Germany
Auto Added by WPeMatico
Global M&A activity is flat so far in 2018
U.S. tech companies continue to be the most active acquirers in the world, says a new report from Crunchbase and Mind the Bridge.
The pair crunched data on 22,000 startup exits since 2010, recording about 4,200 so far this year. U.S. companies, though less active this year than last, have acquired approximately 2x more startups than their European counterparts.
Overall, 2018 is a flat year for M&A activity, despite a record-setting 2017. 
Here are a few key takeaways from the report, which you can read in full here.
- There was a slight decrease in activity in the U.S., but Europe has really pulled back. European companies have completed 11 percent fewer M&A deals YoY.
- U.S. and European companies continue to make up the bulk of M&A deals. More than three-quarters of the transactions and the money spent involved startups from North America and Europe.
- Twenty-two of the top 30 world acquirers are from the U.S., which remains the most active acquirer of European startups, though Europe is closing the gap.
- Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft are the world’s most active acquirers.
- The most active European acquirer is Paris-based Publicis Groupe, which is 20th on the list of top global acquirers. That’s a step up from last year, when the most active European acquirer was Germany’s SAP — 33rd on the list.
- European companies are increasingly buying more of their European counterparts. This year, 81 percent of European acquisitions were domestic versus 75 percent last year.
- Of the startups that exited, 55 percent were between five and 15 years old and had raised between $10 million and $100 million.
Powered by WPeMatico
Chilling effects
The removal of conspiracy enthusiast content by InfoWars brings us to an interesting and important point in the history of online discourse. The current form of Internet content distribution has made it a broadcast medium akin to television or radio. Apps distribute our cat pics, our workouts, and our YouTube rants to specific audiences of followers, audiences that were nearly impossible to monetize in the early days of the Internet but, thanks to gullible marketing managers, can be sold as influencer media.
The source of all of this came from Gen X’s deep love of authenticity. They formed a new vein of content that, after breeding DIY music and zines, begat blogging, and, ultimately, created an endless expanse of user generated content (UGC). In the “old days” of the Internet this Cluetrain-manifesto-waving post gatekeeper attitude served the slacker well. But this move from a few institutional voices into a scattered legion of micro-fandoms led us to where we are today: in a shithole of absolute confusion and disruption.
As I wrote a year ago, user generated content supplanted and all but destroyed “real news.” While much of what is published now is true in a journalistic sense, the ability for falsehood and conspiracy to masquerade as truth is the real problem and it is what caused a vacuum as old media slowed down and new media sped up. In this emptiness a number of parasitic organisms sprung up including sites like Gizmodo and TechCrunch, micro-celebrity systems like Instagram and Vine, and sites catering to a different consumer, sites like InfoWars and Stormfront. It should be noted that InfoWars has been spouting its deepstate meanderings since 1999 and Alex Jones himself was a gravelly-voice radio star as early as 1996. The Internet allowed any number of niche content services to juke around the gatekeepers of propriety and give folks like Jones and, arguably, TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington, Gawker founder Nick Denton, and countless members of the “Internet-famous club,” deep influence over the last decades media landscape.
The last twenty years have been good for UGC. You could get rich making it, get informed reading it, and its traditions and habits began redefining how news-gathering operated. There is no longer just a wall between advertising and editorial. There is also a wall between editorial and the myriad bloggers who write about poop on Mt. Everest. In this sort of world we readers find ourselves at a distinct loss. What is true? What is entertainment? When the Internet is made flesh in the form of Pizzagate shootings and Unite the Right Marches, who is to blame?
The simple answer? We are to blame. We are to blame because we scrolled endlessly past bad news to get to the news that was applicable to us. We trained robots to spoon feed us our opinions and then force feed us associated content. We allowed ourselves to enter into a pact with a devil so invisible and pernicious that it easily convinced the most confused among us to mobilize against Quixotic causes and immobilized the smartest among us who were lulled into a Soma-like sleep of liking, sharing, and smileys. And now a new reckoning is coming. We have come full circle.
Once upon a time old gatekeepers were careful to let only carefully controlled views and opinions out over the airwaves. The medium was so immediate that in the 1940s broadcasters forbade the transmission of recordings and instead forced broadcasters to offer only live events. This was wonderful if you had the time to mic a children’s choir at Christmas but this rigidity was bed for a reporter’s health. Take William Shirer and Edward R. Murrow’s complaints about being unable to record and play back bombing raids in Nazi-held territories – their chafing at old ideas are almost palpable to modern bloggers.
There were other handicaps to the ban on recording that hampered us in taking full advantage of this new medium in journalism. On any given day there might be several developments, each of which could have been recorded as it happened and then put together and edited for the evening broadcast. In Berlin, for example, there might be a bellicose proclamation, troop movements through the capital, sensational headlines in the newspapers, a protest by an angry ambassador, a fiery speech by Hitler, Goring or Goebbels threatening Nazi Germany’s next victim—all in the course of the day. We could have recorded them at the moment they happened and put them together for a report in depth at the end of the day. Newspapers could not do this. Only radio could. But [CBS President] Paley forbade it.
Murrow and I tried to point out to him that the ban on recording was not only hampering our efforts to cover the crisis in Europe but would make it impossible to really cover the war, if war came. In order to broadcast live, we had to have a telephone line leading from our mike to a shortwave transmitter. You could not follow an advancing or retreating army dragging a telephone line along with you. You could not get your mike close enough to a battle to cover the sounds of combat. With a compact little recorder you could get into the thick of it and capture the awesome sounds of war.
And so now instead of CBS and the Censorship Bureau we have Facebook and Twitter. Instead of calling for the ability to record and playback an event we want permission to offer our own slants on events, no matter how far removed we are from the action. Instead of working diligently to spread only the truth, we consume the truth as others know it. And that’s what we are now chafing against: the commercialization and professionalization of user generated content.
Every medium goes through this confusion. From Penny Dreadfuls to Pall Mall sponsoring nearly every single new television show in the 1940s, media has grown, entered a disruptive phase that changes all media around it, and is then curtailed into boredom and commoditization. It is important to remember that we are in the era of Peak TV not because we all have more time to watch 20 hours of Breaking Bad. We are in Peak TV because we have gotten so good at making good shows – and the average consumer is ravenous for new content – that there is no financial reason not to take a flyer on a miniseries. In short, it’s gotten boring to make good TV.
And so we are now entering the latest stage of Internet content, the blowback. This blowback is not coming from governments. Trump, for his part, sees something wrong but cannot or will not verbalize it past the idea of “Fake News”. There is absolutely a Fake News problem but it is not what he thinks it is. Instead, the Fake News problem is rooted in the idea that all content deserves equal respect. My Medium post is as good as a CNN which is as good as an InfoWars screed about pedophiles on Mars. In a world defined by free speech then all speech is protected. Until, of course, it affects the bottom line of the company hosting it.
So Facebook and Twitter are walking a thin line. They want to remain true to the ancillary GenX credo that can be best described as “garbage in, garbage out” but many of its readers have taken that deeply open invitation to share their lives far too openly. These platforms have come to define personalities. They have come to define news cycles. They have driven men and women into hiding and they have given the trolls weapons they never had before, including the ability to destroy media organizations at will. They don’t want to censor but now that they have shareholders then they simply must.
So get ready for the next wave of media. And the next. And the next. As it gets more and more boring to visit Facebook I foresee a few other rising and falling media outlets based on new media – perhaps through VR or video – that will knock social media out of the way. And wait for more wholesale destruction of UGC creators new and old as monetization becomes more important than “truth.”
I am not here to weep for InfoWars. I think it’s garbage. I’m here to tell you that InfoWars is the latest in a long line of disrupted modes of distribution that began with the printing press and will end god knows where. There are no chilling effects here, just changes. And we’d best get used to them.
Powered by WPeMatico
This clever case pops open to protect your phone when you drop it
That moment when you drop your phone and everything stops. You can hear your heart beat — the buzz of the world around you is silenced — all cognition stops — you see as if in slow motion the pirouette of your $700 piece of electronics toward the cement. How will it land? Will you get lucky this time? Or is this it? But if you had this case on it, you’d then see it spring horns and land with a jaunty bounce.
This “active damping” case, a bit like an airbag for your phone, is the brainchild of Philip Frenzel, an engineer at Aalen University in Germany. His idea won the top award from the German Society for Mechatronics, which considered projects from students all over the country, and you can see him explain its genesis in a video here.
Frenzel, like me, doesn’t like compromising his phone’s aesthetic with some ugly protective shell, but he likes even less the shattered countenance that inevitably results from this aesthetic decision.
Why not something that only deploys when the phone is in danger, then? He got to work. The activation mechanism he arrived at early: sensors that detect when the phone is in free fall and activate the next step.
But what was that step? In his tinkering, he initially thought of installing an actual airbag mechanism on the phone. But that, and a foam-based alternative, and a few others, simply didn’t prove practical.
Finally inspiration struck. Instead of something soft, why not something springy? Perhaps… springs.
As you see above, what he arrived at is a set of eight thin metal curls that normally lie flat inside the case. But when released, they pop out and curl up, protecting the edges of the phone from impact and softening the blow considerably compared with a full stop on the concrete.
When you pick up your (hopefully undamaged) phone, you simply fold the springs back into their holsters, priming them for their next deployment.
Of course, there’s the consideration that having these things deploy while the phone is still in your pocket would be at best embarrassing and at worst rather painful. One assumes there are considerations in place for that — tapping into the phone’s proximity sensor, for instance, to see if it’s in a pocket or bag.
Frenzel has already applied for a patent, and even printed T-shirts with a catchy logo. So this thing is practically for sale. Next stop: Kickstarter.
Powered by WPeMatico
Babbel founder talks language learning and the challenges of the US market
There are plenty of choices out there if you want to learn a new language, but if you’re in Europe, chances are you’ve given Babbel a shot. The app, which started back in 2007 on the web, is celebrating its 10th birthday by expanding to the U.S. — a unique country that has proven a unique challenge for the company and its model.
We chatted with Babbel’s Chief Strategy Officer and co-founder, Thomas Holl, at the company’s headquarters in Berlin. The success of the company was evident in the lively, populous workplace.
But although the app is the top-grossing language learning app in the world, it’s more than possible that many of our readers haven’t encountered it, since it started in Europe and until very recently has stayed there.
It differs from other popular platforms like Duolingo, Holl explained, by focusing on real-world settings like introductions and restaurant interactions.
“I think it’s very practical, and that’s probably the difference to many other solutions out there that have a rather structural approach — we’re always focused on language that you can actually use in real life.”
There’s also something unique about each pair of languages — that is to say, a Mandarin speaker has different challenges learning French than a Spanish speaker. So lessons and progression are specific to each pairing, not just copy-pasted and translated. Babbel touts this as a reason why people learn faster on its platform. (People may feel they need to get their money’s worth as well – it’s a subscription service.)
Expanding to the U.S. has been the company’s main ambition over the last year, but the U.S. is very unlike the tangle of closely-related, multilingual states on that side of the pond. Few people are looking to improve a second or third language in order to advance their careers, Holl pointed out, with a major exception: English learners.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the most popular language to learn in the U.S. is English; we are a country of immigrants, after all, and although we have many communities that speak their native language at home, English is a necessity for getting by.
Babbel has deployed a new type of monolingual course for advanced English learners, essentially a story in English that you fill out as it goes along. The audio portion has the added difficulty of multiple English (and Scottish, and Liverpudlian) accents.
Combined with apps like Blue Canoe, which focuses on pronunciation, English learners are beginning to have a real wealth of resources online.
Powered by WPeMatico
A conversation about digital copyright reform
The European Union is in the process of reforming copyright laws that date back to 2001, as part of a wider strategy to establish a Digital Single Market across the 28 Member States of the bloc, aiming to break down regional barriers to ecommerce. Microsoft launches Azure preview in Germany and Canada, announces DoD-specific regions in U.S.
Late last year, Microsoft announced it would start hosting its Azure cloud computing platform and some of its other cloud-based services out of local data centers in both Germany and Canada. Both of these new regions, Azure Canada and Azure Germany, are now officially in preview. To ensure data sovereignty in Germany, Microsoft partnered with Deutsche Telekom subsidiary T-Systems as its… Read More
Powered by WPeMatico