Bill Gates for President

Not that I am a US voter, but he would make a great President of the US of A, I think.  Looks like I am not alone!

Through The Dilbert Blog (gosh, Scott Adams can be so f*****g obnoxious, it makes me want to stop reading Dilbert).

Mark Cuban continues to prove his brilliance

Pretty smart post from Mark Cuban, founder of broadcast.com.  Good creative business thinking!

I do think he is selling local businesses short, though: these guys are very cash smart and will pick up quickly how they need to play the Google AdSense/adWords game.  Also, isn’t Google Local exactly about this piece of the local advertising business?

Sorry for the light blogging…

…but these darn posts take time to write and I have been busy in the past few days.  I will be back tomorrow!

The French are opinionated, rest of the world stunned by news

For the French-reading amongst you, an interesting piece in La Tribune. Thanks for pointing it out to me, Fab!

This is not entirely news to me, as another friend who is active in natural language processing told me their blog analysis tool were giving them the same results.

I don’t think anyone in the whole world is surprised by the fact that the French are opinionated, vociferous even. The good news is that they have gone on the Web to put down their sandboxes. This is the space I am working on at the moment, I am getting so excited it is keeping me up at nights. Gotta go back to work!

Ad-based business models circa 2006

In an conversation with an entrepreneur friend of mine the other day (Gilles, if you are reading this, remember to send me a copy of your bio for my presentation!), we stumbled on the idea that ad-based internet business models were probably pretty fragile at this stage with so many companies rushing out to market on this trend.

It triggered a flashback from 2000: at the time, ad-based business plans were getting dismissed (this is after the bubble burst) because, as there was a potentially infinite supply of web-pages, prices for ads were likely to stay depressed for a loooong time. Fast froward to 2006: Jason Calacanis believes believes recent advertising spend growth could continue for 20 years while Om Malik disputes some of his finding (I find him usually pretty strong but his comments in this specific case are a bit muddled).

I think 20 years of growth is a tad too optimistic, but I also believe web-based advertising will to go to the sites who can deliver targeted ads and, given the finite nature of human attention, few eventually will. In other words, the two-tier web ad world Om describes will stay in place with perhaps a few names changing, all the while growing about as much as overall time online does. It does not deter me from trying to create my own ad-based company, only to make sure we do deliver the right eyeballs…

Through GigaOm.

Anybody making the transition from web 1.0 to web 2.0

Following up on my post of yesterday and on some thinking I have been doing about my own business plan, I am wondering if anybody made the switch from a web 1.0 business model to a web 2.0 one.

I am not thinking in terms of technology, more in terms of opening up to the social interaction model of most web 2.0 companies.  In particular, I would be interested to see if any local web company tried this: in France, I can see that Cityvox has been trying and according to Alexaholic, with some success, but I still believe they retain the characteristics of a content-driven site, talking about citizen journalists.  Perhaps I am being a tad too strict in my definition of web 2.0?

ecommerce 2.0

There is this interesting experience at Amazon.com where the company is asking its customers to vote on which promotion they would best want to see.  It turns out the $100 XBOX core system won.  So far, so good.

This is interesting on many levels.  One, it smacks of group buying, the failed 1999 idea that you could lower prices by grouping the orders of customers online.  More importantly, it shows that the idea of deep user participation, arguably the core of web 2.0, is percolating into e-commerce.  AMZN has always been fairly open to the feedback of its users (see the reviews, and the vote on the reviews, meta-participation!), but this is a step beyond: reviews were fairly basic audience-building tools, but merchandising is usually not something you want to outsource and AMZN is apparently givig it a try.

Where next?  How else can you marry ecommerce and user particpation?  Can it disrupt the market enought to create a new wave of start-ups?  That I doubt, but it is only a gut feel at this point.

A tous les visiteurs du Web 3

Vous ne trouverez sur ce blog aucuns détails croustillants sur le projet en stealth mode que je monte (ce n’est sans doute pas ca que vous cherchiez de toutes façons, mais j’aime me faire mousser).  J’aurai déjà bien du mal à finir mon executive summary à temps pour la conf!

Excitement building up in Web 2.0, ship more tulip bulbs

Looking at the list of people who have registered for Le Web 3 Conference in Paris in a few weeks, it seems excitement is building up very quickly around the European consumer Internet space.  Will it lead to a new bubble?

I think so: there is a paradigm for investment (user-generated content), a business model (advertising, keyword sales) and an investment model (low cost, 500K Series A, €2M Series B, …), there are the first few examples of succesful exits (YouTube, MySpace), the corporates are coming back, stock investing magazines are pitching Internet stocks again…  All of these signs mean that it will be easy for people who control the deployment of capital into this type of projects to greenlight more of them, and because we all take our decisions independently of each other, there will be a glut of projects being funded and, probably, a bubble.  You can have a bubble if everyone agrees on an investment thesis at one point and that is where we are heading in Europe.  I will reserve judgment on the US, but from my reading, it seems they have been there for a while now.

I think it won’t be quite as bad as the last time around, though: memories are fresh, there are more Internet users and the investment paradigm does not call for €10M first rounds on complete crapshoots, so there likely will be less waste of capital.

I still believe we are all targeting a very finite resource: consumer bandwidth and not all of the guys launching these days can win, because soon our target audience will just be underwhelmed and even very innovative and useful services will hit a wall in terms of their ability to connect with users.

Persistence

Struggling with a couple of decisions and some constructive but slightly discouraging feedback. Still also trying to convince a tech guy to join. At times like this, it looks quite tempting to just forget about the whole thing and join a private equity fund.

The whole early stage thing is not pure fun: there is so much doubt involved, it is hard sometime to understand what drives you forward. It feels like pushing against a giant marshmallow: it gives in in places but mostly just absorbs your energy.

Enough with the self pity and back to enterpreneurship!