Yext is finally moving ahead for an initial public offering
New York based Yext is finally going public.
The company has revealed its IPO filing, and it appears as if the business will join the stock market sometimes in April.
The company is planning to raise something to the tune of $100 million through the IPO.
In case you are unaware of it, Yext is a New York City technology company that gives businesses control over the digital knowledge associated with their brand across the digital ecosystem.
The company was founded in 2006 and has been operating since over a decade now.
Its customers include the likes of Best Buy, McDonald’s and Marriott.
The company was surprisingly candid about its future prospects in its filings with the SEC: We have a history of losses and may not achieve profitability in the future.
Yext was referring to the fact that it has been incurring losses for the past quarters here.
The company has managed to raise over $117 million in venture funding at a valuation of over $500 million.
It is currently led by Howard Lerman as CEO.
7 Critical Skills All Sales Superstars Possess in Today’s Market
Instead of talking prospects’ ears off and pushing customers into buying more, you should be focusing on making real connections with your buying audience.
Here are the seven skills you absolutely must have in order to crush your sales goals in today’s selling market: 1.
The old, go-to opener of, “I’d like to set up a call in order to learn more about your business,” isn’t going to engage your prospects anymore.
Although it’s a good idea to find out your prospects’ key business challenges, you have to engage them before you ask them to open up.
Far too many salespeople are still making the mistake of getting distracted with thoughts of what they’ll say next.
Yet far too many salespeople try to persuade all prospects to do business with them anyway.
Instead of focusing the conversation on how great your product or service is going to be, focus on discovering if it’s even a good fit in the first place.
Salespeople have been taught for over 100 years that the key to a successful presentation is plenty of enthusiasm.
You’ll make your presentations seem far more engaging—and close far more sales.
If your top option has a lot of value, you’ll find that many prospects will push their budget to go for that option, helping you close a far bigger sale.
3 Entrepreneurial Lessons I Learned from Raising Horses
Austria’s Novomatic working with Macquarie on potential IPO: sources
Austria’s Novomatic working with Macquarie on potential IPO: sources.
The private owners of Austrian gaming technology group Novomatic [NVMTC.UL] are working with Macquarie to prepare an initial public offering that could value the company at more than 6 billion euros ($6.3 billion), three sources familiar with the matter said.
Novomatic, owned by the family of its billionaire founder Johann Graf, makes slot machines and other gambling equipment and technology.
It also operates casinos and a network of sport betting shops.
The listing would likely take place in the second half of the year in London, although Frankfurt remains an option, one of the sources said.
The company is looking to list roughly 20-30 percent of its stock, one source said.
At a valuation of more than 6 billion euros, that would make it one of the biggest ever IPOs of an Austrian company.
Telekom Austria’s (TELA.VI) raised 1.2 billion euros in an IPO in 2000, Raiffeisen Bank International (RBIV.VI) raised 1.1 billion euros in 2005 and construction firm Strabag (STRV.VI) raised 1.3 billion euros in 2007, shortly before the global financial crisis hit and put the brakes on company listings.
It generated revenue of 3.9 billion euros in 2015.
(Reporting by Arno Schuetze; additional reporting by Shadia Nasralla and Francois Murphy in Vienna; Editing by Harro ten Wolde/Keith Weir)
Switch Raises More Funding For Credit Card Update Platform
Switch Raises More Funding For Credit Card Update Platform.
Switch, the startup that has an online platform to help consumers manage their credit cards, has reportedly raised $400,000 in funding.
According to a report, the $400,000 in funding is from angel investors.
Since launching in 2014, Switch has raised close to $2 million.
“Today, credit and debit cards are the dominant payment solutions for consumers,” Switch CEO Chris Hopen said in a statement, according to the report.
“Switch is the first ever consumer payment solution that automates both the challenge of secure account access and the ‘card on file’ problems users face every day.” With Switch, customers can get updated information for their credit cards, which provides them with a quick and efficient way to make sure their payments are up-to-date and better visibility into their account information.
The idea is also to enable people to update their payment information if the credit card is lost, stolen or no longer in use by the consumer.
Currently the startup out of Seattle has 10 employees.
Switch’s latest round of funding comes at a time when FinTech startups are garnering more attention from investors.
Earlier this month Qapital, the FinTech startup, raised $12 million in venture funding to expand its app that enables users to make goals and save money to reach those goals.
Sorry, but your AI needs to go back to school
Just like human intelligence, artificial intelligence requires continuous learning to advance its expertise.
In addition to mitigating against bias, human validation helps AI keep up with changing knowledge.
Like human intelligence, the only way artificial intelligence can adapt to accommodate a growing body of knowledge is if we continually educate it.
When a customer searches your website for women’s brown boots, the shopper gets back results of brown boots from your catalog.
The right human in the right loop So you’re sold on integrating humans into your AI training loop.
It’s time to identify the right humans with the specialized knowledge your business needs.
You want individuals like her annotating your data, helping to make your recommendation engine as relevant as possible for your customers.
But it doesn’t end there.
Remember, the initial training data set is just the first loop.
The validation loop is as much about improving the AI as it is your human intelligence engine.
Prepare for a second wave of Touch Bar-friendly Mac apps
But many, many Mac apps don’t let you do anything with the Touch Bar, five months after Apple unveiled its 2016 MacBook Pro and introduced tools and guidelines to help developers build for its Touch Bar.
That’s about to change.
Earlier this week, the team behind Electron released a beta version of the software with new features that will let developers add Touch Bar functionality into existing Electron-powered apps.
“The new Touch Bar API allows you to add buttons, labels, popovers, color pickers, sliders, and spacers.
These elements can be dynamically updated and also emit events when they are interacted with,” Kevin Sawicki, a developer at GitHub who contributed to the additions, wrote in a blog post.
Sure enough, GitHub is the company behind it.
Electron serves as the underlying framework for another piece of GitHub open-source software, the Atom text editor.
Now Atom could very well get Touch Bar support soon.
The same thing could happen to Microsoft’s competing Visual Studio Code text editor.
In other words, get ready to see the Touch Bar becoming useful in more and more of the apps you use on the Touch Bar every day.
Dell XPS 2-in-1 review: Fine, but the laptop version is a better bet
Dell XPS 2-in-1 review: Fine, but the laptop version is a better bet.
Dell has capitulated to HP and Lenovo by producing a convertible version of its well reviewed XPS 13 Windows laptop.
After using the convertible for the past few weeks, I get the idea.
The unit I reviewed — with a Core i7-7Y75 chip, 8GB of LPDDR3 RAM, and a 256GB SSD — costs $1,299.99.
Image Credit: Jordan Novet/VentureBeat The keys on the backlit keyboard have just as much travel — 1.3mm — as the XPS 13 clamshell model, but they aren’t the most satisfying to type on.
The typing experience is nicer onHP’s 13-inch Spectre x360 and Microsoft’s Surface Book.
My experience shows closer to about five hours of average battery life on the 2-in-1.
At least the bezels around the display are still very nice and narrow.
The dual speakers produce good enough audio.
Plus, there are detachable Windows 10 tablets you may want to consider, including the Surface Pro 4 (starting at $958.99 with Type Cover keyboard), although to be fair, it hasn’t been updated since 2015.
DeltaDNA hits 100 million monthly active users for real-time marketing and analytics
DeltaDNA hits 100 million monthly active users for real-time marketing and analytics.
DeltaDNA has surpassed more than 100 million monthly active users (MAU) for its real-time marketing and mobile analytics platform.
That means that the game publishers and developers who use the platform have that amount of traffic.
Growth has been driven by the changing analytics landscape as larger publishers and developers start to take the player experience more seriously, according to DeltaDNA, which is based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
“Traditionally, the market’s been driven by mid-sized developers, but now, we’re seeing the big guys begin to realize just how much money is being left on the table, despite already achieving strong monetization.” The platform is now processing approximately 25 billion data events and sending 120 million messages every single month.
In the last six months, DeltaDNA has signed new enterprise agreements with dozens of large developers.
As a result, these big developers are actually missing out on significant revenues.
That kind of realization likely influenced King’s recent decision to acquire rival analytics firm Omniata.
Impressions across the platform are now growing at a rate of 10 million per month, as developers slowly begin to understand how best to integrate ads into their games.
“We’ve been able to benefit significantly from this changing tide, which since last year has enabled us to add an additional 50 million MAU to the platform, helping us pass 100 million MAU, and to shortly hit the 150 million MAU milestone, which is just fantastic,” Robinson said.
Shutting down your startup
Shutting down your startup.
Startup founders often have obligations to many stakeholders, including family, employees, investors, and perhaps customers.
It all starts with communication.
Of course, it’s always better when a potential acquirer contacts you, but you have to face reality.
It’s all about optimizing the exit, so speak to as many potential acquirers as possible.
Compile a list of key customers and suppliers that may be interested in acquiring the company.
If a customer or supplier is heavily dependent on your company, they may be interested in buying it.
Assuming you are unable to sell the company as a whole to a competitor, customer or supplier, think about selling certain assets instead.
Other potential buyers include hotel chains, travel industry analysts, market research companies like Forrester, and perhaps even municipal tourism departments.
So you want to do it right, both for your own benefit and for your stakeholders.
Opportunities for machine-learning startups: An investor perspective
It has enormous potential to transform entire markets and industries.
Successful machine-learning startups will be the ones targeting vertical applications with a clear need for the technology.
According to an Accenture study, machine learning can lead to a 4.25x improvement in delivery times and a 2.6x improvement in supply chain efficiency.
Significant manual intervention implies that there is a real opportunity to optimize with complex prediction algorithms.
By leveraging data like production times, sell through rates, and others, learning models could more accurately predict future needs.
Companies that can either partner with large, established corporations to leverage their data to learn, or that create a product that entices users to input their own data, will win.
Insurance.Insurance is a large and wide-ranging category where machine learning can help insurers deliver more targeted products at lower costs.
Additionally, smart, automated systems are lowering the cost of personalized advice for consumers by tracking behavior and offering suggestions based on preferences and goals.
Personalized education.
As of 2013, the U.S. was spending $620 billion annually on public education, with almost 50 million students enrolled in public schools.
Irrational exuberance II: Why the Fed shouldn’t raise rates now
The Yellen Fed is on the precipice of making the same mistake the Greenspan Fed did when it tried to control capital market prices by increasing rates.
It doesn’t seem to matter what line of business your company is in — if you have investors, your investors are betting on growth.
During the dot-com bubble, investors assumed eyeballs would turn into earnings; they didn’t.
However, today’s economy has been on a slow burn recovery for the last six+ years.
Nothing points to a material departure from this in 2017 other than the “hope” trade we see in the capital markets.
I think we can all acknowledge the Fed needs to raise rates to get back to “normal,” but a slow, deliberate pace is still best given the latent fragility in the economy.
In the ’90s during the dot-com bubble, the Fed thought it could control the irrational exuberance by raising rates and therefore driving down dot-com stock prices.
If it was to raise rates, the move would be even less successful than it was back in the ’90s, as investors would likely interpret a March rate hike as supporting their notion of expansive economic growth being inevitable.
While accelerated growth is possible if the right economic policies are enacted, it’s too soon to make this assumption.
At that point, we will have a much better idea of new economic policy and the timing of such.
Bringing About a New Economic Reality Demands Vigilance and Hard Work
The Federal Reserve has an integral role in managing the money supply by printing paper money, setting interest rates and helping monitor the banking system.
We have absolutely no idea whose hands hold the purse strings of our economy.
Up to and including the Great Depression, if a company went bankrupt, so did the president and CEO.
Prior to that, the government couldn’t print all the money it wanted.
The inevitable result of being taken off the gold standard is what we have today: massive printing of money whose only value is what people psychologically place upon it.
There is no limit to how much money (up to billions) can be bet on a million-dollar company.
In addition, there is now an unlimited amount of gambling done on the price of gold.
This creates the illusion that there is far more gold available than is actually the case.
Due to its finite amount, gold used to provide stability to the financial markets.
If people can be prompted to become more aware, look deeper into economic and societal issues, and tap into their innate wisdom and common sense, the economic crisis that is upon us can still be reversed.
3 Key Ways to Diversify Your Ecommerce Store
The problem facing many would-be entrepreneurs in this space is that as each industry becomes crowded with ecommerce companies, diversifying their products becomes harder.
Oberlo is a plugin for Shopify stores that enables entrepreneurs to import hundreds of products within minutes.
To make better advertisements and have higher conversion rates, you need to understand what niche your ecommerce store is targeting.
This enables it to definite a target niche within the millions of watch buyers worldwide.
The biggest mistake ecommerce entrepreneurs make today is investing too heavily in inventory.
Drop shipping is an ecommerce strategy where a store doesn’t hold inventory.
Instead, when a store sells a product, it purchases the item from a third party and has it shipped directly to the customer.
If you’re entering an industry already crowded with ecommerce stores, you’re going to need to invest in branding.
To increase your brand awareness, start investing in your social media presence.
That’s why it’s important to focus on a niche, test your products and double down on your brand.
2 Essential Rules for Running a Business
First, the Fortune 100 company decided it was ending funding for the project we were working on (not due to anything we did).
Rule 1: Always have a full sales pipeline.
Earlier this year, I made this mistake again; and it happened when I had 10 people on my team.
If this happens with 20 people, it could mean the end of my business.
This has happened to me more than once, and I almost lost my business because of it.
I thought I learned my lesson after the first time, but after a couple of years of solid growth, I lost sight of it.
But if you rely on one big client, a full sales pipeline still might not be enough to replace all this lost business.
However, if the client is just one of many clients, and each makes up a small portion of your revenue, you have a better chance of being okay.
Building a full sales pipeline and not being reliant on any one client reduces this fear and relieves stress.
As an entrepreneur, you can’t prevent all fires.
Why Free Market For Startups is Bit of a Fool’s Paradise
In hindsight, everyone is advocating the hackneyed phrases – need of a level playing field, free and open market, or even the argument that India is not a closed market like Russia or China.
The bone of contention is companies like Amazon, and Uber (that failed in China) are funding the negative gross margin sales or cash burn of their ‘Indianized’ arms even as their ‘actual Indian copycats’ like Flipkart and Ola ‘earning’ investments from investors.
The question hence, shouldn’t be how foreign is Flipkart (the fact that it is registered in Singapore is a separate matter) or Ola (that like many other start-ups is backed by foreign capital) or other startups because eventually their investors are third parties unlike Amazon India or Uber India that are awarded with war chests from their parent companies.
Whenever you go to raise capital from limited partners (LPs – investors in funds) they ask questions about Flipkart and Snapdeal.
“This is just a cycle and will not have a permanent impact on the ecosystem.
An investor with a tier one early stage fund requesting anonymity argues, “These (foreign) companies are getting profits from their home markets and funding their growth in new markets which is an abnormal business practice.
“Of course Uber and Amazon are getting advantage of raising money from their company balance sheet in other market but the problem Flipkart and Ola is facing is that they themselves haven’t been capital efficient with whatever capital they had,” asserts Sinha.
Or would one call it a fair trade though you can’t really stop the rich guy to invest in his shop because there is no one to regulate it?
But importantly, there the question was between two channels of shopping where online was seen as a natural extension to offline through Internet with end-to-end overhaul of shopping experience, from search or discovery to delivery or return.
To sum it up, the call is for these companies to raise money from third party investors just like the home grown companies or have government sponsored funds and bank funding dedicated to domestic businesses, if at all it has to be a full-fledged war based on efficient use of capital.
Snapchat raises $3.4 billion in IPO
Snapchat raises $3.4 billion in IPO.
Even concerns about Snapchat’s slowing user growth aren’t stopping investors from clamoring for its stock.
Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, priced its initial public offering at $17 a share on Wednesday.
That will reportedly give Snap a market value of nearly $24 billion, making it the largest U.S. tech IPO since Facebook (FB, Tech30).
Reps for Snap did not immediately respond to a request for comment. “The demand for the Snap IPO has been very, very strong,” says Jeff Zell, an analyst with IPO Boutique, a research firm.
The slowdown coincided with Facebook’s Instagram launching a Snapchat copycat feature.
Most analysts expect Snap to report around $1 billion in sales this year. “However, we are not contemplating any material acquisitions at this time.”
Facebook famously tried to acquire the company for $3 billion in 2013.
