Startups

Lazada, the e-commerce site founded by Rocket Internet in a bid to build the “Amazon of Southeast Asia,” announced today that it has landed another $100 million from returning investors Holtzbrinck Ventures, Kinnevik Investment AB, Summit Partners and Tengelmann Group, as well as new investor, Belgian-based family-owned investment holding company Verlinvest. This is the largest single round that Lazada has raised to date, and brings its total amount of funding raised since its launch in March 2012 to more than $236 million. News of Lazada’s latest and biggest funding round comes just one month after Zalora, Rocket Internet’s Southeast Asia-facing fashion retail site, announced that it had also raised $100 million in a round led by many of the same investors, including Rocket Internet, Summit Partners, Kinnevik Investment AB, Verlinvest and Tengelmann Group. The two rounds are among the largest ever for e-commerce startups in the region. Lazada operates in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. The site has a lot of room for growth in the region, but also a lot of catching up to do because, according to its own estimates, 99% of Southeast Asian consumers still prefer to do their shopping offline. CEO Maximilian Bittner told Reuters that Lazada’s latest funding will be used to improve logistics and the company’s supply chain, a key factor in the the site’s growth across the region, especially since key rival Amazon announced earlier this month that it would ship some items from the U.S. to Singapore and India for free. Like Amazon, Lazada offers a mix of books, household goods, consumer electronics, toys and sports equipment. The company is also readying the launch of its iOS app, an important move because many Southeast Asian consumers bypass PCs and rely solely on their mobile devices for Internet access (Lazada already has an Android app). Rocket Internet’s continued investment in Lazada, Zalora and its other e-commerce sites in emerging markets represent a departure from its previous strategy operating as a “clone factory” that copies high-growth online sites and then flips them for a profit–often to the very businesses cloned (for example, when Rocket Internet sold Citydeal to Groupon in 2010). Instead, Rocket Internet is now focused on positioning itself as an e-commerce leader in emerging economies with rapidly-growing middle class consumers. Other retail sites Rocket Internet has launched in emerging markets include fashion site Lamoda in Russia (which raised $130 million in funding earlier this month), Zappos clone Namshi in the Middle East, home furnishings site Mobly in Brazil and African retail site Jumia.

Let’s face it. Venture capitalists who take credit for successful startups at the expense of their firms are about as common as seagulls at a beach-side picnic. Now, there’s evidence to suggest that some of their hot-dogging is warranted. When it comes to predicting which startups will be successful, individual venture capitalists are roughly five times more powerful as leading indicators than the firms for which they work, according to a new study published by Harvard and Carnegie Mellon academics. Here’s how the study worked: Using econometrics – the application of math, computer science and statistical models – Matthew Rhodes-Kropf, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, and Michael Ewens, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon, pored over the Dow Jones VentureSource database of venture-backed startups that were founded between 1987 and 2005. They also culled data from Correlation Ventures, a San Diego-based venture firm that uses quantitative methods to invest in startups (and where Rhodes-Kropf and Ewens are consultants). The authors controlled for all kinds of deviations, such as the industry that the venture capitalists were backing, the amount of dollars their firms invested, how much experience they had at the time of the investment, and the age of the startup itself. They also tracked whether the venture capitalists’ success — or lack of it — changed if they shifted to other firms (investments were attributed to VCs based on their board seats), and how these investors compared to their fellow partners. In all instances, they found significant partner “persistence.” That is to say, “The guys who know how to get big exits get big exits no matter where [they’re employed],” says Rhodes-Kropf. “The guys who fail are pretty consistent about that, too.” “I’m not saying Sequoia doesn’t have value,” he adds. “I’m saying that on average, the firm is not very helpful. You can see guys move among firms regularly and find little in the way of changing performance.” I asked Rhodes-Kropf what it means for a partner’s human capital to be up to five times more important than a firm’s organization capital. Does it mean that certain people are five times more likely to steer a company to a successful acquisition or public offering? He says it doesn’t work that way; it has more to do with “signal strength.” Rhodes-Kropf concedes that his study “doesn’t prove anything.” Econometrics also can’t definitively answer why some people are more successful than others over the course of their careers. “I tried to control for as many things, but why one outperforms the other one, I don’t know,” he says. Still, he believes, based on his study, that networks are “maybe just more personal than we may have thought.” The study also seemingly highlights the importance of that intangible quality which all venture capitalists would like to think they possess — skill. “It’s easy to say, ‘Oh, so and so works at this top-tier fund. They see all the best business plans,’” says Rhodes-Kropf. “In some cases, that may be true. But you have to remember that those business plans all look pretty good, and they involve good people. Some investors can just look at 10 strong possibilities and say, ‘That one.’ Some can just smell it a little better.” Image courtesy of Shutterstock. The post Evidence, Finally, that VCs Are More Important than Their Firms appeared first on peHUB.

(Reuters) – A high profile sex discrimination lawsuit in Silicon Valley should be taken private via arbitration, lawyers for venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers argued on Wednesday, but the plaintiff, former partner Ellen Pao, wants the chance to tell her story before a judge. A lawyer for Kleiner told a panel of state court appellate justices on Wednesday that one reason the firm preferred arbitration to litigation was to avoid disclosing the relative compensation of Kleiner partners. Another reason, he said, was to spare embarrassment to Pao. The case involves sensitive issues such as Pao’s sexual relationship with another former partner. She was terminated in October, five months after filing her lawsuit. After the hearing, Pao said she was eager for the case to move ahead. “They continue to drag this out,” she said after the hearing about her former employer. “I just want my day in court.” The hearing centered around the issue of whether agreements governing individual Kleiner funds that Pao signed should compel the case into arbitration. Those agreements call for arbitration of disputes rather than litigation. The issues Pao is litigating involve economics of the funds she was involved with,” the firm said in a statement. “All of those economic issues are governed by the Managing LLC agreements which require that disputes be resolved through arbitration.” Pao’s lawyer, Alan Exelrod, argues that she was suing Kleiner itself – not its funds. Pao never signed any arbitration agreements with the firm itself, Exelrod says. Last year, a judge in California Superior Court agreed with Exelrod. Kleiner appealed. The lawsuit has inspired debate especially in the Bay Area on its specific merits as well as the broader issue of sexism in the technology sector. The justices have up to 90 days to issue a decision. Until Pao’s lawsuit, issues surrounding gender had largely been brushed under the rug in the clubby world of venture capital. Since the lawsuit was filed, female employees at Pantheon and CMEA have also filed lawsuits alleging discrimination, but the firms have a lower profile than Kleiner. Kleiner Perkins, founded in 1972, has backed big-name firms such as online retailer Amazon.com Inc, gaming company Electronic Arts Inc, biotechnology company Genentech, browser company Netscape, information-technology company Sun Microsystems and gaming company Zynga Inc. The case in Superior Court of the State of California is Ellen Pao v Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers LLC and Does 1-20, case no. 12-520719. Photo courtesy of Shutterstock The post Ex-Kleiner Partner Wants Day in Court in Discrimination Lawsuit appeared first on peHUB.

I was asked by a respected colleague from the technology world this question: What is marketing? Mind you, this is a guy who is involved in, and gets marketing. As anyone who works in marketing knows, this is a difficult question to answer. But when I provided some thought on the question, I found that my answer is now longer what it used to be. Hence, I thought I would share it here. I’ve broken it up into 3 parts. The first in order to provide a baseline definition and context. General simplified thought: The development, distribution and promotion of products and services to suit a specific audience in order to achieve business objectives. Unlike what many lay people believe it is neither about selling or advertising, and is much more about business management in totality. Or even more simply, marketing is a fancy word for business. Marketing Then: The tools of marketing which flowed naturally from this were know as the 4 P’s. Product – Solution Price – Value equation Place – Access Promotion – Communication Historically the job of the marketer has been to strategically organise the 4P’s of marketing (the marketing mix) in order to deliver a sustained commercial outcome between the brand and the audience. But it does feel like this is just not enough…. especially not when all of the factors we deal with are being disrupted via technological revolution. Marketing Now: If we want to be a great marketer in 2013 then I feel like there is much more to it today. With the process being non-linear all the forces interact more strongly. Our interests need to be broader than that of the marketer from 1950-2000. I feel there are 4 areas we need to be interested in. And only when we are interested in these areas, will we have the intellectual arsenal to develop an effective marketing mix, regardless of which industry we are involved in. Anthropology: A genuine interest in and study of modern day human movement and historical evolution. The ability to understand and spot patterns based on changing macro behaviour. Being able to see the movement of the collective sentience. Technology: A solid understanding of where technology is taking us in the medium term. Not just understanding how to use what has already arrived, but knowing what is coming next. Knowing the implications of disposable technology, ambient computing and internet everywhere. Believing in this and integrating it into everything you market. In an age of exponential change there is no choice. Finance: A solid understanding of what makes industries and the economy function. A financial brand which goes beyond COGS (Cost of goods sold) and marketing budget parameters. We need to be adept in raising capital, investing and ratio analysis…. all forms of finance are integral in what A grade marketers need to know. Commerce: A true understanding in the art of connections. The why and how do certain parties transact with each other. How are they connecting now, and how will they connect tomorrow. It goes beyond distribution points and pricing models. It digs deep into need scopes and relative utility. It’s the real side of human interaction where commerce facilitates life goals and money is just the way we keep track of who is doing what. A lot of this might sound meta physical, and it is. But like all forms of evolution, new layers get added – and these four elements are the layers which will define how the successful entrepreneurs and business people of tomorrow need to think.

July 9-10, 2013 San Francisco, CA Tickets On Sale Now The main thing MakerBot CEO Bre Pettis wants you to know about his company’s merger with Stratasys is that, no, MakerBot is not selling out. “We’re a growing company. We’re out there to make 3D printing easier and more accesible to more people, and this will help us do that,” Pettis told me earlier today. While it’s barely four years old, MakerBot has quickly established itself as the most hippest, most interesting 3D printing company around. This, as you might expect, automatically made it an attractive target for the 25-year-old 3D printing giant Stratasys, which, like any industry incumbent, could always use some new, innovative blood in its veins. To put it simply: Stratasys, which is focused on the industrial end of 3D printing, had a consumer market-shaped hole in its product line. And MakerBot was the perfect fit for it. The move is a smart one for MakerBot as well. As any hardware startup founder can tell you, scaling your company’s manufacturing operations is hard work – particularly if you’re manufacturing something as intricate as a 3D printer. By working alongside Stratasys, MakerBot finally has a viable way to decrease the days-long lead time for its 3D printers, which, in turn, means getting its printers in the hands of more people. Stratasys’s acquisition may finally give MakerBot a chance to decrease the lead time on the manufacturing of its printers. The other thing to keep in mind is that MakerBot will do most of this without Stratasys breathing down its neck. During my interview, both Pettis and Stratasys CEO David Reis stressed that, while MakerBot is now a part of Stratasys, the company is still going to do its own thing. “We admire and like the way MakerBot operates. It’s a fast-growing, energetic company with a different go-to-market strategy and we’d like to keep it that way,” Reis said. Still, as Reis pointed out, there’s going to be a lot of room for so-called “synergies”, where both companies can combine their respective strengths to accomplish some larger goal.  As Reis points out, one of these goals is finally providing Stratasys’s customers with a true end-to-end 3D printing product offering. “We want people to buy from one company all they need,” Reis said, noting that Stratasys can now sell consumer printers, professional printers, and everything between. In all,  the move seems like a big win for all parties — including New York City and Brooklyn, where MakerBot was founded and continues to operate (and where it  recently opened up a new factory). “We are so proud to be growing in Brooklyn. We live here and manufacture here that’s not going to change,” Pettis said.   Filed under: Business .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat { width:278px; margin:0px 0px 10px 20px; padding:10px; float:right; border:1px solid #e4e4e4; font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif; color:#000; } .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat .logo-date-wrap { width:100%; display:block; float:left; margin-bottom:8px; } .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat img { float:left; } .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat .date-location { float:right; font-size:12px; line-height:14px; text-align:center; padding-left:7px; padding-top:5px; padding-bottom:3px; border-left:1px solid #e6e6e6; color:#585a5b; } .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat .cta { display:block; clear:both; width:100%; border-radius:5px; border:1px solid #1864b1; color:#fff; text-shadow: 0px -1px 0px rgba(0,0,0,0.3); text-align:center; text-decoration:none; font-weight:600; font-size:18px; line-height:17px; padding:4px 0px 6px 0px; background: #1f80e4; background: -moz-linear-gradient(top,  #1f80e4 0%, #1862ae 100%); background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, color-stop(0%,#1f80e4), color-stop(1

July 9-10, 2013 San Francisco, CA Tickets On Sale Now Shopping for clothes online can easily turn into a downward spiral of frustration. “Buying engine” TheFind has unveiled its new iPad app that seeks to turn e-commerce into pleasant shopping experience. TheFind was founded in 2005 back in the early days of e-commerce. It applies machine learning and semantic search to shopping, crawling the web and collecting information on over 500 million products from 500,000 stores. Shoppers enter search terms and filters and the system will surface what you are looking for and provide product comparisons. Sources like Amazon and Google feature content based on advertising, while e-commerce sites like Fab, Polyvore, Wanelo, and Zazzle rely on social activity to make recommendations. TheFind’s goal is to help shoppers find exactly what they are looking for, along with relevant discounts. TheFind gets 18 million unique visitors a month. Director of Corporate Communications Usher Lieberman said in an interview with VentureBeat that 30 percent of TheFind’s traffic is now mobile and its iPad traffic has grown by more than 250 percent in the last year. He said that the iPad will become the device that people use to shop but there are no apps yet that make the most of this opportunity. “An app like this will be destructive in e-commerce,” Lieberman said. “Tablet shopping has exploded, but shopping in the browser just isn’t going to cut it. Our app can fundamentally provide a better experience by cutting across all stores with personalized search, making check out easy, and storing your information. We want this iPad app to become the defacto starting point for shopping and ultimately a daily habit.” eMarketer found that global e-commerce sales topped $1 trillion in 2012 and the numbers are continuing to rise. Mobile commerce is an important part of this trend. Gartner predicted that by 2015 more tablets will be sold than PCs and the Bank of America forecasted that American and European shoppers will spend $67.1 billion on smartphone and tablet purchases in 2015. Despite this momentum, mobile commerce is still held back by a few key obstacles. Many retailers do not offer sites optimized for tablets and checkout is still frustrating. TheFind put a lot of focus into a creating a user-friendly, secure, and seamless checkout process within the app to create an overall experience that encourages browsers to buy. Behind the scenes, natural language processing technology helps to identify and cluster products so you only receive relevant results. By combining metadata about each product with your own preferences and social graph, TheFind could ultimately show you things you want, without even knowing you wanted them. TheFind is based in Mountain View, California and has raised a total of $26 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, and Cambrian Ventures. Filed under: Business, Lifestyle, Mobile .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat { width:278px; margin:0px 0px 10px 20px; padding:10px; float:right; border:1px solid #e4e4e4; font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif; color:#000; } .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat .logo-date-wrap { width:100%; display:block; float:left; margin-bottom:8px; } .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat img { float:left; } .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat .date-location { float:right; font-size:12px; line-height:14px; text-align:center; padding-left:7px; padding-top:5px; padding-bottom:3px; border-left:1px solid #e6e6e6; color:#585a5b; } .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat .cta { display:block; clear:both; width:100%; border-radius:5px; border:1px solid #1864b1; color:#fff; text-shadow: 0px -1px 0px rgba(0,0,0,0.3); text-align:center; text-decoration:none; font-weight:600; font-size:18px; line-height:17px; padding:4px 0px 6px 0px; background: #1f80e4; background: -moz

Google chief legal office and senior vice president David Drummond got right to the point. Asked in a Q&A session with The Guardian immediately following whistleblower Edward Snowden’s live Q&A, Drummond denied that the NSA has access to Google’s data and servers, as has been extensively alleged via the NSA’s PRISM program. I’m not sure I can say this more clearly: we’re not in cahoots with the NSA and there’s is no government program that Google participates in that allows the kind of access that the media originally reported. Note that I say “originally” because you’ll see that many of those original sources corrected their articles after it became clear that the PRISM slides were not accurate. Now, what does happen is that we get specific requests from the government for user data. We review each of those requests and push back when the request is overly broad or doesn’t follow the correct process. There is no free-for-all, no direct access, no indirect access, no back door, no drop box. This is much, much clearer and more specific than any of the company denials from Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, AOL, Yahoo, and other companies accused of indiscriminately sharing data with the NSA. Those earlier denials seemed strangely similar, and seemed to offer big holes via which data sharing could still be taking place. This is a good message to hear from Google, which has seen its users’ confidence shaken significantly with the PRISM accusations. We heard “no direct access to servers” before. We haven’t heard “no indirect access,” and we haven’t heard “no back door,” or “no drop box.” What that means — assuming Drummond is truthful and in possession of all the facts — that PRISM is not the program that we initially thought it was: a program by which Google and thousands of other companies were potentially supplying shadowy government agencies with vast quantities of what was supposed to be private data on American citizens. The message squares with what NSA director General Keith Alexander told Congress yesterday, saying that NSA surveillance programs were were limited, legal, and necessary for the protection of the U.S.A. And Drummond reiterated his truthfulness as well as Google’s in response to a Google’ user’s question about whether he was lying: We’re not in the business of lying and we’re absolutely telling the truth about all of this. Our business depends on the trust of our users. And I’m an executive officer of a large publicly traded company, so lying to the public wouldn’t be the greatest career move. Hard-core conspiracy theorists will have their doubts, of course. And you don’t have to be anywhere near hard-core to have significant concerns and questions about PRISM and other NSA activities, and public U.S. companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple’s involvement with them. Drummond talked about Google’s legal attempts to force the government to allow it to reveal the extent of data-sharing that it has been obligated to do. We should all hope that that attempt is successful. Image credit: Daniel Proulx/Flickr Filed under: Big Data, Business, Cloud, Enterprise, Security

July 9-10, 2013 San Francisco, CA Tickets On Sale Now Facebook page owners have long yearned for more insight than PTAT — Facebook’s people talking about this metric — offers. Starting today, they’re getting their wish. Facebook announced today that the statistics and numbers that make up PTAT are now going to be available, by default, in their individual elements, along with other metrics on page owners’ Insights overviews. That includes: Page likes People engaged (people who have clicked on, liked, commented on, or shared something from your page) Page tags and mentions Page checkins In addition, the former Page Insights virality metric, which Facebook says is often used as a benchmark for post quality, is getting more data. Clicks on post links, which have not been included in virality measures, are now being added in, along with the existing count of how many people saw your posts. Since clicks are being added in, Facebook is tossing the “virality” monicker and substituting “engagement rate.” Facebook is also adding new metrics and data around page engagement, showing not only who you’ve reached by who you is engaged with your content, down to sex, geography, country, city, and language: Perhaps most interesting, however, was what Facebook had to say about getting your posts featured in your fans’ news feeds. We all know that Facebook rewards “quality posts” with greater reach, and that posts with more likes, shares, and comments are more likely to be seen by fans. Facebook said today that one major consideration is the ratio of positive interactions to negative interactions. Which means that posts with plenty of likes, comments, and shares … and no hide posts, hide all posts, report as spam, or unlike page actions will do very well. But if the negative reactions go up, your post dies. In the new Page Insights, Facebook will aggregate all those metrics into a single per-post score card, so you’ll be able to see and evaluate those positive and negative interactions, and fine-tune your content strategy for the future. The changes will be rolling out over the next few weeks and months, and Facebook expects to complete the roll-out by the end of summer. Sadly, there is no waiting list you can sign up on to speed access. Image credits: Jolie O’Dell/VentureBeat, MailChimp® via photopin cc Filed under: Business, Entrepreneur, Media, Social .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat { width:278px; margin:0px 0px 10px 20px; padding:10px; float:right; border:1px solid #e4e4e4; font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif; color:#000; } .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat .logo-date-wrap { width:100%; display:block; float:left; margin-bottom:8px; } .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat img { float:left; } .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat .date-location { float:right; font-size:12px; line-height:14px; text-align:center; padding-left:7px; padding-top:5px; padding-bottom:3px; border-left:1px solid #e6e6e6; color:#585a5b; } .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat .cta { display:block; clear:both; width:100%; border-radius:5px; border:1px solid #1864b1; color:#fff; text-shadow: 0px -1px 0px rgba(0,0,0,0.3); text-align:center; text-decoration:none; font-weight:600; font-size:18px; line-height:17px; padding:4px 0px 6px 0px; background: #1f80e4; background: -moz-linear-gradient(top,  #1f80e4 0%, #1862ae 100%); background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, color-stop(0%,#1f80e4), color-stop(100%,#1862ae)); background: -webkit-linear-gradient(top,  #1f80e4 0%,#1862ae 100%); background: -o-linear-gradient(top,  #1f80e4 0%,#1862ae 100%); background: -ms-linear-gradient(top,  #1f80e4 0%,#1862ae 100%); background: linear-gradient(to bottom,  #1f80e4 0%,#1862ae 100%); filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient( startColorstr='#1f80e4', endColorstr='#1862ae',GradientType=0 ); }

When we first discovered that Makerbot was looking to partner with Stratsys I was a bit non-plussed. Makerbot, as I’ve noted before, has a certain indie cred that makes this move a bit unpalatable. But, at the same time, it’s immensely important. Stratasys makes expensive, industrial-quality 3D printers. They are the “big iron” of the 3D printing world. Items printed on Stratasys hardware are as solid as anything produced by, say, injection molding, and the resolution make them indispensable for engineers and designers. In short, Stratasys is making mainframes and Makerbot is making the Apple I. While I’m loath to claim that Bre Pettis is Woz (let alone Steve Jobs), he is a charismatic leader who makes 3D printing fun, something the folks at Stratasys probably could never do. And, like Apple, Makerbot had to ramp up. By signing with Stratasys Makerbot will be able to maintain its breakneck speed and growth. The company recently opened a 50,000 square foot space in Brooklyn where it is assembling machines and it has office space in downtown Brooklyn overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge. They have made it big with very little investment – they recently closed a $10 million round and were nosing around for more before this news – and they suffered from some severe growing pains along the way, especially in employee satisfaction. This purchase gives the company some breathing room, at the very least. Could Makerbot have made it without selling? Possibly, but it wouldn’t have been pretty. Home 3D printing is taking off. It’s not ubiquitous, to be sure, but it’s a method to turn bits into atoms that will become increasingly important in a post manufacturing world. Sadly, VCs are still suspicious of hardware startups (but that’s changing) and Makerbot could have gotten a few infusions of cash to help them glide to cruising altitude. Now they’re already there. Many will say that Makerbot sold out. Many will complain that the company lost open source roots. Many will claim that there are better printers out there. None of these claims are absolutely false, to be clear, but things are not as cut and dry as we like to think. Makerbot took something simple and made it amazing. They sold when they had to, especially considering issues with quality control and support, and I trust Pettis will bring the open source ethos to Stratasys headquarters and tell them it’s off limits. 3D printing isn’t new, just as computing wasn’t new when Apple hit the scene. Makerbot, like Apple, made it accessible. [image via MakerBot]

The reveal of the Xbox One didn’t go as Microsoft hoped. Gamers loved the system, but hated the absurd restrictions placed on the games. But Microsoft listened and just today reversed its stance on some of the more ridiculous policies. Good for them. Good for us. I mean, the outcry was hard to ignore. The memes, the tweets, the visceral anger was everywhere. Even the talking heads on nationwide morning talk shows were debating the curious DRM restrictions. Gone is the daily Internet check. Gone is the very limited region locking. Games can now be rented and traded and passed among friends just like always. Things are essentially back to normal, for better or worse. This move was clearly to save face and eliminate potential digs Sony and Nintendo could (and would and already did) take at the Xbox One. The last thing Microsoft needs is Sony pointing out that the PS4 doesn’t require an always-on Internet connection like the Xbox One. Microsoft didn’t have to reverse its stance. It could have taken the potshots and rolled out, touting the Xbox One’s features alongside the forward-thinking requirements. After all, the company has historically been pretty good about not responding to consumer feedback in a timely manner. Just look at Windows 8. Or Windows Vista. Or Xbox Live. The company has a long history of doing whatever the hell it wants. Even with the crazy restrictions, the average consumer would have probably purchased the Xbox One anyway. Gaming forums and Twitter represent just a small (if noisy) portion of the One’s target market. And with the One launching months from now, in the midst of the holiday season, the talk would have quieted down before it hit Walmart’s shelves. The Xbox One still requires a Kinect to always be connected, and today’s reversal removes some of the more novel features like game sharing from the system. But at least Microsoft is listening and responding quickly. That’s new. Gamers wanted to love the Xbox One but Microsoft made it impossible. Now things have gotten slightly better. [Image via Flickr/dalvenjah]