SlideShare Axes Its Freemium Model, Makes ‘Pro’ Features Like Analytics Free

SlideShare, the LinkedIn-owned site that lets you upload and distribute presentations online, is turning over a new leaf today. The service, which has 60 million users, is going free. In tandem with that, SlideShare is dropping its PRO tiers, once priced at $19/month and $49/month, and making extra features like analytics, which used to come at a price, free for all.

The premium tiers were introduced in 2010 before SlideShare was acquired by LinkedInfor $119 million. At the time of the freemium introduction, then-SlideShare CEO Rashmi Sinha was optimistic on pricing, telling us, “Subscriptions are sexy.”

You may have had a hint of this coming if you visited SlideShare recently and tried tosign up for the Pro tiers, where you would have been greeted with a shaded window and this message:

Now, LinkedIn has made the change more explicit. “All our existing PRO users will continue to have access to the PRO features we are making free,” a spokesperson told us. “However, the PRO subscription fee will end on Aug. 20, 2014, the day we are making PRO free. We will no longer charge existing PRO users after that point.”

LinkedIn says that it will roll out a new feature every month starting in September. The first of these, according to a blog post from product manager Amit Sawhney, will be analytics.

For those who don’t already use SlideShare PRO, analytics is a feature that is very LinkedIn in its character. It lets you know who has looked at your presentations (including location), how they found the content, which sites are driving traffic to the presentation, and other engagement metrics — much like the profile viewing analytics on LinkedIn’s main site. All this gets presented in an analytics dashboard that looks like this:

After this will come the ability for you to customise your profile, which you can do with a banner, a list of your favorite SlideShares, and other features.

Other PRO perks that will now get opened to all include the ability to set presentations to private so that only specified users can view them, as well as video uploads. You can sign up here for the full list and details of when each feature will get turned on.

So why the change? A spokesperson for the company described it as a “natural next step” that “creates more ways for members to expand their SlideShare distribution and manage their deck and brand.”

But there could be bigger business motives, too. LinkedIn does not disclose how many users it had on the PRO tier, nor how many of the 60 million SlideShare users are active, but I can imagine that making the service far more functional for casual users is a play to increase the number of active visitors and uploads to the site. To date there have been 10 million presentations uploaded to the site, but when you consider how sites like YouTube (to which SlideShare has in its past been compared) host billions of videos, you can see where free might appear tantalising, especially if you are not earning huge returns on the paid version.

The other area that occurs to me is that, if LinkedIn manages to drive more traffic to SlideShare, it’s collecting a whole lot more data for itself about how business people are using its cloud-based services.

If LinkedIn has ambitions to do more in marketing services for businesses — something that its recent Bizo acquisition also points to — then it makes perfect sense for them to be collecting as much information as possible right now on who to pitch that product to and what people really want out of a new service in that vein.

The company does not break out its SlideShare revenue figures in its earnings.

LinkedIn tells me that there will not be any changes in advertising for now. “Business per usual here, no changes to advertising model with this update,” she says.

Skype Will Make Itself Less Noisy Thanks To New, Smarter Chat Notifications

Skype this morning announced a change to the way its notifications will function, designed to keep the app from annoying you with beeps and buzzes across all your devices. These new smart notifications will instead only be sent to the device you’re actually using at the time, says the company, while your other devices, including PCs, tablets or smartphones, will remain silent.

Explains the company on a blog post, this process will continue until the moment you stop actively using Skype on a device, at which point all your devices will again receive notifications, so you won’t miss anything important. (And because if you’re not signed in and using the service, Skype wouldn’t know which device you’re actually on at the time, of course).

The change to smart notifications will only take place when you pick up Skype and begin writing or responding to a notification. Chat history, meanwhile, will continue to sync across devices, the company says.

To be clear, this new feature, which Skype is referring to as “active endpoints,” is only focused on chat notifications, not phone calls, as you may wish to answer a call on another gadget – like your phone – rather than the device where you were previously Skype chatting, like your computer or tablet, for example.

The feature also follows a series of improvements Skype rolled out earlier this year designed to reduce the noise with using Skype in this multi-device world. However, from my personal experience, the system still has a few kinks. When signing in for the first time in quite a while on one device, there’s more than a bit of a lag as your prior notifications roll in, which can be frustrating when you’re hoping to quickly chat, read or respond to a friend. Sometimes, too, I’ll randomly receive notifications on mobile while signed in that are out-of-date or from older chats from earlier in the day, which catches me off guard thinking that someone is asking for my attention in that moment.

At least with this update, Skype may quiet down about these sorts of things.

Skype says active endpoints are rolling out over the next few weeks and will require users to run the most current version of Skype on their respective devices.

Hailo Launches API For E-Hailing On The Same Day As Uber

Not to be left behind in the growing feud between Uber, Lyft, Sidecar and others, Hailo has launched a public API for its taxi hailing service, on the very same day Uber announced its own. The startup, which launched in 2011 in London but has since expanded to various cities across the UK, London and Canada, originally dealt in standard taxis vs. Uber’s black car focus, but has since also moved into black car, SUV and sedan transportation.

The publicly accessible API follows an initial launch integration with third-party transit planning app Citymapper last month. The Citymapper integration worked similarly to how Uber now offers an in-app link to its own services in Google Maps, but didn’t require actually leaving the app to work. Uber’s new API means that it now can and does offer this kind of instant car booking in various third-party apps, too.

Hailo’s public API isn’t surprising, since the Citymapper venture was likely a test all along with an end goal of launching something public if it worked out. Uber’s debut of its own API likely hurried the launch timeline, for fear it get left behind as the two duke it out for high profile app partners: Though in theory there’s nothing preventing developers from including both options, it might confuse users more than help them. If you’re a dev interested in Hailo’s API, the company suggests you email them at api@hailocab.com for now to get started.

The news from Hailo today only serves to reinforce my thesis from earlier, at any rate –APIs from sharing economy startups are about to explode, and before long, you’ll be able to get just about anything on-demand from any app where it makes sense, and probably a few where it doesn’t, too.

Kuddle, An “Instagram With Training Wheels,” Introduces Social Media To Kids

A new mobile application called Kuddle is introducing a safer way for kids to get introduced to social media, while still under a parent’s watchful eye. The photo-sharing app, which is like a more restricted version of Instagram, allows children to post and share photos with friends in a protected environment, safe from cyberbullying or unwanted connections from strangers.

Founded in March by a team of Norway-based developers and designers, all with kids of their own, the idea was prompted by co-founder and CEO Ole Vidar Hestaas’s experience raising his children. His 7-year old son wanted to be on Instagram, like his older sister was, but of course that’s not allowed…or, frankly, a good idea at that age.

After looking for an app designed with the safety and security needs of children and parents in mind, and not finding anything at all, he decided to build one.

Co-founder and executive chairman, Kathryn Moore Baker, was in private equity when she was first introduced to the team, and says she fell in love with the idea.

“I loved the idea of doing something that was good for kids. I’m the mother of two girls, 18 and 14, and the whole time [the team was] telling me about the idea, I was thinking, I wished I had this when [my children] were getting their first introduction to social media,” she says.

Baker, along with other angels, including Wibecke Nagell-Erichsen and international golfer Suzann ‘Tutta’ Pettersen, also invested in the company, which has now raised just under $1 million.

How It’s Safer

The app is designed from the ground-up to offer a safer environment than something like Instagram. Children have to input their parent’s email at sign-up, but can begin to use the app right away. However, their photos can’t be viewed or seen by others until the parent approves the account via the email they receive.

Afterwards, parents are notified every time a child posts a photo and every time they add a friend. (Because children don’t have their own Facebook account and friend list, they search for friends by name.)

In addition, photos will appear only in approved friends’ feeds, and are not geo-tagged so as not to reveal a child’s location.

Importantly, there are no comments allowed on photos. While kids can caption and even draw on their own photos with provided tools, friends can only view and like those images, not respond with text.

Though based in Norway, the app is COPPA-compliant, a U.S. regulation related to software and services designed for children. Children aren’t marketed to, and their info isn’t shared, says Baker.

Should Kids Use Social Media?

Some may argue that children shouldn’t be using social media at all at a younger age, but that’s not entirely realistic. With Kuddle, they can at least have the experience of sharing on mobile with friends, while opening the door to productive conversations with parents about what’s appropriate.

Kuddle, I feel, comes just in time for today’s youngest generation, as the kids of Millennials and Gen X’ers are now receiving their first smartphones at ever-younger ages (often now in the single-digits and pre-teens!). Even PBS is urging parents to “wait until preschool” at least.

Though there’s a plethora of educational apps and games, younger children are naturally drawn to what the “big kids” use. Today, that’s social media services like Facebook and Instagram, where you’re supposed to be 13 or older to register. Many kids just lie, in order to sign up.

Kuddle, which will always be free for children and will never sell things via in-app purchases, sees this app as the first step in a larger vision for the company which will focus on helping parents make better choices when it comes to their kids’ mobile usage, possibly through subscription services.

“Our revenue streams will come from areas where we can help parents make good choices such as safer devices, child-friendly mobile subscriptions, and safer search engines,” hints Baker. These products will be developed in partnership with others, and will be marketed to parents who will make the final buying decision.

In the meantime, Kuddle is a free download on iTunes and Google Play.

Vine Finally Lets Users Import Video From Their Camera

With more than 100 million people watching Vines across the web each month, and over 1 billion loops played every day, Vine has just released an update to the app that finally lets users import video from their camera.

Twitter’s video sharing app has always required users to film new content directly within the app, using Vine’s once-unique hold-to-record feature. Now, Vine users can import video that they shot on their phone, or video they downloaded from friends or Dropbox, etc.

This means that slow motion video from the iPhone will now be supported.

When importing videos, users can choose to pull in one full clip, or choose multiple clips to comprise a video that is no longer than six seconds.

Beyond the camera roll import, Vine is also revamping the way that the camera works to offer more precision editing tools, including a button to duplicate a clip and a mute button, to knock out the sound.

The team also added a preview and undo button, which lets you look at the last clip you filmed and gives you the option to undo it.

Both the camera import feature and the ability to delete the last clip shot are available with Instagram Video, which admittedly stole a bit of Vine’s thunder but has yet to reach the same level of creativity or engagement.

Existing features like the Grid view, Ghost (which lets you see a transparent view of the last clip shot; great for the stop-motion/animation artists), and the focus lock can all be found under the Wrench icon, alongside a brand new feature. It’s called Torch view, and it helps Viners get the right shot in low-light settings.

The update is only available for iOS at the moment, but an Android release is currently in the works.

GoDaddy Acquires MailChimp Competitor Mad Mimi To Beef Up Its Email Marketing Service

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GoDaddy has closed on the acquisition of MailChimp competitor Mad Mimi, the companies are announcing this morning. The move is meant to further expand the web hosting provider’s product suite aimed at small businesses, while filling a hole in GoDaddy’s line-up where it was previously lacking a more solid email marketing service.

Until now, explains Steven Altrich, GoDaddy’s SVP of Business Applications, the company offered an older product called “Easy Email Marketing” which it’s now planning to replace with the Mad Mimi technology. In addition to simply being a weak spot GoDaddy wanted to correct, Altrich adds that Mad Mimi was chosen for its great customer service experience – something that GoDaddy wants to bring to its own small business owner customers.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Mad Mimi had very little in terms of funding, having been largely bootstrapped since its founding back in 2007. The company was also profitable, but declined to share specific numbers.

Headquartered in Brooklyn, New York, founder Gary Levitt, once a part-time jazz musician and part-time busboy, happened on the idea after first trying to build a web app for musicians like himself who wanted to offer an online press kit. He raised a whopping $7,000 from his father-in-law to hire developers, but says the project “crashed and burned” as he began to realize there was no way to build his app for that amount.

But he kept working at it, until, halfway through the project, he decided to scrap the idea in favor of an email service instead.

“I was always having a hard time finding an email service that was good for me because I was a musician,” explains Levitt. “Up to that point in 2008, all email services were identical. They were all doing templates…if you didn’t like a template you had to switch it,” he says.

So with Mad Mimi, he decided to use content blocks which would allow for better customization.

“I focused on total, basic simplicity, because that’s all I could afford,” says Levitt.

The service, when launched, slowly began to grow.

“There was no marketing, no funding, no fancy VC’s involved, or fancy launch parties, or fancy anything,” he says of Mad Mimi’s early years. “It was really just me working from a coffee shop until there were two employees, then three, then four. Then, all of a sudden, there’s 36 employees.”

Today, most of Mad Mimi’s customers – and there were around 250,000 at the time of the acquisition – were on the free tier of the service. The company was sending out 50 million-plus emails daily. It had also attracted a few big names over the years, many of which were using Mad Mimi for internal corporate communications, including Disney, Aol (disclosure: TechCrunch parent company), StumbleUpon, Timbuk2, Air Canada, Seth Godin, Kellog’s, Jelly Belly, Facebook and others.

Levitt says that joining GoDaddy made sense, as it was the “most logical partner in the world” and the two shared the same customer base.

Mad Mimi’s distributed team will now join GoDaddy (but not relocate), and the Mad Mimi technology will be offered to the larger company’s 12 million users sometime next year.

GoDaddy has been snapping up a number of small business-related startups in recent years, as it tries to compete by way of better, more modern technology for the small business customer. Other notable acquisitions have also included Locu, Media Temple,Ronin, Afternic, M.dot, Canary, and Outright.

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Tictail Releases API And Internal Tools For 3rd Party Devs, Stores Numbers Take Off

Tictail is a more unusual e-commerce startup in that it is using its venture capital backing to power ahead on creating a platform which is super-easy to create a shop on. Now it’s allowing third-party developers to build applications for the site.
The Tictail App Store will enable developers to reach online store owners with their applications. An innovation compared to others in the space is the Tictail feed, which prompts Tictail users on a range of issues including customer service, social media, and other tasks depending on their activity. This allows Tictail to recommend specific apps to store owners depending on when they are likely to need them. Handy if you are an app developer
Carl Waldekranz, CEO of Tictail says the feed means the “apps find you”. So for instance, a shop owner might se “Last week you had 3 dropped carts, total value 150$. So you can they install the “Abandoned Carts” app at $10, snd so on.
Apps for ecommerce have been around for a long time. Magento, Shopify and BigCommerce all enable plugins. The difference with Tictail is that they are going “beyond” a mere open API, making available to same tools they use internally, including the UI kit (which is how Tictail looks and feels). This allows developers to create apps that work a lot better than just having access to an API.
As with Apple’s model, Tictail takes a standard 30% cut of all revenue from applications distributed via the Tictail App Store.
The API, SDK and UI Kit, and some launch apps are kicking off this week. So for instance, Zopim, a large live chat tool; Yotpo, a social review service; Klarna, a fast growing Swedish payment alternative; Sendicate, ‘email made easy’; and Sellfy for digital downloads.
To date Tictail stretches across over 110 territories globally and has seen 23,000 stores created since its launch in May 2012.
You can contrast this with Bigcommerce, founded 2009 which nows has 36,000 stores, and Shopify, founded in 2005 which has 60,000.
The startup has raised $1.57 million to date from the likes of Balderton Capital and Angels including serial investor Klaus Hommel and Gustav Söderström, Chief Product Officer of Spotify.

1 inShare15 Nix Is A Smartphone Colour Sensor Plus App That Lets You Scan & Save Favourite Shades

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Kickstarter

The army of Bluetooth-powered auxiliary hardware being built by hardware startups to extend the native capabilities of smartphones shows no signs of slowing its  march. Meet Nix: a colour sensor that lets you scan an object and get its exact colour data signature sent to the corresponding app on your phone so you can maintain a palette of preferred shades — and even track down an exact tin of paint.
The sensor’s Canadian creators say their device is much more accurate than using your phone’s on board camera to grab colour data, firstly because it’s purpose-built for accurate colour scanning and is “calibrated to return exact/specific colour values”. And secondly because it blocks out all ambient light — meaning the true shade can be captured, i.e. unaffected by shadows or changes in lighting conditions.
That’s the ultimate aim. For now, Nix’s creators are seeking $35,000 in crowdfunding on Kickstarter to get their promising prototype plus iOS and Android apps to market. With 29 days left to run on their funding campaign they’re already approaching half that funding amoung, with more than 150 backers on board, so things are looking good so far.
Nix is designed to replace old school colour swatches and paint decks, and has obvious applications for interior decorators, and designers and artists of all stripes — anyone who cares about and plays with colour — but its creators also envisage other possible use-cases, such as using a colour scan to determine the ripeness of fruit, say. Or scanning skin-tone to develop custom make-up.
The sensor can be used to scan the colours of fabrics, as well as solid coloured surfaces like paints, albeit they note that patterned fabrics may return an average colour tone if the pattern is tighter than the sensor aperture (approximately the diameter of a nickel).
Nix’s makers, who secured an R&D grant to fund their initial prototyping work (both the sensor hardware and software on a development PC), say they intend the device to be hackable, so are making it open source — noting that possible ‘hack-lications’ could include machine vision for a line-following robot, a greenhouse system with humidity, temperature and light-sensing, or a push-notification for when your fridge is opened.
As well as allowing Nix users to view data on the colour they just scanned, the apps will include the ability to save a scanned colour swatch and add notes to it; view a colour in RGB, HSL, HSV, Lab, XYZ, HTML, or CMYK; convert the colour to other media such as wall paints, oil paints, make-up, watercolour, wood stain, automotive paint etc; select a particular brand associated with the media type you’re after and get directions to the nearest store where you can buy the paint.
How much is Nix going to set you back? This sensor plus apps are up for grabs for CAD$99 on Kickstarter — with eventual RRP expected to be $199. If they hit their funding goals, these makers are aiming to ship Nix by February 2014.

 

DeveloperAuction Rebrands As Hired.com To Make Recruiting Suck Less For Everyone

DeveloperAuction, which launched in 2012 to revolutionize the engineer recruiting market, is today rebranding itself as Hired.com, and putting its sights on a much larger target covering designers, data scientists and more.
The idea is pretty straightforward: companies can bid on candidates, who then get to see the company’s offer before accepting or declining an interview; companies must honor their highest offer to a particular candidate, and the potential employees are not bound to accept the highest offer (or any offer). DeveloperAuction takes a fee from companies, and offers a bonus to employees once the candidate accepts an offer.
A year ago, co-founder Matt Mickiewicz told me that DeveloperAuction was the “first transparent marketplace for recruitment.” Now, Mickiewicz tells me, “We see an opportunity that’s much bigger than developers and engineers.”
Mickiewicz says DeveloperAuction was too limited, as it implied that the site was just for engineers, and notes that the auction part of the site had negative connotations, as many employers thought that the highest bid won the talents of the best engineers. Mickiewicz has told me on multiple occasions that a majority of engineers do not accept the highest monetary offer that they receive, but evaluate offers on a variety of factors.
He explains that the company spent six months searching for a new name once it realized that DeveloperAuction was too limiting. The company hired an external consulting company and almost pulled the trigger on a few deals before they fell apart at the last minute. Mickiewicz notes that the Hired.com domain was “the most expensive option” for the company, but ultimately conveys the company’s mission the best.
The company raised $2.7 million from NEA, Sierra Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Google Ventures, Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech VC, and John Suliman’s Step Partners in March. Mickiewicz says most of that money is “still in the bank.” He added that the company, which is now up to 22 employees, is on a multi-million dollar run-rate for 2013, but declined to discuss further specifics on the company’s financial situation.
Recruiting is consistently a challenge for tech companies, from Apple and Google to the youngest startups. I’ve seen a wide variety of solutions to the issue, but none as impressive as DeveloperAuction. And with the company’s new name, it can take on more than Silicon Valley recruiters, as DeveloperAuction seeks to disrupt the worldwide recruiting model for every industry.
Earlier this summer, the company opened its auctions to designers and interns. Mickiewicz tells me that shortly after the company opened to data scientists a few months ago, he hired a data scientist off DeveloperAuction to work at DeveloperAuction.
DeveloperAuction has added over 250 companies since May, bringing the total approved employers using DeveloperAuction to over 560. The company is still approving employee applications by hand, and whittled down over 3,000 applications to 200 engineers for the platform last month.

inShare17 Cinemacraft Raises $1.5M From NTT DoCoMo, Turner Broadcasting’s Media Camp And 500 Startups

Cinemacraft, a startup that wants to replace static video thumbnails with its interactive Videograms, has raised a $1.5 million strategic funding round from investors NTT DoCoMo, Turner Broadcasting’s Media Camp and 500 Startups. Combined with an earlier seed round of $500,000 from 500 Startups and angel investors, this brings Cinemacraft’s total funding raised to date to $2 million.
Founded in July 2012 and based in Tokyo, Cinemacraft’s platform allows publishers to promote content with “Videograms,” or interactive images that highlight different clips from a video instead of the usual thumbnail. Cinemacraft says this gives its clients more opportunities for monetization and marketing on social media platforms. Videograms also allow publishers to create a visual summary of their video’s content, which gives them a better chance at enticing viewers than with a single freeze frame. An algorithm is used to determine which frames are shown on a Videogram, which is written completely in HTML5 to work across different platforms and products.

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Once a Videogram is published, viewers can comment on and share individual clips, enabling publishers to see what parts of the video are getting the most engagement. Ads can also be placed within the Videogram, which is automatically refreshed based on which frames are the most popular. Cinemacraft says another advantage of Videograms is that they help content grab more eyeballs, since many viewers will close a video within 10 seconds if they think it’s boring. Instead of worrying about how to make the first few seconds the most attention-grabbing, content creators can focus instead on making sure that the entire video is engaging.
Cinemacraft has run campaigns for clients including Fox Pictures, Sony Pictures, Capitol Records and other music labels. The startup says it will use its latest round of funding to scale globally, improve its platform and expand its core team.

Dafiti, Rocket Internet’s Latin American Fashion Portal, Gets $70M From Ontario Teachers

Earlier this year, when Rocket Internet announced a new injection of $500 million into its Germany-based startup incubator, co-founder Oliver Samwer told me that a large focus for it would be emerging markets like Latin America. Today comes some news about how that strategy is taking shape: Dafiti, a Rocket Internet-backed fashion commerce site based out of Brazil, is announcing a new investment of $70 million to continue building out its business. It comes from the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan (OTPP), a Canadian investment fund that has made other notable tech investments, including a $400 million round in Chinese e-commerce site 360Buy.com.
Rocket Internet confirmed to me that OTPP is the sole investor in this round. It takes total funding for Dafiti to $225 million, and puts OTPP among the company’s biggest shareholders, with others including JP Morgan and Quadrant Capital Advisors. It also comes on the back of a smaller (but strategic) investment of $10 million that Dafiti picked up earlier this year from the Leon Group consortium of shoe brands in Mexico.
Dafiti first opened for business in Brazil in 2011. Riding a swelling wave of middle class consumers in the region, the company has expanded quickly and now operates also in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico. As with many other e-commerce startups (and those in the Rocket portfolio), Dafiti declines to disclose its actual revenue revenues or any other details on profitability. A spokesperson tells me that the Dafiti gets over 25 million monthly unique visitors, with 2,000 brands and 125,000 products across its five sites.
The bigger opportunity is to take Dafiti to more markets in Latin America, but this funding will be used primarily to build out what Dafiti has already established, not expand further internationally.
“We will use this money to strengthen our customer service and our product assortment,” Dafiti co-founder Philipp Povel noted in a statement. “All in all, this impressive funding helps us to bring Dafiti to the next level and fulfill on our strategic objective to change the way people in Latin America buy fashion, lifestyle and sports products.”
There is some logic to that, since Dafiti has already established itself in five of the biggest e-commerce markets in the region. In Brazil alone, sales from e-commerce sites, led by those specialising in fashion, are projected to grow 25% in 2013, having added 10 million consumers in 2012, according to e-bit. It also predicts that by 2015, 39% of internet users in Brazil (31.6m people) will be making at least one purchase online.
A spokesperson from Rocket Internet tells me that this is the first investment from OTPP in one of its ventures. But it may not be the last: the German incubator has a strong track record for repeat business from the likes of JP Morgan, Kinnevik, Summit, Access and more. On top of that, OTPP — which in December 2012 recorded $129.5 billion in assets under management — has been making a stronger effort to diversify its investments into new markets. Most recently, that has included (along with the 360Buy deal) a new office in Asia to expand its presence there.
“Supported by a growing middle class, huge consumption potential and significant growth in online and mobile access, Dafiti is well positioned to succeed in online retail in Brazil and Latin America,” Wayne Kozun, SVP, public equities, at OTPP, said in a statement. “We look forward to partnering with Dafiti’s successful management team.”
Rocket Internet, it should be noted, has some 75 startups in operation worldwide at the moment across six continents, expanding widely beyond its European origins. In Latin America, it’s active in eight countries, and has been making strong use of one basic building block of its e-commerce business model: building out on economies of scale by consolidating logistics for several of its operations (not unlike what Amazon does with its operations). Brazil, for example, is home to 15 different Rocket Internet startups, including Dafiti.

That Was Fast: Nokia Draws Down The $2B In Convertible Bonds Offered By Microsoft Earlier This Week

That Was Fast: Nokia Draws Down The $2B In Convertible Bonds Offered By Microsoft Earlier This WeekIf we needed some more confirmation of how urgent the financial situation was over at Nokia, we got a glimpse of it today. The company announced that it would be drawing down the

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