On Wednesday, Redwood City-based Wildfire was acquired by Google. According to SearchBlog, Wildfire has about 400 employees and supports 16,000 customers, including 30 of the top 50 brands. In their announcement of the new deal, the company said, "We truly could not think of a more perfect home for Wildfire." The company also said that they will operate as usual for now.
Mobile loyalty service and Bay Area-based shopkick has hired Silicon Valley veteran Alexis Rask as head of brand partnerships for the company. As VP and general manager, brand partnerships, Rask will lead shopkick's relations with major brands in the CPG, consumer electronics, entertainment, and other industry verticals. Prior to joining the company, Rask was SVP, sales development at Federated Media. She was previously a founding member of LinkedIn's marketing solutions team and worked at Google selling search marketing campaigns. Through its partner alliance program, shopkick already works on mobile marketing programs with more than 50 brands, including Kraft Foods, Procter & Gamble, Best Buy, Macy's and Target. In 2011, the company says it helped drive more than $110 million in incremental shopping revenue for brand and retail partners. The shopkick app rewards users for entering participating stores and browsing select products.
Demandbase, a SF-based "real-time targeting and personalization platform for B2B," Wednesday announced that they have added 19 "System Integrators" to their Demandbase Certified program. The program was a company initiative launched earlier this year. Among the 19 new parterns are Bay Area companies Siteworx and TechAspect. Demandbase said, "For Bay Area companies, this means they can implement and obtain benefits from Real-Time Identification more quickly." "One of the proven ways to make online interactions more effective is better personalization – getting the right relevant message in front of the right visitor – in real-time," said Demandbase CMO Greg Ott when reached for comment.
Professional networking site LinkedIn on Thursday said revenue surged 89% in the second quarter on strong gains in its hiring services business in particular. Net income was $2.8 million compared with $4.5 million for the year-earlier period, due to higher costs. On an adjusted basis, LinkedIn reported a profit of $18 million, or 16 cents a share. Revenue rose to $228 million from $121 million a year ago. Analysts expected LinkedIn to report a profit of 16 cents a share on revenue of nearly $216 million, according to a survey by FactSet Research. LinkedIn’s growth in the quarter was again driven mainly by demand for its hiring solutions, which help companies recruit job candidates through the site. That business more than doubled (up 107%) from a year ago to $121.6 million, accounting for 53% of total revenue. That share is up from 48% a year ago. Advertising sales grew 63%, and represented 28% of overall revenue. Subscription revenue grew even faster -- increasing 82% to $43 million in the second quarter, making up 32% of sales. U.S. revenue totaled $147 million -- or 65% of overall revenue -- with international sales contributing 81 million, or 35%. With the rollout of its redesigned home page in July, LinkedIn said it's already seeing higher engagement among its 175 million members. The company said interactions, including status updates on the site, are now at all-time highs. LinkedIn is also seeing a strong response to the iPad app it unveiled in the second quarter, with more than half of page views coming from content-focused features, such as updates, news and groups. In June, the company began testing display ads in the iPad app, marking its first step toward monetizing its rapidly growing mobile audience. On the company earnings conference call Thursday, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner said early response to the pilot program, involving advertisers such as Shell and Cisco, has been positive. Weiner said LinkedIn is testing ads in its mobile phone properties and plans to eventually extend each of its business lines -- advertising, subscriptions, and hiring services -- to mobile. As of the first quarter, 22% of LinkedIn's traffic was coming from mobile, up from 8% a year ago.
Another day, another Google acquisition -- but this time the buy focuses on social media. At Wildfire, which the company recently acquired, about 400 employees support 16,000 customers, including 30 of the top 50 brands. Through Wildfire's technology, brands serve marketing and ad campaigns on Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, and YouTube. But that's not all when it comes to building out its advertising stack to support new hardware. Google can now better convince agencies and brands to buy search, display and social ads from one company for both desktop and mobile -- even to purchase them on competing platforms like Facebook and Twitter. It also will give Google access to Facebook data and improve the integration into its search engine results, as well as provide brands and agencies with one platform from which to measure all media. "We've been working towards this end for some time," says Jason Miller, Google product management director, explaining how Google Analytics helps businesses measure the contribution of hundreds of social sites. Google's Admeld service helps to serve ads in Facebook developers' social apps, and the DoubleClick platform enables brands to run and measure ads across social Web sites, he says. On Google+, brands already use a new set of API tools to access services like Vitrue, Buddy Media, Context Optional, Hearsay Social, HootSuite, Involver, and others. Acquisitions will remain an important piece of Google's strategy, as management expects the current pace of acquisitions to continue, according to the company's most recent 10-Q filing. The Motorola Mobility acquisition, which closed on May 22, took Google on a new direction into hardware. While the move gives Google fodder to build out an advertising stack to support hardware devices, such as the Nexus 7 tablet and the Nexus Q entertainment streaming device, the move into manufacturing hardware proves a bit challenging. For starters, Google pushed out the release date for the Nexus Q, which the company manufactures in the United States, to broaden the services offered through the device. Today it streams music and video. The company said Tuesday it will delay the launch of the $299 home-entertainment device to make it even better. A focus on hardware no doubt increases research and development expenses for the company. At Google, R&D rose to $351 million from the three months ending June 30, 2012, compared with the year-ago quarter, which includes $143 million related to Motorola. The remaining increase of $208 million resulted from miscellaneous expenses called out in the SEC filing. Apparently, Google plans to make a go at generating revenue from building and selling hardware through the Motorola business. A line item in its most recent 10-Q filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission states "We generate revenues from our Google business primarily by delivering online advertising, and from our Motorola business primarily by selling hardware products." The Mobile segment designs, manufactures, sells and services wireless mobile devices like smartphones and media tablets, with integrated software and accessories, and licenses intellectual property. The Home segment designs, manufactures, sells, installs and services set-top boxes for digital and Internet protocol (IP) video, satellite and terrestrial broadcast networks, and Internet protocol television (IPTV), broadband access network infrastructure platforms, and associated software solutions to cable TV and telecommunications service providers.