1. HTC Considering Buying WebOS
HTC chairman Wang Xuehong disclosed that the smartphone vendor is considering buying WebOS. HP announced discontinuing its WebOS business couple weeks ago.
“We had internal deliberation over the potential buyout, but we’re in no hurry to do that.” said Wang.
As the “patent wars” are affecting more and more companies including Apple, Google and Samsung, HTC needs its own mobile operating system to avoid such pitfall. Currently, HTC bases its devices on Android and Windows smartphone, and the company has been involved in patent infringement suits with Apple.
2. Chinese Group Buying Market Seeing Imminent Shake-up?
With more than 3000 new daily deal sites sprang up in H1 of this year and an aggregate of over 5500 similar services in China, everyone is speculating a market shake-up will come sooner or later, it’s just a matter of time.
And according to Xu Maodong, founder and CEO of 55Tuan, one Groupon-clone in China, even in the first half when the market was still seeing strong growth there have been signs for the sooner-or-later upheaval.
And it seems to some analysts, group buying services’ founder including Xu and Meituan CEO Wang Xin, and some venture capitalists, the Chinese Groupons are facing both unsolved problems and mounting competitions. As compared to Groupon, its Chinese counterparts lack behind in terms of gross margin, quality assurance and so on. That’s one of the reasons why there’re a whole lot more complaints over group buying deals in China.
3. Rumor Says 360buy Has To Go Public For Running Low On Money
360buy was scheduled to go public in H1 of 2012, the recent rumor about its impending IPO means the company will go public (if it’s true) a year ahead of time. How come?
Observers speculated that the giant online retailer is running low on cash because it hasn’t received the whole sum of the latest round of funding while it has been splashing out money to ramp up its services.
Now that 360buy is about to run out of the former fundings, there isn’t much choice for 360buy except for going public to raise more money.