I discussed the Jamba deal announced some days ago with some friends. Still I'm curious what exactly Verisign seeks in the Jamba technology?

The Samwer brothers held just 16% of the corporation by the time the company was sold. Jamba was expecting sales of US$ 84 mio in 2004, so the multiple would be around 3.25. Pretty low for a high growth company nowadays isn't it?

Just realized that Bloglines now serves this RSS feed to 100 subscribers. Good to see you...

- the latest Carnival of the Capitalists. It is probably the biggest of it's kind for a long time and gives you a great selection of noteworthy articles from the blogosphere.

I just came across this well drafted overview (pdf)about economic indicators in the UAE between 2000 and 2003.

Seems the Monster has even more appetite, after buying jobpilot.de last week monster.com announced the acquisition of tickle.com the grand-daddy of social software.

"Tickle has been profitable since the second quarter of 2002. Through April 30, 2004, trailing twelve-month revenue was approximately $25 million. Monster Worldwide anticipates that the transaction will be earnings neutral in 2004 and accretive in 2005. The consideration paid for the transaction consisted of one million shares of Monster Worldwide common stock, an initial cash payment of $29.5 million and a three-year payment of approximately $40-plus million, related to achieving certain financial objectives."

This company is amazing - although most (or all) of the companies services are still free it just raised US$ 20 million in series C from Cisco and Sequoia Capital. As the discussion about privacy concerns continues Plaxo has been able to catch more than 700 million of adress data sets that can be a valuable treasure.

Cnet has an interesting sidenote how Intel expands R&D; facilities in Russia in a smart way:

"Instead of outsourcing to them, we hired them," Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy said. "This is a rare opportunity, where you can get intact design teams."

As Siemens seems disappointed from sales of the new Xelibri line that has been planned as the second mobile for everyone it stops selling the brand:

"We'll continue to serve this market segment,'' Axel Schafmeister, a spokesman for Siemens's cellular business said in a telephone interview. While Siemens is abandoning the Xelibri brand, it will sell fashion phones under the Siemens name in future, he added."

"Siemens introduced the Xelibri in January last year to help boost its share of the market for more expensive, fashionable handsets. A lack of buyers caused full-year operating profit from mobile phones to drop 67 percent, Siemens said in November. "

Wow, my sincere respect goes to the Samwer brothers. Many thought their first sale of alando.de to ebay was pure luck. With Jamba they have shown it's luck and good entreprenuership that drives them...

"Internet and telecom company VeriSign on Monday said it has agreed to acquire Germany's Jamba, a wireless content provider, for $273 million in cash and VeriSign stock.

Berlin-based Jamba provides wireless content services to millions of wireless subscribers in nine European countries through its distribution and billing relationships with carriers such as Vodafone, T-Mobile and KPN. "

Dubai is probably the best place in the Middle East to do business outside of Israel. The city is a great mix of shopping cathedrals, wonderful beaches, skyscrapers and business parks.

Source: vienture.com

I recently discovered Dubai-based entrepreneur Ashraf Sheikh with his very informative (though not often updated) weblog. Ashraf is also organizing a networking event the Dubai Mixer. If you are in Dubai don't miss...

Mario sends in the announcement of the first (?) angel round of weblogsinc.com that have a similar business model as Creative Weblogging. I'm curious about how this money will be used...

"Calacanis wouldn't answer questions about his own company's funding, but Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban did. Cuban wouldn't say how much he's invested in Weblogs Inc. but confirmed he's putting some money to work in the space. I am an investor [in Weblogs Inc.], and excited about it is all I can tell you," Cuban told The Post. "

Meanwhile vc-facts reports an angel round for OpenBC the Germany based social networking company has used the latest b-to-v investment gala in Zurich to attract business angels with powerful networks and pockets for their first round. OpenBC is cash flow positive and has shown an impressive growth already.

Also the audio media verlag GmbH Munich could find angel investors following up one of the Hamburg Business Angel Lounges. Audio Media develops an audio book magazine with bi-monthly editions. Although the market for audio books became crowded in the last years, the news stand is an almost virgin area for audio books in Germany.

Phil links to Jeff Pulvers hot news about Skype. I had made some (fairly easy) predictions about Skype in March. Now the skype founders haven given the babies names:

"As previously hinted, SkypeOut will provide Skype users on a prepaid basis the ability to place calls to the public switched telephone network. During the talk, I found out that G.729a will be used as the codec to perform the PSTN interconnect, so at least for the moment, when SkypeOut launches, customers placing calls to the PSTN may not always be able to experience the higher quality sound that Skype normally uses for it's own Peer-to-Peer communication."

"SkypePlus will offer Skype customers value-added services including: Voicemail and the mapping of DID (Direct-Inbound-Dialing) numbers."

Rajesh links to Dan Bricklin's thoughts about software licenses.

I guess is very much right with his perspectives. Software distribution has changed as we are even talking about utility computing for many basic software (and hardware) services.

I got a bit deeper into the topic of social software recently. It seems there something of a battle going on between the open networks Ryze, OpenBC, Orkut, Tribe and Friendster and LinkedIn and the only internally active such as VisiblePath and ContactNetworks on one side and Spoke and Zero Degrees.

if you are coming to or staying in Germany and if you are in the process to increase your reach via business networks this linkfest might be a help for you.

Tim Draper who invented a new form of VC pitching last year is back with the second round to pitch your billion dollar idea through the AO weblog.

Honestly if you have any idea of value it might be better included into a private email to him, but still there are some pundits that have placed their idea in the comments section...

(Thanks for the hint goes to Patrick)

Barry mails in the Fenwick trends in Venture Financings - and it is pretty much upbeat, as up rounds outpaced down rounds for the first time since Fenwick does the reporting. Venture valuations are picking up and approach normality again...

I had been in India long enough to make my own judgement. Whatever I had seen is that globalization had huge benefits for this country. There are many smaller countries in a similiar development stage as India and so far I couldn't find too many negative arguments about globalization (although the term is pretty vague).

Now Jagdish Bhagwati throws in his support for on the ground of economic theory. Knowledge@Wharton enthusiastically discusses the book. The Economist has done this before, so you should consider reading it!

"For Bhagwati, the principles of economic globalization are a means to help poor nations escape poverty and help developed nations continue flourishing. He contends there is a lack of evidence that multinationals encourage violations of workers’ rights by poor countries seeking to attract these companies. He likewise maintains that globalization has not adversely affected wages and working conditions in the United States."

"Despite these caveats, In Defense of Globalization is an impressive book. It represents a major step toward defining a more equitable economic model for a world which sadly seems intent on taking giant strides backward away from the ideals of a global community."

Symantec has added spam solutions into it's portfolio by buying Brightmail the so far market leader in spam detection technologies. The deal values Brightmail at approximately US$370 million.

This is not exactly a new headline but pretty noteworthy. After buying Jobline.de some years ago, Monster is still hungry for the German market and has agreed to buy Jobpilot.de Germany's remaining market leader.

"The New York-based company on Friday said it is purchasing career portal JobPilot from the e-HR Services division of Adecco Group. Under terms of the deal, Monster will pay $57 million in cash and 1 million shares of Monster Worldwide worth around $29 million based on Friday's trading price. Monster also will make an additional cash payment of $18.9 million toward JobPilot's working capital."

The deal values Jobpilot.de at € 74.5 million. Jobpilot.de had revenues of € 28 million in 2003 and was slightly profitable. This seems like a pretty fair valuation in these days and if you are not mobile.de. According to the press release Monster has found a smart way to ensure the management will stay with the new company - Davide Villa, CEO of jobpilot.de shall serve as CEO of Monster Central Europe.

Update:

jobpilot.de has been public already in 2000 and was acquired by Adecco in 2002 for € 70 million. It seems to be a low margin deal for Adecco...

M-E-X Blog links to a great beginners guide for writing a business plan (German pdf).

As a response to my last update about social software I had an interesting discussion with Chris Kelly Spoke's Chief Privacy Officer:

"Hi TJ,

"By leading in architecting these controls into the Spoke system, we have established a large and growing network that delivers value to thousands of professionals everyday. In my experience (this is my third time as a Chief Privacy Officer, and I have represented through my former law firms some of the largest and influential companies on the Internet on these matters), I know of no other social networking company that has dedicated the development and support resources to privacy that Spoke has."

I had installed Spoke here and I felt pretty unhappy of what it did to my system. It basically harvested information and gave me (as an inexperienced first-time customer) no control about what was going on.

I did not want to express any concerns about any legal issues that may arise here, as I have no intention to distrust your privacy policy. The point for me was that it felt very strange to see the contacts uploaded without having an instant info what was going with this data.

Initially I really liked the concept of Spoke more than the most other "manual invitation models" as it offered a personal connection (although weak) that might have been forgotten and shimmers within a loosely bound organization. A personal connection that might have been valuable could be found easily. So I was pretty enthusiastic, but apparently I became more clear to me that a connection is much more than a private emails address that might be forgotten. A connection should be an attitude to introduce someone to your network potentially.

I'm pretty lax about giving out my email (it is brutally visible on my homepage) but I'm careful about making introductions. If we ask ourselfs what a value of a software based social network is, we should answer the question what a connection means for us. For Plaxo (and maybe for Spoke?) it is a set of data that makes storing contacts easier. This is a pretty fine value, but it is a much smaller value than having a network potentially opened to you.

In all I might have been a bit too harsh, but I was just disappointed with Spoke as I thought it offers more than Plaxo (indeed the installation was 30 min longer).

Hamburg has selected the entrepreneurs of the year 2004 in this wonderful city:

- Goertz a German shoe discount retail giant
- Globetrotter the best known outdoor chain in Germany

and most importantly...



- the Hamam (a turkish inspired oasis) that friends of mine started last year
The Hamam is a new variant of a traditional Turkish bath house that offer a classic way of bathing and massage. It's a great publicity for Coskun and Selma Costur and I hope we will see more Hamams in Northern Germany...

Russell mails in this interesting article at the NYT. It highlights a field of VC activity that hardly gets much attention - the buyout of startups acquired during the tech boom.

"Silicon Valley is littered with hundreds of former start-ups trapped inside larger technology companies that are no longer happy with the ventures they snapped up in the acquisitions frenzy of the 1990's."

"In some cases, the best candidate for running the newly freed company may turn out to be its original creator."

While I see this market as an interesting niche, the problem is often that such a startup is often drained by years of mismanagement and the best people have gone already. A buy-out might be interesting but the risk is still high (compared to say a manufacturing company) while the upside (an IPO or another trade sales) if often smaller compared to a "virgin" tech start-up.