Photographer: Balint Porneczi/Bloomberg

The logo for SFR, a mobile-phone unit of Vivendi SA, sits on a giant display screen at one of the company’s stores in Paris, France.

In its unlikely transformation from a regional water utility into Europe’s biggest telecom and media conglomerate, Vivendi has ridden a lot of corporate trends. It may be on the verge of adding another to the list: the spinoff. Vivendi is considering getting rid of its biggest unit, French mobile provider SFR, according to people familiar with the situation. That would let it focus on faster-growing media businesses like Canal Plus, its pay-TV arm, and Universal Music Group (home to the likes of Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber).

If this all sounds familiar to Vivendi-watchers, that’s because it is. A year ago, the company started exploring a break-up, with telecom assets (increasingly out of fashion as smartphone penetration plateaus) on one side, and zippier media properties on the other. After boardroom infighting that led to the ouster of then-Chief Executive Officer Jean-Bernard Levy, the plan was shelved in favor of seeking buyers for assets like GVT, a Brazilian broadband provider, and Activision Blizzard, which publishes blockbuster video games like “Call of Duty.”

Problem is, Vivendi hasn’t managed to find a taker for either at a price it’s willing to accept, so it’s back to square one. Splitting off SFR has obvious appeal. Vivendi could load the slow-growing but reasonably profitable phone group with most of its debt, leaving the media side almost debt-free. And doing so would put an end to a corporate structure that investors have always found a bit odd. But given last year’s misfires, they shouldn’t expect any immediate change.

Original post is Vivendi Goes Back to Future With SFR Spinoff Plan by Tech Deals.

Photograph by Sauce Communications via Bloomberg

A chicken soup dish with accoutrements is served at Naamyaa Cafe in London

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but photos of restaurant food are apparently worth $10 million.

OpenTable, the online restaurant reservation company, is announcing today it’s paying that amount to buy Foodspotting, a smartphone application that lets people share and rate photos of food.

Images from Foodspotting users will appear on the OpenTable site and mobile applications, helping people judge a restaurant based on how appetizing the dishes look.

While OpenTable has pictures for some establishments already, “we don’t have nearly as many as I think will be helpful for diners to pick the perfect restaurant,” Chief Executive Officer Matt Roberts said in an interview. With Foodspotting, “there’s an opportunity for us to present some dishes you might like at the restaurant you’re about to go to,” he said.

San Francisco-based Foodspotting, which started in 2009 and raised $3.75 million in venture capital and private financing, has capitalized on diners’ preoccupation with documenting what they eat. It will continue operating as a separate website and application, although the features will eventually be available on OpenTable, the company said.

Foodspotting has about 3 million photos, or one for every $3.33 OpenTable plans to spend on the startup. Roberts thinks the acquisition will enhance his company’s content on smartphones and help people make better decisions through social recommendations.

He said he will give updates on some other features that are on the way, including tools that let restaurants recognize users by their photo and dining history, on a Feb. 7 conference call with investors.

“We really want to be broader than our foundation, which is reservations,” Roberts said.

Original post is Hungry for Photos: OpenTable Buying Foodspotting for $10 Million by Tech Deals.

Cox Enterprises, the closely held company that includes the third-largest U.S. cable operator, as well as automotive services and radio and TV stations, is handing over $250 million to Rackley, who has built a track record founding and selling companies to buyers such as Qualcomm and Intuit.

With the money, Rackley said he hopes to start about five to 10 companies specializing in media and security, as well as mobile commerce and payments. The strategy includes patenting ideas and technology to guarantee full control, he said.

“This is so different than the typical corporate venture arm or venture fund in general,” Rackley said in an interview. “Cox Enterprises is investing in these businesses for the long term. There is no fund life associated with this. We’re not trying to get back to our limited partners to tell them we made these investments and exited these companies.”

While competitors such as Comcast and Google have entire divisions or funds dedicated to investing in companies that invent and integrate new technology, Cox is taking a different approach.

Instead of investing in an existing firm or fund, Rackley and his 15-person team plan to build startups from scratch using seed money. That’s aimed at giving Cox a close relationship with the enterprises.

“We already spend billions on new technology, research and development, but we can’t move as quickly as Tripp,” Jimmy Hayes, Cox Enterprises’ chief executive officer, said in an interview. “This way, we can partner with someone we know, we respect and we trust.”

Last year, Rackley introduced Experience, a company that lets sports fans upgrade their seats at games using mobile devices. Experience charges teams, including the Boston Celtics and the Atlanta Falcons, a transaction fee for every purchase made using their application.

Rackley says he focuses on ideas that aren’t on anyone’s radar in the next three years, and not so outlandish that they can’t grow to commercial scale within seven years. While the businesses Rackley builds may later become a part of Cox Enterprises, that’s not the objective of the investment strategy, Hayes said.

“I don’t want to do things that people are already thinking about,” Rackley said. “And I don’t want to do science experiments.”

Original post is Cox Enterprises Invests $250 Million With Board Member Rackley by Tech Deals.

Courtesy Fingerprint Cards

Fingerprint-authentication sensors are expected to show up in mobile phones this year.

Mobile phones will soon know your touch.

Fingerprint Cards, a Swedish biometric-security company, said a Japanese electronics maker plans to introduce mobile phones with fingerprint sensors in the third quarter of this year. The technology, which identifies a person’s unique fingerprint when placed on a reader, can be used to prevent unauthorized access to a device.

Japanese phone makers placed a total of three orders for Fingerprint’s components in the fourth quarter of last year. One of those purchases was for at least a million phones, my colleague Niklas Magnusson reported. The demand from Japan has prompted Fingerprint Cards to open a sales and support office in Tokyo. The news sent the company’s stock soaring to its highest level in more than five years.

For Japan’s electronics makers, the big bet on biometrics could be an attempt to differentiate their phones from the myriad other black rectangles on the market. Those companies could use some help. Kyocera, Panasonic, Sharp and Sony are among the nation’s largest phone makers, yet none of them has captured enough global market share to rank among the top five mobile or smartphone manufacturers, according to research firm IDC. Fingerprint Cards declined to name its customers in a press release last month.

But the Japanese companies may have some competition from the world’s second-largest smartphone maker. In August, Apple agreed to pay about $350 million for AuthenTec, which has its own fingerprint authentication and encryption technology. The Cupertino, California-based company has also filed patents of its own for biometric technology. Silicon Valley-based SecuGen and Validity Sensors are showing off their fingerprint tools this week at the 2013 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

As we cram ever more sensitive information into our smartphones, stronger security should be a welcome addition. But let’s make sure that, like with the passcode lock on today’s smartphones, there is some way to get around these biometric walls in case of emergencies, or when I accidentally mangle my thumb in the car door.

Original post is Mobile Phones With Fingerprint ID Coming This Year by Tech Deals.

Photograph by George Frey/Bloomberg

Mobile carriers now want customers to manage their megabyte usage, but a startup is pushing a different approach.

It sounds like a high-school math problem: You have 250 megabytes of data left on your smartphone plan. For the rest of the month, you plan to spend four hours a day checking Facebook, e-mail and YouTube. At that rate, will you have to pay overage fees?

Unfortunately, this tricky question is very real for those who try to manage their mobile data usage. A possible solution? ItsOn, a Redwood City, California-based startup, is working on an alternative to the metered data plans that have become standard for most smartphones.

ItsOn’s technology could allow mobile subscribers to tailor their data plans according to the services they use.  For example, rather than monitoring how many megabytes you’re using watching Netflix, a carrier could offer a flat monthly rate just for video streaming. The same could be done just for e-mail or social networking.

With the ItsOn app, customers can manage which types of services they’re subscribed to, and the requests would go into effect immediately. That type of granular control could unlock many more billing options that aren’t possible within the current wireless infrastructure.

“Today’s mobile networks are incredible feats of engineering because they were built in a world of calling and dumb feature phones,” said Marc Andreessen, whose venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz led a $15.5 million funding round in ItsOn that closed this month. ”The current ways that mobile phones are provisioned in price is sort of a blunt instrument approach. You have aggregate buckets of bits.”

Ron Conway’s SV Angel and others also contributed to the round. Earlier investors included Best Buy, as well as Verizon and Vodafone, which together operate the largest U.S. mobile carrier Verizon Wireless. In total, the company has raised $27.9 million from investors. Bloomberg LP, which owns Bloomberg News, is an investor in Andreessen Horowitz.

The jury is out on whether people would rather get nickel and dimed on each type of app they want to use, as ItsOn’s system could enable. But the current billing setup clearly has room for improvement. About one-third of mobile subscribers are confused by their carriers’ data plans, according to a study released this month by consulting firm Ernst & Young.

ItsOn was started four years ago by Greg Raleigh, who funded it early on with his own money and investments from friends. A longtime telecom entrepreneur, Raleigh sold Clarity Wireless to Cisco in 1998 for $157 million and Airgo Networks to Qualcomm in 2006 for an undisclosed amount.

The advantage of separating the fees for each app or class of apps, Raleigh said, is the flexibility it brings. Companies could pay for their staff’s business-related applications, while the employees pay for their bandwidth related to recreational apps, such as Hulu video streaming and online games. The system also allows for operators to sell advertisements, so that, say, a sportswear maker could provide three hours of free video streaming during a football game.

“In the old world, these things are impossible because it takes so long to build them into the hardwired network,” Raleigh said in an interview. “It’s profitable for the carrier because it presents some new opportunities.”

ItsOn recently conducted a five-month trial with a European operator, Raleigh said. Early next year, a major U.S. carrier will roll out the service to its customers, which will support one smartphone operating system to start, he said. Raleigh declined to provide any other details.

Andreessen is particularly optimistic about this pricing model working well in emerging markets, where customers could choose inexpensive plans that only include basic services such as maps and messaging.

“If you go into the developing world, and you go into countries like India, there are billions of people who want smartphones, and they cannot possibly afford them,” Andreessen said. “What they’re solving is actually the central problem in how mobile networks are going to operate in the next five to ten years.”

Original post is Coming to a Mobile Plan Near You: Pay Just for E-Mail or Facebook by Tech Deals.

Xiaomi Tech, the Beijing-based maker of cell phones, secured the largest investment with $216 million, according to a recent report from Rutberg & Co. India’s Sistema Shyam, a mobile services provider, followed with $158 million in funding.

Out of the 25 largest venture capital investments in mobile, Chinese companies claimed three spots and India accounted for two. Still, American companies dominated the rest of the list with 17 companies, the vast majority of them based in California. The top 25 specialize in everything from mobile payments to advertising to social networking.

Investments in mobile rose 30 percent to $3.9 billion globally in the first half of 2012, up from $3 billion in the same period of last year, according to Rutberg, an investment bank. Mobile-related investments accounted for 46.3 percent of all technology investments by venture capital firms in the first half of the year. That’s up from 16.9 percent in 2009.

Original post is Chinese, Indian Companies Land Largest Mobile VC Investments by Tech Deals.

The company cited “unfavorable market conditions” in withdrawing its prospectus on July 13. Chief Executive Officer Charles Nooney said yesterday that MobiTV has plenty of capital to invest in the business and is expanding its offerings for TV in the home as well as on smartphones and tablets.

“For us, the markets were too choppy,” Nooney said in an interview. “To be going out after the first of the year and examine the market with a couple announcements under our belt was certainly part of the consideration.”

As of Dec. 31, Emeryville, California-based MobiTV had cash, equivalents and short-term investments of $25.4 million, and Nooney said the company will be profitable by the end of this year after recording an $11.8 million loss in 2011. While he doesn’t expect to need additional cash, the private equity markets are “pretty wide open” should an opportunity arise that brings strategic value, he said.

MobiTV, which started as a provider of technology for carriers to deliver live television on mobile phones, has more recently focused on a service called “TV everywhere.” In January, the company announced a partnership with Deutsche Telekom that allowed the German phone company to deliver content to phones, tablets, computers and set-top boxes. Nooney said other partnerships will be announced this year, including one in Asia.

To expand the product portfolio, MobiTV said yesterday that it will be licensing digital video recorder technology so cable providers, satellite companies and wireless carriers can let users record shows from any device, pausing on one and picking up on any other.

“The world is changing,” Nooney said. “To really play in the space, you have to get multiple screens.”

Last year, 97 percent of MobiTV’s revenue came from Sprint Nextel, Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile USA unit, AT&T and Verizon Wireless. Live mobile television has proven to be a challenging market, because consumers can access free on-demand services such as Google’s YouTube and subscription offerings from Netflix and Amazon.com.

As MobiTV pulls away from the public markets, other technology companies are going forward. Business software maker ServiceNow has jumped 33 percent since its IPO last month, and Palo Alto Networks and Kayak Software debuted today. Companies are expected to raise more than $700 million this week as the market recovers from a drought after Facebook’s offering in May.

For MobiTV, the concern surrounding the European debt crisis and uncertainty around the U.S. presidential elections are more significant, Nooney said. Because his company has cash, almost no debt and is coming off a year of 27 percent sales growth, he’d prefer to wait.

“The company is extremely healthy, we have resources in the bank and we’re virtually debt-free,” he said.

Original post is MobiTV Boosts Product Line, Plans to Revisit IPO Market in 2013 by Tech Deals.

After accepting $41 million from investors for an application that failed to gain popularity, Color Labs Inc. has been held up as an example of Silicon Valley excess and a looming tech bubble. Just saying the company’s name can get a laugh.

“It sucks and it hurts my feelings, but it hasn’t stopped me from taking risks,” said Nguyen, who sold online music service Lala.com to Apple Inc. in 2009. “I have this faith that we’re going to get there, that we’re going to pull it out.”

Nguyen said many have been asking what he’s doing with all that money. Now, after months of not releasing a new product, Color today announced a partnership with Verizon Wireless to have its application pre-installed on many Android smartphones running on the carrier’s next-generation LTE wireless network.

The application allows people to broadcast 30 seconds of video from their phones that others can watch live. When sharing a video live, a user can send an alert to friends through Facebook or a text message, Nguyen said.

Color is among several companies with products for sharing video. Viddy raised money last month from investors including Twitter co-founder Biz Stone.

The company, which has about 50 employees at its offices in downtown Palo Alto, California, has created a new file format so users can both stream the videos live and then store them on Color’s network to view or share later, according to Nguyen.

For Verizon, the arrangement provides a way to promote its new 4G wireless network and offer a feature that differentiates its phones from those running on rival carriers such as AT&T Inc. Sharing video with audio via Color is only possible on the faster network, Nguyen said.

Adding Color also is an example of how phone manufacturers and wireless carriers are trying to add features to stand out in the crowded smartphone market. Samsung Electronics Co. announced a partnership with the Web-storage company Dropbox last week, while HTC Corp. last year bought a 51 percent stake in Beats Electronics, the maker of high-end audio gear co-founded by rapper Dr. Dre.

Color is hoping Verizon, which has more than 90 million subscribers, will give them a boost in users. The announcement is the third evolution of Color since its debut in March 2011. The company started as a way to view photos taken by others using the app within the same proximity. The company then shifted to to be a way to share video on Facebook. Neither features were popular for users, with Color having just 30,000 daily active users, according to AppData.com.

Nguyen said Color will be on ‘‘most, if not all” of Verizon’s 4G smartphones, though he declined to discuss the financial details of the deal. One phone that Color won’t be on is Nguyen’s former employer; Apple decides what applications are pre-installed on the iPhone.  Nguyen said he feels conflicted about switching teams to lend support to Google’s Android operating system.

“I have mixed feelings,” said Nguyen, whose main phone is an iPhone. “It’s not easy for me.”

Original post is Founder of Color Still Has Faith, Partners With Verizon on Android by Tech Deals.

Courtesy Tap Tap Tap

Twitter executives talked with Tap Tap Tap, maker of the photo app Camera+, about a possible deal.

Soon after Facebook agreed to pay $1 billion for Instagram, social networking rival Twitter considered acquiring a mobile photo-sharing application called Camera+, two people with knowledge of the negotiations said.

Twitter executives held several meetings with Camera+ developer Tap Tap Tap, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the talks were private. The talks broke down before Twitter could make an offer because the startup’s far-flung workforce was reluctant to relocate to San Francisco, they said. While 10 employees are already based there, Tap Tap Tap has 20 others in Austria, New Zealand, Spain and elsewhere.

Like Instagram, Camera+ lets users take photographs with an iPhone, tweak the colors and share them on its own social network or through Facebook and Twitter.

Twitter had expressed interest in buying Instagram in recent months, the New York Times reported last month. Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder and executive chairman, had invested in Instagram, and frequently posted pictures using the app. He said in an interview with Charlie Rose last week that Instagram has more in common with Twitter than with Facebook. His point was that people rely heavily on Twitter and Instagram to post items instantly from mobile phones.

Two hours before Facebook announced its deal on April 9, Dorsey uploaded a photo on Instagram of a San Francisco bus. Two days later, he added his first picture to his Camera+ profile, and hasn’t posted to Instagram since.

Dorsey helped lead the negotiations with Tap Tap Tap, according to the people with knowledge of the talks. Twitter Chief Executive Officer Dick Costolo wasn’t directly involved, they said. Carolyn Penner, a Twitter spokeswoman, declined to comment.

Costolo told reporters in Japan two weeks ago that Twitter wouldn’t alter its strategy or seek to acquire an Instagram competitor to counter Facebook’s move.

The Camera+ iPhone app, which costs 99 cents, has been downloaded 7.5 million times in about two years. Instagram, which debuted four months after Camera+, has 50 million people signed up to use its free software that runs on Google’s Android system and Apple’s iPhone.

–With assistance from Naoko Fujimura in Tokyo.

Original post is Twitter Said to Have Considered Buying Mobile Photo App Camera+ by Tech Deals.

Photograph by David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

Zynga faces the challenge of keeping the entrepreneurs it brings aboard from leaving.

As Zynga uses part of its $1.8 billion to acquire popular mobile apps and the key talent behind them, one challenge it faces is keeping the entrepreneurs it brings aboard.

“The most important component of a deal is the human element,” said Barry Cottle, Zynga’s new head of mergers.

So how has the social gaming company done with earlier acquisitions? The founders of at least eight startups have already left Zynga:

• MyMiniLife (bought in 2009): This acquisition laid the foundation for FarmVille. Sizhao Yang left in 2010 to become COO of BetterWorks. Joel Poloney and Amitt Mahajan left in late 2011 to work on undisclosed projects.

• Serious Business (bought in 2010): Alex Le and Siqi Chen left in February, and are working on undisclosed projects.

• XPD (bought in 2010): Robin Chan became Zynga’s general manager of Asia business operations, helping with the acquisition of Unoh Games. He left last year to focus on investing.

• Challenge Games (bought in 2010): Andrew Busey became general manager of Zynga’s Austin office before leaving this year to join Austin Ventures.

• Conduit Labs (bought in 2010): Serial entrepreneur Nabeel Hyatt built up Zynga’s Boston office before leaving this year to become a VC at Spark Capital.

• Area/Code (bought in 2011): Kevin Slavin left shortly after the acquisition, while his co-founder Frank Lantz remains creative director at Zynga New York.

• DNA Games (bought in 2011): Jon Lee left earlier this year to become an investor and adviser.

• Roger Dickey, whose stealth startup was acquired by Zynga in 2008, also left the company last year.

Despite these departures, CEO Mark Pincus said out of all the company’s deals, including those not publicly disclosed, more founders have stayed on than have left. Many have stuck around because they got key roles in the company, like Newtoy’s co-founders, who head up the McKinney, Texas-based Zynga With Friends studio, and Wonderland Software’s Matthew Wiggins, who is general manager of Zynga’s UK studio.

The company has gotten better at keeping entrepreneurs, said Hyatt, the founder of Conduit Labs.

“They made a lot of mistakes in those early acquisitions,” he said. Even though Zynga has gotten bigger, it’s doing a good job of letting newly-acquired teams do their own thing, he said.

Still, Hyatt himself decided to leave this year because he wanted to get back to building companies.

“Being a senior executive wasn’t as interesting to me as being in the startup ecosystem,” he said. At Zynga, “it felt like I wasn’t contributing back to that ecosystem.”

Original post is Zynga’s Acquired Founders: Where Are They Now? by Tech Deals.