Showing posts with label Alibaba. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alibaba. Show all posts

Tuesday, 31 March 2015

Alibaba Signs Distribution Deal With BMG, Its First Music Partner Outside Of Asia

Welcome Matthew Lynley, Nicole Wilke, Andrew Sweeney And New TCTV Director Sarah LaneIn a bid to increase its online entertainment offerings, Alibaba has struck an agreement with music publisher BMG, which gives it access to over 2.5 million tracks. The partnership is notable because it represents the first time Alibaba’s digital entertainment unit has signed with a music partner outside of Asia.
The business already has agreements with Taiwanese music companies Rock Records and HIM International Music.
The deal gives Alibaba access to BMG’s catalog, which includes tracks from Bruno Mars, the Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, and Kylie Minogue. Music will be made available to consumers through streaming apps Xiami and TTPod, both of which are operated by Alibaba’s digital entertainment business.
It’s important to remember that Alibaba is more than just an e-commerce company. It is also one of China’s biggest mobile Internet players, competing head-to-head with Tencent, which has already struck similar arrangements with Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment.
Alibaba’s growth plans include selling other online services to the huge user base it has grown by operating China’s top e-commerce platforms and online payment service Alipay.
In addition to online entertainment, the company and its subsidiaries also has aspirations in healthcare management, cloud computing, and financial services like a credit scoring system that uses data from Alibaba’s family of e-commerce platforms.
Streaming music is a potential growth market for Chinese Internet companies, but only if they succeed in dealing with piracy. According to the Financial Times, China accounted for less than one percent of the $15 billion in global revenues made in 2013 by record companies, in part because pirated tracks are easy to obtain.
The government, however, has begun to crackdown on copyright infringement, and deals like the ones Alibaba and Tencent have struck with BMG, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Entertainment give music publishers more power over their IP in China.
In a statement, Alibaba said “the agreement will not only significantly boost earnings by BMG artists and writers from the world’s most populous nation, but also give them a powerful ally in hleping grow the legitimate music market in China.”
This means that Alibaba will help BMG keep an eye on pirated music and work with them to take legal action against services that are using tracks that violate BMG’s copyright.

Thursday, 12 March 2015

Alibaba, Prince Alwaleed Go In On Snapchat’s $500M Round

Haven Streamlines The Process Of Ocean Freight ShippingSnapchat is seeking to raise up to $500 million in a new round that includes Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba and Saudi Arabian investor Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, according to a source. The Los Angeles-based messaging app company has raised $648 million from investors to date.
Alibaba declined to comment. Snapchat had responded to our request for comment at the time of writing.
Bloomberg today reported that Alibaba is in talks to invest $200 million in Snapchat at a $15 billion valuation, and a source confirmed those details to TechCrunch. We are told that Snapchat is again keen to secure a $19 billion valuation, but that for some reason it did not happen with this piece.
Bloomberg reported that Alibaba’s investment is separate to an ongoing effort to raise up to $500 million, but we understand that it is part of a single round. Snapchat is raising the funding (which is not closed yet) in a less than conventional manner once again. That’s to say that it is jumbling a range of investors together to form a round — here’s what we wrote on Snapchat’s fundraising methodology before:
Snapchat is interesting in that they break the conventions of traditional fundraising, one source tells us. Traditionally an entrepreneur will set out to raise a round for a specified amount of money, and then you get interested investors on the same page based on an agreed valuation and then you close it. Spiegel does this somewhat differently. “He goes after individual investors at different valuations. It’s a rolling investment and a rolling close. In theory you could say he’s already done 40 rounds.” (40 is likely figurative rather than literal.)
Another interesting nugget: We’ve heard billionaire Saudi Arabian investor Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, a Twitter investor, is a participant in the round.
Prince Alwaleed’s Kingdom Holding organization confirmed this weekend that it met with Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel to discuss “future potential business cooperation.” That, it seems, means investment opportunities.
The Prince is no stranger to U.S. tech firms and has held investments in a range of companies, including Twitter, AOL, Apple, Motorola and Fox. He personally owns 95% of Kingdom Holding, and Forbes puts his estimated wealth at $22.7 billion.
snapchat kingdom holding
Spiegel meeting Prince Alwaleed [source]
Alibaba was linked with an investment in Snapchat last year, but a deal never materialized. Leaked emails from Sony, including those of Sony Entertainment CEO and Snapchat investor Michael Lynton, showed there had been meetings between both sides, though it seems to taken some time for those discussions to be consummated.
Snapchat ended last year by quietly closing a $485 million funding round from 23 investors. We reported at the time that the company had initially aimed to land $900 million, this time around the goal seems less lofty.

Thursday, 12 February 2015

Alibaba Launches Enterprise Messaging App DingTalk, Its Latest Mobile Software Product

Alibaba is best-known as an e-commerce company, but it aspires to be much more. Some of its initiatives, including affiliate Ant Financial, have been very successful. Others, like its operating system Aliyun and mobile messaging app Laiwang, have yet to take off. Alibaba is continuing to build its portfolio of software services, however, with DingTalk, a collaboration and messaging app for small-to-medium sized businesses.
DingTalk, which launched this week and is currently available only in Chinese, first entered beta testing in December.
Making a product geared toward SMBs is a smart move for Alibaba because it can market DingTalk to the 8.5 million active sellers on its e-commerce sites. On the other hand, DingTalk has to compete with Tencent’s WeChat, which is China’s top messaging app with 468 million users.
WeChat is targeted mostly to individual users, but the app launched enterprise accounts, which have higher security and allow a company’s employees to collaborate on projects and share files including PDF documents, last fall. WeChat also offers accounts designed for marketers and brands.
Both Tencent and Alibaba, two of China’s top Internet firms, already have large ecosystems that they can tap into to draw users to new products. As Tech In Asia notes, however, DingTalk also faces competition from a roster of enterprise messaging apps that are also tailored for Chinese companies, including Maimai, WorkingIM, Fengche, Mingdao, and IMO.
Even though Alibaba has struggled to get its mobile software service to gain traction, it continues to plow money into related businesses, including its $590 million investment in smartphone-maker Meizu. If DingTalk manages to become more successful than Aliyun and Laiwang, it will help prove the viability of Alibaba’s aspirations beyond e-commerce.
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SHARES0Share0Tweet0Share0000AdvertisementAdvertisementCrunchBaseAlibabaFounded1999  OverviewAlibaba is a Chinese e-commerce company operating online marketplaces for both international and domestic China trade. It also operates an online payment system called AliPay.Alibaba is a family of internet-based businesses, which enables its users to buy or sell anywhere in the world. It has developed businesses in consumer e-commerce, online payment, business-to-business marketplaces, and cloud …LocationHangzhou, ZhejiangCategoriesE-CommerceFoundersJack MaWebsitehttp://www.alibaba.comFull profile for Alibaba

 

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