Jason Ball's TechBytes

Age of Abundance (The Dedicated Device Rule)

There's a fresh article in this month's UK Wired- "Watches are the ultimate proof that we are not rational", which applies directly to me (and an increasing number of my VC friends.)

It reminded me of a discussion that happened during my MBA - we were asked to envision what "the watch of the future" would be- ideas of mini-computers embedded in watches, internet connected glasses, etc populated the conversation. I suggested that the watch of the future was no watch- time was all around us and on every phone (this was when my Ericsson T29 constantly showed the time, not my black as night iPhone), and for a long time I lived by my prediction- no watch. Just my phone. My personal philosophy for many years has been one of simplicity- having just *one* of anything...

But days have changed, and on the watch front, I now own more watches than ever before… my three favorites are my Suunto T3 heart rate monitor- my trusted companion as I pedal away on my bike for 100+ miles a week, my Casio CA53W-1 for splitting up the dinner tab, and my Explorer II because it needs to be worn to be wound-  I love the idea of a self sufficient, kinetic watch. The one thing the three watches have in common is that they all offer dual time; as an expat that's one point that never crossed my mind during my MBA (even though I was sitting in Spain at the time)- how important knowing what time it was in more than one city at any given moment. Instantly. But they are all very different watches, designed for different purposes or occasions.

Yes, my iPhone shows me the time (and weather) across the globe, but having a dedicated item on my wrist has taken on more importance over the years- and I've had a proliferation of watches in the interim. 

I think the same applies the digital devices world. (I've had device creep without even realizing it.) 

My iPhone was the holy grail when I bought it (and gets more powerful with each generation and app release), and I thought it would be the only device I needed… but I carry an iPhone and a Blackberry daily, and if rumors are to be believed, will probably add an iTablet to the mix soon. In the computing world, I also own 3 computers (iMac, Macbook Pro, Lenovo PC) but will also be getting a cloudbook next month. I tend to travel with both my Macbook and my PC. A cloudbook may replace my Macbook, but that remains to be seen… (I imagine it will end up being for checking mail and social activities online from the couch more than as a road warrior…)

I was even handed a dedicated wikipedia device last week as well- which is designed to be used by school kids.

All of the devices mentioned above are designed to perform one core function, with overlapping functionality in other areas. For me, I believe the future of devices will be exactly the same. Simplicity and function will drive this proliferation of dedicated devices-  the kindle, the flip, etc indicate the future... all in one devices means lowest common denominator. Dedicated devices mean optimal design and performance....

Venture's Back II

Last month I posted suggesting that Venture might be back... The post below from trueventures makes a strong case, that yes, indeed, Venture is back.

http://www.trueventures.com/blog/2009/12/02/venture-is-back-baby/

Also, I was at Noah earlier in the month; company after company spewed out fantastic stats:

Betfair- online betting, 6.5m trades per day, 5 bn pageviews per month, 2.5m registered users, 600k active users, £13bn annual deposits, £300m revenues- £150M UK; £150M international

Delticom - online tire sales (yes, tires) €200M Revenues, €53M gross profit, €15M Ebitda, €10M net profit

Zed- entertainment (http://www.business.zed.com/) Started off as mobile content player, expanded into everything - including tv $700M revenue;

Bigpoint - browser gaming; playstation 2 quality Free games, community based 1000 distribution partners TV partnerships with rev streams to broadcasters Virtual goods/currency- micro transactions Subscription = one price; virtual goods means variable pricing 95M registered users, 250k new registrations per day

Spotify- online music, 6m users (3m UK), 15k new registrations  per day 120 staff Avg engagement: 94 min per day; 

Stardoll- online "paper" dolls, 40m members, Avg age 13.8, 12m uniques/month

There were several billion dollars of revenue on stage that morning - representing some of Europe's more mature startups... with companies like these in VCs portfolios, and the exit market opening up-  it's easy to understand why venture's back.

Venture's Back

I'm sure everyone has been seeing what's happened in the US Equity markets- NASDAQ is up 30%+ YTD, with many stocks like Apple showing 131% gains this year. Strong earnings reports mean public companies have cash to deploy...

I attended GP Bullhound's Mobile Sector Breakfast two weeks ago, where Manish reported some positive liquidity stats (available here): M&A activity in the mobile sector has seen a 77% increase in transaction value and an increase in transactions over $50M (AT&T's acquisition of Plusmo is one example)

Today's announcements that Google is buying AdMob for $750M and EA's acquisition of Playfish for $300M (congrats Hussein) adds further fuel to the fire- and is very good news for the venture industry. Unless this is a dead cat bounce, it looks like the venture cycle just might be back...

Entrepreneurial Leadership Speaker Series

Hussein Kanji has organized a venture capital and entrepreneurship lecture series starting in October, which will be held at London Business School. Current speakers announced are:

Robin Klein, The Accelerator Group, Thursday Oct 1
Stan Bowland, Icera, Thursday Nov 5
Stefan Glaenzer, Last.fm, Thursday Dec 3
Bernard Liautaud, Balderton, Thursday Feb 4
Jos White, MessageLabs, Thursday March 4
Herman Hauser, Amadeus, Thursday, May 6
Mike Hedger, KVS, Thursday June 3

Other speakers will be announced in the near future.

If you're interested in venture capital and entrepreneurship; then this is the series of speakers you need to get to...and it's FREE. It's a stellar lineup, and the price is right. Full details and bios available at the London Business School website or on Hussein's blog.

See you there.

Feeds 2.0 and the Netflix Prize

I've blogged about my friends at Feeds 2.0 many times over the past few years; I've followed the Netflix prize out of interest since it was covered in Wired back in 2007, mainly because I was rooting for the Feeds 2.0 team...

For those of you who may not spend your weekends and evenings reading up on artificial intelligence, here's an overview of the Netflix competition:

Netflix released a large movie rating dataset and challenged the data mining, machine learning and computer science communities to develop systems that could beat the accuracy of their in-house developed recommendation system (Cinematch) by 10%. In order to render the challenge more interesting, the company will award a Grand Prize of $1M to the first team that will attain this goal, and in addition, Progress Prizes of $50K have been awarded on the anniversaries of the Prize to teams that have made sufficient accuracy improvements. Apart from the financial incentive however, the Netflix Prize contest is enormously useful for recommender system research since the released Netflix dataset is by far the largest ratings dataset ever becoming available to the research community. Most work on recommender systems outside of companies like Amazon or Netflix up to now has had to make do with the relatively small 1M ratings MovieLens data or the 3M ratings EachMovie dataset. Netflix provided 100480507 ratings (on a scale from 1 to 5 integral stars) along with their dates from 480189 randomly-chosen, anonymous subscribers on 17770 movie titles. The data were collected between October, 1998 and December, 2005 and reflect the distribution of all ratings received by Netflix during this period. Netflix withheld over 2M most recent ratings from those same subscribers over the same set of movies as a competition qualifying set and contestants are required to make predictions for all 2M withheld ratings in the qualifying set.

I was thrilled when I saw the final Leader Board: The Ensemble (Feeds 2.0 + others) was at the top:

The final winner will not be announced until next month; Netflix still has to decide which of the leading algorithms perform best and how they score on various tests...

So, as the latest Wired article says, it ain't over til it's over.

Good luck Nicholas!

Opera reinvents the web?

"Opera today (well, last week. I've been a little slow getting this post out) unveiled Opera Unite, a new technology that shakes up the old client-server computing model of the Web. Opera Unite turns any computer into both a client and a server, allowing it to interact with and serve content to other computers directly across the Web, without the need for third-party servers.

Opera Unite makes serving data as simple and easy as browsing the Web. For consumers, Opera Unite services give greater control of private data and make it easy to share data with any device equipped with a modern Web browser.

For Web developers, Opera Unite services are based on the same open Web standards as Web sites today. This dramatically simplifies the complexity of authoring cutting-edge Web services. With Opera Unite, creating a full Web service is now as easy as coding a Web page." Full press release here.

Very interesting concept which I imagine Google will copy quickly, roll into Google Wave and Chrome...and leave in beta for 5 years. But they wouldn't be alone....

Nokia also has been working on making your phone into a server. I spent a lot of time last year looking into this space. It has some interesting implications on network usage and ease of use for photo sharing, etc... another problem that gets solved by having a local server is separation of data and application.

One of the problems with web apps is that the data and the application are intertwined. Separability of data and application was very clear in the desktop world- you could tote your word files with you anywhere... but with cloud apps, this is becoming much more difficult. (For example, have you tried to export your gmail messages?) As they say, if you can't take data with you, it's not yours... One of the benefits of having a "server" on your phone or laptop is that any pictures you take can still be accessed on Facebook, but you can host those on your own "server".  (And we all know Facebook is trying to build their own private version of the internet. If you believe things like that.)

The current problem with having a local server on your machine (any machine) is that you need to be a geek to make it work. Opera is moving this towards the masses, but it's still a Yahoo Pipes mass appeal. Google needs to make this dead easy to use - maybe that's part of what their doing with Wave...

Qualcomm Ventures - Business Plan Competition

Today we announced the Qualcomm Ventures Business Plan Competion. 

It's open to startups in the US, Europe, China and India. Semi-finalists from each region will win $100k, and then compete for a further $150k at the Qualcomm Ventures CEO Summit in November.

We're looking for companies that impact the wireless space in the following areas:

• Consumer/enterprise applications and services
• Communication devices
• Semiconductor and component technologies
• Mobile platforms
• Digital media and content
• Healthcare technologies and services
• CleanTech 

Additional details on the Qualcomm Ventures' QPrize competition and submission guidelines are available at www.qprize2009.com. Deadline for business plan submissions is July 31, 2009.

European Startups... Still alive and kicking

Just in case you thought innovation was dead (or maybe non-existent) in Europe, the guys over at Mashable have pulled together a short list of European startups. If you missed the The Next Web conference and are interested in monitoring the space, The Next Web is a great resource (with pretty swell twitter too).

Five Steps to Music Nirvana

Step 1. Get Spotify

Step 2. Sign up for an account at last.fm

Step 3. Enable scrobbling inside the prefs pane in Spotify

Step 4. Check this site to find new artists based on your las.fm recommendations  http://lutt.se/lastfm+spotify+new/

Step 5. Enjoy your new found music nirvana

The Future of Search

I've been blogging about the search space for a couple of years, and this has to be one of the most promising developments I've seen: Wolfram Alpha. 

While Nova Spivak has an excellent overview of what Wolfram Alpha is trying to achieve, this will give you an idea:

Where Google is a system for FINDING things that we as a civilization collectively publish, Wolfram Alpha is for COMPUTING answers to questions about what we as a civilization collectively know. It's the next step in the distribution of knowledge and intelligence around the world -- a new leap in the intelligence of our collective "Global Brain." And like any big next-step, Wolfram Alpha works in a new way -- it computes answers instead of just looking them up.

Doug Lenat has also posted his thoughts on Wolfram Alpha.

The wrapper comes off in two months for everyone to access the service. I can't wait.

Pitch your startup: VCIC 2009

I've been a judge for the VCIC competition held at London Business School for the past few years. The school is actively looking for entrepreneurs willing to pitch to a room a VCs and MBAs learning to be VCs. The venture funds present (previously) were Accel, Atlas, Amadeus, Balderton, Doughty Hanson, et al plus corporates like Microsoft and Qualcomm Ventures.

London Business School is currently recruiting Entrepreneurs to pitch at either of the competitions- general requirements are: 

• Actively looking to raise capital
• No previous institutional funding
• Has product.  Preferably has customer traction
• Available to present on 20th /21st February and/or 27th February

 
It’s an opportunity for your start-up to present to several top VCs in one shot. If you are interested in pitching at VCIC please contact ccarrillo.mba2010@london.edu and/or for more information regarding pitching click here.

Amazon Web Services Meetup- London

I received this in an email today, in case anyone is interested in learning more about Amazon's services in Europe:

Amazon Web Services Technology Evangelist for Europe Simone Brunozzi and Cohesive co-founder Alexis Richardson will be hosting the next AWS Meetup in London on Cloud Computing and AWS, with details on S3, EC2, CloudFront and the other services!

Details of this free evening event are as follows:

When: Wednesday 4th February, 6.30pm start - as usual afterwards we will go to the Crown for drinks and further discussion
Where: Skills Matter, 1 Sekforde St, Clerkewell, London EC1R 0BE
Format: Simone and Alexis will each speak for 20-25 minutes and there will be time for some Q&A after that.

For more details about the event and speakers please visit http://skillsmatter.com/event/cloud-grid/amazon-web-services-meetup

Registration is open and places are filling fast so register now at http://skillsmatter.com/event/cloud-grid/amazon-web-services-meetup

M&A Trends for 2008/2009

Every year I start off with a retrospective of what's just happened over the past 12 months. I guess the difference this year is that everyone knows 2008 was simply awful across the board...

Icon Corporate Finance has provided the data points though, demonstrating that 2008 looked very grim:

You'll notice the vast majority of exits were sub $100M last year, while valuations outside of this band are falling fast. This means the venture portfolios are in for tough times... and capital intensive companies will find it much more difficult to raise capital.  Already I'm hearing the "10yr limited life" venture fund model being challenged. People are realizing it might take longer than 3-4 years to build and exit a company. Plus LPs are simply choking...and VCs are feeling the pinch as well in terms of LPs reneging on capital commitments. Yes, some venture funds continue to raise new funds- this is the exception (Accel's $1bn closed in December and Balderton's recent $400M come to mind...)

To state the glaring obvious, 2009 will spell the end for many venture funds and venture backed companies. I believe there was always venture funding overhang from the early 2000s- that will have fully corrected by the end of this downturn... 

The word on the street in California is "this downturn could be as bad as the great depression". The word on the street in London still seems to be, "what recession?". Look for "Sale Now On" signs to change to "Going out of Business Sale" in 2009.

Happy Holidays

It's that time of year, and I'm heading off into turkey, present and (hopefully) gadget land for a few weeks.

No real posts (unless total boredom sets in) until 2009.

Happy Holidays everyone!

(Picture credit: gun show)

Google's Search goes open: Wiki-style

I couldn't believe my eyes this morning when I ran a search on Google. If you are signed in, you can now promote results as well as leave comments. I had asked a Googler last year when they were going to meld Bookmark Sync (social ranking) to Google's PageRank. This is equally good/better.

Google's been wikified.

This appears to be a staged roll out, so here's a screen shot showing where you can promote, remove or comment on a result:

 

There's also a video on YouTube demonstrating Google's SearchWiki in action.

The Android Wars

I was lucky enough to unbox a G1 yesterday. Pretty neat phone, it doesn't outshine the iPhone in my opinion, but it's a great device. Definitely 100x better than any other phone out there (minus the iPhone).

But what makes the G1 great is the apps that take full advantage of *everything* the handset has to offer. Wikitude (worst name ever for the coolest app I've seen to date). Just watch the video.

It doesn't really give the same effect as standing on the 9th floor in a Qualcomm building looking out over the mountains towards Phoenix - seeing your field of view populate with POIs in the area for miles around, but it gives you a pretty good idea... More info/background on Wikitude is available here.

What's clear is that Android is going to be a serious contender- and is a fully functional Battleship.

Go Green- Get out your Bike

Yes, it's another bike post on my blog. I'm turning into a regular gear-head. The WSJ has a feature on cycling in London- approximately 500,000 trips are made via bicycle every day in London. Maybe the credit crunch is having an unexpected positive impact...

Spotify- The Next Great Music App

Congratulations to the Spotify team- they've launched their public beta today allowing anyone to listen to music over the web, in what I think could be the next great music app.

I've been lucky enough (thanks Daniel!) to be one of the beta testers over the past several months- today's the first time I've seen (and heard) ads on Spotify- and they've come up with a great advertising supported music model that's legal. Yes, it's all legit...

Two things you've got to do: 1) Download the app 2) SHARE a playlist. Sharing music via Spotify has to be the most fun I've had in years. (Yes, VCs are kind of sad that way.)

And if you can't wait to get your hands on a beta invite- you can get the premium version of Spotify immediately which has no ads...

This is gonna be a great.

 

Would the real iPhone please stand up?

I agree, the iPhone looks snappy in those Apple TV commericals. I love my iPhone, but it doesn't work *exactly* as advertised. Some guys with too much time on their hands decided to make this comparison video- the "TV" iPhone versus the "Real" iPhone.  

Dropbox- how file sync should be

My beta invite for Dropbox (funded by Y Combinator) arrived this weekend - and my initial impression is very positive. I've migrated my home mac use to a client/server (MacBook Pro/iMac) set up- with my iMac doing most of the heavy lifting.

I've tried multiple back up services and even tried to use iDisk as a "dropbox", but it never worked like it should. I'm now sharing my "Current" folder between the two macs seamlessly- and can even get access via the web if needed. Essentially, Dropbox is what iDisk should be - seamless cross-platform file sharing, complemented by web access:

Apple should acquire these guys ASAP and switch out iDisk for Dropbox...and getting access to these files via my iPhone would make a nice addition to MobileMe too.