Extending the digital marketing investment and IPO streak we called back in December, today the Wall Street Journal reports that IBM will acquire Unica for $480M.
Look around: These *are* amazing times. Who would imagine, in the “Summer of the Great Recession,“ that a digital content start-up and a phone company whose majority of customers pay nothing would be hot IPO news. But that’s the point. These two companies shift the status away from the status quo. And they’re heating up August, which is usually a quiet investment month.
Today Skype announced it would seek up to $100 million in its Initial Public Offiering (IPO). This comes on the heels of last week’s S1 filing that content producer Demand Media seeks to raise $125 million. (You may recall that I predicted a digital IPO hot streak as a 2010 trend. So far, digital has been a hot spot in a largely cool market.)
If the name Demand Media doesn’t ring a bell, you may recall thelengthy feature in Wired that described them as a video content factory. While I love video and at-scale content production, Peter Guber, Chair of Mandalay Entertainment and a board member of Demand Media, surely did not. During his INTA Keynote he explained how he helped counter this pejorative view through media outreach.
Demand Media’s genius is that it figured out that the things people are searching on aren’t necessarily what writers naturally focus on for fun. That’s a breakthrough. Imagine people searching for ways to get wasps out of their sheds, or how to draw a viking helmet. But there aren’t many resources for such specific questions.
It’s been six months since my post that 2010 investment in digital marketing would occupy an increasing share of marketing dollars. Since then, Oracle, CDC, and Hearst Media have taken the leap.
And now, social business software company Jive has taken a $30M series C investment round from Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers (KPCB). Here’s the press release announcing the investment.
This milestone will allow Jive to move into a new category. Imagine Jive going up against other new social entrants (ie. Salesforce) or providing social tools as an enterprise social platform.
As they ramp this new capability for revenue growth, expect investment in the brand and talk of a 2011 IPO to fuel them way up the hype-cycle.
Back in December I advised to be on the watch for digital marketing IPOs and acquisitions. It’s been two years since Eloqua took funding, ExactTarget seems always to be 90 minutes from an IPO, and Neolane and Marketo just keep on boarding venture capital.
This week, Market2Lead, a niche player in marketing automation, was rolled-up by Oracle. Market2Lead established itself as a way small business can identify and track anonymous traffic on their websites.
There’s less in it for Oracle’s platform: Oracle bought the IP but not the book of business, because they have different models and very different audiences. So is the IP is all that relevant?
There’s surely less in it for Market2Lead’s customers: they have a business relationship with a company that no longer owns its own IP. The firm’s owners just sold out, so Market2Lead’s customers, real early adopters who also bet on the company, are having a “Market2Nowhere” experience.
There are amazing digital marketing juggernauts to be formed by pairing breakthrough companies in this space. And, as predicted, I expect there are larger high-profile acquisitions and IPOs, assuming continued economic recovery. I get why Oracle went for this, but now the real work begins.
Google made something huge out of Urchin. So let’s see what Oracle makes from the IP assets of a shallow-end lead-gen company. Oracle’s entry validates the space, but will they make the investment and do the learning necessary to move this already fast-growing market? Watch for actions and a road map that go beyond acquisition.
Today, Prime Minister Gordon Brown will announce a massive IT project to move in-person transactions with citizens online. (See coverage in the Telegraph.) This will change a wide range of interactions, including tax disputes and payments, vehicle licensing, applying for school, public housing issues, and passport applications.
No less than Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the World Wide Web’s inventor, has been a driver for the undertaking.
”I don’t want to go to a government office to do a government thing. It should all be online. That saves time for people and it saves money for the Government – the processing of a piece of paper and mailing it back costs many times more than it costs to process something electronically.”
Run away. Quickly
As a veteran e-government strategist, I’ve walked parts of this path, and this project is almost certain to underperform the idealistic goals being set out for it.
In the first year, every Briton will be issued a unique identifier allowing them to interact with all state agencies. I happened to run the “unique identifier” project which issued six million identifiers to each student in a large eastern state. I have no doubt that the UK already has other unique identifiers to base this on, but the human training needed to implement this across millions of citizens is daunting, as is the potential for fraud.
Within three years,the Times reported, the secure site would include a Facebook-style interactive service allowing people to ask medical advice of their doctor or consult their childrens’ teachers. Again, I managed an educational portal project that extended such functionalities, and I was part of a state portal project that brought 70 agencies under one system. Both took more than three years, and faced significant difficulties (most of which were cultural and political, not technical).
In ten years the nation would see closure of the physical centers dealing with most citizen affairs, as services would be offered through a single digital ”gateway.” Any return that is ten years removed is beyond the political life of those involved with project. But so boldly planning to close large categories of offices immediately solidifies a resistance group.
Machiavelli on project management
The current state is easy to defend, as its benefits and constituents are present and well-rooted. Future benefits often lack real constituents who are aware and ready to engage in combat in the present for a future that is currently conjecture and hope.
Considering the negative politics, resistant culture, and rather ambitious goals inspired by a brilliant engineer and academic, the project is replete with “expectation risk.”
And so begins what I fear may be the UK’s digital Big Dig.
A call for insights & authors.
We’re calling on you, our blog’s readers to help select the top online law issues you face today, and to describe what you see ahead. Dave Wieneke fills in the details in video above.
We’d like to hear from you by email at “strategy2.0″ at “gmail.com“. Starting next week we’ll start sharing what you and your colleagues have told us, along with original research and perspectives on our readers’ top themes. Hey, thanks for reading UsefulArts, and sharing your ideas!
Mark the date. This announcement is the start of an effort by the FCC to regulate both Internet operations and content just as the Commission does in broadcast channels. After an earlier effort to regulate bloggers as lobbyists failed, this appears to set the stage for another attempt for regulation of Internet content.
In a speech to the Federal Communications Bar Association on February 22, acting chairman Michael Copps said it was time to think “more rigorously” about the impact of the migration of communications to the Internet.
“Open access issues are important, but so too is how to ensure that as the Internet becomes our primary vehicle for communicating with one another, it protects the public interest and informs the civic dialogue that America depends on.”
The term “public interest” is what the FCC was created to protect in broadcast communications. Commissioner Copps’ use of this term signals an intent to attach the FCC to regulation of the Internet. And when the FCC regulates, it will not limit itself to operational issues, as “content” is where public interest in fact originates. The incoming FCC chairman seeks to remake the organization, so this statement connecting “the public interest” with Internet communication signals a potential sea change.
Of course, the Internet exists on private infrastructure. Your blog or website is a private asset. I can think of no actual nexus for government control, other than that this medium is influential. And that makes it attractive for government agencies to try to control.
The problem with all this “public interest” thinking, as Ben Compaine aptly notes, is that “In democracies, there is no universal ‘public interest.’ Rather there are numerous and changing ‘interested publics.’” The viewing public is likely to have a broad array of interests and desires that cannot be adequately gauged by what five FCC commissioners believe to be in the public interest.
Conservative reactionaries have predicted that under Democrats the FCC would resurrect the Fairness Doctrine to regulate talk radio and blogging. This connection of “public interest” to the Inertet certainly fits the scenario. We may find that the line between “reactionary” and “visionary” may only be that reactionaries are a little ahead of the visionaries.
It seems that only natural disasters happen suddenly. Man-made ones begin small. The EU is adopting policies that secretly allow the police to hack into personal computers anywhere, at any time, for any reason – all without any judicial oversight, which would be the start of a man-made disaster.
The hacking is known as “remote searching”. It allows police or MI5 officers who may be hundreds of miles away to examine covertly the hard drive of someone’s PC at his home, office or hotel room.
Material gathered in this way includes the content of all e-mails, web-browsing habits and instant messaging.
Under the Brussels edict, police across the EU have been given the green light to expand the implementation of a rarely used power involving warrantless intrusive surveillance of private property. The strategy will allow French, German and other EU forces to ask British officers to hack into someone’s UK computer and pass over any material gleaned.
Make no mistake – this is the equivalent of the police knocking down your door and entering your house at any time. Continued
The sky is falling on ICANN’s ill-considered gTLD policy.
I’ve been a skeptic of ICANN due to its incredibly slow response to fixing its own rules enable domain tasting.Also, last year its own domain was hacked, which didn’t increase anyone’s opinion of its chops as the world’s domain authority.
I’ve read in disbelief as this slow moving body has proposed supporting nearly unlimited new top level domains, in a near endless variety of languages, all done at light speed and at great expenses to customers.
The Cosmic Slap-Down Begins
Part of ICANN’s gTLD proposal is to allow any word to potentially be its own domain. So, instead of “coke.com” it would be “anything.coke”. Domains would be very expensive, and if brands didn’t claim them quickly, competitors could. Not unexpectedly, most brand holders I know consider this more a threat than an opportunity, and an expensive threat at that. Last month several big brands called ICANN’s gTLD policy as a train wreck driven by greed.
This wave of negative response is gaining momentum both among businesses, registrars, and with the agency which charters ICANN, the US Department of Commerce. The Commerce Department sent ICANN a scathing letter essentially telling them to rethink their plan. ICANN manages domains under an agreement with Commerce, which the department can reconsider or revoke at will, so such scathing letters carry significant weight at ICANN.
Microsoft, who some consider nearly a governmental force themselves, raised substantial legal and technical concerns about ICANN’s gTLD proposal.
The Best Summary of Reaction to ICANN’s gTLD Proposal is from PPF
Mike Palage, an Adjunct Fellow at the Progress & Freedom Foundation, has an expert analysis of the growing business and government pressures against ICANN’s gTLD proposal. It shows the scale of opposition this policy has inspired. In my opinion, this will put ICANN’s mid-2009 launch schedule off track, and sideline the organization’s reported goal to relocate its operations to Switzerland.
I had imagined that ICANN would simply miss its deadline. But instead, it seems a storm is brewing that could simply quash its ambitious plans, even before the deadlines approach.
INTA, The World Intellectual Property Review, and TelNic hosted a webinar to discuss the “revolutionary” landscape ICANN has proposed by opening up top-level domain ownership. There was real dissension against ICANN’s vision, and at best, muted support.
What was striking was the fear that an onslaught of new top-level domains would create confusion, expense, and technical difficulties. Participants repeatedly referred to ICANN’s ambition to gain over $80 million from this offering, which would be used to establish themselves as a “domain college” in Switzerland. There was broad concern that this has caused a drive to popularize an expensive gTLD scheme that is of little use to brands.
Legal staff from Yahoo and Verizon voiced strong concerns, starting with the fact that no research suggests there was a market demand among brands from TLD expansion; quite the opposite.
Sarah Deutsch of Verizon observed that during the worst financial crisis in recent history, ICANN is opening a “fire hydrant” of new domain names. Many brands may be compelled to become registries to claim their own marks as domains, which means paying perhaps $185,000 to register, and annual ICANN tax consultants to uphold the security and technical responsibility of a registry.
She noted that many brands may sit out the initial bidding and save their money to legally challenge those who bid on infringing names, or perhaps to sue ICANN directly. Participants noted that a requirement to “check trademarks at the door,” and abide by ICANN findings as part of the domain assignment process, absolutely must change.
The Positive Case for Brands to Get TLDs Was Lacking
What’s striking is the absolute lack of a compelling case for brands to move speedily in this direction. Several members pointed out there are marginal advantages. Paul McGrady, Jr. of Greenberg Traurig noted that companies that are registries directly own their own domains. Though few registrars have gone bankrupt, he pointed out there is a chance that company domains could be resold by a trustee holding the registrar.
It’s been six months since 
Back in December I advised to be on the watch for digital 
Today, Prime Minister Gordon Brown will announce a massive IT project to move in-person transactions with citizens online. (
Mark the date. This announcement is the start of an effort by the FCC to regulate both Internet operations and content just as the Commission does in broadcast channels. After an 
The sky is falling on ICANN’s ill-considered gTLD policy.
I simply didn’t expect this.