This is coming a little late in the week from me. Mark van ‘t Hooft is hosting the Carnival of the Mobilists #113 on his site Ubiquitous Thoughts. He is done a great job in selecting some of the best writing in this area. Thank you Mark. You can access the link here.
Techcrunch40 conference: All TC40 presenting companies and “what they do” is summarized here in one single page. Effort is made to keep it brief and simple, representing facts in layman’s language minus the marketing fluff and all other heavy mambo jambo. Shouldn’t take you more than 5 minutes to finish the page.
After reading short company reviews here, if you want to know more about a company, you can click on the profile link, which will take you to startup’s profile page at Crunch Base. Also included are the links to the live coverage at Techcrunch in detail towards the end of this post. Enjoy!
List of startups presenting at Techcrunch 40 conference -at a glance:
App2You lets you create do-it-yourself database driven web-based applications using a simple browser based interface. (profile)
8020 Publishing lets online communities actively participate in creating print magazines, crowd sourcing the print magazine creation process, and providing the logistics and editorial oversight. (blog, profile)
Cake Financial (blog, profile)
CastTV is a video search engine which help users finding and cataloging videos from the web. (blog, profile)
Ceedo lets you take your Windows desktop environment with you on mobile devices. Just connect mobile device to a Windows-PC and start working. (blog, profile)
Cognitive Code provides SILVIA, a complete system for the development and deployment of intelligent application that allows humans to interact with computers in completely natural and intuitive ways - uses artificial intelligence. (blog, profile)
Crowd Spirit is all about Electronic Product Crowd sourcing - Define, design, invest, finalize, test, recommend electronic products and share product revenue. (blog, profile)
Cubic Telecom Cubic Telecom is a mobile startup focused on reducing roaming and call charges for overseas calls. (blog, profile)
DocStoc DocStoc is YouTube for documents. Upload, share and rate your documents with the world. (blog, profile)
eXtreme Reality (blog, profile)
Faroo is a Peer-to-Peer distributed search engine with a distributed index providing more democratic user centric ranking while sharing advertising revenue with users. (blog, profile)
Flock is a web browser which makes discovery and sharing of rich media (video, photos, blogs etc) easier while enhancing social networking experience. (blog, profile)
LoudTalks is a push to talk free downloadable application, which allows you to talk to your friends or colleagues instantly with a single touch of a button. (blog, profile)
MusicShake lets your create music without previous knowledge of music or expertise. You can create ringtones and personalized music. (blog, profile)
Ponoko helps you convert your designs into real products, helps sell these products online or deliver directly to the customers. (blog, profile)
Story Blender lets your create video mashups from video clips, images and audio and share with your friends. (blog, profile)
Teach the People Lets you create communities for fun, education & innovation and share knowledge. Allows uploading of audio, video, docs and provides broadcasts, chat discussion boards etc. (blog, profile)
Tripit Tripit is a do-it-yourself online trip planner which lets your share your trip itineraries etc with friends. (blog, profile)
TruTap lets you IM from mobile phone, share pics etc across different Instant Mesaging (IM) networks. Requires app download to your phone. (blog, profile)
Viewdle allows monetization of videos by indexing and making embedded meta data searchable. Its facial-recognition technology enables better cataloging and more relevant search results. (blog, profile)
Wixi is a media sharing desktop which lets you store and share all your video, music and photos in one place. (blog, profile)
Techcrunch 40 Day 1 presentations:
TechCrunch 40 Session 1: Search & Discovery
TechCrunch 40 Session 2: Mobile & Communications
Techcrunch40 Day 2 presentations:
TechCrunch40 Session 5: Productivity & Web Apps
TechCrunch40 Session 6: Revenue Models & Analytics
Note that some links will become functional on Sept 18 once the demos. Please leave a comment if you find any mistakes or inaccuracies.
In his post, the always interesting Paul Golding asked the question “Is personalization that important?” especially in the mobile sector.
In my opinion, Personalization is a vital part of this equation.
Personalization of mobile devices allows the creation of a unique user experience and a user-statement. Padmashree Warrior (Motorola) stated this as:
… user expectations in the mobile world revolve around Personalization, Mobilization and Socialization. Personalization is about reducing digital clutter, and making a world of exploding digital content increasingly relevant to you. Tomorrow’s personalization engines need to learn your preference and work with location and presence to deliver an experience tailored to you.
I think Personalization goes beyond that. It transcends the device, to include user-interaction, content, context and services. Device makers, service providers and the customers need to realize that they are part of a learning, adapting and evolving ecosystem. In such a system, the user should not only be able to customize, choose, create, distribute and control content, but this entire process, should in itself create additional value. When done correctly, everybody in the food chain gets a slice of this additional revenue.
Ringtones are one of the simplest examples that come to mind. They are a rage in Asia and Europe and catching up here. Third-party moblogging, location and presence based services focus on the ‘context’ aspect. This is the ‘Who Effect’ that Tony Fish referred to in his illuminating post.
To do this correctly, an open standards based approach has to be agreed upon and followed by all the stakeholders. Organizations such as W3C, Open Mobile Alliance and 3GPP have still a long way to go before Personalization standards are in place.
Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, Nokia’s chief executive has said, “Devices alone are not enough anymore. Consumers want a complete experience.”
Unlike Twitter or Jaiku, Pownce is not a messaging service or a presence-announcer. Pownce focuses on your sharing stuff with your friends. That stuff could be photos, music, messages, links, events, etc. to your friends from your PC/laptop to your friends who are connected to you on Pownce.
Kevin Rose (of Digg fame) started Pownce with three other friends as an offering from their company - Megatechtronium.
I have been checking out Pownce. I am not impressed by the browser interface but the desktop application is much cooler since it is based on Adobe’s AIR. While we are still waiting for the Pownce API to be opened up, why are the feeds missing in a social-networking Web 2.0 application such as this? The ability to import the events into your calendar application is useful. If you shell out US$20/year, you are allowed file-sizes upto 100MB and no advertisements to bother you. Now, I don’t think that has enough pull to get paid subscribers.
Pownce is taking the lessons from Twitter seriously by adding members through invitations only. This will allow them to scale in a measured way. By the way, some folks you may want to befriend on Pownce are here. A nice feature about Pownce is that you can define sets of friends so that you can have your ‘islands’ of ‘friends at office’, ‘neighborhood pals’, ‘college buddies’, etc. No SMS or ‘moblogging’ feature is available, unless you actually access your web on your mobile phone to share stuff.
So, as you can see, Pownce operates in a slightly different space as compared to Twitter or Jaiku. We will examine these related spaces a little more closely in my forthcoming post.
Guest Post by Chris Gill, President & CEO, SVASE
Having been invited by Vic to be a guest on Silicon Valley blog, the problem comes in thinking of something that other people will find interesting. I recently attended the Kauffman Fellow program in London for up and coming VCs where I moderated an outstanding panel on “Helping portfolio companies develop globally”, and on my return ran a workshop for startup CEOs on creating a winning funding pitch. Both of these surfaced a wealth of interesting information on entrepreneurial foundations and survival, so I thought I’d share some of this with you, saving thoughts on success and significance for another time. - Chris Gill
Entrepreneur Foundations
Put yourself in situations where you can meet & evaluate potential team members.
You can’t do it all on your own, so you need a team. A pretty good founding team consists of a visionary, a technical guru, and a market specialist. Take jobs that put you in direct contact with these types of people and give you some experience & insights into what makes good & great ones.
Keep your eyes & ears open for significant problems or opportunities. This usually means you have some interface with your potential customers, typically in a sales or marketing role.
Have a good understanding of who has the problem, what it means to them, what you have to promise/show for them to take action & how much they are prepared to pay for possible solutions. Prepare yourself to be able to describe these issues clearly & concisely.
Have a good understanding of how you can deliver your promised solution, the resources required to create, market & sell it both initially & in volume production, how much it will cost to do this & therefore how much profit you can make.
Evaluate the potential of the business. Can it be a great business that could grow to $30M in 10 years time, employ hundreds of people and allow you to live a very comfortable life? Or could this realistically be a global corporation with revenues of over $100M, profits over $8M and dominant market share within 5 years?
Be prepared to share your ideas & information with potential team members, so you can infect them with your passion, to recruit the best & brightest to your business.
Entrepreneur Survival
Spend as little money as possible. Use a spare bedroom instead of renting an office; borrow, or buy used equipment instead of new; convince your attorneys to defer payment until you get funded. If you think you’re going to need venture capital to succeed, double check to make sure you have a fundable team and proposition, otherwise while you will hopefully learn a lot, you’ll waste a whole bunch of time, friends & family money, & goodwill, and have fewer friends & less credibility than when you started.
If you’re going to need venture capital, use a Delaware “C” corporation as your legal structure. Use an attorney in a reputable law firm with a lot of experience & contacts developed over years working with startups. Set up a standard stock option scheme, and be careful who you give stock options to. Be prepared to share your solution with potential customers, to get their feedback on what they really see as the problem, what they’d really like to see as the solution, how much they’d be prepared to pay for it, and how eager they are to be paying beta customers.
Someone needs to be the CEO, and the team needs to understand that.
Make sure everyone understands that the success of the company comes first, and that anyone on the founding team, including you, will be replaced as soon as it becomes apparent they don’t have the experience and skills to meet the growing demands of their assigned roles.
If you’re looking for venture capital, reconcile yourself to your first institutional round of funding looking something like:
If you’re looking for venture capital, reconcile yourself to your share of the equity in the company being diluted by further rounds of funding. But if the venture capital you seek will enable you to rocket ahead, that’s OK. 7% of a $1B market cap company is worth a whole heck of a lot more than any percentage of a company that failed to become mainstream.
Get a really good handle on the buying cycle, the decision tree and the budgeting constraints of your potential customers. This generally requires you to talk with lots of customers and to get to know them intimately.
Build a business model and business plan that shows how you understand the problem, can deliver a viable solution, and make money along the way. Your assumptions are more important the numbers, but the numbers also need to show how well you understand the market and the business, from the bottom up, not from the latest Dataquest report.
Understand that your initial goal is to get a representative number of paying beta customers who will give you constructive feedback in return for early access to your solution. This provides evidence that there is demand for what you’re offering. Everything else is just a milestone along the way.
Understand that venture funding is just a milestone on the way, and actually a great test to see if you, your team and your proposition have got what it takes to deliver to the promise.
Don’t give up too easily. Almost nothing works the first time it’s attempted. Just because what you’re doing does not seem to be working, doesn’t mean it won’t work. It just means that it might not work the way you’re doing it. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it, and you wouldn’t have an opportunity. But if nobody wants to buy what you’re offering then maybe you need a different approach or a new idea. You don’t have to give up your passion for being an entrepreneur, it’s just that only a small proportion of ideas can spawn businesses, and relatively few teams are capable of the outstanding planning and execution required to turn the promise into viable, fundable businesses.
See Also:
Startup Funding Experience at Podtech
Evolving Market for Startup Funding Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
Raising Startup Funding at Onstartups blog
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