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| December 3, 2014 | |
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| Good morning, Data Sheet readers. Scrappy e-commerce payments company Stripe is worth more than $3.6 billion after its latest venture infusion. That’s thanks in part to the forthcoming eBay-PayPal split. (Coming next year.) Plus, meet BlackLine Systems, a software company that thinks accounting teams spend too much time with spreadsheets. Forward this newsletter to colleagues and business partners, and tell them to sign up! Did you miss one? Here’s an archive of past editions. | |
| TRENDING | |
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| $3.6 billion valuation for PayPal rival Stripe. Add this one up: a $70 million venture round from Sequoia Capital and Thrive Capital just doubled the e-commerce payments company's potential worth. The money is earmarked for international expansion. So far, the four-year-old startup has raised about $200 million, including money from PayPal founder Peter Thiel. If you think Stripe's valuation is big, consider that some analysts estimate the potential market capitalization for a post-split PayPal at $100 billion. Wall Street Journal, New York Times Debate on Internet traffic rules delayed. The Congressional committee that oversees technology issues has postponed a hearing with the Federal Communications Commission into next year. Reuters Google: Why waste ad dollars on TV? The Internet giant is targeting big brand advertisers more aggressively. Its pitch: better (and quicker) measurement of the audience impact. WSJ | |
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| RESEARCH & PREDICTIONS | |
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| Is it any wonder? The second quarter was a record-breaking one for investments in security startups, with more than $767 million through 56 deals. That compares with $1.7 billion for all of 2013. The estimated annual market for this technology, given the current climate for corporate data breaches: $80 billion. NYT | |
| POLICY & STRATEGY | |
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| Sprint's half-off plan. The wireless carrier is promising to cut monthly bills for AT&T and Verizon customers by 50%. Permanently. Desperation or signs of a new price war? Fortune | |
| CLOUD CHATTER | |
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| IBM: Wait, there's more! The company signed two more big contracts for its cloud services on the heels of the relationship announced Monday with big Dutch bank ABN AMRO. The deals with communications company WPP and media giant Thomson Reuters boost the value of recent wins to $3.5 billion. And apparently, we can expect more. Reserve Amazon Web Services space, no money down. The company introduced new billing tiers that let organizations reserve servers without paying upfront (currently required). It's not exactly a price cut, and it's not the only payment option, but it's a big strategy shift as competition grows fiercer among cloud service providers. Forget all or nothing. Close to 75% of the 1,000 C-level executives recently surveyed by Wakefield Research (on behalf of consulting company Avanade) say their company will rely on multiple cloud-sourced applications or servers within the next three years. Among the first things they'll move: data and analytics software, and customer-facing services. | |
| STARTUPS & DISRUPTORS | |
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| Can this financial software company liberate accounting teams from spreadsheets? If you've never heard of BlackLine Systems, that's precisely the point. The company's financial management software is intended to keep businesses out of the headlines. It automates balance sheet reconciliation, overhauling a process that relies heavily on mind-numbing, manual workflows at many companies large and small. "There are still many things that many people do in spreadsheets," said BlackLine CEO and founder Therese Tucker. "It's a very uncontrolled process, which is not something that the market loves." As of October, Los Angeles-based BlackLine had signed up more than 900 companies as customers—100 from the Fortune 500, including AT&T, Boeing, Costco, eBay, Kimberly-Clark, Northrop Grumman, and United Airlines. Aside from eliminating literally hours of work every month, BlackLine's financial controls software lets controllers pay more attention to identifying patterns that deserve closer attention and that could be indicative of potential fraud. "You don't have to send your auditors into the closet to make copies. It allows you to concentrate on the things that require accounting training," Tucker said. For the first nine years of its existence, BlackLine relied on self-funding and its own revenue to fund its strategy. In August 2013, however, it accepted a $200 million investment from Silver Lake Sumeru. "We see an enormous opportunity to bring world-class transaction analytics and workflow technology financial process management," said Hollie Moore Haynes, managing director of the private equity firm. The investment is meant to position BlackLine for an eventual public offering. Even though the company's sales have consistently grown more than 50% annually for the last six years, the backing lends more credibility as the category attracts more competitors. Among the other vendors vying for share are big names including Oracle and SAP, and smaller players such as Runbook and Trintech. Tucker said: "You can only take a bootstrapped company so far. … We'd like to get to the IPO." | |
| MY FORTUNE.COM BOOKMARKS | |
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| Piper Kerman on employment barriers for ex-cons By Heather Muse Why Mellody Hobson stopped apologizing for being a black woman By Beth Kowitt CEOs see investment slowing, but they're ready to do more hiring By Laura Lorenzetti 7 surprising facts about the Victoria's Secret business By Benjamin Snyder Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos: 'I've made billions of dollars of failures' By Erin Griffith Body cam stocks are soaring after Obama urges greater use by police By Ben Geier The war on drugs comes to Corporate America By Chris Matthews Fortune's Blue Ribbon Companies By Fortune Editors | |
| FOR YOUR INNER TECHNOPHILE | |
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| Inside job. Isn't it annoying how many mobile phones lose their signal when the owner walks into an office building or warehouse? Verizon has a plan to improve coverage in elevators, cubicles and hallways. Gigaom | |
| ONE MORE THING | |
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| A game-changing, all-girls robotics team. Ever hear the one about the two (male) high-school teachers from Arizona who assembled the first all-girls team to compete at inventor Dean Kamen's annual FIRST robotics competition? This is no joke. It's the subject of a new book (and a forthcoming movie) with this great title: Spare Parts: Four Undocumented Teenagers, One Ugly Robot, and the Battle for the American Dream. Wired | |
| MARK YOUR CALENDAR | |
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| IBM Interconnect 2015: Cloud and mobile strategy. (Feb. 22 - 26, 2015; Las Vegas) Microsoft Convergence 2015: Dynamics solutions. (March 16 - 19, 2015; Atlanta) Knowledge15: Automate enterprise IT services. (April 19-24, 2015; Las Vegas) MicrosoftIgnite: Enterprise tech extravangaza. (May 4 - 8, 2015; Chicago) SAPPHIRE NOW: The SAP universe. (May 5 - 7, 2015; Orlando, Fla.) VMworld: The virtualization ecosystem. (Aug. 30 - Sept. 3, 2015; San Francisco) | |
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