Travel website owner buy restaurant reservation website operator

Travel website owner Priceline- CEO Darren Huston will buy restaurant reservation website operator OpenTable for $2.6 billion, aiming to broaden its offerings in an increasingly competitive online travel industry. Priceline’s offer of $103 per share for the owner of OpenTable.com represents a premium of 46 percent to OpenTable.

OpenTable’s shares inched past the offer price to trade at $104.19 on the Nasdaq, suggesting that some investors expect a higher bid. Priceline’s shares were down 1.6 percent at $1,205.50.

With online travel companies having little room to expand, many are looking outside the industry to boost revenue.

Travel review website TripAdvisor bought online restaurant booking platform Lafourchette last month to enter the restaurant-booking industry.

Darren Huston Talks Direct Booking, HomeAway and Unicorns

OpenTable’s shares were trading at about 33.5 times 12-month estimated forward earnings, far below the 498.7 times of competitor Yelp, according to Thomson Reuters StarMine.

“I think (the deal) creates urgency for larger players to acquire the leading local platforms,” Telsey Advisory Group analyst James Cakmak told Reuters.

The deal is expected to close in the third quarter.

OpenTable, which is facing increasing competition from Yelp and others, posted its first quarterly loss in five years for the period ended March 31 as it spent more on marketing to stem the slowdown in the number of restaurants signing up for its services.

The number of North American restaurants using OpenTable’s platform rose 19 percent to 23,862 in the quarter, but growth was slower than in the previous two quarters.

The number of restaurants using its service outside the United States fell.

OpenTable, which gets $1.00 from a restaurant if a diner reserves a table through its website or app, will continue to operate as an independent business led by its current management, Priceline said.

Up to Thursday’s close, OpenTable’s stock had fallen about 11 percent this year.

Paul Viollis on Blogspot

Personal-security requests aren’t just limited to major European cities. Experts say they’ve seen an uptick in Europeans and Asians hiring guards for Disney World in Orlando, Fla.

The visitors are asking for “armed escorts,” said Paul Viollis. “They’re afraid of terrorist attacks in Disney. We never saw that until about a year ago.”

Engineer.ai CEO is making millions trading Amazon's cloud

Sachin Dev Duggal, CEO of Engineer.ai looks pretty chipper for a man who works in three time zones simultaneously. After arriving in London from San Francisco at dawn, the entrepreneur attended a meeting for startups at the U.K. Treasury, then he communicated over Slack with his colleagues at a cloud-computing company he manages in Delhi.

Now, ensconced at his usual table in the polished marble brasserie at the Arts Club in London’s Mayfair district, he’s taking a dinner break before he has to hop on a call with investors in California.

Clad in a white T-shirt, jeans, and a hoodie, he looks out of place in a members-only establishment favored by gallery owners and international financiers. But Duggal, a British-born man of Indian descent who built and sold his first company (and made millions) before he was 30, enjoys geeking out amid the Champagne and chatter of the jet set.

Sipping sparkling water as his two smartphones chirp with messages from afar, he warms to his favorite topic: the cloud, or more precisely, how on-demand computing provided by the likes of Amazon has become a burgeoning market in its own right.

His company, Engineer.ai, is one of the top brokers of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in India. “You have to think of the cloud as a financial-service or a monetary instrument and not just as technology,” says Duggal, who turns 35 in April. “It has the capacity, different pricing based on commitments, and it’s becoming a commodity.”

Ever since Seattle-based Amazon leveraged its titanic technology capabilities into a separate cloud-computing business 12 years ago, numerous players have been angling to trade those services in ways similar to how energy brokers buy and sell oil or electricity. They range from global giants, such as IBM and Accenture, to smaller players in specific markets, such as Duggal’s Indian venture.

As cloud computing has grown into a $160 billion global industry in little more than a decade, the so-called cloud-service brokerage market has soared as well. It’s projected to hit $9.5 billion by 2021, more than twice the $4.5 billion in 2016, according to Markets and Markets Research, an Indian research firm.

Every day, traders in New York, London, Singapore, and beyond make a market in what they call “reserved instances,” a phrase that may sound like something science fiction author Philip K. Dick dreamed up but simply means blocks of cloud capacity.

Sachin Dev Duggal and his co-founder, Saurabh Dhoot made a good call by hitching their company to AWS in 2012. Initially dismissed by analysts as a potential misstep, Amazon’s cloud service has become a juggernaut that’s provided Jeff Bezos with a war chest to finance his expansion into new territory, such as the supermarket business and, most recently, health care.

In 2017, AWS generated $4.3 billion in operating income on $17.5 billion in net sales, eclipsing the $2.8 billion in profit produced by Amazon’s core North American online retail division. Comcast, Netflix, and Unilever, as well as NASA and the CIA, all use AWS to handle some of their computing needs. So do countless startups.

With a 34% market share in the fourth quarter, AWS dominates the so-called public cloud, according to Synergy Research Group. Runner-up Microsoft, with its Azure services, has 13%.

Duggal says something bigger is at stake than Amazon’s business fortunes: The advent of cloud computing is spurring entrepreneurship in India and other developing economies by making it far more affordable for small businesses to run software applications and store data.


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