Pages tagged: 'Valuation'
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Scale Up or Cover Up?
Investing in fast growing scale up businesses that generate over 100X is the stuff analysts dream of. Yet it can so easily all go wrong, no matter how deep your pockets are. Cast your mind back to 2012 and imagine that you’d been offered the opportunity to invest in a technology business that was changing the way people and businesses work.
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Unfortunate Unicorns
Unicorns remain the ultimate achievement for entrepreneurs and investors alike. But away from the kudos of joining this exclusive club, are such goals the best target to aim for?
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Worn Out Wearables?
Ever since we realised that computers were really getting smaller, pioneers and visionaries have been trying to make them wearable. As far back as the 1975 Pulsar produced the first watch calculator and in the mid 1980’s these devices were in their heyday. Of course more recently, there has been a surge of smart watches but even Apple has failed to make a device that has really caught public interest.
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Bulls, bears and unicorns
Is the market turmoil making it harder for innovative companies to IPO – or providing opportunity? In March 2014 King Digital, the makers of the hugely popular Candy Crush game, launched it’s IPO. All the signs were good and the market was in stable bull territory. However, in the first day prices tumbled from the IPO guide at $22 to less than $18. For a $7bn company, it was the largest IPO failure for a tech business for some years. The stock further declined to $12 over the next few months. Yet today, those early investors may be thinking how smart (or lucky) they were when others are losing their heads. So what is going on?
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Why Some Bubbles Burst
Nick Woodman is one of those rare breed of golden geese that have made more than $1bn through a technology innovation. In Nick’s case (he founded GoPro in 2002 to take action surfing shots) it wasn’t that he even made a technical breakthrough – he simply took existing technologies (firstly 35mm film and then digital cameras) and used them in a new and disruptive way. GoPro was once the darling of investors but why did this tech hit a bad wave?
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Why Technology Investments Shine
Every index has its ups and down but on 11th April this year the technology focussed Nasdaq fell 3.1 per cent, the worst one-day percentage loss since 2011. Why?
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Why There’s Money in Messaging - Eventually
Facebook has just announced that it is spending a colossal $19billion buying the mobile instant messaging company WhatsApp. This is one of the biggest deals in tech for a long time – reminiscent of the $25billion acquisition of Compaq by HP. Now, $19 billion is a lot of money – it’s larger than the entire market cap of say Sony for example – and it’s over 10% of the value of Facebook itself ($170bn). The key point is that messaging platform acquisitions don’t always work. Whilst YouTube has continued to grow since it’s take over by Google in 2006, MySpace fell off the cliff after Newscorp spent $580million buying it in 2005. So why has Facebook risked so much?
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Is Bitcoin Worth More than Chocolate Money?
A turbulent week for Bitcoin has seen the price for one bitcoin slump to half it’s November high water mark, principally on the basis of comments from China. On Wednesday the Chinese central bank authorities ordered third-party payment providers to stop using the virtual currency. So how can anyone use a transaction medium with such wildly varying exchange rates?
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Gamers Look to Where the Sun Rises
Whilst the popular media may be fascinated by the rivalry between Xbox and Playstation, a different battle is being fought in the online games market. A recent report by Digi Captial highlights that 8 out of 10 major games acquisitions have been launched by Chinese, Japanese or South Korean buyers.
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Giving it Away for Free Lands S1bn
If you want to find out what people think, of you, your product, or even where you should go for the Christmas meal, the chances are you’ll use Survey Monkey. It’s simple, easy to deploy, almost user foolproof – and the basic version is free. So how come the company has joined the “unicorn” brigade of $1bn plus?
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