. And we’ll continue to look at “media properties and media brands” that fit our strategy. [Remember, Web site owners: HuffPo just got 10x revenue.

8:50 am: Minson: But we're very price sensitive and we've walked away from deals.

8:50 am: Arianna: And we like women!

8:51 am: Armstrong sums up: Success "in the Internet space" requires vision and execution. That's this deal. And remember, content and brands become more valuable as tech gets faster, more advanced. And "expect us to stay on strategy and on point" going forward. "We're going to overcommunicate" with both sets of employees as we integrate. [You've been warned!]

And we’re done. Thanks for reading.

[Photo credit: Arianna Huffington]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110207/liveaol-explains-its-huffington-post-deal-to-wall-street/feed/ 5 http://allthingsd.com/20110203/sony-net-slips-8-6-percent/ http://allthingsd.com/20110203/sony-net-slips-8-6-percent/#comments Thu, 03 Feb 2011 11:30:41 +0000 Daisuke Wakabayashi http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=35875 Sony Corp. said Thursday its net profit in the October-December period was down 8.6 percent from a year earlier, weighed by the strong yen and thin margins in its television business.

The Japanese electronics conglomerate reported a net profit of 72.3 billion yen ($885.7 million) for the fiscal third quarter, down from a year-earlier 79.2 billion yen. It beat the mean forecast of 66.96 billion yen from six analysts polled by Thomson Reuters.

Revenue slipped 1.7% to 1.98 trillion yen, while operating profit dropped 5.9% to 137.5 billion yen.

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