Category: News

Wanderful Media, an online local discovery shopping company, has secured an additional $9 million in funding from existing investors. This addition brings the company’s total funding to $36 million. Wanderful Media is a Silicon Valley-based company online discovery shopping business.

PRESS RELEASE

Wanderful Media™, an online local discovery shopping company, today announced an additional $9 million in funding from existing investors. This addition brings the company’s total funding to $36 million and comes on the heels of the April launch of the completely reimagined Find&Save® , an online community offering a comprehensive collection of local savings.

Wanderful Media is experiencing rapid growth with its Find&Save product, now available in all 50 of the top 50 designated market areas (DMAs). With Find&Save, Wanderful Media gives retailers a proven way to engage shoppers around local sales and products, with the intent of driving them across the threshold of retail stores. Find&Save provides shoppers a fun way to easily flip through all the latest sales in their area, keep track of what they need, and want, and share their discoveries with other shoppers wherever they are, via tablet, mobile or web.

“The retail and shopping landscape is evolving and Wanderful Media’s decision to ‘double-down’ on mobile and social has pushed us to the forefront of innovation in this area,” said Ben T. Smith, IV, CEO of Wanderful Media. “The latest round of funding emphasizes the continued enthusiasm from our core group of investors in the market potential and in our overall product strategy.”

With access to more than 100 million unique visitors per month throughout its network, Wanderful Media represents a media industry initiative to transform the $4 billion business of traditional advertising circulars through digital innovation – just as joint media ventures such as CareerBuilder and Cars.com strengthened the industry’s position through the use of new technology.

About Wanderful Media
Wanderful Media is a Silicon Valley company reinventing local online discovery shopping. Providing reach into more than 80 percent of U.S. markets through trusted media brands, Wanderful Media helps retailers bring consumers into local stores and gives consumers the most convenient way to discover local merchandise. Wanderful Media is an independent company financed by a powerful group of media companies that includes Advance Digital, A. H. Belo Corporation, Community Newspaper Holdings Inc., Cox Media Group, The E. W. Scripps Company, Gannett Co. Inc., GateHouse Media Inc., Hearst Corporation, Lee Enterprises, MediaNews Group, The McClatchy Company, and The Washington Post Co. Wanderful Media is headquartered in Los Gatos, Calif.

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Useful Links
Wanderful Media Website
Wanderful Media on Twitter
Wanderful Media on Facebook

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@wanderfulmedia adds another $9M in funding on the heels of its successful @findnsave launch http://bit.ly/UrsZfL

Contacts:
Libra White, Wanderful Media, 408-502-2431, [email protected]
Scott Lechner, Kulesa Faul for Wanderful Media, 650-340-1987, [email protected]

The post Wanderful Media Adds $9m Funding to Fuel Growth appeared first on peHUB.

Fleming Family & Partners and Garber Hannam & Partners Limited have announced announce a final distribution to the shareholders of FF&P Russia Real Estate Limited. The payment means RREL has now returned over $213 million to shareholders, including international private equity companies and clients of FF&P Asset Management.

PRESS RELEASE

Fleming Family & Partners (“FF&P”) and Garber Hannam & Partners Limited (“GHP”) are pleased to announce a final distribution to the shareholders of FF&P Russia Real Estate Limited (“RREL”).

The payment means RREL has now returned over $213 million to shareholders, including international private equity companies and clients of FF&P Asset Management. UK investors achieved a 2.1x return on their initial investment which sets RREL apart from most other Russian-based commercial real estate vehicles, in terms of returns.

RREL was launched by FF&P in 2003 as the first institutional fund focused on Russian commercial real estate investments. RREL acquired various commercial real estate assets in Moscow including the Gogolevsky 11 and Lesnaya 3 office centres, and warehouse assets at Sholokhovo and Tomilino. These were sold to international and domestic buyers including Hines Global REIT and Raven Russia plc.

FF&P sold its Russian business, including the real estate management team which advised RREL, to GHP in 2012.

Surviving the global financial crisis

RREL operated successfully throughout the difficult market conditions created by the global financial crisis. Throughout this period, its assets remained fully-leased to a strong international tenant base and held up their value. This meant that, despite the challenges posed by the global credit crunch, the team nevertheless succeeded in securing several refinancing facilities for the assets with international banks.

Oleg Myshkin, Managing Partner at GHP Real Estate noted that RREL is one of very few vehicles in the Russian property market to have completed the full investment cycle and returned significant profits to its shareholders. He attributed this success to the strong, multi-disciplinary team at GHP which has built significant experience and expertise in institutional management, over the course of advising RREL and its sister company, FF&P Russia Real Estate Development Limited (“RRED”).

On behalf of FF&P, Richard Hill, co-head of FF&P Advisory, said “We are delighted with the outcome for our clients against the backdrop of an extremely difficult global market over the last few years and the challenges presented by operating in a complex real estate market. This is testament to the expertise, commitment and energy of the real estate team in Moscow combined with the guidance of the company’s experienced board of directors throughout the investment cycle.”

The story continues
GHP Real Estate continues to manage RRED, which was launched by FF&P in 2007 with $153 million of capital. RRED has acquired two A-class development projects in St. Petersburg, namely the Electro office centre (www.electrospb.com) and the Trinity mixed use complex (www.trinityspb.com) both of which are fully financed and under construction, as well as a warehouse project in Tomilino, close to Moscow. RRED’s shareholders principally comprise international private equity companies, sovereign wealth funds and clients of FF&P Asset Management.

For further information, please contact:

Cubitt Consulting: James Isola +44 (0)207 367 5100 [email protected] (on behalf of Fleming Family & Partners)

GHP Russia Real Estate Management at +7 495 411 5300 or [email protected].

Notes to Editors

Fleming Family & Partners (“FF&P”) is an international wealth manager which advises wealthy individuals and families on how best to grow and maintain their capital, and how to transfer it between generations. The firm offers an institutional level of professional advice and service to individuals, and an investment process designed to manage risk in a way that is appropriate to each individual client’s needs and objectives.

FF&P Asset Management Limited invests clients’ funds in a range of asset classes, primarily through third party managers, designed to make use of the best abilities available in any given class and allowing clients to benefit from economies of scale. It also offers clients innovative, higher risk opportunities as appropriate. As well as benefiting from FF&P’s core asset management skills, clients also have access to its capabilities in private office and trust services, in private equity funds, in corporate finance advice and in financial planning.

FF&P was founded in 2000, following the sale of Robert Fleming Holdings to JP Morgan Chase Manhattan. It now manages assets of around £4 billion and beyond the founding Fleming family looks after an additional 50 core, discretionary clients.

FF&P Asset Management Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority.

Garber Hannam & Partners Limited (“GHP”) is a financial group which focuses on wealth management, real estate investment, direct investments, M&A and financial advisory. It strives to achieve long-term goals for the benefit of its clients and combines strategic investments and efficient asset management. The Group’s presence in the UK, Russia, Switzerland, Japan, Luxemburg and Guernsey provides a diverse range of investment opportunities for the company and our clients.

GHP has had a presence in Russia since 1992. In 1998, the company was called Fleming UCB and was affiliated to the international investment bank Robert Fleming & Co. Between 2000 and 2012, the company was a subsidiary of FF&P. In 2008, the company established its asset management business, the assets under the management of which have increased to 20 billion Roubles ($670 million).

In 2012 the company was sold by FF&P to management and renamed Garber Hannam & Partners Limited.

The post FF&P Completes Successful Exit for Investors appeared first on peHUB.

There’s been lots of investor interest recently in backing startups focused on making IT more secure, at least in part because of the barrage of news of cyberattacks against government agencies and companies, including a defense contractor. Now comes more security investment activity. Blue Coat Systems, a vendor of network gear for security and WAN optimization, is bolstering its hardware and software strategies with the acquisition of Solera Networks.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Among Solera products is a BlackBox Recorder that, true to its name, records all network activity, which analysts can play back after attacks to see what happened. Solera Deepsee software conducts deep-packet inspection to reveal the nature of applications and associated files in play inside a network. It also brings up timelines of suspicious activity, runs analytics and enables integration with other network tools, such as Palo Alto Networks. Dashboards and other visual features are available. Solera also makes appliances that monitor traffic, storage boxes and a virtual appliance available as a VMware virtual machine.

The deal follows news earlier this month of Blue Coat’s acquisition of the SSL product line from Netronome. The thinking behind that deal was to offer enterprises more visibility into both inbound and outbound traffic and apply policy across all traffic, according to a Blue Coat statement.

Also this month, McAfee agreed to pay around $389 million for network-security provider Stonesoft.

In the midst of the attention on cybersecurity among other enterprise IT hot spots, it’s not surprising to see vendors rushing to bolt on products and services and then pinging potential customers to promise the solution to their problems (and then announcing sales gains). The real indicator people should be on the lookout for, though, is a drop in cyberattacks, and judging by some recent headlines, that might still be a ways off.

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Google has released Chrome 27 for Windows, Mac and Linux. And while the previous build was less than exciting, this one delivers multiple improvements which see the browser’s page display time improve by 5 percent.

Much of this acceleration is down to smarter scheduling, with Chrome 27 making more intelligent decisions about what it loads, and when. Previously, for instance, the browser might tie up bandwidth downloading a vast number of images in parallel. Now it focuses on visible images, and limits parallel downloads to a maximum of 10, so the details you need should be displayed noticeably faster.

Another significant enhancement comes from moving Chrome’s resource scheduler into the browser process, which means it has much more knowledge about your system state. In particular, it can spot and take better advantage of network idle time, preloading images just as soon as it has the opportunity.

Elsewhere, the official release blog post talks about “improved spell correction, and numerous fundamental improvements for Omnibox predictions”. We’ve yet to confirm these in practice, but anything Google can do here will be welcome.

Developers will appreciate the new chrome.syncFileSystem API, which helps them create apps which can save and synchronize data on Google Drive. (Although as the API notes point out, this is about app-specific syncable storage, not some general API which will access whatever files happen to be on your Google Drive.)

And of course there’s the usual selection of security fixes, 13 this time. 10 of these, all rated “High”, were “Use-after-free” issues, memory corruption flaws which at their worst may allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code. (Chrome isn’t alone, though — similar issues were uncovered in IE recently, and it seems that the area is a hot topic for security researchers right now.)

On balance, then, while Chrome 27 may look exactly the same, it has some very welcome changes under the hood. The browser is now available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

The Microsoft partner network (MPN) is Microsoft’s ‘official’ body for channel partners. A Microsoft partner is one of the 640,000 companies worldwide that build, sell, or consult with Microsoft products. Most of these companies operate in the small-medium enterprise (SME) space, selling services related to Azure, .NET and SQL, Office 365, and SharePoint.

The MPN isn’t a revenue earner for Microsoft in itself, but the reason for its being is pretty clear. A successful partner ecosystem means lots of lovely license sales for Microsoft. With Office 365 subscriptions to push (and Windows likely following this model sooner rather than later) the MPN is a pretty important area for Redmond guys right now.

Offline there is a lot of support (marketing, financial, networking) available to partners, but online is where things are much more interesting. There are a number of private portal sites for partners, offering access to useful digital assets. But the only public tool is something called PinPoint — a searchable directory of partners.

The site seems to be moving away from a straight directory service, towards more of an online store. As the releases of Office and SharePoint 2013 (and of course Windows 8) show, apps are very important to the future of many of Microsoft’s biggest products. The jury is still out on apps in Office and SharePoint, but any success will in part depend on the process of downloading, installing, and maintaining them. PinPoint seems to be an almost ready made solution.

This leaves a bit of a gap for people wanting to find a Microsoft partner to work with, a gap that a new site called PartnerPulse hopes to fill. PartnerPulse is a new way for potential customers to find, review, and compare Microsoft channel partners. Partners can join for free, create a profile, and use social tools to market themselves.

More than this though, PartnerPulse is a social marketing platform, one that is as much about what customers say about partners as what partners say about themselves. Sites like PartnerPulse, as well as those catering for non Microsoft vendors (VendorStack being a good example), are part of a wider trend in the enterprise world for peer reviews and social analysis.

So what does this mean? Well PartnerPulse gives every partner a profile. Every profile hosts any number of Pulses, which are short messages posted by anyone. Pulses can consist of text, images, URLs, or ratings. But Pulses can also be summed, and calculated. Text can be analysed for sentiment (are the contents generally positive or negative). Ultimately partners can be scored based on their Pulses. Who has the most Pulses, who has the most positive Pulses?

This is a new way for companies to think about marketing online, to think about reviews and ratings. Klout and Kred have made great strides in this area for individuals. Sites like PartnerPulse now want to do it for companies as well. If 640,000 members of the Microsoft Partner Network want to differentiate themselves, they need to sit up and take notice. Online marketing isn’t just about Google adverts, or sponsored blog posts. It is about people, reputations, scores, and reviews. PartnerPulse is trying to give Microsoft partners a platform, it will be interesting to see how they use it.

Photo Credit: nopporn/Shutterstock

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