Home Depot’s history of acquisitions has run toward building products companies and home services, not Silicon Valley start-ups. But the home improvement retailer is showing that it is trying to be more innovative and forward-thinking with the purchase of online home services marketplace Redbeacon.
It’s unclear how Home Depot wants to use Redbeacon, which allows users to get bids on home projects by contractors using Redbeacon’s marketplace. The start-up, which first launched in 2008 and won a number of start-up competitions, said today that it would remain open for business for its users. It was generally well regarded for its ability to bring together consumers who needed services from contractors. Redbeacon uses algorithms that even look at Facebook connections to find the right contractors for a job.
Home Depot didn’t disclose the purchase price but said that the Redbeacon leadership team would remain in place in San Mateo, CA. The company was founded by former Google workers Ethan Anderson, Aaron Lee and Yaron Binur. It has raised .4 million from Mayfield Fund and Venrock.
Redbeacon co-founders Aaron Lee, Ethan Anderson and Yaron Binur
The deal though shows that big retailers are increasingly looking toward Silicon Valley for ideas and inspiration about how to grow their business. By buying Redbeacon, Home Depot can get some lessons on how to tap users through online and mobile channels. And it helps them become more of a resource for people looking to remodel and improve their homes. Home Depot is not simply about being a physical store to sell goods and services but being a brand that people turn to for all their needs, including labor.
Home Depot has also been working closely on PayPal’s first trial of its in-store payment system. PayPal just said today that it expects to roll that out to all of Home Depot’s more than 2,200 stores by March. That’s another example of Home Depot getting with the times. Increasingly, retailers have to think about how to handle the changing needs of consumers, who are buying online and through mobile devices. Partnering with PayPal gives Home Depot a chance to be first with a new form of payment, but it also means it will likely get first crack at many of the other services PayPal plans to roll out, such location-based offers, in-aisle purchases, scanning products for inventory checks and other in-store services.
Big retailers are being forced to look this way. Walmart bought Kosmix and established Walmart Labs to help it evolve as mobile and social change the way people shop. Walmart Labs has turned around and started acquiring start-ups to help it get up to speed. The Gap has done a bunch of deals with mobile and social start-ups to try and get ahead of new buying patterns. Rival Lowe’s equipped its workers with iPhones last year, in response to Home Depot’s deployment of Motorola devices to help answer consumer questions.
As Venky Harinarayan, SVP Wal-Mart Global eCommerce and Head of WalmartLabs told me the RoadMap conference last year that retailers are still trying to understand the implications of social and mobile on commerce. But it’s clear companies need to move forward and embrace the changes in commerce. And that means increasingly partnering with technology companies and sometimes buying them up.
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In the last day, I’ve gotten two notes from start-ups that began on the web but have seen their businesses transformed by mobile, as users increasingly shift their consumption to mobile apps and browsers. This might seem obvious in a world in which services like Twitter and Pandora now get most of their traffic from mobile. But it bears highlighting because the trend is happening across all sorts of apps and websites and that has implications for developers, publishers and businesses, who must now consider what a mobile-first world looks like.
It also means you can’t just water down a site or gin up a simple app. It still needs to have robust functionality because people want to do a lot of things on mobile. And they look to developers to also leverage the unique capabilities of devices, which are location aware and have cameras and other sensors. Some developers may want to think twice about how they implement some web-only features if it can’t be enjoyed by mobile users.
In the past two weeks, we’ve seen at least three green technology CEOs sent home to spend more time with their families, two companies implode, a trade war escalate between China and the U.S. over solar and Google cancel its program to develop technology that can producer power cheaper than coal. Only one bright spot of news has stood out recently: Siemens bought eMeter, a smart grid software company, for an undisclosed amount.
Remember all of those articles with journalists yammering about how green technology needs a Netscape moment? Well, this is it. But it’s not the moment when Netscape zoomed in its IPO. It’s the moment when it got absorbed into the gaping maw of AOL. Netscape became irrelevant, but life went on. The Internet, in fact, became even larger. Netscape’s demise simply proved that the so-called First Mover Advantage is vastly overrated.
infrastructure. But VCs have thrown away large amounts of capital on companies serving the web, too. Anyone remember Akimbo? @Home? AltaVista?
that championed investigations into Solyndra, sought to get federal loan guarantees for the company.
Range Fuel’s success in landing VC fund and government loans was to some degree due to its fortunate timing. It emerged at the dawn of green tech investing, when VCs and others were optimistic and desperate for new ideas to fund. At the time, many also mistakenly believed that the same skills required to succeed in computers would directly map to green. Mitch Mandich, a former Apple exec, served as CEO. Few people would now think, “Fuel additives, all-in-one desktops that come in five designer colors. It’s all just sales. Hire him.”
trying to steer the conversation to reflective surfaces. All of your closest peers are at Brightsource Energy, 3M and DuPont. You might as well have a hairy mole on your upper lip.
DSL is on the ropes, and cable companies are seeing their broadband numbers rise, according to data on broadband sign ups during the second quarter. Leichtman Research Group found that the top 18 providers in the U.S. acquired about 350,000 net additional high-speed Internet subscribers in the April-June period. Net broadband additions in the quarter were the second fewest of any quarter in the ten years LRG has been tracking the industry.
