WILL FLURRY BE THE NEXT BIG TECH IPO?

Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of Flurry before. A lot of people haven’t, but if you own a smartphone your certain to have been affected by this quiet mobile adtech giant. Some surprising information can be found on their website. The company claims to have a reach of over 1 billion devices each month and mines 3 terabytes of data each day through 350,000 apps from 115,000 different companies.

Business Insider’s Jim Edwards had a talk with Flurry CEO Simon Khalaf about the future of the company:

Simon Khalaf, the CEO of mobile adtech company Flurry, tells Business Insider that an IPO is inevitable in the company's future because his business has grown so big.

There has been gossip about a possible Flurry IPO for months now. Large adtech companies are often aimed specifically at IPO "exits," so that their venture capital funders can get a payback on their investments. Millennial Media, Tremor Video, YuMe, Criteo and Marin Software have all gone public recently. Yet when CEOs are asked directly if they want the rich rewards of floating their companies on the public markets, they usually demur or hedge.

When we asked Khalaf about an IPO exit, however, he was refreshingly direct: "I consider an IPO an entrance," he tells us. "We don't have a choice, our volume is too high and our scale is too big for anyone to absorb us."

Flurry has a net revenue run-rate of about $100 million. It has 150 employees and has taken $50.5 million in funding from investors. And although that doesn't make Flurry the biggest player in mobile adtech — InMobi and Velti still have more employees, and Millennial has greater revenues — it is one of the biggest players in big data analytics and mobile app ad reach.

Flurry reaches 1.1 billion mobile devices each month with ad impressions inside apps, almost twice as many as Google, which is alarming because everyone knows that Google has the largest share of mobile ad revenue on the planet, which is in the billions of dollars. But the Flurry’s numbers refer to reach on devices via ads in apps. Google's mobile ad business is largely search. And the bulk of consumer time spent on mobile devices is in apps, not on the web, Khalaf says.

Flurry offers the full mobile ad stack, including a "supply side platform" for mobile app publishers who want to offers ad space for sale, a "demand side platform" for buyers who want to place ads, an analytics suite to measure the whole thing, and most recently a "real-time bidding" platform so that buyers can place ads on a live auction basis. That RTB marketplace, launched in April, already has 30 DSPs buying in it, Khalaf says. The Guardian and The BBC both use Flurry as publishers.

There is one more thing Khalaf is unusually direct about. Flurry is not yet profitable, he says. Usually when adtech CEOs are asked whether their businesses make money, they launch into an explanation of how they're investing for growth or scale (or they say something impenetrably complicated about EBITDA). When asked whether the company is profitable, Khalaf says, "No. In 2014 we're profitable maybe."

The reason: Flurry is spending $28 million a year on data centers. "The cost of analytics is huge," Khalaf says. Flurry wants to create the largest HBase cluster in the business, he says, referring to the gigantic — and gigantically expensive — database serving devices that can handle millions of lines of tabled information.

You can read the original article here: http://www.businessinsider.com/flurry-ipo-and-ceo-simon-khalaf-2013-9

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE TWITTER IPO

On Thursday Twitter announced via a tweet that they had confidentially filed their S-1 documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a planned initial public stock offering. Twitter, with 200 million users, is the currently most highly anticipated consumer Internet IPO. The excitement surrounding the Twitter IPO will be the largest since Facebook went public in May 2012. For investors looking to get in on the action here is what you need to know.

As Forbes explains, under SEC rules established in the JOBS Act passed last year, companies defined as “emerging growth companies” can file their S-1′s confidentially if their annual revenue is less than $1 billion.

Companies do not have to make their documents public until 21 days before the company goes on the “road show” to pitch the company to big investors on Wall Street for the IPO. The documents remain completely shielded from public until then.

Despite the confidential filing, this does signal that Twitter is making less than $1 billion in annual revenue. That’s generally in line with third party estimates. EMarketer in March estimated Twitter’s revenue at $582 million this year and close to $1 billion in 2014.

Just last week, Twitter acquired mobile ad exchange company MoPub for $350 million in stock, showing the much larger advertising ambitions beyond its promoted Tweets. MoPub offers ad services on a variety of publishers’ apps beyond Twitter.

However, investors are still waiting for details on how many shares of the social media company will be offered, the timing of the offering and the price of the shares. Typically, much-anticipated IPOs are doled out by the investment bankers running the deal to favored clients and long-standing customers. Individual investors interested in buying shares usually have to purchase them in the open market once trading begins. But experts are thinking Twitter may likely follow the lead set by Facebook and other recent IPOs in holding back some shares for individual investors. With most recent IPOs, there will usually be about 20% of the shares outstanding held back for individual investors, says Jay Ritter, professor of finance at the University of Florida.

Interested investors will need to check with their brokerages over the coming months to see how many shares, if any, will be available to them. Most large online brokerages have deals with underwriters that allow them to get allocations to certain IPOs.

More details will be revealed after Twitter officially files its IPO registration statement for the public to see, possibly as early as November.

Fast Facts about Twitter

Twitter was founded 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone and Evan Williams.

In the first hour of @Twitter sending their IPO announcement tweet, 7,872 people retweeted the message.

Twitter soared to popularity in 2007 at the South By Southwest Interactive festival in Austin, Texas.

A billion tweets are sent every two and a half days. That's three for every man, woman and child in the U.S.

The 2013 Superbowl performance by Beyonce had 268 million tweets per minute, more than any other event in past two years.