Nick d'Aloisio displays his mobile application Summly.(Photo: Matt Dunham AP)
SAN FRANCISCO — It was a blockbuster year for the technology industry in 2013. The Nasdaq Composite Index surged more than 30% as the power of giants such as Google, Facebook and Twitter grew, while start-ups raised billions of dollars at increasingly lofty valuations. But it was not a great year for everyone.
WINNERS
— Nick D'Aloisio created an aggregation app called Summly from his bedroom and sold it in March to Yahoo for $30 million. He recently turned 18, so he was theoretically able to drink while in Paris as the star speaker this month at LeWeb, Europe's biggest tech conference. D'Aloisio is a product manager at Yahoo now and is reportedly looking at applying the Summly concept into fields like multimedia. D'Aloisio's rapid rise and sudden wealth show how Silicon Valley is back in a big, bubbly way. It also highlights how Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is on an acquisition spree to recruit talent that she hopes will change the company from a tech has-been to a nimble player in the fast-growing mobile and online video sectors.
—Larry Page took back the CEO reins of Google when Eric Schmidt stepped down in 2011. At the time, Google had a Facebook fixation and some worried the Internet search giant had lost its mojo. But under Page's leadership, the company added more than $100 billion of market cap in 2013. Page's "moonshots" — big, risky, long-term ideas — have become more accepted on Wall Street as early signs of commercial potential emerge from Google projects such as self-driving cars and Glass. In the company's latest conference call with analysts, Page announced he would no longer be taking par! t in the quarterly updates. Just rewards for an executive to dislikes talking with Wall Street almost as much as the press.
— Jack Dorsey became a billionaire on paper when Twitter, the company he co-founded, went public in a blockbuster November IPO. That same month, the Wall Street Journal reported Square, the other start-up Dorsey founded, had discussed a 2014 IPO with banks including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Still, there are questions about Square's business model and Dorsey came off looking ruthless in a recent book about Twitter by New York Times reporter Nick Bilton. However, if Square can pull off an IPO next year -- admittedly a big if -- Dorsey will have been intimately involved in two very successful tech start-ups. Not many people can say that.
Alibaba founder Jack Ma.(Photo: PETER PARKS AFP/Getty Images)
— Forget Amazon.com and eBay. Alibaba is the world's most successful e-commerce company and it was started by a former school teacher Jack Ma in his apartment in 1999. Ma was named the Financial Times' Person of the Year for 2013. During China's Singles' Day shopping festival on Nov. 11, Alibaba handled $5.75 billion in online sales. That's more than double what U.S. shoppers spent online last year on Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined. Alibaba is set for one of the largest and most closely watched IPOs of 2014, an offering that could value it at about $150 billion.
Erick Tseng.(Photo: Craig Barritt Getty Images for AOL Inc.)
—Erick T! seng, hea! d of mobile at Facebook, had a lot of work to do this year. The company's shares languished below the $38 price of its troubled IPO for most of the early part of the year as investors worried the company had not worked out a way to show lucrative ads on smaller smartphones, rather than big desktop PC screens. But Tseng's team was busy creating a mobile platform capable of handling different types of ads that show up in users' News Feeds. In July, Facebook reported a 76% surge in mobile ad revenue from the second quarter, emphatically quashing the notion that it could not thrive in a mobile world. The stock jumped 20% the day after the results and it recently traded above $50, almost double where it started the year and 36% over its IPO price.
LOSERS
— As Page reveled moonshots like self-driving cars and Glass wearable computers, Apple CEO Tim Cook spent the year toiling in Steve Jobs' shadow and trying to show how the technology giant still has the ability to create blockbuster new gadgets that change the way people live.
Apple CEO Tim Cook speaks on stage during an Apple product announcement at the Apple campus on September 10, 2013 in Cupertino, Calif.(Photo: Justin Sullivan Getty Images)
Apple's stock price swooned in the first half of the year as rumors of an Apple TV ebbed and flowed and nothing else earth-shaking big and new materialized. More recently, Apple unveiled new iPhones and iPads that are selling like hotcakes, helping the shares to rebound. But Apple shares are up about 5% so far this year, while Google and Amazon are up more than 50%. Cook has said exciting new products are coming soon and hinted at some type of wearable technology. If Apple can produce another blockbuster on the scale of the iPad or i! Phone, in! a big market like TV or wearables, Cook may well end up on USA TODAY's list of tech industry winners in 2014.
—Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has become the perennial whipping boy of the tech world as the company milks its legacy Windows operating system and struggles to adapt to the rise of mobile and cloud computing. But this year was particularly difficult for the executive. The launch of Windows 8 has been troubled to say the least. Worse, activist investor Jeff Ubben of ValueAct Capital took a stake in Microsoft in April and put pressure on the company to change. In August, Ballmer announced he was stepping down. He told the Wall Street Journal he couldn't change Microsoft quickly enough. "Maybe I'm an emblem of an old era, and I have to move on," the 57-year-old Ballmer told the paper as his eyes welled up. Or maybe the job was just too tough. The search for his successor was still dragging on into late December. Ubben has emerged a winner so far. Microsoft shares are up about 25% since ValueAct's stake became public.
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In this April 11, 2013 photo Fairfax Financial Chairman and CEO Prem Watsa speaks at the company's annual general meeting in Toronto.(Photo: Frank Gunn AP)
— Another respected investor did not do so well from their involvement in another struggling tech company this year. Prem Watsa, known as the Canadian Warren Buffett, amassed a 10% stake in BlackBerry and earlier this year said he was excited about the company's prospects under the new leadership of CEO Thorsten Heins and the "technical genius" of founder Mike Lazaridis, who is a friend of Watsa's. However, Blac! kBerry's ! business deteriorated rapidly after that. The company warned of a big quarterly loss in September and said it would cut 4,500 jobs as sales of its newest smartphones failed to take off. Later than month, BlackBerry said it was working on a deal to be acquired for $9 a share by a group of investors led by Fairfax Financial, the insurance company run by Watsa. But in November, the company took itself off the market, instead accepting a $1 billion investment from Fairfax. BlackBerry shares are now trading at around $6, down 50% so far far in 2013. Watsa's 10% stake was purchased for an average price of about $17 a share.
—Noah Glass co-founded Twitter and came up with the company's name. But he was betrayed by his friend and co-founder Jack Dorsey. In 2006, when Twitter was just getting started, Dorsey met with another of Twitter's founders Evan Williams and threatened to quit if Glass was not let go, according to the book Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal. Glass was forced out and Dorsey soon became CEO of Twitter. The company completed an IPO in November that made Williams and Dorsey billionaires on paper. Glass was not listed as one of the company's major shareholders in the IPO documents and he has faded into obscurity. His Twitter page says "i started this" and on the day the company announced IPO plans he tweeted "I wish the twitter team the best of luck and trust that they will be successful in continuing to develop this important communication tool." He has not tweeted since. In 2011, Williams said Glass never got enough credit for his early role at Twitter.
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