The company has now built up a massive amount of funding for its efforts to fund its next steps.
Xiaomi recently announced that its latest round of funding had closed at about $1 billion, and now it is going to take that money and pour it into efforts to open up mobile technology startups in India, as well as companies focused on connected devices and content aggregation.
The company is working on launching its own startup environment in India, comparable to what it accomplished in China.
In fact, mobile technology startups in India are included among the top priorities for Xiaomi in 2015. According to the head of Xiaomi India, Manu Jain, “We may co-develop, invest or launch their products. We have discussed with a few startups so far.” At the same time that these statements were released, the company declined to make any specific mention of the names of some of the startups that would be launched, or the size of the investment that it would specifically be making.
The company already labels itself as being a mobile technology and e-commerce business, not just a handset manufacturer.
Xiaomi has previously poured investments into Chinese startups that are focused on parts of the tech industry including wearable technology (such as in its fitness band), a video website, and in a smart light bulbs effort.
According to a Convergence Catalyst partner, Jayant Kolla, “Startups would find it lucrative to work with Xiaomi versus other corporates, as it is agile and has been able to grow, coupling the scale brought forward by both the internet and mobile era.” That firm is the Indian branch of one of Xiaomi’s most valuable startups on the globe and which managed to sell a million devices in the country in well under half of a year.
At the time that this article was written, Xiaomi was being valued at about $45 billion, and it has every intention to grow this year through its mobile technology and other startup investments in India. Though its past has been greatly based on smartphones, those are clearly only the beginning of what it has up its sleeves as it progresses into the future.
As the search engine giant works to expand its smartphone and tablet based audience, its acquisitions continue.
Yahoo! has just revealed its most recent step in widening its audience of smartphone and tablet users in its purchase of the mobile marketing platform, Sparq.
This allows users to be able to more conveniently toggle among their smartphone apps.
This is far from the first of the acquisitions that Yahoo! has made recently in the mobile marketing area. In fact, this is only one of a growing number of small startups that are being absorbed by the search engine giant in its efforts to move into the smartphone friendly channel more effectively. The primary benefit of Sparq is that it allows its users to be able to switch from one app to another while using their smartphones. This could be highly appealing to marketers because this capability is believed to help to increase the app usage from the owners of mobile devices.
Sparq integration into Yahoo! could also help the company to use mobile marketing for monetization.
According to the founder of Sparq, Jesse Chor, who is also the company’s CEO, “We are uber passionate about mobile — we’ve been striving to build the best mobile platform possible, and are excited to continue upon that goal with Yahoo.” Chor went on to express that “Words cannot describe how ecstatic we are to be joining such an amazing team with such an inspiring mission. We see endless opportunity ahead.”
The earnings at Yahoo! haven’t been exceptionally good over the last while. During the last quarter of 2013, the company’s reports showed that its earnings had fallen by 91 percent when compared to the same time a year before. That said, one of the reasons that the earnings were as low as they were was that the company had spent a massive amount of money on the acquisition of startups. In fact, in the last quarter alone, there was $163 million spent by Yahoo! on purchasing other companies.
In December, the company took in a number of companies that could contribute to its mobile marketing strategy, including PeerCDN, a content-speeding startup, Evntlive, a startup for “virtual venues”, and SkyPhrase, a natural language software startup that has been compared to Siri.
