Priceline announced Thursday that it has acquired Kayak at $40 a share, putting the travel search site at a $1.8 billion valuation. Kayak recently went public in July 2012 after delaying its IPO since 2010, waiting for the markets to improve. Read more »
A lot of hopes were riding on Facebook having a superstar IPO, including the hopes of venture investors that it would help trigger a wave of interest in other social-web companies, which could then also go public. But now those rosy assumptions are in question. Read more »
Who says the IPO window is shut: successful public offerings by online travel company Kayak and networking software company Palo Alto Networks shows that investors will open their checkbooks as long as the companies have real business prospects. Both stocks ended their first day flying high. Read more »
Kayak, which first filed to go public back in November of 2010, is back on track with its IPO. The company updated its S-1 Monday saying it is looking to raise up to $100.6 million after pricing its IPO between $22 and $25 per share. Read more »
ESPN is seeing huge traffic and engagement from its mobile offerings — enough for the sports giant to think about its design and products from a “mobile-first” perspective. And it is not alone, as we have pointed out many times before. Read more »
One of the world’s most popular travel websites has decided mobile is better. On Monday, Kayak will reveal an updated design for its eight-year-old site. The interesting part? Kayak is now taking design cues from its recently updated iPad and iPhone apps, not vice versa. Read more »
On Tuesday Kayak plans to launch a new app for iOS. It’s throwing out its old Kayak HD app and making a universal app for iOS. We talk to its head of mobile about the lessons learned since the launch on the original iPad. Read more »
The window of opportunity for Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) is almost closed according to a report released by the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) in conjunction with Thomson Reuters. The report points out that the Q3 2011 was the weakest since the end of 2009. Read more »
Will huge returns on social media investments — like Groupon, LinkedIn or Pandora — help make up for underperforming greentech investments in a venture firm’s portfolio? If so, perhaps this gives firms time — and wiggle room — to keep up their cleantech investing. Read more »
Last week, investors poured money into ShopIgniter and Milyoni, companies that build Facebook storefronts for merchants and retailers. Many are skeptical about that opportunity, but with thousands of merchants building Facebook stores, it’s worth examining the challenges and what could make those stores effective shopping vehicles. Read more »
Kayak kicked off 2011 with major sales growth in the run-up to its planned IPO, according to a regulatory filing. The travel search company made $52.6 million in the first three months of 2011, representing a 43.4 percent increase over the same period in 2010 Read more »
LinkedIn is upping its expectations for its much-anticipated IPO, which it now believes can pull in as much as $274 million. The company this morning released the pricing for its IPO and is now prepared to offer 7.84 million shares at $32 to $35 each Read more »
Business and IT leaders now face significant opportunities and challenges with big data — that is data sets that are so large they are difficult to store, manage and analyze. This report explores the rapidly evolving big data business and technology ecosystem. It examines big data in the context of several different industries: financial services, health care, sports, travel and media. We explore the different big data technologies — from Hadoop and NoSQL derivatives to cloud-based collaboration tools — and their various benefits for enterprises. And we examine some of the existing challenges big data poses, and what enterprise IT leaders can do to overcome them. Companies mentioned in this report include Amazon Web Services, Google, Teradata, IBM and Cloudera. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Kayak is now handling hotel bookings itself, rather than just referring customers to partner sites like Expedia and Orbitz. The move marks a significant turn as Kayak shifts from simply aggregating travel deal information into being a destination where users can complete their purchase. Read more »
Social commerce involves businesses using online collaborative tools — social networks, real-time feeds and user-generated contributions, for example — in order to sell products and services to consumers. The space is now more dynamic than ever: Hundreds of startups like Groupon, Zynga and CrowdStar have emerged, and it’s also attracting the attention — and cash — of online giants like Google, Amazon and Apple. This report examines the factors propelling the sector’s growth, how it will evolve over the next one to three years and what that means for those companies involved. We also examine factors inhibiting the growth of social commerce, and the likelihood of fragmentation as more local markets emerge. Companies mentioned in this report include Groupon, Foursquare, Gowalla, Playfish and LivingSocial. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Silicon Valley has to get over its initial public offering anxiety, according to Benchmark Capital’s Bill Gurley, and it needs to do it fast. What could help? An initial public offering by Kayak, the travel service, which filed for a $50 million IPO today. Read more »
It’s hard not to be intrigued by the bits of information that have filtered out of stealthy startup New Travelco, which comes from Expedia, Zillow and Glassdoor founder Rich Barton, along with other “early Expedians” including Greg Slyngstad, co-founder of VacationSpot and board member of Kayak. Read more »
One of the more solid and genuinely useful Internet startups out there, Kayak, was dissected in a report released today by NeXt Up Research for SharesPost. Based on estimated revenue and comparison to competitors, the report estimates Kayak’s market cap at between $705 and $771 million. Read more »
Yapta today announced a partnership with travel search site Kayak that will make its highly useful flight-tracking service a lot more accessible. Soon, all search results on Kayak and its subsidiary SideStep will give you the option to “track price drops.” Read more »
A mobile app needs to be more accessible than a web site, but not simpler and dumber. Travel search service Kayak is changing its overall business strategy to address user needs it only became aware after seeing how they use its iPhone app. Read more »
