We have launched a Social Software Weblog at Creative Weblogging. We are very proud to see Scott working with us. Scott Allen has a tremendous experience in social software and entrepreneurship. Welcome Scott and happy blogging!

"I've been researching, writing, and teaching about online
social and business networking since fall of 2002. I teach classes in
conjunction with LinkedIn and Ryze, with more on the way. I also run
networks/groups/whatever on many of these sites about how to use them
more effectively to grow your business and advance your career.

I've co-authored an introductory book on the topic, The Five Keys to Building Business Relationships Online, and have a contract with a major publisher for a more comprehensive book, The Virtual Handshake,
for publication in early 2005. You can learn more about the classes and
books, as well as see archives of past writings on the topic, at OnlineBusinessNetworks.com.

My other great passion is entrepreneurship, having either been an
entrepreneur or been at the right hand of one for most of my career.
I've run a software company, a consulting firm, and even a used CD
store. My current outlet for sharing that passion and experience is as
the Entrepreneurs Guide on About.com, where I provide over 10,000
weekly readers with guidance and resources to help them start and
develop their new businesses. If you're an entrepreneur, or considering
entrepreneurship, I invite you to join me at entrepreneurs.about.com."

Dreaming of your very own private island? Then Farhad Vladi might be just having a new island on sales right for you. His company Vladi Private Islands has more than 12000 islands in 40 countries in the archive and actively sells about 300 simultaneously. His islands range from $ 45 million with 3 million square meters to 500 square meter miniature island for CA$ 1500.

Mr. Vladi is a classic Hamburg entrepreneur who started his business just after finishing university. He developed this niche real estate business from Hamburg during the last 30 years and is today's biggest real estate agent for private islands in the world. Impressive...

The NYT is pretty gloomy about the prospects of independent start-ups as Vonage and Skype in the booming VoIP market.

"The findings, based on a poll of 1,000 consumers in the two countries to be released today, suggest that the market for low-priced Internet phone services will most likely be dominated by phone companies like AT&T; and cable providers, and possibly local phone carriers, but not the new entrants that control much of the Internet market now.

"The companies with existing relationships with consumers have huge advantages," said Martin Kon, a consultant at Mercer and the author of the survey. "It's an uphill battle for the upstarts with no customer base."

While Internet calling, which sends voice calls as data packets over the Internet, is considerably cheaper than traditional calling, most consumers will not switch solely because of price, Mr. Kon said."

I pretty much disagree with th report. Skype is at least a strong buy for many existing phone companies as they have created a new client relationship to 10 million downloaders in the last 6 months that are fine with the kind of connection Skype delivers.

Kirsten from re:inventioninc mails in her perspective about my yesterdays post:

"Thank you for posting news about our Venture Funding for Women Entrepreneurs report in partnership with L.A.-based Growthink Research, a leading venture capital research firm. Just a quick point of clarification, re:invention never attributed the lack of venture capital for women exclusively to their business plans. We did suggest emerging women entrepreneurs are at a disadvantage if they don't write a sound business plan. In that same post, however, we went on to suggest: “Looking at this infographic, however, one might infer that women simply need some kickstart tips about where and how to successfully secure $$$.” We have written multiple posts exploring reasons why women-led business are underfunded. Warmly invite you back over to re:invention's site to read more about our perspective on women-led businesses and venture capital. I think there may have been some understanding."

We have a new post up at Creative Weblogging that highlights the results of a recent Blogads survey. Quite interesting...

Is there a difference how women approach venture capital and how they got investment? There is much difference as a new report from Growthinkresearch.com argues:

"The disparity in funding between ventures led by males and females continues, but there are several areas of note in which women-led companies are performing better than others” announced study author Corey Lavinsky, CEO of Growthink Research, a leading venture capital research firm. “Leading the pack are women-led biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies which collectively raised $289 million. Further, women-led companies in the fields of HR software, e-mail/messaging software, and imaging technologies all raised more than 10% of the total dollars invested in their particular fields."

• Women headed 4.5% of all funded firms and received less than their fair share of capital (4.2%). This amounts to 84 women-led companies that raised $783.8 million.
• Over 200 investors provided venture capital to privately-held women-led companies in 2003, led by eight that funded three or more ventures.
• Women-led companies in the healthcare sector dominated all women-led firms receiving funding, receiving nearly 55% of funds.
• Women-led firms raised more than 10% of the total dollars invested in the following subsectors: Agricultural Biotechnology (17.5%), HR software (14.2%), imaging technologies (14.1%), and e-mail/messaging software (11.5%).
• More than one-third of the funding went to companies in the Bay Area.

Russell mails in the 24 hours dotcom contest. Apparently they succeeded in build up this indispensable website :) Cool initiative...

Reader Evelyn mails in the URL of the company blog she writes fro pivia.com. Pivia just won the Venturewire award. Evelyn focuses on:

"1) Distributed enterprise - the increasing virtualization of work
2) Software as a service - the increasing use of the Web/Internet as a platform for application (or 'services') delivery"

Two pretty interesting topics - you should subscribe to the newsfeed.

You know when it's five it's Fast Company - 10 technologies would have come from Technology Review. But you don't have to fear you have missed something big that will change your world. The fifth is actually interesting:

"The glass door of the dressing room at Prada's Epicenter store in SoHo slides shut.

I hang a $450 gray patterned shirt on a rack inside, and suddenly, a color flat-screen display on the wall lights up. The dressing room has "recognized" the item I've brought in, then suggests other sizes and materials that it comes in and even shows a picture of a much-better-looking-than-me model wearing the shirt in a Prada fashion show.

Attached to the shirt, along with the stratospheric price tag, is a piece of clear plastic the size of a business card. Embedded in the plastic is a coil of bronze microchip circuitry, which contains information about the shirt and conveys it to a reader built into the dressing room. This is a smart tag (or RFID tag, for radio-frequency identification), made by Texas Instruments and sold for about $3. It can be made much smaller -- about the size of a fleck in a snow globe -- and for as little as 10 cents."

This is pretty much the vision shown in "Minority Report". I feel cheap RFIDs, ubiquitous broadband and flat-screens will shape the world in industrialized countries in the next 15 years much more than expected now. All these new technologies are about to break trough and combined they will make you see the world differently...

Find more news about RFID in our RFID Weblog

Wired supports the common complaint of service quality of cell-phone companies:

"Your cell-phone company knows you hate it. Mobile-phone service was the second-lowest-ranked industry -- beating only cable providers among the 40 rated -- in the University of Michigan's newest customer satisfaction index.

And there's more: Mobile companies were the No. 2 sector in complaints last year to Better Business Bureaus, dropping from first place in 2002. Only auto dealers did worse."

Interestingly most cell-phone companies (or mobile networks) in Germany have been on the top of customer satisfaction index some years ago. I wonder if this can only be the much worser competition in service quality from other industries that makes people think so?

I still wonder why this step takes so long. Radio has found a way into the Internet. At home I haven't touched local radio stations for months, internet radio has far more selection to offer when it comes in CD quality. Video streaming via Video on Demand comes in perfect quality, so why TV makes so little foray into this area? Advertisement based Free-TV does not even have to change or customize the business model streaming through the web. Premiere a German subscription-only station has announced plans to stream via web but is not in a hurry. This is a much cheaper way to deliver the signal compared to the complicated Premiere set-top-box.

Now TiVo makes headlines with "bridging" the analog/digital divide:

"The new TiVo technology, which will become a standard feature in its video recorders, will allow users to download movies and music from the Internet to the hard drive on their video recorder. Although the current TiVo service allows users to watch broadcast, cable or satellite programs at any time, the new technology will make it possible for them to mix content from the Internet with those programs."

Seth links to the Ringtones Magazine. Finally a magazine where the title says it all...

Meanwhile Cnet reports about an investment from Siemens Mobile Acceleration into pretty promising Xingtone.

"Xingtone sells a $15 software package that allows consumers to transfer songs and other digital content that they already own to their cell phones.

The start-up, which was founded in March 2003, has also developed software that allows media companies to sell music and other digital content that can be placed on cell phones directly, bypassing wireless carriers, said Brad Zutaut, Xingtone's chairman and one of the company's four founders."

Find more news about mobile technlogy at our new Mobile Weblog.

Winds of Change has added a new wonderful series - Winds of Discovery. Keep discovering...

Dispatches has an excellent piece about the new breed of startups that are more professional than ever and the new role of global VC.

"The parallel that Anandaram draws between the players in the venture creation ecosystem and the multinational corporation ("MNC") is apt. Increasingly, the core functions of the MNC include (a) raising capital, (b) allocating capital, and (c) managing affiliation networks composed of firms having specialist knowledge and capabilities. My friends Jan Twombly and Jeff Shuman at The Rhythm of Business can attest to the heightened interest among MNC's in how to cultivate the entrepreneur's choreography skills in order to effectively manage affiliation networks. Although the VC's role as choreographer is nothing new, the requisite geographic scope has expanded*."

I received a couple of bug reports since yesterday's relaunch. If you see this page in a weird design please press reload at your browser and everything should work fine if you have updated your browser in the last 3 years. Enjoy!

There has been a surprising hype in the last months about the paid blogging model. Business 2.0 devotes a long article to Nick Denton's media empire and weblogsinc.

"After only a few months in the lab, the Kinja team scrapped the marketing-tool angle. The project persisted as a kind of Google for blogs, and at launch, to no one's surprise, the New York Times ran a piece about it. But so far, the thing has turned out to be an overhyped bust on par with "push technology." Hourihan quit the day of its launch. Power bloggers eschew it as a weaker version of the programs they already use, the blog-gathering RSS applications, which keep tabs on hundreds of blogs at once. People new to the blogging world, of course, don't look at it at all."

Meanwhile Wired investigates on Nick Denton's past:

"Clearly, this is not Rupert Murdoch's world. In Nick Denton's nanopublishing empire, that last word is usually accompanied by eye rolling and air quotes. The meat of his Gawker Media enterprise, after all, is not newspapers or satellites or movies but weblogs, until recently viewed as non-revenue-generating megaphones for online bloviators. Denton, a part-Hungarian, part-Jewish, matter-of-factly gay and cheerfully iconoclastic 37-year-old British expat, has recruited a squad of talented workaholic misfits who use Movable Type, sexual prurience, and relentless snarkiness to draw enough of a crowd to lure advertisers. While he isn't making a bundle yet - and doesn't claim that he ever will - Denton is making a splash that's seriously rattling the media hierarchy."

Looks like the hype is looking for new targets...

Another interesting M&A; news comes from China. Xinhua Finance aims to acquire Mergent.

"Xinhua Finance, the fast-growing Chinese financial information company, has been actively pursuing a plan to become the first Chinese company to list in Tokyo, with Nomura Securities as its lead underwriter.

However, the decision to acquire Mergent may signal a preference for a US listing. Fredy Bush, chief executive of Xinhua Finance, said: "There is an underwriter in the US that is making a compelling case for going to Nasdaq."

If the company - which bought AFX News' Asian operations 18 months ago and US-based Market News International for undisclosed amounts - does launch its initial public offering in New York, it would represent a blow for the Tokyo Stock Exchange, which has been lobbying hard to secure its first Chinese listing.

Mergent, which was spun off from Moody's Investors Service, the ratings company, in 1998 will add crucial database technology and information to Xinhua Finance's existing ratings work.

Xinhua Finance will try to develop a dividend product for China based on Mergent's popular "dividend achievers" reports that track which US companies are the best dividend providers."

Xinhua is an agressive media company I watch out for a couple of months now. They keep surprising me with bold steps.

Who said the times of mega VC rounds are over? Apparently it can still be achieved. TechTarget has received stunning US$ 70 million from Technology Crossover Ventures and Polaris Venture Partners. The company looks pretty interesting as it does niche publishing, something I'm pretty much working with in the last months...

Here are some indicators:

• Current member base of enterprise IT professionals - 2,874,748
• Number of industry-specific Web sites for enterprise IT professionals 19
• Total monthly impressions 42 million
• Total monthly page views 12 million
• Average number of Webcasts produced each month 50
• Opt-in E-Newsletters sent each month 70+
• Number of invitation-only IT conferences 10+
• Number of sponsors and advertising customers 1,500+

Venturewire announced their TopTen Enterprise Start-Ups last week. "The award recognizes start-up technology companies that are best positioned for long-term success in the business software and services industry."

• Blazent, San Mateo, CA has some much needed solutions:
  "Whether you are launching an enterprise-wide server consolidation initiative or evaluating new server purchases for an expanding business unit, Blazent helps you maximize the value of your server and storage infrastructure, as well as your financial investments. "


• Composite Software, San Mateo, CA which has a promising mission:
  "The Composite Information Server makes all enterprise data accessible as if it existed in a single location. Through dashboards and other information applications, business analysts, managers and executives can now obtain complete, real-time views of their business operations - views that can be stored, reused, and combined with other views."
  
• Gluecode Software, El Segundo, CAprovides open source application infrastructure and seems to be competitive to Grand Central


• Intelligent Results, Bellevue, CA which says the following about their product:
  
  "Intelligent Results delivers business analytics software and solutions that unleash the value stored in unstructured data. This enables companies to discover powerful new insights and trends not possible from existing structured data, and turn those insights into operational and competitive advantage."


• MetaMatrix, New York, NY has a very tough pitch for their sales people:
  "MetaBase serves as a map of the enterprise's data resources, including relationships among elements and keys on the same or disparate data sources. The MetaBase Modeler, a UML based diagramming tool, is used to build E/R diagrams and graphically produce relationships."


• Pivia Software, Cupertino, CA has something any ecommerce company needs - performance:
  
  "Application generation bottlenecks are often the most crucial problems enterprises must resolve in order to be fully functional. Pivia offloads the origin web site infrastructure by applying a number of technologies including connection pooling, SSL optimization, static caching, and application smart caching. In concert, these technologies can reduce the load on databases, application servers, and web servers by as much as 90% as well as increase web application responsiveness."


• Proofpoint, Cupertino, CA probably company 101 to sell anti-spam and anti-virus solutions


• Quadrus Financial Technologies, Vancouver, British Columbia is a thread for Intel apparently:
  "The Quadrus system can perform tasks in seconds that can take other systems hours to complete (achieving gigaflop performance on standard desktop computers and teraflops on distributed server environments) and offers users the ability to dynamically extend and customize system functionality to handle even the most complex models, instruments and analytics."


• Syndera, Redwood City, CA claims to have found a new way to improve business intelligence:
  "Syndera offers a comprehensive application that delivers real-time visibility across the organization to align business, operations and IT around the same goals."


• Wily Technology, Brisbane, CA helps companies to monitor their application performance:
  "Introscope, the industry-leading enterprise application management solution, provides deep visibility into the entire application environment and helps enterprises keep their mission-critical applications high-performing and available 24x7."

So many enterprise software companies in California - impressive. For me some concepts are pretty interesting, alas most companies have been discovered already by the financial community and investment will be less thrilling. Also interesting to note if you browse through the different sites, they offer a very similar approach to present the company and the respective solutions. Indeed some seem to be cloned. Is this the pressure from users or just the same web design/marketing company?

Seth has been so nice to send me his newest book "Free Prize Inside" a while ago. So here comes my review.

I really like Seth's style of writing. It's easy to understand and he packs things into short sentences. Yet it is no simple stuff. He successfully describes the small differences that are so difficult, to see yet so much needed, to create something remarkable in today's marketing. The free prize is in Seth's terms a product that has an edge that is unique. It's more than an USP it's something outstanding.

This book is a wonderful guideline what could be your very own next billion dollar idea and how you will nurture it.

"The unsatisfied are the folks who don't even realize that they've got a problem that needs solving...That's were the real growth comes from, and where you will find the customers you need when your current product becomes obsolete."

It is especially written for the rather inexperienced entrepreneur who looks for an opportunity within an organization:

"There's no correlation between how good your idea is and how likely the organization [you are in] is to embrace it. None."

I really liked the book it's a good read for one weekend. If you are interested in more stuff from Seth, just mail Ashraf and you have a good chance that he will send you some gifts from Dubai (as I experienced).

Such a pity - VC Buzz was one of my favorite VC destinations. They are closing down on 4th of June.

"Dear VC Buzz Newsletter Subscriber,

Thank you for you past support of VC Buzz. Regretfully, we will be ending the VC Buzz Newsletter subscription service on June 4, 2004. The VCBuzz.com Web site will be shut down on the same day.

We would like to take this opportunity to invite you to subscribe to our internet.com Daily newsletter. The internet.com Daily Newsletter lists summaries and links to InternetNews.com-produced stories focusing on the internet. Subscribers will get the day's top internet stories pushed directly to you from our team of real-time news editors who are focused 100% on the internet industry. "

Seems this free weblog has demolished the competition :)

We featured Pay by Touch some time ago. Now they make headlines with another US$ 25 million infusion. I'm impressed this is a big bet.

Have a look at their demo (WMP required).

Paul Allen has found the newest M&A; rumor:

"So here's why a Google/Skype combination would work:

1. Google will have nearly $3 billion available in the short term; they could invest as much as Skype needs to finish building out the technical infrastructure so that Skype users can call any phone in the world.
2. Google has hundreds of millions of users and could dramatically increase the number of Skype downloads and therefore exponentially increase the value of the Skype network.
3. Google already offers voice access to some of its search and news services; but they could integrate voice activated queries and audio responses from the Google servers into the Skype service. It would be amazing to drive down the freeway with my Skype mobile phone and Jabra earpiece and say "search Google for Mexican restaraunts in Sandy, UT" and have it retrieve and tell me all the listings. Or a million other more important queries.
4. Even more important to me, I want Google to offer me audio access (both send and receive) to my gmail from any phone, and I want it to be free. I remember when Onebox.com did this back in 1999. You could send a voice email message from your phone. It was so hot that Phone.com paid $850 million (in bubble money, of course) to acquire them with only 2.5 million non-paying customers. I'm guessing that the Skype infrastructure would make this possible with no long distance charges.
5. Google may someday develop audio search engines that could access all of my previously recorded email messages and phone conversations (and meetings that I tape on my iPod with the Belkin voice recorder accessory). Owning Skype would give them a lot of audio data to play with in their Labs."

It would be such a delight, alas I fear we might have to wait a little :)

Ed Sim has a great post that highlights the risk to overhype your company:

"When you have a grandiose launch you set high expectations for your company. As my colleague, Ben Tanen, put it, "they would have to be the next generation phone company" to deem their execution worthy of their launch. Anything short of that and they would be deemed a failure."

Great marketing as in the case of Cometa Networks can be a burden. Be sure not to oversell as buyers will expect extreme returns from your products.

The entrepreneur of the year 2004 has been chosen by Ernst&Young.; This years award goes to Philippines based Tony Tan Caktiong, founder of Jollibee Foods Corporation. Jollibee is the country's leading fast food chain and employs 26000 employees in 1000 branches leading to more than US$ 500 million in revenue.

Click continue to see all this years nominees.

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.