Showing posts with label web development. Show all posts
Showing posts with label web development. Show all posts
Friday, December 11, 2015
Thursday, December 10, 2015
Tuesday, December 8, 2015
Monday, October 26, 2015
Wednesday, October 21, 2015
Tuesday, October 20, 2015
Wednesday, May 20, 2015
One Guy Made $66 Billion on China’s Web. Now He Needs a Second Act
South African billionaire Koos Bekker has spent 15 years riding the rocket of the Chinese Internet thanks to one really smart -- or really lucky -- investment. Now he's trying to do it again.
In 2001 Naspers Ltd., the media group he chairs, put $32 million into a then-obscure Web company called Tencent. Its stake today is worth $66 billion -- roughly equal to Naspers’ entire stock market capitalization. To prove he’s capable of more successes like Tencent, Bekker is scouring the globe in search of new tech deals.
“What we’ve done over the years is take huge risks,” Bekker said over a cup of Rooibos tea in Naspers headquarters, 19 floors above Cape Town’s harbor. The task now, he said, is “to find the countries where the gaps still exist because in many countries the good opportunities have been taken.”
Bekker, 62, is seeking to prove Naspers is more than a giant venture-capital fund built on a single grand-slam investment. The markets accord little to no value to the company’s other businesses, including Africa’s largest pay-TV network and investments in dozens of other startups.
A year ago, Bekker stepped down from running Naspers for a year-long “sabbatical” that took him to Shanghai, Seoul, San Francisco and elsewhere in search of new ideas. He says the time away convinced him the firm needs to double down on e-commerce in developing countries -- even though there’s a lot more money chasing emerging-market Internet deals today, and brutal competition both from locals and U.S. giants like Amazon.com Inc.
Naspers is almost unrecognizable from the company Bekker took over as chief executive officer in 1997. At the time, it was called Die Nasionale Pers, or The National Press, and was principally known as the publisher of Die Burger, an Afrikaans-language daily that was a staunch defender of apartheid. Though the editorial line has changed, Naspers still publishes the paper. Bekker now serves as chairman and has given the CEO job to former EBay Inc. executive Bob Van Dijk.
Using cash from the pay-TV division, which was founded in the 1980s, Bekker started plowing funds into more than 100 technology businesses around the world. Most of those bets bled money: Online retailers in Africa had to be shut down, and the company took an $80 million loss on a Chinese Internet service provider.
When Naspers bought half of Tencent in 2001 (since diluted to 34 percent), the Chinese company was a fledgling player in a country with minimal Internet use. Today more than a billion people use Tencent’s messaging services, such as WeChat. On May 13 the firm reported record profits from its vast range of online businesses.
A deal with Russian portal Mail.ru Group Ltd. was another win, albeit less spectacular. Naspers bought 30 percent in 2007 for $165 million; its current 29 percent holding is valued at about $1.6 billion, though the shares have fallen by almost a third since the start of the Ukraine crisis.
Naspers is Africa’s biggest company by market capitalization, worth about $66 billion. Its shares have climbed more than 500 percent since 2010, thanks largely to Tencent, growth that’s allowed its chairman to acquire some of the trappings of tech super-wealth. Bekker is now worth some $2.5 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, and he and his wife spend much of their time at Babylonstoren, a sprawling farm and luxury hotel they own in the Cape winelands that dates to the 17th century.
In emerging markets "there are no more secrets"
Yet when it comes to betting on emerging-market tech winners, “there are no more secrets,” said Ciaran O’Leary, a partner in Berlin at Earlybird, a venture capital firm that invests in Turkey and eastern Europe. “Valuations are even higher than the U.S. in many cases.”
Closer to home, Naspers’ pay-TV business is bracing for assaults from Netflix Inc. and Apple Inc. That’s forcing it to invest in mobile applications to deliver content more widely in a region where high-speed landline connections are rare, and to find ways to sell movies to poor consumers while still eking out a profit. A sustained slowdown would reduce Naspers’ cushion for bad bets on startups.
Some of Bekker’s more recent investments face a long road to success. Naspers owns 19 percent of Flipkart, an Indian online retailer that's locked in a head-to-head battle with Amazon, which last year said it would spend $2 billion to expand in the country. Another flagship Indian investment, travel site Ibibo, needs to fight off the likes of Google and Kayak.com.
Bekker said the epiphany of his working holiday -- which made him more determined to stick to his strategy -- came after he gave a lecture on entrepreneurship at China’s Nanjing University. The moment he finished, Bekker was “absolutely stormed by people with pitches,” he recalled. “One guy will say, ‘give me one minute to just explain my concept,’ another one will say ‘here’s my paper, its three pages, please read it,’ so you feel absolutely enormous ambition,” Bekker said.
His vision is for Naspers to become a leading e-commerce presence in places that American tech giants haven’t yet focused on. Though Bekker concedes it’s a difficult game, he argues the hunger of consumers and entrepreneurs in India, China, Africa, and Eastern Europe offer ample opportunity for those willing to wait for their bets to pay off.
“E-commerce is not a get–rich-quick business,” Bekker said. ‘You need a good amount of patience.’’
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Tuesday, April 21, 2015
With Fizz, Google hopes to bring new power to mobile Web
A Google project called Fizz is beginning to pop, letting programmers make Web apps on mobile devices livelier and easier to use.
The Android version of Chrome 42, released last week, brings some new Fizz features to better match what's possible with native software written for operating systems like Google's Android and Apple's iOS. One big Fizz feature is that Web apps -- those written to run in a browser -- now can deliver pop-up notifications just as native apps already can.
Google's Fizz is a new chapter in the fight by Web allies to reconquer territory lost to mobile operating systems. The Web's universality conveniently spans multiple operating systems, from Windows to Mac and beyond. With Web apps, there's no need to worry that Google Maps might be missing from Windows 10 or that Apple Photos isn't on Android.
But unless the Web can match the performance and features of apps that are native to mobile operating systems, it's not likely to win. Thus, Google's project Fizz.
"The Web makes it easy to navigate and discover new and diverse experiences," by just typing in a Web address and not fussing with software installation, said Alex Komoroske, senior product manager for Chrome's open Web platform. But Web apps don't always keep pace with native apps. "We're trying to bring features in from native apps in a responsible way."
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Fizz features
Three new Fizz features arrived with Chrome 42:
First, push notifications will mean Web apps can alert you about things like updates from your social network or new email from your spouse -- once you agree to receive the notifications. Companies Google signed up to use push notifications include Beyond the Rack, eBay, Facebook, Pinterest , Product Hunt, Sports Illustrated's Fansided and Vice News
Second, Chrome will promote Web apps that meet certain criteria, offering to make them more easily accessible via an icon on your phone's home screen. One criterion is that you must visit the website on two separate occasions within two weeks, for example.
Third, a technology called the Web manifest will let programmers package useful tidbits of information -- for example an icon for the the Web app or a message it can deliver if you try to use it when there's no network connection.
They join an earlier Fizz feature that lets Web apps work better when they're offline -- a common occurrence for people on planes, subways and rural areas with no phone network.
Future Fizz features
One Fizz feature that's still in development is synchronization, which will let Web apps update themselves even when they're not open. That'll make it possible for Yahoo Mail to be up-to-date the moment you open the Web app so you don't have to wait for new data to download. Or you could schedule a tweet on a Twitter app that would be delivered when you got back into network range.
Another future Fizz project is durable storage, which will help people make sure Web apps are available even when there's no network. Along with offline support, push notifications and synchronization, it's powered by a technology called Service Workers that Google has championed.
The Web's power stems from its universality: no operating system these days can ship without a browser. But several of the technologies Google is working on aren't yet standardized and don't appear outside of Chrome. Mozilla is working on Service Worker support, for example, but Microsoft so far only has said it's evaluating it, and there's no word from Apple's Safari team.
In the long run, Komoroske is confident they'll all be hammered into standards and adopted more widely so people with other browsers besides Chrome can benefit, and ultimately so the Web itself can..
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