13
Technology
Carbonite has agreed to a $1.42 billion purchase by OpenText, an enterprise information management giant, ending weeks of speculation about the anticipated buyout.
The deal marks a 78% premium on Carboniteshare price on September 5, when it was first rumored the company was preparing to buy the backup and data recovery company. Carbonite said the board &strongly believes& the deal will return &substantial& cash value to shareholders, said Steve Munford, chairman of Carboniteboard.
It ends a busy couple of years for Carbonite as the company has moved away from a traditional data backup business to a more proactive, defensive security company.
InFebruary, Carbonite bought endpoint security company Webroot for $618.5 million in an all-cash deal, as the company pushed to protect against emerging threats like ransomware. Only a year earlier, Carbonite bought Mozy for $145 million, a cloud backup service.
Carbonite said at the time of its acquisition by OpenText the backup company had losses of $14 million on revenues of $125.6 million, an increase by 62% year-over-year.
Wall Street was expecting average revenues of $131.5 million.
An earlier version of this story said Carbonite made $125.6 billion in revenue. This was in error — the figure should have been in millions. We regret the error.
- Details
- Category: Technology
Read more: OpenText buys data security firm Carbonite for $1.42B
Write comment (95 Comments)SpaceX has a big launch coming up this morning from Cape Canaveral in Florida — a Falcon 9 will carry a payload of 60 of its Starlink orbital communications satellites to space at 9:56 AM ET (6:56 AM PT). The Starlink satellites are the first non-test group of SpaceXnew constellation heading up en masse, with the aim of helping set up a network that will eventually provide global high-speed internet connectivity.
SpaceX has already sent up 62 Starlink satellites in total, across two test batch launches: Two launched in February 2018 from Vandenberg in California, aboard a rocket that was also transporting a satellite called &Paz& for a client, and 60 launched in May of this year, a large test batch that was used to trial ground-based communications, as well as controlled de-orbiting mechanisms. Of those 60, 57 satellites are still in orbit while three became non-operational after launch.
This mission will set up this new batch of 60 Starlink satellites in orbit, which feature increased spectrum capacity and construction that features 100% &demisability,& which means that at the end of their operating life they&ll burn up completely upon controlled re-entry to ensure therenothing left behind once they&re no longer in use. This is one of six launches of Starlink satellites that SpaceX says will lead up to the launch of its service across the U.S. and Canada, and one of 24 launches that will enable global high-bandwidth broadband service.
Besides setting up the foundation for its global satellite internet network, this launch is noteworthy from the perspective of SpaceXfocus on re-usability. The first stage for the Falcon 9 used here previously flew on three separate missions, a record for a Falcon 9 booster in terms of re-use, and the fairing used to protect the payload also flew before on the Falcon Heavy Arabsat-6A mission launched earlier this year. SpaceX plans to land the booster again, and it will attempt to recover the fairing once again, using its sea-borne catcher vessels in the Atlantic.
The launch window at 9:56 AM ET is instantaneous, and SpaceX should begin broadcasting the live stream above about 15 minutes prior to that.
- Details
- Category: Technology
Read more: Watch live as SpaceX launches 60 Starlink satellites with a thrice-flown Falcon 9 rocket
Write comment (94 Comments)Frontier Car Group, the Berlin-based startup building used car marketplaces targeting high-growth, emerging markets, has picked up another significant round of funding from a strategic backer also focusing on the same geographical opportunity.
Today, OLX, the online classifieds division Prosus (the digital division of Naspers that listed earlier this year in Europe) announced that it would invest up to $400 million in Frontier, in a mix of equity, secondary share acquisitions and existing business shares. The deal will include a primary capital injection of an unspecified amount, which OLX has confirmed to me values Frontier Car Group at $700 million, post-money.
In terms of business shares: OLX also said that it will be contributing its shares in a JV it had in place with Frontier in India and Poland. Meanwhile, the secondary acquisitions — the shares are currently held by other investors, founders and management — are subject to a tender process. The markets that Frontier operates in now include Nigeria, Mexico, Chile, Pakistan, Indonesia and the USA (where it acquired WeBuyAnyCar last year), in addition to India and Poland.
Notably, even before the full $400 million amount is exercised (that is, after the tender process is completed), an OLX spokesperson confirmed that first capital injection will make it Frontierlargest single shareholder (but not the majority shareholder), which essentially values the deal at less than $350 million (based on the $700 million valuation).
Today, Frontier Car Group offers buyers and sellers a range of services: in addition to basic inventory listings, there are inspection reports, financial, pricing guides, warranties and insurance. The plan will be to expand more services for one of the key players in the used-car space, dealers — via FrontierDealer Management System — more resale services (via OLX) and more CarFax/Blue Book-style pricing guides and other products.
Frontier sold about $700 million worth of cars in the past year, triple its value of a year before.
As a point of reference, in May of last year, when the company raised $58 million, it had sold 50,000 cars to date and was on track for $200 million in annualised revenues. CEO and co-founder Sujay Tyle says the company has been on a growth tear.
&FCG has nearly tripled performance across every key metric since the first OLX Group investment less than 18 months ago and has expanded to four new countries in that time,& said Tyle in a statement. &This is a testament to FCGteam, the ripe market opportunity, and the results of early integration with OLX in our key markets. Together with OLX and Prosus, we are aiming to revolutionize the used car market in several emerging and developed economies by adding trust, transparency and a comprehensive suite of services to all participants in the ecosystem.&
&Together with FCG, we are aiming to build the leading global used car marketplace, offering a premium and convenient service to millions of car buyers, sellers and dealers,& said Martin Scheepbouwer, CEO of OLX Group. &We&re in a unique position to accelerate the expansion of this platform worldwide. Our experience in India is a great proof of concept, where within the space of a year, our joint venture has already increased the number of stores threefold, with car purchase volumes continuing to grow by 10% month-on-month.&
This is the second time that OLX has invested in Frontier: In May 2018, Naspers invested $89 million in the business, an investment that came just weeks after Frontier had raised $58 million from Balderton, TPG and others.
The deal underscores the longtime trend of consolidation in e-commerce businesses — something Prosus is also seeing played out in a completely different arena, that of food delivery.
The basics of the economy-of-scale principle, as applied to used car sales, goes something like this: economies of scale makes a platform more useful (there will be more cars on it, and less on competitors& sites); but it also potentially means that Frontier would be making more transactions, thereby more revenues overall; and building and running more sales on the same platform improves the margins on the investment that gets made in building and operating that platform.
Targeting P2P used car sales in emerging markets is a big potential business: In part because of the nature of those economies, car owners are more likely to sweat out assets rather than go for buying completely new vehicles. OLX notes that combining the operations in Frontierfootprint with those of the JV businesses that it is now taking over, plus OLXown business in Latin America, Asia and Poland, results in a market where some 30 million used cars are sold annually, &more than double that of China.&
- Details
- Category: Technology
Just a day after it was revealed that Qualcomm was prepping to release its next-generation Snapdragon 865 chipset at the Qualcomm Snapdragon Tech Summit 2019, key specifications of the said chip have leaked.
Snapdragon 865 chip is the successor to the SD 855 and SD 855+, which headlined flagship smartphones launched in 2019. Now, according to a
- Details
- Category: Technology
Read more: Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 purported specifications leak on the web
Write comment (92 Comments)
Despite Google Stadia being vaunted as the future of gaming – a future in which you don't need expensive consoles or regular PC upgrades to stay at the forefront of video game technology – the streaming game platform's newly-announced launch lineup is a surprisingly weak offering.
Of the 12 titles being offered with Google Stadia's launch on
- Details
- Category: Technology
Read more: Google Stadia's 12-game launch lineup is surprisingly weak
Write comment (90 Comments)
Malware developers have begun to mix politics with their malicious payloads according to the Cisco Talos Group which recently discovered a payload named Trump.exe.
The firm first found the politically-themed payload while investigating a recent malspam campaign and they then decided to look into other malicious programs that contained political
- Details
- Category: Technology
Read more: Trump and Clinton-themed ransomware lands
Write comment (100 Comments)Page 385 of 5614