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Saturday, 9 March 2013
CASIS and the MassChallenge startup accelerator want to help you conduct research... in space!
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A Big Deal For The Middle East, Daily Deals Site Cobone Acquired By Tiger Global Management
![cobone2[702]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_u_mLxZ8MaP2mtSePm6Onr8m9D2rCSmcQ9sTxJTlT2CFi6U88_J4k06vUYgDneenjemQdszrpRM-zrl0nearDlu6blVSGz2YilCQ8_mg2ewrV5w35pWVd23epBkb8fveGIRYp2hDLvCWgyKUBArB6O7T1am_sUf3w=s0-d)
After months of speculation that its backer Jabbar Internet Group were shopping around for a sale, the leading Middle Eastern daily deals site Cobone has been acquired by investment firm Tiger Global Management.
The size of the deal remains undisclosed, though my understanding is that the figure of $40 million that’s been touted building up to this sale isn’t far off the mark.
Furthermore, the acquisition — which sees Jabber Internet Group exit entirely — is said to leave Dubai-based Cobone with additional capital to further its ambitions in the region, while its Irish founder and CEO Paul Kenny, along with other key members of the management team, will remain with the company.
Launched in July 2010, Cobone operates a group buying model akin to Groupon, by offering subscribers to its site a daily deal on the best things to do, see, eat and buy in cities across the Middle East.
While this acquisition likely represents one of, if not, the largest e-commerce exit in the region, where e-commerce remains far behind many other parts of the world, the company’s funding and finances remain opaque.
It’s not clear, for example, how much Jabbar Internet Group or Cobone’s other backers — Klaus Hommels and Oliver Jung — have invested in Cobone, so it’s difficult to gage how successful an exit this is. The company doesn’t disclose revenue, either, or if it’s profitable (last year one report pegged its revenues in 2012 at around $31m).
The company is willing to wax lyrical about user numbers, however. It says that it has a subscriber base of 2 million to its daily deals newsletter, and has sold 1.5 million coupons, “saving” its customers $100 million.
What’s also clear is that Cobone has successfully fended off one global competitor in the form of LivingSocial. The U.S. company made strides to enter the Middle East by acquiring local player GoNabit in June 2011, only to shut down operations just over a year later.
Samih Toukan, Chairman of Jabbar Internet Group, comments in a statement: “This deal represents the international recognition of a highly successful local business. With Paul Kenny, we created a company that lead the way in regional group buying, and took on global players on our own turf. While this deal represents a successful exit for the Jabbar Group, we have little doubt in Cobone’s commitment to the region and in Paul’s determination to continue excelling and leading his brainchild to new successes.”
Finally, an interesting tidbit to the Cobone story. So nascent was e-commerce in the Middle East when the startup first set up shop almost three years ago, 80% of its business involved cash on delivery. Users would order their daily deal online and get the voucher delivered to their door where they’d be asked to pay.
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Alt-week 3.9.13: Sunstones, knotted vortices and a zero-g robot
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45 Digital Media Resources You May Have Missed
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Ocho Quilates: Una historia de la Edad de Oro del software español
La celebración de RetroMadrid 2013 y su homenaje a La Abadía del Crimen es la excusa perfecta para recomendar la lectura de Ocho Quilates: Una historia de la Edad de Oro del software español.
En dos partes, la primera de 1983 a 1986 
Mediante entrevistas con los protagonistas el libro nos mete en la sala –literalmente– de las casas de los padres de unos chavales que se dedicaban a copiar a mano las cintas y a hacer paquete tras paquete para enviar por correo las cintas con los juegos con vendían, o en las oficinas de las primeras empresas que acabarían siendo nombres míticos como Dinamic, ERBE, Indescomp, o Made in Spain, entre algunas otras; también repasa la caída de esta cuando no fueron capaces de adaptarse a la llegada de las máquinas d 16 bits y a la dura competencia de otras empresas extranjeras con muchos más recursos económicos.
Para los que recordamos noches en blanco intentando terminar La Pulga o volvernos locos intentando que no nos expulsaran de la citada abadía del crimen, es un documento que no puede faltar en nuestras bibliotecas, aunque en honor a la verdad quizás no le vendría mal un repaso a la maquetación y a ratos al texto propiamente dicho, que a veces parece que no ha sido revisado muy a conciencia.
Claro que todo esto se le perdona por las memorias que despierta en los que ya tenemos una edad y que no podemos evitar de vez en cuando arrancar un emulador de Spectrum o de Commodore 64 para revivir aquellos tiempos.
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Younity Makes All Your Files Available Everywhere You Need Them
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With 26.5M Daily Users, Denmark’s Kiloo Pioneers New Ways of Producing Mobile Games
One of the sleeper hits on the charts over the last year has been a tiny game out of Denmark called Subway Surfers. It’s a runner game like Imangi’s Temple Run that has a character named Jake riding train tracks and dodging trains.
That single title has helped Kiloo and Sybo, the studio it co-produced the game with, reach 26.5 million daily active users. For comparison, that’s more daily users than Zynga had on mobile platforms last quarter.
Subway Surfers was also the sixth most actively used game on U.S. iPhones in December, according to app tracking company Onavo. It has some off-the-charts retention numbers with 91 percent of players returning after day 1 and 60 percent returning after 30 days.
How did they do it? Kiloo’s chief creative officer Simon Moller credits a co-production model where they split development of the game with outside studios.
Kiloo handles the free-to-play part with the user interface, monetization, marketing, user retention and community. Their developer partners focus on the concept and art.
Moller, who co-owns the 50-person company with his brother, says Kiloo’s model isn’t about publishing. He insists it’s different.
“This model is good for people who come out of the traditional gaming world. They know how to do gameplay and graphics, but they’re really confused about free-to-play,” he said. “Maybe they know it’s the way the industry is moving, but they don’t realize it requires a whole different skill set and mentality.”
What’s happened over the last year on mobile platforms is that early companies like Pocket Gems and then big publicly-traded companies like Zynga have started a publishing arms race. With their reach, they promise indie studios distribution and customers. While indie hits do break out from time to time, the market overall is just getting a lot more expensive and competitive. Last month, Distimo said that only 2 percent of the top 250 publishers in the iPhone App Store were “newcomers,” versus just 3 percent in the Android store, Google Play.
Publishing is also a way for the bigger gaming companies to de-risk their portfolio and counter the hits-driven nature of the business by relying on outside studios for original IP.
The publishing model, which was necessary in a world where games were packaged goods sold on store shelves for $60 or more, is controversial on mobile platforms where anyone can just submit an app to the store.
There is always a question who really created the value? Was it the game developer with the original concept and art, or the publisher made certain tweaks or suggestions to make a game more appealing to a mass audience?
“These guys are playing off the myth that traditional publishers make a difference,” Moller said. “They just put their name on it and then publish it to the market.”
Even to this day, the original Angry Birds game published with the Chillingo label still has some lingering bad blood. The thing is that hits can be so unpredictable that it’s hard to say looking backward who was truly responsible for making a game successful and what a fair revenue split should be.
In Kiloo’s co-production model, the company splits revenues 50-50 with partners. It goes back to the Mollers’ childhood where everything between the two brothers was split evenly.
He said the company probably spent at least 20 thousand hours on building the game and then another roughly $20,000 on marketing it (which is a lot lower than the few million dollars per month many of the top studios spend on marketing these days).
“We spent all our money on product because we believe that product can win by itself,” he said.
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Last-chance Expand ticket giveaway and congrats to our Photo Contest winner!
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Russian Satellite Hit by Debris from Chinese Anti-Satellite Test
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Live from SXSW: catch our Leap Motion, Elon Musk and Al Gore liveblogs today!
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Kinect Fusion-powered concept demos AR brain models for neurosurgeons (video)
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Need Funding? Pass Shaq Your 15-Second Startup Pitch on Tout
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OpenPool transforms billiards with a Kinect camera controlled light show
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Zaarly Shutters Its Reverse Craigslist Marketplace, Goes All In On Virtual Storefronts As Co-Founder Exits
When Arrington first introduced the world to the concept of Zaarly two years ago, my first thought was “a fast, mobile way for me to request booze delivery on demand? Sign me up.” But my second and third and so on were: “Wait, why should I trust a stranger to do the job and actually show up? Isn’t this akin to a marketplace specializing in herding cats? Do I even like cats? Hello? Where are my pants?”
For those unfamiliar, Zaarly began as a mobile-focused “reverse Craigslist” service — in other words, a peer-to-peer marketplace in which local buyers could request nearly anything from local sellers. And people seemed intrigued. Smart people. After winning LA Startup Weekend, Zaarly almost immediately raised $1 million from a long list of notable investors (even “Steve jOBS”), and then raised $14 million more before the end of the year in a round led by Kleiner, while adding Meg Whitman to its board.
Fast forward to today and you’ll no longer find Zaarly’s marketplace on the web. And, with the next update to its mobile app, co-founder Bo Fishback tells us, its “request anything” model will disappear from the Zaarly experience completely. That means, not only has the concept with which it raised $14 million been put to bed in order to move in a new direction, but we’ve also learned that Zaarly co-founder Eric Koester left the company around the same time. (It also means no more this.)
Both Fishback and Koester say that the departure was amicable and “for the best,” but understandably a change of direction and the early whiff of attrition don’t exactly a success story make, so to speak. But the truth may be just the opposite — if not slightly more complicated.
The co-founders would prefer not to see Zaarly’s change of direction as a pivot — after all, “pivot” is a dirty word in Silicon Valley, often a synonym for “failure” — but they also have good reason for that.
Lately, TechCrunch has received tips from Zaarly users informing us that the service is no longer available on the web. In fact, that’s been true for a few weeks now, as the startup blogged about it in February (though it will be news to most that “Request Anywhere” will be gone completely by the end of the month). But, really, as some already know, the shift started back in September — with the launch of “Storefronts” for Zaarly sellers.
Just as it sounds, Zaarly’s new Storefronts provide local merchants or sellers with customer-facing websites that allow them to showcase (and sell) their goods and services, essentially leveraging the Etsy (and Shopify) model(s). Now, instead of enabling users to request anything and everything, Zaarly enables its merchants to offer relative certainty (of identity, inventory and delivery, for example) and proactively market their products to customers, receive orders, payment, confirm details, and so on.
In fact, Fishback tells us that the decision to drop the peer-to-peer model and focus exclusively on its merchant product was the result of a number of stressful, white-knuckled internal conversations that took place over months. Coupled with metrics on the original marketplace, it became increasingly clear that the new direction was necessary.
The founder still remains hopeful that the “request model” can be integrated into the new platform, but the hard truth is that its original concept was just more of a feature than a service, or a real business. Fishback scribed a pretty excellent response on Quora to the question of why Zaarly pivoted in September (when they launched Storefronts), which is a must read. But his answer is telling in terms of how the experimentations with the request marketplace informed the new direction.
While some predicted that the “request model” of Zaarly’s P2P marketplace would make it difficult to establish a significant level of trust (and quality), Fishback tells us the real issue was actually one of certainty. A startup doesn’t enter the market with the trust of an established brand or guaranteed supply, so that a pure request model “is like going fishing in a black water pond,” he says. If you don’t know if there are any fish in the pond, or what kind of fish are there, why would you fish? (Well, you might, but only if you also enjoy herding cats. Or you’re a friend of misquoted Thoreau.)
In his Quora post, Fishback explains that, in a marketplace like this, startups can either try to guarantee supply for certain services or recommend/surface items that they know have plenty of supply or show off the supply they do have. Zaarly chose to do the latter, but highly empowered buyers are in short supply, and the request model only worked for “a small segment of buyers.”
Instead, they found that the key was to show off the most talented sellers, and in designing its new direction, Zaarly started with those who were the most active and popular sellers. To guarantee quality in its new marketplace, the startup handpicks from an applicant pool, using a dozen different touchpoints when vetting candidates. Most just do a background check, but Fishback says that these sellers need to have a number of referrals, and need to have reviews up and running on the site.
The startup spends time interviewing them, getting to know them, because it wants to help them build sustainable online businesses, and if sellers aren’t responding promptly, can’t demonstrate an existing network (and three or four referrals) or the ability to sell quality items, then it declines. It’s a high-touch way of vetting candidates, not the same as just filling out a short online form and getting up and running in 15 minutes. Zaarly has an editorial team that helps sellers create the text in which they describe their goods or services, and, taking a page from the Airbnb model, sends a photographer to take photos of their products.
Over time, it wants to reduce the amount of involvement in the process, but, at the outset, high-touch curation guarantees quality. Fishback says that its “request model” (while once did $1 million in transactions in a month) in the end only had a 10 to 20 percent close rate, but with its Storefronts, that has flipped to over 90 percent. The other incentive for sellers is asking them what they want to make from their products and does its best to guarantee that. Using an eTail markup, if they want to make $200, Zaarly includes its own 10 percent fee and lists the item for $220.
Today, Zaarly has over 750 merchants on the platform, offering everything from custom meals (and delivery) and home service and repair to custom speakers, music lessons and event planning. So, like Etsy, a large portion of Zaarly’s sellers are women (70 percent), but, unlike Etsy, the platform isn’t just offering homemade, handcrafted goods — although that’s a part of it.
Sellers are now making between $1,500 and $2,000 per month on average, with the highest grossing doing between $6 and $7,000. The idea is to provide the world’s hobbyists who have a particular talent, something they’ve been doing for years, and give them a supplemental revenue stream – help pay their rent. Fishback said that some are already quitting their jobs to manage their storefronts full-time, and that’s the startup’s end goal for all of them.
There’s still a long way to go, but the founder says that it was almost relieving to be able to focus on one thing, especially since the new marketplace is growing in a way the initial idea wasn’t. He thinks this one is much closer to finding product-market fit. Going forward, the next steps for Storefronts are to add more management tools for sellers, in the way that Groupon has been doing for its merchants, whether it be inventory management tools, scheduling or sharing tools.
Storefronts have launched in San Francisco, Seattle and Kansas City (where Fishback is from) and it’s about to go live in New York, with Los Angeles, Washington D.C. and Portland all potentially following the Big Apple.
As to Koester, the departed co-founder, he tells us that “While I wanted to write something very ‘Andrew Mason-y’ about leaving Zaarly, I quickly realized that I just couldn’t come up with anything that damn hilarious. I love Zaarly and the team, believe in the direction of Storefronts, but the time was right to start working on my next startup. Am excited to share more about that soon.” More in his blog post here.
It may be the end of the request-driven marketplace, or it may not. Time will tell. If Zaarly can scale Storefronts and maintain quality, there’s a chance it could make a return. After all, we’ve heard from sources that Zaarly is now doubling transactions every month and looking to raise a B round. If that’s true, Zaarly may just become the first to pivot into an eBay acquisition. Though with Whitman on the board, that could be awkward.
For more, find Zaarly at home here.
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Serve Shots With Your Smartphone and This Bartending Robot
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Chevy Unveils 2014 Corvette Stingray Convertible
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We're live at SXSW's Virtual Reality: The Holy Grail of Gaming panel with Valve, Oculus and more
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The Daily Roundup for 03.08.2013
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