Diebold features a pretty good free research report (free registration required) about mobile gaming. It analyzes the state of mobile gaming in Europe especially in Germany.

"The potential for Mobile Gaming is promising: with European revenues forecasted to exceed $6 billion in 2006, Mobile Games will deliver a solid revenue source for mobile operators, portals, game developers and publishers. Almost 75% of the forecasted revenues derive from download games (as opposed to online games) and this is therefore the primary focus of this report."

Diebold Consultants have this pretty good pdf how to prepare your organization for successful outsourcing.

Also Patrick sends in some legal advice.

If you are interested in more news about outsourcing follow our Outsourcing Weblog that hosts the Carnival of Capitalists this week.

Just a month after the announcement of the last takeover Xinhua is ready to swallow Stone & McCarthy Research Associates a company that staffs over forty economists and analysts at its offices located in the US, London, Tokyo, Sydney, and Mexico City.

Tell I'm wrong but research in various niches is although fitted with small entry barriers still a great entrepreneurial opportunity.

Following my yesterday's article Anita makes a "bullish" comment:

"Subscription-based business models can be incredibly profitable once they get legs. I've been in established subscription-based businesses, and it is like printing money off a printing press."

"But consider this: subscription-based startups take a long time to get off the ground and require a huge amount of investment money. As someone I respect once told me, starting a business from the ground up with a subscription model is like "building a beach a grain a sand at a time."

Russell also points me to Ecademy's ambitious goals for subscribers:

"Ecademy is nothing if not ambitious. Their long-term plan is to build the world's largest trusted business network of 10,000 members in each of 1,000 cities or organizations (Trusted Networks) to 10 million members (Power Networkers) worldwide by 2050, generating a combined revenue of £2 billion."

Actually I'm working on two different subscription models. Keep tuned for more information here soon.

Anita analyzes a recent Economist article that has good arguments against the notorious naysaysers.

"SO THOROUGHLY have the lessons of the internet bubble been learned that the launch of any new technology is now invariably accompanied by much talk from industry observers about dangerous hype and inevitable disappointment. A case in point is radio frequency identification (RFID), a new, super-cheap version of which may, its backers hope, be destined to transform everything from shopping to warfare. As soon as RFID's boosters alerted the world to their innovations, reports of dire setbacks began to circulate. Yet if anything, the surprise is how well the roll-out of the new technology is meeting early expectations."

"The article says that many of the doom and gloom reports are coming as a result of suppliers who are being forced to implement RFID in order to save retailers -- like Wal-Mart -- money. Add to that the lack of standards for tag technology and "scaremongering" by privacy advocates (the article's terminology, not mine!), and you have a situation where firms are defensive about RFID and downplaying expectations."

Dispatches has another fascinating post about the growing value of the mindset (read: intellectual capital) of entrepreneurs and the absence of intellectual capital in balance sheets:

"In the not too distant past, having an entrepreneurial, business-oriented mindset wouldn't get you very far if you didn't happen to be co-located with the requisite, tangible tools of production. Without the latter, skills couldn't develop, either. Today, on the other hand, mindset comes to the fore."

"Here in Montana, we have numerous advantages over the majority of the world: We are part of an enormous free trade zone; the rule of law is well established; our transportation and communications systems are excellent; and we have a well-educated population. In places where an entrepreneurial mindset has taken root, high-growth, productive companies have emerged (e.g., RightNow Technologies, and PrintingForLess.com). However, the mindset of a significant part of the state is still characterized by a focus on a service, industrial, or agricultural economy. Even if the means of production in a knowledge economy aren't as tightly tethered by geography as its predecessors, capacity won't be built unless there is a corresponding shift in mindset."

Dispatches features good thoughts how important meetings between entrepreneurs really are:

"As my recent interview of Inc. 500 entrepreneur Andrew Field underscored, entrepreneurs' search for sources of expertise - in the form of an individual advisor or a peer group - is often driven by the perceived need to solve immediate problems. The logistical constraints and diverse makeup of Master Mind groups mean that peer feedback is typically more valuable for longer-term strategic issues than for shorter-term tactical problems. I think this is why "lack of time" is given as the primary reason for not participating in a Master Mind group. Entrepreneurs are so busy solving today's problem, it is difficult for them to value a forum for thinking more broadly about tomorrow's problems and opportunities."

"Second, even for those who do participate in Master Mind forums, the value of such forums waxes and wanes over time as a function of the experienced rate of change. In periods of little change, peer groups serve largely a social function. That's not to say that's unimportant, as evidenced by the study's conclusions above. However, entrepreneurs often have more than one purely social outlet that can substitute for the Master Mind groiup. When the pace of change picks up, however, the value of vicarious learning increases, as does the value of the Master Mind group. (As Field puts it, the ability to learn from others' bruises increases.)"

While I'm not a "meeting guy" and I try to discipline myself in meeting necessary to attend, I nearly always enjoy meeting other entrepreneurs and share ideas and try to make predictions which business models could take off and which not. It can look like a waste of time initially but during such a conversation in nearly all the time it paid off.

Rajesh links to an insightful Businessweek article about Hasso Plattner:

"Other early influences shaped Plattner's career. He worshiped John F. Kennedy. "He had a vision," Plattner says, shifting into a nasal Boston accent to mimic Kennedy's voice: "We want to get to the moon in 10 years." For a kid growing up in beaten-down Germany, Kennedy represented the promise of a new, can-do era. When Kennedy was shot, Plattner was devastated. "I couldn't believe it," he says. "I went to bed and listened to the radio." Plattner followed in the footsteps of a grandfather and studied engineering--intent on being where the action was."

I just read about Bill Clinton's reaction about Kennedys death. It seems that both men Hasso Plattner and the young Bill Clinton had been determined to achieve more in their life..

Paul Allen seemingly likes subscription models:

"I have concluded that the best and fastest way to build another billion dollar company (assuming, of course, that MyFamily.com gets a billion dollar market cap someday) is to create a subscription product that one million people will eventually pay $10-20 per month to use. A million customers paying $15 per month would generate $180 million in revenue. If the company had a profit margin of 25% and a P/E ratio of 20, the company's market cap would be $900 million."

Scott has a nice piece about how to monetize on social software:

"Mark raises some valid points. However, there are underlying financial transactions—it's just that they're not brokered by the system. Charging for a social networking service is going to require people to look at longer-term ROI, rather than immediate transactional satisfaction.

But the transactions are there. In an informal survey I took of about 125 active Ryze users a few months ago, about 40% reported having had some sort of profitable transaction with someone met on Ryze. And it just doesn't take much of a transaction to justify $10 a month or so. If the transactions aren't there, then I'm inclined to say that it has more to do with how one is using the system than with the system itself."

McKinsey has the results of a comprehensive survey of executives around the world. Especially notworthy are the optimistic projections by IT executives:

"Do CIOs and CTOs know something about their budgets that other top executives don't, or are they just more optimistic? Half of them expect spending on IT to increase over the next six months, while only 39 percent of other senior executives think that might happen. Among all executives who expect their companies to spend more on IT, nearly a third predict an increase of more than 10 percent; hardly any executives expect IT spending to fall.

Tech executives in India and China are more optimistic than those in other parts of the world: 86 percent of the Indian and 75 percent of the Chinese CIOs and CTOs say that their companies plan to increase IT spending. A third of the Chinese CIOs and CTOs report that it will rise by 26 percent or more."

Even this can be found nowadays. It is always interesting for me how the Netflix success has inspired so many copycats.

Thanks Russell!

Wired has another good one how solar panels could make the life of soldiers in the filed easier:

"Hampel said using solar tents would reduce the need for diesel powered generators and diminish the "thermal signature" that enemy sensors use to track troop location. She said soldiers could carry smaller flexible solar panels and unfold them during the day to collect energy to recharge their personal communications equipment.

This would enable soldiers to lighten their loads of extra battery packs, which are sometimes left behind and reveal the soldiers' presence, according to Hampel. While Iowa Thin Film's PowerFilm products are ready for field use, the Army's "type classification" process, which enables them to be purchased in bulk, will require one to two years of additional testing. "

This more widely discussed Wired article digests the lawsuit from Affinity Engines. If you read the article it seems pretty obvious that something is wrong with the "super-speed one man show" that used by Google during the launch of Orkut.

"In its initial investigation, AEI (Affinity Engines) uncovered a total of nine unique software bugs ... in AEI's inCircle product that were also present in orkut.com," according to the lawsuit. "The presence of these bugs in both products is highly indicative of a common source code.... orkut.com contains software and source code copied, developed or derived from AEI's inCircle software or source code."

After graduating from Stanford in 2001, Buyukkokten and fellow graduate Tyler Ziemann built a social-networking service called Club Nexus, which they sold to Stanford for use by the university's undergraduates, according to the lawsuit. Club Nexus was a success, and Buyukkokten and Ziemann subsequently decided to form Affinity Engines and design a product for the Stanford Alumni Association called inCircle.

Wired investigates on a new Israeli sensor that makes the world a better place:

"A small Israeli company has developed a sensor technology it says is 10,000 times more sensitive than what's available today in products like heart monitors and MRIs. The tiny company is poised to capture a chunk of a $50 billion market, analysts say.

The technology will lead to one of the first remote sensing devices that can provide readings from several feet away without physical contact, according to executives at Nexense. That could mean no more sweaty heart monitor straps and no more grabbing handles while running on a treadmill -- the device could get a signal through a wristband or a patient's feet. Devices that could use the Nexense technology include heart monitors, satellites, cell phones and automobiles. It could even help people stop snoring. "

Is it just me, or how can one invention have so mayn applications? Wonderful, if it works out for the company!

Fast Company has a good inside into the virtues rackspace.com an ISP that turned superior service into critical mission. Lesson - if work in a market with small margins or are in danger to get commoditized make service your mission , but have an eye on the cost and it can still create as substantial enough USP.

Bryce was hired to convert Rackspace--born at the height of the tech boom out of the dorm rooms of three college students --into an organization motivated by service, not just by technology. "We knew what great service looked like, but we didn't know how to build it," says managing director and cochairman Morris Miller. After spending a few weeks observing customers and employees alike, Bryce figured that he did. "In the dictionary, under 'fanatic,' it says 'overly zealous or obsessed with,' " says Bryce, who had impressed Miller with the superb service organization he created at a startup cleaning company called USA EnviroClean. "I wanted that to be us, so providing fanatical support became our internal mantra. I held a meeting and said, 'This is going to be our focus from now on.' "

"Fanaticism has its rewards for Rackspace, too. The e-tastrophe of the past few years has decimated the ranks of dotcoms and driven once-powerful rivals such as Exodus Communications into bankruptcy. Yet privately held Rackspace has posted net profits since 2002; its revenue grew 50% in 2003, to $58.6 million; and it has 5,500 customers, up from 56 in 1999. Fanatical customer service may be mildly nuts, but there's clearly a method to Rackspace's madness."

Another good example for this kind of differentiation is Commerce Bank.

Russell sends in the analysis of Tim Drapers second "beauty contest" by the NYT:

Consequently, he tossed sharp-edged questions at the contestants whose presentations he found intriguing. But a sure signal that someone was about to get the gong could be spied beneath his desk - Mr. Draper's foot bobbed uncontrollably whenever he grew bored.

"That's terrific," he would say, cutting someone off. "Good luck with it." And then another face would pop up on the screen.

In May, Mr. Draper had invited entrepreneurs to post their ideas on his Web log. He offered no promise of money, only a chance to secure a few minutes with a bona fide top-drawer Silicon Valley venture capitalist.

Mr. Draper sponsored a similar contest last fall. That experience convinced him the event was something he should hold more often. Sure, there were a lot of "nutty ideas" among the 110 entries he had received by the first contest's cut-off date, Mr. Draper said, but he does not doubt it was worth the time and hassle. "

Trendwatching runs a bigger story about "life caching" a trend that has been in discussion here earlier and is IMHO rightly spotted.

People realize that vastly increasing storage of digital gadgets give you the opportunity not only to cache but store impressions of most senses of your own body on your hard drive. However what business model this could encourage I have thought about for the last year and wasn't really able to identify something valuable. Trendwatching writes:

" This LIFE CACHING introduction is just the tip of the iceberg. Obviously, providing consumers with the software, hardware and storage space to start building, unlocking and showcasing their 'lifelogs' should be high on your priority list if your business is in any way related to the world of photography, publishing, video, music, SMS, instant messaging, search, blogging, cell phones, email, memory sticks, PDAs etc etc etc. (And don't forget the vast amounts of non-digital, non-organised LIFE CACHING artifacts waiting to be digitized: think millions of shoeboxes, photo albums & framed photos, home movies/videos, old bundles of letters, CDs, DVDs, bookshelves and filing cabinets!)

But there's much more: understanding consumers' gradual move towards collecting and storing experiences instead of goods (especially in mature economies), is crucial, whether you sell luxury handbags or manufacture cars. Basically, LIFE CACHING is what happens after you've figured out how to provide your customers with an experience. So how are you enabling your customers to make the experience last? Yes, TRENDWATCHING.COM knows that this could be an entire business book in itself, so stay tuned ;-)"

Maybe you have a good idea?

Kurt mails in this good article from Business 2.0 about India's burgeoning middle class. It cites Gurgaon, south of New Delhi, where my ex-company contributed good money to the development of the shopping suburb :).

"On a typical afternoon, 26-year-old Shruti Sharma heads with friends to Gurgaon, a New Delhi suburb that's also a shopper's paradise. The malls here are vertical versions of their U.S. counterparts: five-story high-tech bazaars with multiplex cinemas, ice cream parlors, escalators, parking lots, even Muzak (smarmy versions of Bollywood disco hits). Outside it's so hot the asphalt is melting -- talk about Indian summer -- but inside, shoppers stroll in air-conditioned bliss past a Pizza Hut, a Subway, a Benetton, and a TGI Friday's. Sharma volunteers that her favorite brands are, in no particular order, Nike (NKE), Nokia (NOK), McDonald's (MCD), and Levi's. "Buying habits are changing," she says with a shy smile. "Nothing less than a brand name like Nike or Adidas will do."

Rajesh links and reposts a wonderful entry from Brad Feld. He enlists questions entrepreneurs should be able to answer instantly.

1) WHAT IS YOUR VISION?
- What is your big vision?
- What problem are you solving and for whom?
- Where do you want to be in the future?

Russell who writes the Mobile Technology Weblog for Creative Weblogging has been interviewed by corporateblogging.info. Here is what he expects working with us:

"What do you expect/hope that the blog will deliver in terms of marketing and branding? Something different compared to other ways of communication?

It's a great way of raising personal and therefore your company's profile. It's also something I am doing as part of my job anyway - keeping up to date with what's happening, so blogging it is very little extra effort. In fact, blogging makes me analyse things more than I normally would too, which is a bonus.

But the specific benefit of marketing is that I get maybe 1,000 people to think about what I'm saying every day - and therefore thinking about me. While I hate the word, blogging can turn you into a guru quicker than any other way right now.

I couldn't get this kind of quality exposure in any other way. Even if I spent a million Euro's a year on advertising and marketing, nothing beats the fact that these people actively seek me out."

Patrick mails in this interesting grass root initiative:

"Torrentocracy (pronounced like the word democracy) is the combination of RSS, bit torrent, your television and your remote control. In effect, it is what gives any properly motivated person or entity the ability to have their own TV station. By running torrentocracy on a computer connected to your television, you not only become a viewer of any available content from the internet, but you also become a part of a vast grass roots media distribution network. This is not about the illegal distribution of media, but rather it's about enabling an entirely new way to receive the video which you watch on your TV. If you ever wondered how and when your computer, the internet and your television would merge into one seemless device with access to anything and everything, then at this very moment the theme song from 2001: A Space Odyssey ("Also Sprach Zarathustra") should be resounding through your head."

The Economist has a good analysis about the state of advertising and the increasing role of the internet:

"The advertising industry is passing through one of the most disorienting periods in its history. This is due to a combination of long-term changes, such as the growing diversity of media, and the arrival of new technologies, notably the internet. Consumers have become better informed than ever before, with the result that some of the traditional methods of advertising and marketing simply no longer work.

Getting trendsetters to buy (or be given) new products in order to influence a broader market is hardly a new idea. So-called “early adopters” are a similar group, much sought-after by consumer-electronics companies in order to give their new products a good start. But there is a wider group which marketers sometimes call “prosumers”; short for proactive consumers. Some people in the industry believe this group is the most powerful of all.

Euro RSCG, a big international agency, is completing a nine-country study of prosumers, which it says can represent 20% or so of any particular group. They can be found everywhere, are at the vanguard of consumerism, and what they say to their friends and colleagues about brands and products tends to become mainstream six to 18 months later. They also vary by category, says Marc Lepere, Euro RSCG's chief marketing officer: a wine prosumer, for instance, will not necessarily be a prosumer of cars.

Such people often reject traditional ads and invariably use the internet to research what they are going to buy and how much they are going to pay for it. Half of prosumers distrust companies and products they cannot find on the internet. If they want to influence prosumers, says Mr Lepere, companies have to be extremely open about providing information."

I took some great days off at a pristine tropical island in the Gulf of Thailand. Two weeks without any gadgets, well almost any, was a wonderful experience.

More news here soon...

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.