Every week the Opus team picks a news story or topic or idea that is relevant to the entrepreneurs and businesses we partner with.

RSS Feed

Archives

Pinterest on the rise!

Ajit Deshpande - - 0 Comments

Last week, Pinterest hit an interesting albeit purely notional milestone – that of becoming a larger source of traffic for publishers than Yahoo – in its journey towards becoming a truly influential player in the world of social commerce. Shareaholics, a developer of tools for web content discovery and sharing, published its August traffic sources report, which showed Pinterest as being the fourth largest traffic source for publishers, behind Google Organic Search, Direct Search and Facebook, in that order.

The notional distinction of surpassing Yahoo aside, what is highly informative is Pinterest’s relevance to social eCommerce as indicated by the Shareaholics blog post; Pinterest’s user base of ~25 million seems to be contributing at least an order of magnitude in per capita referral traffic compared to Facebook’s roughly billion and Twitter’s roughly half a billion strong user bases. One part of this relevance might be related to demographics – the currently predominantly female and educated user base that is representative of Pinterest would be expected to more frequently share and click on visually pleasing retail item images. But the other, more telling part might just be structural about Pinterest the company. Since the late nineties, the monetization strategy for many a website has been to identify ways to display ads to its visitors, and well, Pinterest might just become an infinitely scrollable set of visually pleasing display ads! And even so, while a company such as Twitter believes its value is in its social graph, Pinterest hasn’t even built one of its own yet. Surely an excellent start for a company that raised its first financing round less than three years ago. Now will Pinterest scale up into the kind of effective and far-reaching social eCommerce platform that Facebook hasn’t been able to become yet, only time will tell.

Continue Reading ...


VMworld

Ajit Deshpande - - 0 Comments

Last week, VMware hosted its annual conference, VMworld, over three days between August 27th and August 29th. Coming just a few weeks after the company’s acquisition of software defined networking pioneer Nicira (as well as of Opus portfolio company Wanova), this year’s VMworld was all about driving home VMware’s strategic vision of becoming an end-to-end virtualization solutions provider for the datacenter. To that end, a couple of key integrated virtualization solution stacks were announced by the company. The first one was vCloud 5.1, an integrated bundle consisting of server, network and storage virtualization products, as well as management and extensibility offerings. The second one was Horizon Suite which is a solution for centralized management of files, data and privileges across multiple devices and platforms in the enterprise (with Wanova Mirage technologybeing a key component of this suite).

As we move towards a virtualized world with optimally shared IT resources, a couple of interesting virtualization-related trends seem to be gaining steam. First, innovation on the hardware side might be becoming less lucrative, driven down by lower exit multiples in the face of capital efficient software defined solutions. Second, even for software plays, significant sales and platform barriers from VMware’s integrated suite (and potentially very soon from Microsoft as well, since they will be expected to build out their own solution stack) imply that future M&A exits in virtualization might actually be for application / feature plays that broaden out the virtualization suite as opposed to creating new markets. A VMworld where the major announcements are about vertical integration as opposed to cool new technologies may be a sign that the industry is maturing, and so early stage startups will probably need to be extremely strategic and farsighted as they scale up and grow.

Continue Reading ...