March – Another Month Full of Acquisitions

I have an opinion that several large companies decided to buy as many smaller companies as possible. At the end of each month I go back to see what has been acquired and every time I am surprised to see the number of mergers and acquisitions. Names of many companies appear on my lists every month. And I should also mention that there are only the largest and most prominent acquisitions in my lists, otherwise it will become an endless list. And, here we go: 

March 5 - Yahoo Acquires  Social  Data Visualization Startup Vizify

Yahoo acquired Vizify, a company that turns social media data into interactive visual aids such as infographics and videos, adding to the Internet giant's string of acquisitions designed  to get talent and access to new technologies and services

.March 5 - News Reader Company Flipboard Buys Rival Zite from CNN

News reader company Flipboard has bought rival app Zite from CNN and struck a content partnership with the cable news network. The deal is valued at $60 million.

March 12 - Google Buys Green Throttle, a Smartphone Game Controller Company

Google is going to jump into the home game console market with a set-top box and has just snapped up a gaming company "Green Throttle Games," the producer of a gaming controller for Android.     

March 17 - Vodafone Agrees to Buy Spanish Cable Operator Ono 

Vodafone continues to strengthen its fixed network holdings by acquiring Spanish cable operator Ono for $10.1 billion. Vodafone sees the acquisitions of Ono and Kabel Deutschland as opportunities to combine mobile, fixed broadband and TV.

March 24 - Dell Continues Software Expansion with StatSoft Acquisition

Dell has added another company to its growing software portfolio with the acquisition of predictive analytics company StatSoft for an undisclosed amount. StatSoft sells analytics, database management and integration software. Terms of the acquisition were not detailed.    

March 24 - Palo Alto Networks Buys Maker Cyvera

Palo Alto Networks - next-generation firewall, is buying Israeli startup Cyvera for about $200 million to gain access to its endpoint security product for real-time attack prevention. The deal is expected to close in a few weeks. 


March 25 - Facebook Buying Oculus VR Virtual - Reality Company 

Facebook announced it is buying hot virtual reality gaming company Oculus VR for $2 billion. Facebook noted, and with Oculus it plans to tackle areas such as communications, media and entertainment, and education.

March 25 - Golden Gate Capital Completes Acquisition of LiveVox 

Golden Gate Capital, a leading investment firm has acquired a majority stake in LiveVox a leading provider of cloud-based contact center software and solutions for business process outsourcers and enterprise clients. Golden Gate Capital is highly experienced in the contact center software market,having previously invested in Aspect Software. 

March 26 -  Klout Acquired for $200 Million by LithiumTechnologies

Social score startup Klout has been acquired by Lithium Technologies for nearly $200 million.Lithium is a provider of social customer experience solutions for the enterprise.  

March 26 -  SAP to Acquire Fieldglass, the Global Cloud Technology Leader in Contingent Workforce Management

SAP acquires Fieldglass, the leading technology provider for procuring and managing contingent labor and services. The addition of Fieldglass' cloud-based Vendor Management System (VMS) solution meets the growing demand among employers to manage flexible workforces that can be quickly engaged and on-boarded to support rapidly changing business and customer needs.

 

 

Always Keep Your Online Reputation Up!

Really very important statement and if you follow it, your business will prosper.

Have you ever tried to type your name/company name and see what is being spoken about you? It’s very important to scan everything and if there is any negative stuff, it’s necessary to remove.

How to monitor your reputation

There are many tools that can help you and the most important is setting Google Alerts. It’s free and it tracks all types of web results, like news, blogs, videos and more.

If you are using social media, for example Twitter, you can monitor your name using a hashtag to see what is written about you. And one more important thing about socials: go private – modify privacy setting in all your social platforms,  ensure that only friends with whom you don't mind sharing your personal life or photos will have access to that information. Also de-tag from any uncomplimentary pics of you.

There is also another way of tracking – Question and Answer websites, like Yahoo Answers. If anyone is asking questions about you, your company or a particular keyword, you can track those on certain Q&A sites.

Who needs an online reputation and why

Every human being, any company needs a good online reputation. And if you don’t control your brand online, your competitors will do. Imagine you work in a company which is not aware of your present reputation and competition finds this out. What will happen then? The company you work for is at risk, you, as well.

Another situation: you’re looking for a better job and you’re not aware of what is being spoken in the internet about you (there are lots of “kind” people around us). It would be so difficult for you to find the desired work, as many companies know how to check your “online reputation”.

Or you sell some product - today people don’t buy anything before checking who the seller is or what is being said in the product reviews.

Who really cares about your online reputation

As stated above, many people may be interested in your reputation, starting from consumers, business partners, marketers, journalists, stock holders to co-workers. The easiest way is just to have a “good” reputation.

How to manage your online reputation

There are some points you should follow to improve your online reputation. Google posted some good advice on how to manage your reputation through search results which says:

• Think twice before putting your personal information online.
• If something you dislike has already been published, try to remove it from the site where it's appearing.
• Proactively publish useful, positive information about yourself or your business.

Finally it’s not so difficult to be a “positive”, “kind” and “wise” person. Build credibility, be polite and accessible, respond to any criticism and you’ll prevent reputation problems. And the most important thing – think before you click!

February Acquisitions

As promised I’m going to inform my readers about most important acquisitions of the year. If in January I thought that it’s the beginning of the year which is due to great changes, now I can say that I changed my mind and decided to call 2014 an “acquisition” year.

Many biggest companies buy more and more companies. But the “Wow” acquisition of the year (and not only year - it’s one of the biggest tech acquisitions since 2001 when HP bought Compaq for $25 billion) became Facebook’s $19 Billion WhatsApp Acquisition. February also became the biggest acquisition month for LinkedIn. Let’s go by date:

5.02.2014 - Amazon Acquires Video Gaming Studio Double Helix Games

Double Helix has a history of creating popular games for nearly 20 years. Amazon has acquired Double Helix as part of their ongoing commitment to build innovative games for customers.

6.02.2014 - LinkedIn makes its biggest acquisition by paying $120m for Bright
LinkedIn’s biggest acquisition deal ever! Bright is a natural fit for LinkedIn as it makes a bulk of its revenue from its Talent Solutions group. Over the past couple of years, LinkedIn has made several updates and launched new features to improve the process for recruiters - Bright may kick things up a notch.

11.02.02014 -Yahoo Acquires Social Diary Wander For A Price Over $10M

Originally, Wander was focused on sharing travel experiences in a diary, but soon pivoted focus onto an app called Days. The app lets users create a series of photographs and gifs in a package called a “Day,” which can be shared the next day. Days is about sharing an entire story of how your day went. 

13.02.2014 - Yahoo Acquires Technical Recruiting Startup Distill
Distill was working on a way to make technical recruiting easier by pairing video interviews and programming challenges. Distill’s product paired the basic features of a video chat service like Skype, and put them alongside a text editor and file upload space so that an interviewer could walk a candidate through a collaborative coding session. 

14.02.2014 - Rakuten buys Viber for $900 million to expand digital empire
Rakuten aims to be the world's number one Internet services company, and buying Viber complements its strategy in the digital space. Viber has rocketed in popularity as a potential rival to Skype, announcing 100 million worldwide users in September 2011, and then more than 200 million in May of 2013. The Viber app is available for iPhone, Android phones and tablets, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Windows, Windows 8, Mac OS X, Linux, Symbian, Nokia S40 and Bada devices over 3G/4G or Wi-Fi connections. Besides providing Rakuten access to new markets, the deal will offer new potential markets for Viber through Rakuten users. 

16.02.2014 – Google acquires SlickLogin to kill the password

SlickLogin is a small startup, whose product involves a unique, sound-based system for logging into websites.

19.02.2014 - Facebook’s $19 Billion WhatsApp Acquisition

WhatsApp is a global messaging platform with 450 million MAUs, which allows you to exchange messages without having to pay for SMS. WhatsApp Messenger is available for iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Windows Phone and Nokia and yes, those phones can all message each other! 

21.02.2014 - Apple acquires TestFlight creator Burstly

Burstly offers a full suite of products to power the entire app lifecycle. The app ecosystem is crowded but Burstly provides tools to help you navigate with ease. 

21.02.2014 - Google Acquires Spider.io To Help Spot And Stop Online Ad Fraud
Spider.io is a startup that specialized in weeding out fraudulent clicks around online ads. The three-year old company has tech that will help Google identify bad behavior around their content in video and display ads on the web, to help them get a more accurate picture of what is and isn't succeeding.

24.02.2014 - IBM Buys NoSQL Cloud Provider Cloudant
Based in Boston, the privately held Cloudant offers a hosted version of the ApacheCouchDB open source data store. Its own version, called BigCouch, can be run across multiple servers, providing a way to build and maintain an extremely large and fast data store for a front-end application. 

All You Need to Know about Customer Loyalty

Customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, customer relationship - expressions that became very popular and valuable in every sphere. Are they really so important?

Only great professionals can create long lasting customer loyalty. It seems to be so easy to use the right behavior, but in reality it’s not so. Creating mutual relationship with the customer is the most difficult thing, as it’s not a one-click-action, but an ongoing process.

In fact, to become a loyal customer, you should have the “desired” product. And when you become loyal, you adore not only the product you have, but the whole brand with the whole variety of its products.

“Marketing Metrics found out that the probability of selling something to new prospects is only about 5-20%, whilst the probability of selling something to an existing customer is 60-70%” reports Nextupasia.

The problem of most companies is that as a result of a poor customer service they cannot keep existing customers. Studies across a number of industries show that it costs about 5 time as much to attract a new customer than to keep the existing one. The value of each lost customer is $243.

Loyal = satisfied customers come back over and over again and they are likely to refer the product to others. The most trustworthy recommendations are made by friends or relatives.

“90% of online consumers worldwide trust recommendations from people they know” says Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey.

Loyal Customers are said to represent about 20% of our customer base, but make up more than 50% of our sales. The more you do for them, the more they are likely to recommend you to their acquaintances. They provide honest and valuable feedback, which can help any product to make future improvements.

Most Apple buyers are extremely loyal to Apple and always speak negative about competing products. They love everything Apple does, starting from design to all its solutions. They become a part of the “Apple World” and as a rule they use several Apple products.

Increase Customer Loyalty

Needless to say, to increase customer loyalty any company should focus on improvements – a process that never stops. Know and appreciate your every customer, promise only what you really can provide, try to understand their needs and finally make them happy. This is all you need to make them loyal to your business and never forget: “Actions speak louder than words!”

Age of Mobile

Mobile, smartphones, iPhones - here what we hear every now and then. A little more than a decade ago no one could believe that in such a short time mobile will play such a big role in our life. By 2015, 81% of US cell users will have smartphones.

Mobile being a pocket-sized computing device has become an inseparable part of our routine. Remember yourself, when you, by a great mistake, forgot your phone at home – you are lost, you seem to be cut from the whole world. Or, imagine your child has left the phone at home - what happens to you? And you start to wonder: how could people do without a phone before?

Yes, mobile is really a great addition to our lives and now we use it not only for calling and messaging, even many people use it for other purposes more than for its main functionality. It became our newspaper, alarm clock, watch, photo album, map, radio, video, travel guide, organizer, game zone and much more. Even while shopping many people should look up other local stores’ pricing before buying something (73% of consumers say they have used their mobile phone in a store). In short – mobile revolutioned our lives.

Most of the population almost never leaves their phone - while watching TV, eating and even going to the bathroom. 75% of Americans admit to bringing their phone to the bathroom, Digiday.

Here are some interesting facts about mobile:

• 91% of all people on earth have a mobile phone, WalkDigital 
• 29% of the world’s mobile users live in India and China, Mobithinking 
• 50% of mobile phone users use mobile as their primary Internet source, WalkDigital 
• The average person checks their smartphone 34 times a day, WalkDigital 
• 39% of mobile users access social networks from their phones, Business Insider
• By 2016, 88% of local advertising will be delivered on a mobile device, WalkDigital