When it comes to deal-making, predicting what Larry Ellison will do next is never easy - which is just the way he wants it.

So what to make of the fact that Mr Ellison’s pursuit of Sun Microsystems has now reached a point few expected, with the European Commission close to drawing a line in the sand with a formal objection to the deal?

This doesn’t necessarily mean that Brussels will act to block it. But it does show that things have reached an impasse in Brussels, which at the very least means a longer delay - with further detrimental effects to Sun’s business.

Assuming neither side balks before the EC issues its objection, Mr Ellison now appears to have a number of options. Continue reading "Oracle/Sun: the plot thickens"

Dailymotion, Europe’s biggest online video challenger to YouTube, on Thursday said it had raised $25m in a new funding round led by the French Sovereign Fund (FSI). The French strategic investments fund, which is 49 per cent owned by the government, contributed $11m to the round, with all the existing investors, Advent Venture Partners, AGF PE, Partech International and Atlas Ventures,  taking part.

Dailymotion chief executive Cedric Tournay also said the company had now hit break-even and expected to make a profit next year. The site now attracts around 60m unique users each month, up from 35m a year ago.  Although it is dwarfed by YouTube, it is doing well to survive and grow in a market where competitors like Joost and Veoh have had to retreat. Continue reading "Daily motion raises $25m to accelerate growth"

Why is Google so tone-deaf to the interests of Wall Street?

The company’s latest quarterly earnings look good, and are enough to warrant Eric Schmidt declaring the search advertising recession well and truly over. All segments of advertising are improving again, he said, and pricing recovered from the second quarter (cost-per-click up 5 per cent.)

The earnings call that is currently underway, however, once again reveals the company’s lack of sensitivity to the way analysts work, and its over-enthusiasm for using technology to replace human interaction. Continue reading "Crowdsourcing Wall Street"

This is a guest post from the FT’s media correspondent, Kenneth Li

Finding a good movie is generally a hit or miss proposition, Reed Hastings, chief executive of Netflix, explained on Monday.

That’s a problem for Mr Hastings, whose billion dollar mail order movies rental business hinges on subscribers being progressively happier about what they watch next or risk dumping the service.

Netflix, which discovered early on that movies that were recommended generally pleased customers more than even new releases, spent a decade struggling to take the guesswork out of what to watch next and were unable to boost accuracy by 10 per cent.

Mr Hastings turned that challenge — telling customers what they want before they want it –- into a million dollar global challenge. The winners were announced today. Continue reading "Netflix’s Geek Super Bowl"

It gets harder trying to spot the next big thing, especially when you can’t see the start-ups for the upstarts among the hundreds of pitches being made at TechCrunch50 this week.

In the end, the judges of this tech jamboree of new ideas in search of funding chose RedBeacon - a local service started by former Google employees to hook up plumbers and painters with customers - as winner of the $50,000 top prize. Continue reading "TC50 start-ups are flickering beacons of success"

Tech entrepreneurs are fleeing from social networks and advertising revenue streams and moving into business applications, according to Seedcamp, the start-up investor that holds its annual event in London later this month.

Seedcamp – which was founded by Index Ventures’ Saul Klein and Reshma Sohoni, formerly of 3i – has seen advertising-based business models drop from 30 per cent to 10 per cent of the 1,500 entries to its Pop Idol-style investment contest since 2007.

By contrast, marketplaces that take a fee or percentage of transactions have risen by more than 60 per cent in the last three years, while “freemium” businesses have more than doubled. Productivity and business applications have increased 90 per cent while online games have “skyrocketed”, said Ms Sohoni. Continue reading "Seedcamp sees greater diversity of European start-ups"

UPDATE: follow it live. Chris Nuttall will be providing live coverage from San Francisco of Wednesday’s Apple event, starting at 10am local time. Follow it here.

Apple is holding a music-themed press event tomorrow, where it is expected to unveil a package of  goodies that will start being attached to sales of full digital albums.

The product, code-named Cocktail by the record labels, will include interactive lyric sheets, photos and other virtual extras aimed at replicating and improving on the old experience of opening a vinyl record sleeve or CD boxed set filled with trinkets. Continue reading "Apple might offer a `Cocktail’ of new iPods and music"

In yet another sign that the appetite for shares in fast-growing technology companies has returned, Ancestry.com, a genealogy website that lets users trace their family origins, filed for a $75m initial public offering on Monday.

In its filing with the SEC, the company revealed that it has almost 1m paying customers, and took in $107m over the last six months, with profits of $8m. The company plans to list on either Nasdaq or the New York Stock Exchange as ACOM. Morgan Stanley and Bank of America Merrill Lynch are the two lead underwriters.

Ancestry.com will be the latest tech company to go public after a nearly yearlong drought. Continue reading "Ancestry.com files for $75m IPO"