Author: Ben Debski

Not all bad news for European venture capital

Posted on by Ben Debski

With European markets engulfed in a debt crisis that has seen many lenders reluctant to give money to risky businesses, many observers have assumed that one of the last places to get value is in the continent’s venture capital sector.

Not so, says the UK’s industry body the British Private Equity & Venture Capital Association (BVCA). The group says that the chances of European VC firms achieving an IPO exit is broadly the same as their US counterparts, and that many in the industry have been misled by policy makers and institutional investors.

The BVCA has been conducting a study into the market alongside Dow Jones, and has concluded that the industry is in “much ruder health” than expected. Richard Anton, the BVCA’s chairman, said: “Attitudes have unfairly hampered European high-growth companies which in turn poses a serious threat to the future of both entrepreneurship and the economy across the continent.

“This report explodes some of these myths and is an extremely welcome and robust contribution to the debate over the financing of European start-ups. The sooner we can dispel the myths that unnecessarily hinder venture capital; the sooner venture capital can help power the next generation of world-beating companies.”

Dreamliner problems mount for Boeing

Posted on by Ben Debski

The 787 Dreamliner was supposed to revolutionise the aviation industry, with its advanced fuel-efficient technology and supposedly reduced environmental impact. Since its first flight in late-2009 the plane has been beset by problems.

The latest wave of issues with the plane stem from problems with the batteries supplied by Japanese firm GS Yuasa, leading to Dreamliners operated by airlines All Nippon Airways and Japan Airlines being grounded by regulators. Now a joint investigation has been launched by US and Japanese authorities into the firm’s production lines.

Japanese transport ministry official Yashuo Ishii told reporters: “Engineers from the [US Federal Aviation Administration], Boeing and our aviation bureau started a probe this morning that is mainly focusing on GS Yuasa’s production line.

“They are checking on whether there have been any issues in the production process. We still don’t know what caused the battery problem, and so we are looking into all possibilities.”

The difficulties Boeing has had with its Dreamliner, which also include faulty brakes, fuel leaks and on-board fires, has led to talks of a crisis at the firm. However, European-based rival Airbus has also suffered trouble with some of its new fleet of jets, including its A380 superjumbo, with faults and production delays causing fewer than expected deliveries in the last year.

Google makes record breaking move to new London HQ

Posted on by Ben Debski

The commercial property sector in London has received a major boost with the news that tech giant Google will move its UK headquarters to a specially designed new site near King’s Cross station.

The deal is worth a reported £1bn, allegedly the largest commercial property transaction in the UK so far this century, and will see Google take over a 1m sq ft site in one of London’s biggest regeneration sites. It will also allow the firm easy access to the rest of the UK and mainland Europe by train.

Google Vice President for Northern and Central Europe, Matt Brittin, said: “This is a big investment by Google, we’re committing further to the UK – where computing and the web were invented. It’s good news for Google, for London and for the UK.”

The British government has been keen to attract major tech firms to the capital in order to kick start growth and a new wave of tech innovation. Amazon recently announced plans to move to a huge new site in nearby Barbican, while other international firms are have been looking to take up residence in east London’s burgeoning tech hub near Old Street roundabout.

Efficient engine gets financial boost from army

Posted on by Ben Debski

Finding more efficient means of powering vehicles has been a goal for automotive experts for years. One US based firm believes it has designed an engine that will use just a third of the fuel of conventional engines, and has received backing from the US military for development.

Archates Power, and partner AVL Powertrain Engineering, have been given $4.9m to develop a multi-cylinder engine after the successful testing of their small single-cylinder design, according to MIT’s Technology Review.

The engine is reportedly able to burn a number of different fuels, and is therefore capable of use in both commercial and private engines. CEO David Johnson says that as diesel fuel is already efficient, the savings from the design could allow efficiencies of 50 percent on traditional gasoline-fuelled engines.

Archate’s design is based upon the German aircraft manufacturer Junkers’s 1930’s Jumo engine, which was considered the most fuel efficient of the time.

A number of research projects recently have led to designs of more fuel efficient engines, with scientists and General Electric developing a pulse detonation engine. If these designs are made commercially viable, then considerable savings for vehicle manufacturers are likely, while the environmental lobby will be equally receptive.

HMV calls in administrators as latest victim of digital era

Posted on by Ben Debski

The rapid decline in physical sales of music has led to one of Britain’s most well known retail brands appointing administrators yesterday, representing the last major seller of music and film disappearing from the UK’s high-streets.

After months of speculation and a freefalling share price, HMV announced last night that it “has been unable to reach a position where it feels able to continue to trade outside of insolvency protection.”

Many music retailers have struggled in the last decade to offer customers a service to rival the convenience of online challengers like Amazon and digital music providers, such as Apple’s iTunes store.

The UK market has been badly hit, with firms including Woolworths and Zavvi failing in recent years, while the US has seen recognisable brands like Tower Records disappear.
Speaking to the BBC, Neil Saunders, managing director of retail analyst Conlumino, said the news was “inevitable”, adding: “In the digital era, where 73.4 percent of music and film are online, HMV’s business model has simply become increasingly irrelevant and unsustainable.”

While HMV attempted to stave off the decline in music sales by diversifying into other areas, such as books and technology, it was unable to compete with consumers appetite for digital content.

Mobile penetration set for boost in Burma

Posted on by Ben Debski

Companies from around the world are circling the newly liberalised Southeast Asian state, eager to profit from one of the last remaining untapped markets in the region. Of particular interest is the telecom industry, with the World Bank estimating in 2011 that just three percent of Burmese people owning mobile phones.

After Samsung and Huawei entered the market with low cost devices in recent years, other providers have been attempting to carve a place in the new market. Taiwanese firm HTC launched a smartphone specifically tailored for the Burmese market on Monday, and have set about overcoming one of the key challenges faced by phone providers.

HTC have devised an on-screen Burmese-language keyboard which it says is the most advanced around. There is no internationally recognised standard for Burmese language symbols, meaning it’s especially tricky for firms trying to offer an advanced phones that can cater for the whole country.

The company’s Burma-born CEO Peter Chou told the BBC that it was his ambition to open up the country to international communication: “My aspiration is to design innovative smartphones that offer full compatibility with the Myanmar language, so that people in Myanmar can enjoy enhanced communications simply and easily.”

Speaking to Reuters, he explained that the keyboard HTC had devised would be the easiest to use: “You don’t have to spend two months to learn how to type it. You just type it. We want to give people here a computing device they don’t have to learn. They just try it, they just use it, they just get it.”

Other firms will be keen to see how popular HTC’s phone proves in a country not used to mobile phone use, let alone internet-connected devices.

Samsung profits soar, but legal issues remain

Posted on by Ben Debski

A rapid increase in sales of Samsung’s mobile phones has seen the company’s operating profit surge 88 percent on the year to $8.27bn, while revenues jumped 18 percent, according to the South Korean technology giant yesterday.

The company has wrestled control of the majority of the global smartphone market in recent years, offering consumers a range of phones. While Samsung enjoys a larger market share than Apple in users, they have struggled to match the profits margins that Apple has achieved with their iPhone. However, it’s bitter legal battles with the US firm over patent issues led to the company being fined in a California court $1bn last year, while it has both companies have sought to have their rivals new products banned in different territories for numerous other infringements.

In a continuation of the rivalry, Apple is set to ditch Samsung as their primary silicon chip supplier in the coming year, further harming the South Korean firm. Samsungs semiconductor business garnered $8.2bn in revenues in the third quarter of last year, with Apple products making up as much as 81 percent of processors made in 2012 by the company.

Anti-GM food activist admits he was wrong

Posted on by Ben Debski

Since the mid-90’s a war has been waged on proponents of genetically modified foods by campaigners concerned about their environmental impact. One of the leading voices was British environmentalist Mark Lynas, who tirelessly lead the anti-GM movement and caused governments around the world to put strong restrictions on research into such foods.

Now, however, Lynas has shockingly admitted the errors of his ways and come out in favour of the scientists who had developed these types of foods that many believe could aid third world famine and bring down global food prices.

In an address to the Oxford Farming Conference last week, Lynas said: “I want to start with some apologies. For the record, here and upfront, I apologise for having spent several years ripping up GM crops. I am also sorry that I helped to start the anti-GM movement back in the mid 1990s, and that I thereby assisted in demonising an important technological option which can be used to benefit the environment.”

Many of the arguments that he and other campaigners had used centred around the impact GM crops had on agriculture, and led to restrictions on farming that caused a focus on more traditional and supposedly less efficient farming practices. Lynas says this was wrong, and deprived many of decent diets: “As an environmentalist, and someone who believes that everyone in this world has a right to a healthy and nutritious diet of their choosing, I could not have chosen a more counter-productive path. I now regret it completely.”

The cause of his u-turn, Lynas added, was simple: “I discovered science, and in the process I hope I became a better environmentalist.”

The significance of his change in attitude towards GM foods is great, as many proponents hope that relaxed regulations on GM crops in the third world could allow famine-ridden countries in Africa and Asia to properly feed their citizens. The organic food movement in Western countries has also been on the wane in recent years, with concerns over prices. If GM gets a revival in favour, food prices could soon dramatically fall.

Could Twitter really be worth as much as $11bn?

Posted on by Ben Debski

When Facebook held its IPO last year, many investors expected to reap the rewards of taking a stake in the now ubiquitous social network. The subsequent collapse in price caused panic and exposed many so-called experts to the reality that the company had not recognised a meaningful way to profit from its activities.

This morning, analysts a speculating that Facebook’s rival Twitter is preparing to follow suit and take itself public in the next year, and say it could be worth as much as $11bn.

However, the company has similarly been struggling to find a way to monetise its business, and so such valuations seem rather inflated.

Although widely used by millions of people around the world, and from many demographics, Twitter is a free service. It has attempted to implement some form of advertising in recent months, with sponsored tweets appearing in users’ timelines, but the money gleaned from this is not thought to have made much of an impact on Twitters’ operating costs.

Financial researchers Greencrest told reporters yesterday that they had seen secondary market activity had pointed towards the $11bn valuation, as well as rumours of a buyout from a big tech firm like Apple.

Greencrest’s analyst Max Wolf said that Twitter could avoid the pitfalls of the Facebook IPO, and that there were indications they were learning the lessons of making the company profitable. He said: “Using the secondary market for shares to mark enterprise value is a very difficult and opaque process,” he said.

“It is a rumour rich and special share class soup. That said, Twitter is up since the Facebook IPO and is now valued at northward of $11bn. This makes sense as growth in users and new monetisation efforts are both yielding fruit and pointing toward a good 2013 for Twitter.”

Making the best of the web: Customer analysis

Posted on by Ben Debski

The CEO of Mozilla had a revelation. Gary Kovacs realised web pages he visited allowed other websites to ‘track’ information about his browsing. In other words, the pages he viewed transmitted data about his online behaviour to third parties. Speaking at TED in February 2012, he said: “Not even two bites into breakfast and there are already nearly 25 sites that are tracking me. I have navigated to a total of four.” He recounts that his nine-year-old daughter fared no better while visiting children’s websites, and as a parent, he worried:  “Imagine in the physical world, if someone followed our children around with a camera and a notebook, and recorded their every movement?”

Thankfully, this comparison is misleading. Trackers do not collect ‘personally identifiable information,’ or anything that may reveal the user’s identity.  In this sense, to compare trackers to the behaviour of a real life stalker might be considered a pessimistic exaggeration. What is most curious is that, in contrast, while users are typically concerned by the number of third parties collecting data, as well as the content of the data itself, knowing about trackers does not change online behaviour.

A study by the University of Salisbury, Maryland confirmed this. Despite the discovery that most consumers dislike being tracked and are conscious that information is collected in order to generate targeted advertising, many do not let it change their performance. Save for the zealous few who will download blocking programs, informed consumers continue to browse as before. This may be because users suffer few tangible costs as a result of behavioural tracking, aside from the unpleasant awareness.

This has not stopped Mozilla from developing an add-on called Collusion, which shows which third parties collect information resulting from a visit to a given website. Collusion displays browsing as a spider web of connections between trackers and your sites of interest.  After a few hours of internet usage, the size of the diagram exponentially grows into a daunting network of trackers and the tracked. Yet, many online whizzes complain that Collusion is not as sensitive in detecting these as similar programs, such as Better Privacy, No Script, Ghostery or Tracker Block, which in addition offer the option of blocking third parties from retrieving information. Mozilla aims to provide a new version of Collusion that will also have a blocking function.

Despite Kovacs’s alarmist tone, the official Collusion web page does recognise that “not all tracking is bad. Many services rely on user data to provide relevant content and enhance your online experience”. The firm’s aim is to compile data willingly submitted by Collusion users and make the information available to the greater public for the benefit of research.

Raising awareness is the mission of many privacy advocacy groups, as well as industry regulators, such as the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI), which unites 90 firms that use behavioural tracking under a self-imposed standard. In addition to providing information and enforcing its rules, the NAI also offers users of its member websites an opt-out tool. Big industry names such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, AddThis and AppNexus are members. Meanwhile, organisations such as Privacy International raise awareness and lobby governments for greater protection of personal information (although while visiting their website, an internet user will be tracked by Piwik Analytics).

Evidon, a US-based data and privacy firm, which produces the add-on Ghostery, is a leading firm in providing transparency tools to ensure that firms are complying with their privacy policies. Their business caters both to firms and consumers. For instance, their tools allow firms to provide greater information about advertisements or information collected by third parties, while others notify the user as to whether implicit or explicit consent is required for a cookie to be installed on their computer.

In terms of legal regulation, European governments have taken a conservative stance on the issue. An EU e-Privacy directive was passed in 2009, requiring users give their consent before having third-party cookies installed on their machines. This law came into effect in May 2012 in the UK, requiring that websites inform and request consent of their users for the presence of cookies. Neelie Kroes, European Commissioner for Digital Agenda, recently requested the World Wide Web Consortium, the organisation responsible for setting rules of use for the internet, to set as a default a ‘Do Not Track’ standard.

Meanwhile, Viviane Reading, the European Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights and Citizenship, condemned a March 2012 revision of Google’s privacy policy, which enabled the corporation to combine information compiled across all its services, including Search, YouTube, Picasa and email in order to generate more specific profiles for individual users.

Preference referral
Whereas behavioural tracking has changed little in the consumer’s relationship towards internet use, it has altered the content that target markets interact with online. Targeting means consumers are shown only links and recommendations tailored to individual preferences. This potentially limits consumers’ awareness of competitor products and encloses us in what author and activist Eli Pariser describes as a ‘Filter Bubble’.

Consumers are placed in a self-sustaining cycle, reducing the size of the individual’s marketplace. The links they click are used to narrow down our preferences, further enclosing us within predetermined characteristics. Facebook, for instance, uses this to determine which posts feature most prominently on a user’s newsfeed.

As a result, the internet’s potential as a means to openly share a wide range of information is limited. In this sense, Pariser argues, the power of gate-keeping has moved from publication editors to algorithms.

For example, Google collects characteristics from the user’s machine to refine search results according to what it believes to be his or her preferences. Jeremy Keeshing, writer of blog thekeesh.com, developed a script that shows Facebook’s ‘EdgeRank’: the ranking of your friends based on your interaction with them.

Organisations seeking to take advantage of behavioural tracking need to be careful not just with how they attain the information, but how they use it, bearing in mind the savvy nature of today’s consumer. When it was discovered that users of Orbitz.com who owned PCs were targeted for ads for cheaper hotels than those using Macs, there was an outcry of ‘digital discrimination’.

It is possible for users to alter their online profile. Looking at the ads preferences section on Google allows one not only to view which classifications one has been attributed by behavioural tracking, but also to edit and delete these characteristics.

Tracking organisations install third party cookies, which save a small amount of data on the user’s web browser. At the user’s next visit, the browsing history can be retrieved through the cookie. Web beacons, images of a few pixels or features embedded in a webpage, report site traffic, unique visitor counts, and personalisation, such as your favoured volume on a YouTube video. Locally shared objects or flash cookies not only store more complex data, but are much more difficult to opt out of. Browser fingerprinting identifies a series of settings, which makes a computer uniquely identifiable. This method has also provoked protests from privacy advocates, as it is also impossible to avoid.

Trackers combine various sources of information into one identity if the user crosses over to other websites within the tracker’s network. Profiles are assigned to a specific anonymous identity, churning out consumer categories or aggregate data.

Shortly after the release of Collusion, the Guardian called for readers to submit the data from the add-on after a day’s worth of browsing. With this data, they measured the 10 biggest trackers. Unsurprisingly, Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo! feature on the list, as well as two divisions of Google: DoubleClick and Google Analytics. The former creates income from publishers and advertisers: the latter allows website publishers to gather more information about their web use. Facebook also uses tracking for its social plugins, but not for targeted advertising, for which it uses the information its members freely provide. In addition, as soon as a non-member lands on a Facebook page, it tracks their browsing progress. If that non-member ultimately signs up to the network, Facebook gets a sense of what persuaded them to do so.

Also among the top 10 are giants specialised in tracking and targeted advertising, such as Quantcast, Comscore, AppNexus and Nielsen. These firms buy the right to access information from websites with heavy traffic and sell the information on to firms looking to advertise. Ghostery indicates that the New York Times allows access to the following list:  Audience Science, BrightCove, Chartbeat, Check M8, DoubleClick, Dynamic Logic, Facebook Connect, Google AdSense, NetRatings SiteCensus, Score Card Research Beacon and Web Trends.

Tracking solves a major problem in both consumer and organisational markets; it saves time. It’s a proven hit; Google made 96 percent of its revenue from tracking techniques in 2011.

In many ways, Gary Kovacs is right to raise concerns about the transmission of information: users have the right to know their behavioural traits are being analysed for commercial gain. Many websites offer an opt out, but with warnings that many of their functions may no longer work as a result. Governments also need to make sure trackers toe the line with regards to Personally Identifiable Information and privacy advocates have pressurised governments to do so. Between July and December 2011, the US government made 6,321 requests for data to Google, which complied in 93 percent of cases and led to 12,243 user accounts being specified. To its credit, all these results are published on Google’s transparency website.

Advocates have argued tracking behavioural information online has little difference from supermarket loyalty cards and other forms of market research. Perhaps the continual increase in reliance on the internet makes users more protective of their information: as does the uncontrollable nature of the net itself. Those wishing to utilise information extracted from online research should, in turn, be conscious of society’s level of acceptability before putting a brand in peril.

What do trackers track?
– How often a user returns to a website
– The path of a user’s journey from one website to the next
– The time of a user’s visit and the title of the visited webpage
– The user’s IP address (from which their location can be inferred)
– The user’s browser and its language
– Whether the user clicked on a given ad

CES points way ahead for 2013 consumer tech

Posted on by Ben Debski

Every year in early January electronics companies congregate at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), eager to show off the products they hope will capture the imagination of buyers and the world’s media, while catapulting them to leading their industries.

The trade show, which begins next week in Las Vegas, has been running for over 40 years and has allowed the world its first glimpse of products that have come to be ubiquitous in homes around the world, including the video recorder, plasma TV’s, the Microsoft Xbox and tablet computers, while promoting growth in the US consumer electronics market of nearly $195bn.

Gadgets expected to be revealed next week include Samsung’s latest attempt to dominate the smartphone market with their Galaxy SIV, Fujifilm’s new X200 high-end camera, and a range of smart televisions that are seeking to revolutionise the way we all watch TV.

While many industry experts make grand predictions about which products will be in everyday use by the end of the year, there have been many misfires. Google unveiled their GoogleTV products at last year’s show, with many expecting them to be the must-have gadget throughout the year. However, one year on and sales have been unremarkable, with only a handful of hardware makers, including Sony and LG, offering the service.

Over the course of the next week there is likely to be a great deal of talk about many new innovations, from new TVs to augmented reality glasses. How likely they are to go mainstream remains to be seen.

Women’s Empowerment Corporate Leadership Awards 2012

Posted on by Ben Debski

Belcorp   Peru
Glowork   Saudi Arabia
Walmart Brazil   Brazil
BLC Bank   Lebanon
MCM Worldwide   South Korea
Access Bank   Nigeria
L’Oreal   Malaysia
Coca-Cola   Phillipines
MAS Holdings   Sri Lanka
Bank of Deyang   China
Tata Group   India
PwC   UK
Qtel Group   Qatar
GE UAE   UAE
Goldman Sachs   US
Garanti Bank   Turkey
Finnair   Finland
Westpac Bank   Australia
Cartier   France
AAK   Sweden