Tag: small business for sale

From teen wizards to Harry Styles romances: How Wattpad created a user-generated media empire

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In the world of Wattpad, no genre is too niche. The user-generated publishing platform, founded in 2006 and boasting 90 million monthly readers, has spent the past few years turning its most online popular stories into both print books and movies and TV shows. In 2021, the multimedia powerhouse was acquired by the Korean tech giant Naver for $600 million—a price buoyed by Wattpad’s ability to analyze content down to which lines of a story readers like best (and absolutely must appear in a movie adaptation). “We have what is possibly the largest library of fiction that’s ever been created,” says Aron Levitz, General Manager of Wattpad Studios, the film and TV arm. “Our audience data allows us to really explore that.” The company’s insights have catapulted dozens of untraditional stories to box office and bestseller success.  Click to expand [Data Visualization: Chelsea Schiff] Wattpad estimates it has 90 projects currently in development (see above), with more titles being surfaced every day by users and algorithms. Some prime examples of the company’s success: Anna Todd’s After series began as Harry Styles fanfiction, selling millions of books. The first After feature film, released in 2019, made $70 million, and a third ( After We Collided ) will come out later this year. Young adult novel I’m A Gay Wizard was one of Wattpad Books’ first print releases in 2019, and is currently being developed into a TV series by the Wattpad Development Fund, which identifies and elevates underrepresented stories for film and TV. The company also has a massive presence in Asia: Indonesian romance novel Turn On garnered more than 17 million reads on Wattpad, and debuted as an eight part TV series in January. With 10 million views so far, it’s the most successful Wattpad project of 2021. Read More …

How two Southeast Asian superapps beat Uber at its own game

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In 2009, while Uber’s cofounders were gearing up to launch, a cadre of young Asian entrepreneurs-to-be entered the MBA program at Harvard Business School. Out of that group came two ride-sharing startups that would evolve quite differently than their American cousins. The company now called Grab was conceived by Malaysian students Anthony Tan and Hooi Ling Tan (no relation) as their entry in a business-plan contest. They didn’t win—but later, they wound up out-Ubering Uber in burgeoning cities across the 10-country ASEAN region in Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, another classmate took a zigzag route to the top. Nadiem Makarim, working remotely with buddies back home in Indonesia, started Gojek as a side project while finishing his MBA. This ride-share app has branched into businesses from massage therapy to moviemaking. And just this week Gojek announced the largest business deal in Indonesia’s history, its merger with e-commerce giant Tokopedia. (Disclosure: Golden Gate Ventures is a small shareholder of Gojek via its acquisition of Ruma Mapan. We’ve also invested in Gojek’s spinout, GoPlay.) Both Gojek and Grab are now venture-funded decacorns. Each is headed for a dual IPO on New York and Asian exchanges. And they’re racing to dominate much more than ride-hailing on Southeast Asians’ mobile phone screens. Grab and Gojek each offer what hasn’t yet been seen in the U.S. market: a superapp combo, featuring a payment app that’s a potential gateway to selling anything people may wish to buy. Gojek’s Winding Road Gojek began modestly in 2010. At first it was a “minimum viable product” venture—a local, low-tech operation led on a part-time basis by its faraway founder. Read More …

Sick of Zoom meetings? Send Otter Assistant to attend your next one

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What’s worse than missing a meeting? Attending one. So say most workers and managers, even as more meetings were held in the last 15 months than perhaps in any previous 450-day period. Otter.ai wants to free you from taking notes at virtual and hybrid meetings—and maybe even from attending them. Its deep-learning voice-transcription service can now scan your Google or Outlook calendar for Zoom sessions, automatically sign in at the appropriate time, and produce a live transcription that you and other participants can correct, annotate, and highlight in real time. Or—if you’ve ditched the meeting—your colleagues can while you’re busy elsewhere Read More …

Don’t get too excited about Apple Music’s ‘spatial’ and ‘lossless’ music

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I’ve often gushed about my admiration for Apple’s commitment to music. The company employs a lot of musicians or ex-musicians, and even more music lovers. It’s not trivial: It says something about the company’s culture and the way it approaches creativity and collaboration. Apple has obviously made many important music-related announcements in its time, but this week’s announcement about Apple Music offering “lossless” and “spatial” audio probably won’t end up rocking the world. Spatial audio Apple has been working with Dolby to begin making some of the Apple Music catalog available in Dolby’s proprietary Atmos format. Those recordings are meant to sound something like the experience of watching a movie with surround-sound technology, where sounds might come from behind you, above you, or anywhere else within a spherical audio surface around you. And sounds can move around in that space, so a guitar solo might seem to slowly circle above your head (which is cool, because guitar solos are boring). Apple says it’s going to start off with a few thousand Atmos songs in June, including some from Ariana Grande, Kacey Musgraves, and others, and then add more tracks over time. When the spatial support launches next month, Apple devices will be set to play available songs by default, rather than the regular binaural mix. I’ve no doubt the Atmos mixes themselves will be true to the spatial concept. Read More …

How Google’s new ‘MUM’ algorithm could transform the way we search

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Google is flexing its artificial intelligence muscle to help users of its search engine research complex tasks that would normally involve multiple queries. Many of the Google searches we do are just a single query, such as “file a request for extension federal tax.” But other searches involve several searches about different aspects of a complex task. You might, for example, want to know how to prepare for a river rafting trip in Montana in August, and how the preparations might differ from the preparations you did before your Colorado River rafting trip last fall. If you asked a local rafting expert how to prepare you might get an extended answer that covers a range of relevant questions. Will the weather be hotter than it was in Colorado Read More …