A senior Sony executive revealed that the Sony Ericsson brand would be phased out as the company focusses on becoming a complete smartphone business that will sell its new smartphones under the Sony label. The move aims to invigorate Sony’s smartphone sales, which slowly began to pick up when Sony Ericsson decided to soley develop smarthphones powered by Google’s Android operating system.

With this decision, Sony Ericsson will invest significant amounts into its marketing and advertising channels for the new Sony smartphone brand. Kristian Tear, executive VP and head of sales and marketing at Sony Ericsson commented that “A lot of planning goes into getting the branding right but we will be done by middle of next year. It will also mean that the marketing and advertising investments will go up. We haven’t been as fierce as we were a few years back but we will step it up, refocus and invest more in brand-building in select markets.”

Although Sony is the world’s leading entertainment company, it holds only 2% of the global smartphone market and expects its mobile presence to increase with its assets on the content, technology and brand side along with its planned marketing and advertising boost.

Sony’s acquisition still requires approval, so the changes aren’t expected to be implemented until next year.

source: The Next Web

As part of the deal, Sony has bought out Ericsson’s ownership of  “five essential patent families” in an intellectual property agreement between the two companies. As part of the transaction, Ericsson will receive a €1.05 billion cash payment from Sony. That values the deal at $1.47 billion at current market prices.

The acquisition will give Sony the opportunity to incorporate mobile products into their other electronic offerings such as TVs, laptops, mobile phones and tablets which will enhance its ‘four-screen strategy.’ It will also allow Ericsson, once a strong contender in the mobile phone sector, to concentrate on its network gear business.

CEO of Sony, Sir Howard Stringer, has said in a statement: “This acquisition makes sense for Sony and Ericsson, and it will make the difference for consumers, who want to connect with content wherever they are, whenever they want.”

source: mashable

World of Avatar had an awesome week last week, having seen the launch of boom.fm and announcing their acquisition of Mxit. On Thursday afternoon I had a chat with Peter Matthaei the CEO of boom.fm and the CTO at World of Avatar to discuss how the investment company is doing and what his plans are in running boom.fm. Click play below.

Google Inc. Chairman Eric Schmidt has stated that its purchase of mobile company Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. in August was for more than just its patents.

Rather, the aim of  the search engine giant, that bought the company for $12.5 billion, was to acquire Motorola’s product line. “Motorola has some amazing products,” Schmidt told Salesforce.com Inc. Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff.

The acquisition might have come as a surprise but it makes total sense. Gone are the days of Android being called fragmented because of hardware manufacturers tweaking Android to suit their requirements before shipping their handsets. Google can now control their entire mobile experience from hardware to software (Sound familiar? Think iOS).

The acquisition of 17, 000 patents will also help them defend Android against patent claims by their number one competitor – Apple.

So let’s take a lighter look at group buying this week. I keep a very lose eye on the industry globally. How are things going in other countries, in Africa, and more specifically, in Kenya? Naturally the group buying model goes well in countries with some sort of internet penetration. South Africa’s has been quoted as anything from 7% to 15%, depending who you ask, and this gives us an “internet population” of anywhere up to 7.5 million. Kenya seems to have around 6 million already.

According to a man on the ground in Kenya, Mark Kaigwa, and some funky Google skills, I find the following are in the mix in Kenya’s group buying scene:

http://Rupu.co.ke
Rupu is seemingly the biggest, but I watched it recently drop on Alexa, and can’t imagine why. Earlier this year they partnered with Eat Out Kenya. Seemingly the one to beat.

http://Zetu.co.ke
This one uses the same website that old Twangoo used, so there went my dinner. However, do they then potentially have the connections to get on the Groupon bandwagon? This could be interesting.

http://Sokopal.com
Mark Kaigwa mentions them as the first to market, and, like Wicount in South Africa, that doesn’t ensure first place.

http://MyShillings.com

I also noticed this website a while back in Kenya and now see that they are not operating any longer.

http://Zebumob.com
This doesn’t seem to be group buying to me, but nevertheless one to watch.

I came across http://www.groupbuykenya.com/ as well, and I’m sure there are more lying around in cyberspace. Zetu and Rupu were also featured in this post.

However, this all means that Kenya has a very, very small market, which I’m told is due to a smaller infrastructure, but also the difficulties facing small online businesses as well as a different set of payment options in Kenya.

A difficult whois check finds that most of the top global group buying sites’ domain names have been registered – not always by the company themselves. All of this makes for a gap where we could see things changing rapidly soon, as Kenya has the potential to be yet another fresh group buying marketplace.

Do you have any news on Kenya’s group buying scene?

According to bidorbuy CEO Jaco Jonker, UbuntuDeal complements the bidorbuy online marketplace: “While bidorbuy enables sellers to sell online to buyers far beyond their geographical locality, UbuntuDeal brings online audiences through the doors of local businesses. On top of that, bidorbuy focuses on products, and UbuntuDeal is more oriented towards entertainment and leisure experiences. Together, we are poised to bring some very exciting shopping events to the South African internet audience”

Launched in November 2010, UbuntuDeal is based on the business model of collective buying power. Every day, a heavily discounted deal is placed on the site on behalf of one of the participating merchants. If a certain number of people buy, the deal becomes available to all. If not, the deal is off. Currently, the site has daily deals in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban, Bloemfontein, East London and Port Elizabeth, ranging from restaurant vouchers and spa treatments to hotel stays and even Wi-Fi internet access.

For consumers, online group buying means great discounts. For businesses, it is a good way to turn available surpluses into cash and to market their services to a very wide audience without spending exorbitant amounts on marketing. Jess Green, Managing Director of UbuntuDeal, says that the social buying business model took off in 2010 and expects further growth this year, both internationally and locally. He adds that UbuntuDeal has clear advantages in this very competitive market: “We always feature deals that offer between 50% and 90% discounts, not less, giving the consumer a bigger and better deal. We pride ourselves on being a step ahead in terms of customer service and web site functionality. Last but not least, the merchants we team up with are happy with the whole process and their marketing exposure.”

Simple as the online group buying business model looks, the real challenge is attaining the critical mass of users. “This is where bidorbuy, a high traffic site with over one million visitors per month, will play a key role”, says Jaco.

Jaco adds that bidorbuy has recently launched a ‘deal of the week’ offering, which aims to offer the best deals for the South African audience on brand new, consumer products. “With the acquisition of UbuntuDeal, bidorbuy is now in a position to offer both product and experience deals to its audience, the largest e-commerce audience in the country.

Look out for the interview with UbuntuDeal this week on BandwidthBlog. Charl Norman will be interviewing Jess Green, Ubuntudeal’s founder for our SA tech startups video series. Look at last week’s interview with Adii for a taste of what to expect!

Once the darling of the SA blogging community, Amatomu began to show signs of strain after its original creators, Matthew Buckland and Vincent Maher, left the company that owned the site (Mail & Guardian Online). The repeated downtime eventually got so bad that many top bloggers in the country reluctantly removed the code from their blogs, as it was presumed to be causing errors and slowing down page-load times.

Registered Amatomu users this week received an email explaining that the site has now been taken over by Creative Spark Interactive. What makes this particularly good news is that Creative Spark is Matthew Buckland’s new project – so in a sense, Amatomu is going back home.

The Creative Spark team says, “We are passionate about amatomu.com and believe it has a bright future. We are aware of the stability issues the site has experienced, and we have made significant changes to improve uptime. We do monitor the site daily and respond to all technical complaints and issues. We will also be working on the core architecture of the site during the course of the year to increase stability.”

They’ve also called for any PHP developers interested in playing a role (either part-time or full-time) to make contact with them.

Let’s hope that this is the beginning of a new chapter in Amatomu’s story – a happier one this time.

This just in – Internet marketer and entrepreneur Randolf Jorberg just blogged the news that eTRAVELi has acquired Cape Town based Travelstart’s Nordic operations – this adds just another success story to serial entrepreneur Stephan Ekberghs list of achievements. Travelstart is a South African company and generated sales of approximately ZAR 1.5 billion during 2009. eTRAVELi and Travelstart combined produce a monster booking engine with expected revenues of 5 billion (Rand and Swedish kronor are nearly on par) in 2010. The report does not state the acquisition price, we are waiting for a reply from Stephan with further details.

Reportedly brokering 50,000 bookings a month on the Travelstart SA platform, Travelstart is a travel giant in the e-commerce market of South Africa and I do seriously hope that this is not the last positive news we hear from this travel powerhouse, operating from Cape Town.

Update from Stephan -

Just to clear some basic facts:
The Deal covers our european business and our brand in Europe.
We will still continue to do business outside of EU with our new global HQ in Cape Town.
Our main efforts will be directed towards continental Africa for a while as well as launching a global kick ass mobile app.
Our ZA business is doing very well and we expect to break the 1 billion zar mark in 2011.

Come by and see us at 56 Shortmarket.

I have written some personal reflections on the sale on my blog:
http://ekbergh.blogspot.com/2010/01/when-to-let-go-2930-decade-with.html

(edit – we have fixed our confusing headline)

The two year-old experiment in hyper-local news is available in 15 cities (New York, San Francisco, and Seattle to name a few) deeply covers local communities with a range of topics which span from announcements to news coverage, blog entries, civic data, photos and dozens of other types of information — just by typing your address, neighborhood name or ZIP code.

The evident aim of the acquisition is to compete with local newspapers and other forms of media. EveryBlock is capable of providing stunning stats for specified local areas which strengthens the base of MSNBC.com making it a more vivid news source. It is all about weaving more local results into the site and this could even assist the new search engine Bing.

Founded in 2007, with a $1.1 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, we have to agree that this is a wonderful achievement for a start-up company with just six employees. What’s even more interesting is that MSNBC plans to keep EveryBlock independent and will help it continue grow to other cities, too.

[via NYTimes]

The overall acquisition cost for Google is $106 million and Google has taken this step to thoroughly use On2 futuristic video compression techniques for its own expansion. YouTube currently lacks ways that could assist High-Definition HD Video conversions and compressions, which means that the deal is much needed considering the bright future Google sees for their service.

The deal is expected to close by the fourth-quarter of this year and the investors look already pleased as the On2 stock closed 62% over the premium at the close of yesterday.

Google is certainly feeling the pressure with its contemporaries expanding its domains and this deal will have surely relaxed the nerves a bit. Now it can further evolve the immensely successful YouTube to newer heights.

[via TechCrunch]