My morning tears of joy 19 december 2008

This is for those of you who doesn't follow my twitter feed.

Not much bring me to tears, but passionate cheerful happiness does. Always. Every time. It's like a curse.

This morning I got a link from Anders Fredriksson. It's a shameless spoof from "Where the hell is Matt." Never the less, it's beautiful. It's a video of some of the worlds best startups dancing in sheer joy.

Only this and "Extreme Home Makeover" can bring me to tears. I know. I'm a sucker.

Why do we still think locally?

Mike Butcher of TechCrunch UK gave an excellent speech at LeWeb '08 covering the european startup spirit. He says about the europe startup scene:

...  in Rome I found Angel/Entrepreneurs like Gianluca Dettori of dpixel trying their damndest to get a startup scene going, resorting to throwing their own conference (TechGarage). In Istanbul I found blogger Arda Kutsal or Webrazzi writing about the Web 2.0 scene in Turkey - and there are more Turkish connections inside Silicon Valley than you might think.

Why does this surprise anyone? The Internet is as local as it is global (the world is where you are). Of course there are going to be amazing startups all over the globe. Everywhere there is an internet connection there is a person thinking: "What if I could have this?", or "What if we could do that?". These people will build amazing stuff. 

So why is it that the common opinion is that it's going to be built in Silicon Valley? Great companies are not built by white educated men in their thirties. They're built by people. Creative, talented, smart, engaged and hard working people.

Right now we've got a generation of people are growing up who never lived without the Internet. They'll have a whole new perception of what the world is like, how small it is.

So lets stop talking about this amazing UK startup or that great Italian startup. Lets start thinking about this great company built by all these talented people who really understand what I need and what I want.

I'm bored with the locality of the world.

My predictions in Tech for 2009

ReadWriteWeb list their predictions (or wishes rather) for 2009. The first thing they cover is 

What We Want in 2009: Help Us Manage Social Media Better
For the entrepreneurs still looking to get our attention with the latest social media toys, their pitch may no longer be "come try this, it's new," but instead, "come try this, it helps." Because if there's anything we learned from 2008, it's that social media overload is not sustainable.

In my previous post I covered social media overload too. Makes me proud that they feel it too.

Anyway, here are my predictions / wishes for 2009.

Twitter breaks it into the mainstream.

The way they do it is by appealing to journalists, who in turn use it for research and social interaction, for a more fulfilled journalism. And just like Michael Arrington they post the topics of their articles on Twitter before before the article goes public.

Apple hits 15% market share.

But before that Apple break the 10% barrier, probably very soon.

Many sites start using Microformats.

Effectively this makes any site an API, allowing for interaction between sites in a yet unimaginable way. It's the natural next step, the ultimate modularisation of the World Wide Web. 

Facebook hits a virtual brick wall.

The behemoth made sense in a booming economy. Now, monetization of a company with 1000+ employees is getting urgent. I'm not sure what this brick wall will be, money, lack of CPM for ads, expenses of servers or whatever.

Tech startups survive.

At least to a greater extent than expected. The tech economy learnt a great deal from the days of the bubble. Maybe the most important lesson was how to live and exists cheaply - something many businesses are not used to at all. So I predict tech companies, specifically startups, will survive to a greater degree compared to other types of business.

What are you predictions?

Happy holidays to you all!

(How) do you handle social media overload? 09 december 2008

Lately I've been thinking a lot about the fragmentation of Social Media. More specifically about juggling all different services without losing time.

Today Seth Godin writes about the tsunami of media and information. His posts reflects pretty closely my sentiments about the problems with all my different social media. 

I use a lot of social media services. Among these are Blogger, Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku, Tumblr, FriendFeed, YouTube, Last.fm, Spotify, Del.icio.us, Picasa and Flickr. And this is just of the top of my head. I bet I use three to four times as many weekly.

My way to cope with this so far has been to funnel them through each other. Facebook becomes a collector of my streams, through different feed imports . This is what Tumblr and FriendFeed are designed for, but I have a bigger audience on Facebook.

And my entrance to my feeds is usually Twitter. Anything I say on twitter propagates itself through my feeds to touch as many of my contacts as possible.

I'm thinking of writing a more lengthy post (no promises) about tips and tricks on how to cope with social media overload. What should I include? What are your best tips to stay on top of the pile? I appreciate your feedback.

VC money still necessary to stand out 05 december 2008

Paul Graham has (as usual) a very interesting read about why VC's may soon not matter.

The current generation of founders want to raise money from VCs, and Sequoia specifically, because Larry and Sergey took money from VCs, and Sequoia specifically. Imagine what it would do to the VC business if the next hot company didn't take VC at all.

VCs think they're playing a zero sum game. In fact, it's not even that. If you lose a deal to Benchmark, you lose that deal, but VC as an industry still wins. If you lose a deal to None, all VCs lose.

This recession may be different from the one after the Internet Bubble. This time founders may keep starting startups. And if they do, VCs will have to keep writing checks, or they could become irrelevant.

His point is very, very good. But what about performance? Or startup competition? It's not as easy as "Ok, our curves are sky rocketing, and we're ramen profitable - we don't need no stinkin' VC money!"

It's about optimal performance. Can you reach optimal performance without the VC money? If there are more startups there is also more competition. You have to be noticed in the noise.

Consider this chart:

Cash burn over time. 

Optimal Performance is about growing as fast as your market and customers allow you. If you burn too fast you waste money. If you don't have enough money you can't reach your optimal performance. Huh?

Well, we're in the disruptive Internet business right? That is: We're changing and adapting customer behaviour. But customers adapt slowly. Back in the bubble I used to work for Red Message.  $20M investment by Goldman Sachs in 2000. The went bankrupt, but there are businesses today thriving on the very same idea. Many of the companies back in the bubble burnt through their cash faster than their customers adapter their behaviour. They were all Over Spending. Other examples include Boo.com and Letsbuyit.

Hardware, software, marketing and distribution are all ten to hundred times cheaper now than back in the bubble. But customers are still slow to adapt.

So what am I saying? Well... Sure, with ramen profitability and curves that make any VC open their fat wallet you may not need them. But are you performing at your optimal curve? I doubt it. You're likely Under Performing, even though you may not know it. Even if the tools available for marketing and CRM are cheaper, if you want to reach a global audience chances are you'll use traditional (old) media. Newpapers. Journalists. Catching their attention them takes time and money. Maybe less than before, but still.

Optimal performance is very hard. It's about spending your money where it impacts the changein behaviour and faster adaptation of your customer. And that is very, very hard. No cheap hardware-, software-, marketing-, CRM-, distribution-, whatever-model in the world will help you there. You may just want to watch your curves, listen to and understand your customer better etc. etc. It's all soft, ad-hoc, and less measurable. And finding your optimal curve takes monkey. At least more than ramen money.

So while many things are cheaper, taking VC money to perform at the optimal curve is still necessary in order to stand out in the noise, and outcompete the competition.

What do you think? If my logic is fuzzy, it's because it's friday and I need beer.

Justitiekanslern svarar mig 04 december 2008

(klickbar bild)

Boxee brings the TV revolution 03 december 2008

The last few weeks I've been trying out a new service. In short, Boxee empowers your living room TV. Basically it composes of two parts: An application to view movies, locally or over the Internet and a community which lets you share what you've watched with your friends, much like Last.fm.

The application is pure gold. It scrapes your harddrive and selected network resources for video, pictures and music. Through a sleek interface you can then easily browse through your content, play movies, listen to music or play photo slideshows. But it doesn't stop there. The guys at Boxee has connected the application to various online content, be it Jon Stewart on Comedy Central, mixing mentos and coke on YouTube or a sucky 70's martial arts movie (public domain through a built in torrent downloader). In all it's a very full application.

The community is still a rough diamond. Clearly this is where Boxee will have the most impact. Having tried other full TV oriented applications like Joost, Boxee has the potential to build a much more interesting community. Since I can provide my own content to the recommendation engine Boxee has the potential for being as useful as Last.fm for content discovery, something that really, really sucked while using Joost, YouTube, et.al.

Using Boxee makes two things obvious to me: 

First, it's all about the content. And Boxee provides the content for you, through your collections, the internet or your friends recommendation. No more dull moments.

Secondly, community is so powerful. The Boxee dashboard is a fluid view of what your friends have watched and recommends, and a great way to finding interesting content. Add some intelligent matching to this and no more being slave under the TV guide. 

Boxee is alpha, but already useful. I'm missing some features like seamless integration with iTunes and iPhoto. However my general feeling about it is that Boxee might very well be the one killer application for the living room computer. It's very powerful and has so much potential. I'm just in love, and hoping that it keeps developing as quickly as to date.

Visit the Boxee website at: www.boxee.tv. Leave a comment if you want an invite.