Helping people help you

I can’t remember where I read that line: some US entrepreneur wrote that the most important benefit of sharing your thoughts and the outcome of your work with other was that it gave them the opportunity to help you.

I have made it my motto: “help people help you.”

Not quite out of stealth yet

I am not entirely ready to come out of stealth mode just yet, as I still need to polish the idea and plan, but I thought I’d point to an excellent blog about local search: The Local Inliner.

My plan is all about local search too, and I believe the people writing on this blog really understand their stuff and are pretty good at coming up with provocative analyses. Go read it! If anybody knows of n equivalent blog or publication in France, please let me know!

I’d blog more but WordPress.com is acting weird these days

Julien Codorniou me fait trop d’honneurs…

Une fois n’est pas coutume, un post en français… 

Voir ce lien: http://codor.blogs.com/intro/2006/12/chouette_un_nou.html

Julien est aujourd’hui dans le top 100 des bloggeurs français, c’est dire!

The fickleness of social networks

A fairly common criticism of social networks from investors and VCs is that they are afraid social networks are fads that attract the cool kids then the not-so-cool kids driving out the cool kids who move on to the next network.

It seems MySpace is currently disproving that thesis, having bypassed Yahoo for the most popular site on Earth.  I think that’s because MySpace has been able to reach out to a mainstream, if fairly young, audience, instead of the usual hip/technophile crowd that a Yelp caters to, for instance.

These “hip” audiences are by their very nature very fickle.  Mainstream audiences actually tend to stay a lot longer when they derive some value from the site.  eBay is, as always, a good example: it may not be very trendy but it is one of the largest communities out there.

Le Web 3 Day 2

Almost no notes today…  See below:

Chappaz: chairman Wikio, co-CEO NetVibes

• Internet users are taking power.  Blogs are not separate from what is happening in media in general: media 2.0.
• Distribution of content is changing: RSS enabling ubiquity;
  Ajax allowing sophisticated apps executed in the browser (personnalisation essentially). Hence success of netvibes today.
• Long tail: niche readers of niche blogs appearing on the map.

I had planned to leave early anyway but then reality interfered, under the guise of Loic’s ego and his will to transform his perfectly adequate business conference (which I paid €500 out of my own pocket to atend, thank you very much) into his own little Davos.  So he had Chappaz shut up so Shimon Perez could talk.  Perez is great and a fantastic orator, but what was he doing addressing this crowd?

Then I caught up with an entrepreneur I backed in a previous life and that took me away from the hastily convened panel that replaced most of the presentations of the morning.  I usually hate roundtables, they are the fastest way to mindless soundbytes, so I decided to stay away.

Detoured rapidly via the start-up corner but nothing overly exciting there, so I decided to call it a day at 11:30, with no regrets as I heard that Sarkozy was going to be speaking in the afternoon…

Le Web 3 Day 1

Was at the Lemeur love fest today, here are a few notes.

Net takeaway: entrepreneurs are excited to see some action, VCs are afraid this is just another bubble and wish there was less money chasing too few good deals (the last one is still hilarious to me).

Notes Le Web 3 Day 1 (December 11, 2006)  Keynote address by Loic Le Meur: 1000 delegates without any invitation sent, only word of mouth. Niklas Zenstrom:

• US companies are US-centric so coming from a small country helped Skype as their company had to look abroad from the get-go.  Forget about your home market!
• Web 2.0: More of a label.  But today we have the infrastructure in place, not during bubble 1.0.
• Media transformation: everything that can be digitized will be.  But it doesn’t mean journalism as in-depth analysis will go away, only the delivery channels are likely to change dramatically.
• The Venice Project: would not talk about it too much.  He only said it would mix the best of TV and the web.

Lorraine Twohill: marketing director EMEA Google

• 1 billion people on line, a quarter of them in
  Europe.
• Networking is the 3rd phase after information (1^st) and distribution and communication (ecommerce,… in the 2^nd phase).
• 3 drivers of change: broadband penetration, information access, self expression.
• Piczo: social network focused on teenage girls with a focus on security and viral distribution.  Its initial success demonstrates there is still space for innovation.

Danny Rimer:

• Web 2.0: Real potential of innovation (you can disrupt the business of a large of big businesses through it) but everyone wants to start a company, not get to the bottom of an idea.  Not everyone is going to win…
• He developed that idea further through the concept of micro-bubbles, bubbles happening only in specific geographies. 
  Europe appears especially prone to the phenomenon, with multiple companies are going after the same markets.
• He is worried about social networks sites as they tend to look like cool clubs, going in an out of fashion pretty quickly.
• Ecommerce is going to be massive.. ?

Hornik:

• Search quality is deteriorating, opportunity there.

Technorati CEO:

• 60 million blogs tracked
• 100K blogs being created per day in Q3 2006
• No slowing down yet
• Posting volumes: 1.3 million legitimate (ie excluding splogs) posting per day.
• 55% of the blogs out there have been updated in the past three months.  7 million blogs (11%)  update once a week or more.
• Spikes occur as world events happen.
• Languages: French: 2%, English: 39%, Japanese: 33% (!), Chinese: 10%.
• People blog at a specific time of day: English and Spanish blogs: early in the day and late at night.  Japanese blogs a lot during the day!
• A threat to traditional media: 3 blogs in top 50!
• People with high authority post a lot and have been around longer.

IPSOS: one of the best of the day!

• 44% of Europeans use the internet
• 60% of European internet users know what blogs are; 90% in
  France!
• 17% of Internet users read blogs (27% in
  France – 7% of the French contribute to blogs, 7% own one).
• 60% of the French trust the press.
• 24% of Europeans Internet users trust blogs, 35% of the French users.
• In general, more broadband penetration equals more blogs equals more trust in blogs.
• Blogs: number 3 in terms of trusted media, more so than TV ads, etc.
• 40% of internet users use it at some point in the buying process.
• Those that spend more trust blogs more…  A third of the Internet users have not bought because of negative consumer feedback on the web  44% in
  France
• Half more likely to buy if they read positive comments on the web.  62% in
  France.
• Blogs impact the purchase but also the image of a given company.
• User generated content is known read and has an impact.  Blogs have power.
• Blogs arrived at the right moment: European consumers don’t want to be talked to, but be participants in the consumption process.

LinkedIn CEO: tried to be very structured, but not very enlightening in the end

• Web 2.0: social and entertainment oriented
• They are soon going to move into the enterprise.
• Axioms of web 2.0 and how they play out in the enterprise:
  • Everyone is becoming a publisher but not every professional will become one.  What they will have is an online profile.
  • Social networking:
    • Myspace became popular because it was social.
    • Your real community matters, see facebook.
    • That is very useful in a professional setting.
  • Ubiquity of usage: more collaborative work with wikis, …
  • Apis and interoparbility: zoominfo type of features will become more important.
• LinkedIn:
  • 8.5 million users
  • The profile piece:
    • Today I send a cv, a document which can be inaccurate and is lacking metadata.
    • That changes with a LinkedIn profile with a stronger identification of expertise.
  • Search: Vertical search can add a lot of context to professional-oriented searches (example of “sex” search in Google bringing up porn, whereas it brings journalists and health experts in LinkedIn…).

A few start-ups that pitched:

• Feedback 2.0:
  • Dimelo: parent company
  • Growing gap between consumers(no communication)  and companies (no control over the information being discussed)
  • Solution: tool to improve this communication.  Not forum, not blogs but dialogs and feedback.
  • Exalead is a customer
• Ulik
  • Recommendation engine a la Criteo
  • One stop shop solution for all sort of socially-based recommendation.
  • Very detailed thinking about the feature scope for a destination like this site.  Interesting!
• Wengo
  • People to people services marketplace
  • Huge market: home tutoring, etc.
  • Started two years ago, 34 employees
  • Focused on on line connectivity?
• SMS Connect

o        Powered by echovoxo        2 billion mobile users, 100 billion dollars to in 2010o        CEO got sidetracked trying to get the online demo to work, but it sounded some sort of SMS-based web monetization mechanism?

VCs trying to become entrepreneurs

I got this through the mail from a former associate of mine (Thanks Hadi!):

Venture capitalists switch to startups

MANY ARE SURPRISED BY TYPE OF WORK

By Constance Loizos

Mercury News

I can now take comfort in the fact that, far from being suicidal, what I am doing is actually part of a trend that is soon to engulf Europe! It will be a nice change from the reactions I get from fromer VC colleagues when I tell them that I have switched sides: they usually look at me as though I have announced I have some form of disfiguring but not life-theatening cancer. Thanks guys!

My own impression so far is not so much that I am surprised by the type of work (I kept enough in touch with operations over the years to know what it is like; details are *why* I want to be an entrepreneur again!) but just how much of a rollercoaster it feels like: as a VC, you are buffeted from the entrepreneurial elements by the fact that: a, you are only an investor (if it fails, you can blame ity on the CEO); b, you spend a day a week max on the subject (you are not attached to it as much as somebody who breathes his company); c, you have other things (other portfolio companies, fund raising, upcoming Xmas cocktail parties…) to worry about. As an entrepreneur, even borderline good news make you want to go hang yourself: it may just be me, but it feels a lot more poersonal and a bit less like spectator sport, which is exactly what I wanted.

Because being a VC has its own brand of special, insidious stress. You don’d do things, you only talk about them. Everything is tackled at an abstract level and everything is an idea, not a task. If you are cerebral, that’s fine; if you like to take responsibility, it can wear a bit thin after a few cycles, which is what happened to me.

Still, I regret that there aren’t more connections between VCs and entrepreneurs and the two career paths aren’t seen in some sort of a continuum. That is my explanation for the rise of intermediaries in Europe.

Steve, fire Ray Ozzie before it’s too late, please!

I am a bit of a Microsoft fan.  Not that their product don’t suck from times to times, but they are *really* good at commoditizing technology and innovation and making it palatable to the masses.  Better Bill Gates than Stallman in my book: I really don’t want to have to compile my OS every time I update it.  Plus i think they are really good at making stable, usable software and that is where I am starting to be worried: with Bill Gates gone, Ozzie is now Chief Software Architect.

Ray is revered in some circles as a “visionnary” but a look at the product he has created leaves a very different impression: this is the guy who created Notes, a great concept and an abomination of a product.  Actually, it was more of a develoment tool than anything else, but millions of corporate drones had to suffer it as their primary email and groupware interface for years.  More recently, Ray was the brain behind Groove, another great concept and a total failure as a product/service: has anyone out there really tried to use it?  The interface is so bad two guys I am working with on a project (one of them with an engineering background…) couldn’t get the hang of it and we had to revert to using emails….

So, Steve, if you know what is good for your company and the huge silent majority of users who love your products, here is a suggestion: fire Ray before he can work some of his “magic” on your OS, on Office or any of the hundreds of great products Microsoft releases every year.  I am keeping my fingers crossed in the meanwhile.

Basho, again and again

I remain fascinated by Basho’s haikus. For some reason, they remind me of some of Ponge’s poems/descriptions in Le parti pris des choses. They have the same focus on things as opposed to emotions, perhaps. In the case of Basho, though, most of his haikus do “loop back” in a way and provide a glimpse into the emotional state of the poet, leaving the reader with a bittersweet, slightly melancholy feeling, thus escaping from the apparent dryness of Ponge:

Along this road
Goes no one;
This autumn evening.

(translated by Blyth)

I discovered Basho through Hôhokekyo Tonari no Yamada-kun, Takahata’s anime and one of my all-time Japanese movies (a tender look at family life in Japan), where the chapters are interlaced with a few Basho poems. I seem to recall there were a few other poets as well, but I can’t recal their names.

Gosh, how I miss Tokyo. When will I be back?